So I've finished re-reading Eliade's THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE as mentioned in the previous essay. I remembered a lot of Eliade's essential points, probably because he tended to re-iterate similar positions in his other books.
SACRED is probably not Eliade at his most expansive in a philosophical sense. If there's one sentence that most captured the book's theme statement, it might be the one on page 106:
... through the reactualization of his myths, religious man attempts to approach the gods and to participate in being; the imitation of paradigmatic models expresses at once his desire for sanctity and his ontological nostalgia.
This sounds very high-minded, but terms like "being" and "ontology" are not defined here, though Eliade may have previously descanted about such concepts in earlier works. Nor does he define the "existential situation" of the profane as he suggested he might in this quote from his introduction-chapter:
The reader will very soon realize that sacred and profane are two modes of being, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history.
Eliade certainly does state in that chapter that his priority is to expound on the "modalities of the religious experience," and he does this by listing dozens of ways in which human beings sacralize the ordinary necessities of the world. The building of houses or temples is founded upon the paradigm of the gods' creation of the world; the tilling of the fields is linked to the paradigm of the gods' gift of vital foodstuffs for man to harvest. In the absence of a thoroughgoing definition of the profane, though, what one has is the sense that the profane is a chaos which must be made into a cosmos through the process of sacralization. One of Eliade's more effective examples is that of "the Vedic ritual for taking possession of a territory; possession becomes legally valid through the erection of a fire altar consecrated to Agni." I would add, in addition to the various cited conquests of dragons or giants that bring about the founding of new terrains, the somewhat more mundane event of Aeneas' single combat with Turnus, which ends the AENEID as we have it and prefigures the rise of the Roman people in the Latin country they conquer.
So all these paradigms are very well, but is that all that common, profane experience actually is: raw matter to be transcended? Does profane experience not have its own modality?
I do not doubt that many primitives sought meaning in acts of paradigmatic imitation, and this may indeed be the source of all religion. Certainly it's a better theory than the materialists' idea that religion was a con-game originated by various knavish priests, who in caveman days figured out a way to rook the naive laity. Still, I don't think even cavemen would have been endlessly absorbed in paradigms. The modality of the profane would be the idea that one is doing a thing purely out of necessity. I imagine a primitive cursing his fate to labor for his daily bread...
"DAMN I got to hollow out this DAMN log to make a DAMN canoe so I can catch some DAMN fish!"
As I said in the previous essay, this is the "short-term" view of life; one does what one can to live, and nothing more. Such a view naturally breeds as many if not more dissatisfactions as the imposition of paradigmatic models on mundane activities, and such dissatisfactions may be the main reason that religion took hold upon preliterate societies. They might not need "ontological nostalgia" as such, but they could well need an escape from drudgery-- which would also be the inspiration for all forms of art and storytelling as well as religion. Not surprisingly, Eliade is so focused on his thesis that he's entirely silent about the parallel developments of expressive art and paradigmatic religion in general pre-literate societies. In the final analysis, THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE is primarily significant for exemplifying Eliade's methodology and erudition, but as a philosophical exploration of "the sacred" it's a very limited work.
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