SACRED PROFANITIES

Though I've only mentioned Mircea Eliade once or twice here, I've read most of his works over the years, and I was probably an Eliade fan in college before I knew anything about Northrop Frye, since I remember discovering Frye after graduating.

Most of Eliade's key works were published in the 1950s and 1960s, and recently I happened to pick up a copy of one of the most influential, 1957's THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE (the source of my punny title). This will be the first Eliade book I've reread since beginning this blog, so I don't yet know if I will write more than one post on it.

Whenever I first read the book, I surely didn't know Rudolf Otto from a hole in the ground. So I found it interesting that Eliade's opening chapter names Otto's 1917 IDEA OF THE HOLY as an influence upon Eliade's theories of the sacred, particularly since I myself ultimately wrote a series of analyses on Otto's book, starting here. The Romanian myth-critic claims that while most historians of religion concerned themselves with "the ideas of God and religion," Otto focused on "the modalities of the religious experience." 

Eliade then segues to his own definition of those modalities, which are dominated by the perception that the sacred "is the opposite of the profane." That said, he admits that the sacred often manifests through objects in profane reality, through "some ordinary object, a stone or a tree." In this chapter Eliade does not distinguish what are the sacred qualities that distinguish a profane object that has been "sacralized," though I presume other chapters will expand on this assertion.

He may also expand later on this passage:

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.

But before I read further, I will say that I've also frequently emphasized "two existential situations" in human culture, though my inspirations there have more often been Schopenhauer, Frye and Cassirer. My 2016 essay THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL posits that one may view the metaphors of "close-sightedness" and "far-sightedness" as they might apply to the two types of will identified by Schopenhauer. I did not specifically relate these types of will to the sacred/profane duality, though I can see ways in which it would apply, with "close-sightedness" aligning with "the profane" and "far-sightedness" aligning with "the sacred."

Take as a quick example the exogamy restrictions of primitive tribes. Claude Levi-Strauss was quick to point out that contiguous tribes may have totally opposite customs, with one tribe forbidding marriage between cousins in the maternal line while another tribe restricts marriage between cousins in the paternal line. An advocate of the profane, "close-sighted" view might find these customs pointless, since the tribal citizens had no real way of knowing that either form of consanguineal marriage had any ill effects on either the spouses or their offspring. But a "far-sighted" view might argue that total lack of restriction is not beneficial to the tribe's sense of identity. Thus taboos may, in a short-term sense, seem arbitrary. However, in the long-term sense of defining the tribe's identity, the sense that some behaviors are restricted is a necessary evil, even when there is no rational justification.

And that is where I'll leave things for now.