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CHAPTER I Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 20
CHAPTER I1 Sacred Time and Myths 68

CHA     The Sacredness of
PTE     Nature and Cosmic
R Ill   Religion

PTE     Human Existence
R IV    and Sanctified Life

CHRONOLOGICAL SURVEY The "History of ReligWus"          a Branch of Knowledge 216
   The extraordinary interest aroused all over the world by Rudolf Otto's Das Heilige (The Sacred),
pub- lished in 1917, still persists. Its success was certainly due to the author's new and original point
of view. In- stead of studying the ideas of God and religion, Otto undertook to analyze the modalities
of the religious, experience. Gifted with great psychological subtlety, and thoroughly prepared by his
twofold training as theo-logian and historian of religions, he succeeded in de- termining the content
and specific characteristics of religious experience. Passing over the rational and speculative side of
religion, he concentrated chiefly on its irrational aspect. For Otto had read Luther and had understood
what the "living God" meant to a believer. It was not the God of the philosophers~of Erasmus,
for example; it was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power,
manifested in the divine wrath.
In Das Heilige Otto sets himself to discover the char- acteristics of this frightening and irrational
experience. He finds the feeling of terror before the sacred, before the awe-inspiring mystery
(mysterium tremendum), the majesty (majestas) that emanates an overwhelming superiority of
power; he finds religious fear before the fascinating mystery (mysterium fascimms) in which perfect
fullness of being flowers. Otto characterizes all these experiences as numinous (from Latin numen,
god), for they are induced by the revelation of an aspect of divine power. The numinous presents
itself as something
64wholly other" (gam adere), something basically and
     Sacred and the Profane
totally different. It is like nothing human or cosmic; confronted with it, man senses his profound
nothing- ness, feels that he is only a creature, or, in the words in which Abraham addressed the Lord,
is "but dust and ashes" (Genesis, 18, 27).

The sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from "natural" realities. It is
true that language naively expresses the tremendurn, or the majestas, or the mysterium fascinans by
terms bor- rowed from the world of nature or from man's secular mental life. But we know that this
analogical terminol- ogy is due precisely to human inability to express the ganz andere; all that goes
beyond man's natural expe rience, language is reduced to suggesting by terms taken from that
After forty years, Otto's analyses have not lost their value; readers of this book will profit by reading
and reflecting on them. But in the following pages we adopt a different perspective. We propose to
present the phe- nomenon of the sacred in all its complexity, and not only in so far as it is irrational.
What will concern us is not the relation between the rational and nonrational ele- ments of religion
but the sacred in its entirety. The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the
profane. The aim of the following pages is to illus- trate and define this opposition between sacred
and profane.
          becomes aware of the sacred because it
itself, shows itself, as something wholly differ- ent from the profane. To designate the act of manifes-
&on of the sacred, we have proposed the term hiero- phony. It is a fitting term, because it does not
further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i.e., that something sacred
shows itself to us.' It could be said that the history of religions-from the most primitive to the most
highly developed-is constituted by a great number of hiero- phanies, by manifestations of sacred
realities. From the most elementary hierophany-e.g., manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary
object, a stone or a tree-to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God
in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same
mysterious act-the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not
The modem Occidental experiences a certain uneasi- ness before many manifestations of the sacred.
He finds it difficult to accept the fact that, for many human beings, the sacred can be manifested in
stones or trees, for
'Cf. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, New York, Sheed Ward, 1958, pp. 7 ff. Cited hereafter as Patterns.
The Sacred and the Profane
example. But as we shall soon see, what is involved is not a veneration of the stone in itself, a cult of
the tree in itself. The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshipped
precisely because they are hierophies, because they show some thing that is no longer stone or tree
but the sacred, the ganz andere.
It is impossible to overemphasize the paradox repre- sented by every hierophany, even the most
elementary. By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain
itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone;
apparently (or, more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all
other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is trans-
muted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature
is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The, cosmos in its entirety can become a
The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity
to con- secrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understand- able, because, for primitives as for the
man of all pre modem societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to
reality. The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time
enduringness and efficacity. The polarity sacred-
Introduction 13
profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal or pseudoreal. (Naturally, we
must not expect to find the archaic languages in possession of this philo- sophical terminology,
real-unreal, etc.; but we find the thing.) Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply
desires to be, to participate in reality, to be satu- rated with power.
Our chief concern in the following pages will be to elucidate this subject-to show in what ways
religious man attempts to remain as long as possible in a sacred universe, and hence what his total
experience of life proves to be in comparison with the experience of the man without religious
feeling, of the man who lives, or wishes to live, in a desacralized world. It should be said at once that
the human spirit. It does not devolve upon us to show by what historical processes and as the result
of what changes in spiritual attitudes and behavior modem man has desacralized his world and
assumed a profane exist- ence. For our purpose it is enough to observe that desacralization pervades
the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modem societies and that, in con-sequence, he finds
it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic
The Sacred and the Pro
  The abyss that divides the two modalities of expe- rience~sacred and profane~will be apparent when we
come to describe sacred space and the ritual building of the human habitation, or the varieties of the
religious experience of time, or the relations of religious man to nature and the world of tools, or the
consecration of human life itself, the sacrality with which man's vital functions (food, sex, work and so
on) can be charged. Simply calling to mind what the city or the house, nature, tools, or work have become
for modern and nonreligious man will show with the utmost vividness all that dis- tinguishes such a man
from a man belonging to any archaic society, or even from a peasant of Christian Europe. For modern
consciousness, a physiological act eating, sex, and so on-is in sum only an organic phenomenon, however
much it may still be encumbered by tabus (imposing, for example, particular rules for "eating properly" or
forbidding some sexual behavior disapproved by social morality). But for the primitive, such an act is
never simply physiological; it is, or can become, a sacrament, that is, a communion with the sacred.
The reader will very soon realize that sacred and pro-fane are two modes of being in the world, two
existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history. These modes of being in the world are
not of concern :
only to the history of religions or to sociology; they are not the object only of historical, sociological, or
ethno- logical study. In the last analysis, the sacred and profane modes of being depend upon the
different positions that man has conquered in the cosmos; hence they are of concern both to the
philosopher and to anyone seeking to discover the possible dimensions of human existence.
It is for this reason that, though he is a historian of religions, the author of this book proposes not to
confine himself only to the perspective of his particular science. The man of the traditional societies is
admittedly a homo religiosus, but his behavior forms part of the general behavior of mankind and hence
is of concern to philo- sophical anthropology, to phenomenology, to psychol-
om. The better to bring out the specific characteristics of life in a world capable of becoming sacred, I
shall not hesitate to cite examples from many religions belonging to different periods and cultures.
Nothing can take the place of the example, the concrete fact. It would be use- less to discuss the structure
of sacred space without showing, by particular examples, how such a space is constructed and why it
becomes qualitatively different from the profane space by which it is surrounded. I shall select such
examples from among the Mesopo- tamians, the Indians, the Chinese, the Kwakiutl and other primitive
peoples. From the historico-cultural point of view, such a juxtaposition of religious data pertaining
     Sacred and the Profane
to peoples so far removed in time and space is not with- out some danger. For there is always the risk
of falling back into the errors of the nineteenth century and, par- ticularly, of believing with Tylor or
Frazer that the reaction of the human mind to natural phenomena is uniform. But the progress
accomplished in cultural eth- nology and in the history of religions has shown that this is not always
true, that man's reactions to nature are often conditioned by his culture and hence, finally, by history.
But the important thing for our purpose is to bring out the specific characteristics of the religious
expe-rience, rather than to show its numerous variations and the differences caused by history. It is
somewhat as if, in order to obtain a better grasp of the poetic phenome- non, we should have recourse
to a mass of heterogeneous examples, and, side by side with Homer and Dante, quote Hindu,
Chinese, and Mexican poems; that is, should take into consideration not only poetics possessing a
histori- cal common denominator (Homer, Vergil, Dante) but also creations that are dependent upon
other esthetics. From the-point of view of literary history, such juxta- positions are to be viewed with
suspicion; but they are valid if our object is to describe the poetic phenomenon as such, if we propose
to show the essential difference between poetic language and the utilitarian language of everyday
Our primary concern is to present the specific dimensions of religious experience, to bring out the
differences between it and profane experience of the world. I shall not dwell on the variations that
religious experience of the world has undergone in the course of time. It is obvious, for example, that
the symbolisms and cults of Mother Earth, of human and agricultural fertility, of the sacrality of
woman, and the like, could not develop and constitute a complex religious system except through the
discovery of agriculture; it is equally obvious that a preagricultural society, devoted to hunt- ing,
could not feel the sacrality of Mother Earth in the same way or with the same intensity. Hence there
are differences in religious experience explained by differ- ences in economy, culture, and social
organization-in short, by history. Nevertheless, between the nomadic hunters and the sedentary
cultivators there is a similarity in behavior that seems to us infinitely more important than their
differences: both live in a sacralized cosmos, both share in a cosmic sacrality manifested equally in
the animal world and in the vegetable world. We need only compare their existential situations with
that of a man of the modem societies, living in a desacralized cosmos, and we shall immediately be
aware of all that
him from them. At the same time we realize the validity of comparisons between religious facts per-
The Sacred and the Profane
taining to different cultures; all these facts arise from a single        of behavior, that of       religiosus.
This little book, then, may serve as a general intro- duction to the history of religions, since it describes
the modalities of the sacred and the situation of man in a world charged with religious values. But it is not
a study in the history of religions in the strict sense, for the writer, in citing examples, has not undertaken
to indi- cate their historico-cultural contexts. To do so would have required a work in several volumes.
The reader will find all requisite information in the books listed in the Bibliography.
Saint-Cloud April,
Sacred Space
and Making
                                          the World Sacred
space are qualitatively different from others. "Draw not nigh hither," says the Lord to Moses; "put off thy
shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" (Exodus, 3, 5). There is, then,
without struc- ture or consistency, amorphous. Nor is this all. For re- ligious man, this spatial
nonhomogeneity finds expres- sion in the experience of an opposition between space' that is sacred-the
only real and real-ly existing space and allother space, the formless expanse surrounding it.
It must be said at once that the religious experience of the nonhomogeneity of space is a primordial
homologizable to a founding of the world. It is not a mat- ter of theoretical speculation, but of a primary
religious experience that precedes all reflection on the world. For it is the break effected in space that
allows the world to be constituted, because it reveals the fixed point, the central axis for all future
orientation. When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the
homogeneity of space; there is also revela- tion of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the
vast surrounding expanse. The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homo-
geneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of refer- ence is possible and hence no orientation can
be estab- lished, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point,
a center.
The Sacred and the Profane
So it is clear to what a degree the discovery-that is, the revelation-of a sacred space possesses
existential value for religious man; for nothing can begin, nothing can be done, without a previous
orientation-and any orientation implies acquiring a fixed point. It is for this reason that religious man
has always sought to fix his abode at the "center of the world." If the world is to be lived in, it must
be founded-and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of profane
space. The discovery or projection of a fixed point-the center-is equivalent to the creation of the
world; and we shall soon give some examples that will unmistakably show the cosmogonic value of
the ritual orientation and construction of sacred space.
For profane experience, on the contrary, spaceis homogeneous and neutral; no break qualitatively
differ- entiates the various parts of its mass. Geometrical space can be cut and delimited in any
direction; but no quali- tative differentiation and, hence, no orientation are given by virtue of its
inherent structure. We need only remem- ber how a classical geometrician defines space. Natu- rally,
we must not confuse the concept of homogeneous              neutral geometrical space with the experience
of profane space, which is in direct contrast to the expe- rience of sacred space and which alone
concerns our investigation. The concept of homogeneous space and the history of the concept (for it
has been part of the com- mon stock of philosophical and scientific thought since
                                Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred
are a wholly different ~roblem, upon which we shall not enter here. What-matters for our purpose is
the experience of space known to nonreligious man- that is, to a man who rejects the sacrality of the
world, who accepts only a profane existence, divested of all
It must be added at once that such a profane existence is never found in the pure state. To whatever
degree he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favor of a ~rofane
life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior. This will become clearer as we
proceed; it will appear that even the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of a religious
valorization of the world.
But for the moment we will set aside this aspect of the problem and confine ourselves to comparing
the two experiences in question-that of sacred space and that of profane space. The implications of
the former expe- rience have already been pointed out. Revelation of a sacred space makes it possible
to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation in the chaos of homo- geneity, to "found the
world" and to live in a real sense. The profane experience, on the contrary, maintains the
homogeneity and hence the relativity of space. No true orientation is now possible, for the fixed point
no longer enjoys a unique ontological status; it appears and dis- appears in accordance with the needs
of the day. Prop erly speaking, there is no longer any world, there are
The Sacred and the Profane
only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more
or less neutral places in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligations of an existence
incorporated into an industrial society.
Yet this experience of profane space still includes values that to some extent recall the
nonhomogeneity peculiar to the religious experience of space. There are, for example, privileged
places, qualitatively different from all others-a man's birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or
certain places in the first foreign city he visited in youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man,
all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the "holy places" of his private
uni- verse, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in
which he participates through his ordinary daily life.
This example of crypto-religious behavior on profane, man's part is worth noting. In the course of
this book we shall encounter other examples of this sort of degrada- tion and desacralization of
religious values and forms of behavior. Their deeper significance will become appar- ent later.
To exemplify the nonhomogeneity of space as experienced by nonreligious man, we may turn to any
religion. We will choose an example that is accessible to
                              Sacred Space and             the World Sacred
of continuity. The threshold that separates the two spaces also indi- cates the distance between two
modes of being, the pro- fane and the religious. The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier
worlds communicate, where passage from
the profane to the sacred world becomes possible.
A similar ritual function falls to the threshold of the human habitation, and it is for this reason that
the thresh- old is an object of great importance. Numerous rites accompany passing the domestic
threshold-a bow, a prostration, a pious touch of the hand, and so on. The threshold has its
guardians-gods and spirits who for- bid entrance both to human enemies and to demons                the
powers of pestilence. It is on the threshold that sacri- fices to the guardian divinities are offered. Here
too cer- tain palaeo-oriental cultures (Babylon, Egypt, Israel) situated the judgment place. The
threshold, the door dz.ow the solution of continuity in space immediately and concretely; hence their
great religious importance, for they are symbols and at the same time vehicles of Pasage from the one
space to the other.
What has been said will make it clear why the church
shares in an entirely different space from the buildings
that surround it. Within the sacred precincts the profane
       Sacred and the Profane
world is transcended. On the most archaic levels of cul-
ture this possibility of transcendence is expressed by
various images of an opening; here, in the sacred en-
closure, communication with the gods is made possible;
hence there must be a door to the world above, by which
the gods can descend to earth and man can symbolically
ascend to heaven. We shall soon see that this was the
case in many religions; ~roperly speaking, the temple
constitutes an opening in the upward direction and
ensures communication with the world of the gods.
territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualita- tively different. When Jacob in
afraid and cried out: "How dreadful is^ this place: this is none other but the house of God, and this is
The symbol- ism implicit in the expression "gate of heaven" is rich and complex; the theophany that
occurs in a place con- secrates it by the very fact that it makes it open above that is, in
                                Sacred Space and Making the          Sacred
shall soon see even clearer examples-sanctuaries that are "doors of the gods" and hence places of
passage between heaven and earth.
Often there is no need for a theophany or hierophany properly speaking; some sign suffices to
indicate the sacredness of a place. "According to the legend, the marabout who founded El-Hamel at
the end of the six- teenth century stopped to spend the night near a spring and planted his stick in the
ground. The next morning, when he went for it to resume his journey, he found that it had taken root
and that buds had sprouted on it. He considered this a sign of God's will and settled in that place.''1 In
such cases the sign, fraught with religious meaning, introduces an absolute element and puts an end
to relativity and confusion. Something that does not belong to this world has manifested itself
apodictically and in so doing has indicated an orientation or deter- mined a course of conduct.
When no sign manifests itself, it is provoked. For example, a sort of evocation is performed with the
help of animals; it is they who show what place is fit to re-ceive the sanctuary or the village. This
amounts to an evocation of sacred forms or figures for the immediate Purpose of establishing an
orientation in the homoge- neity of space. A sign is asked, to put an end to the tension and anxiety
caused by relativity and disorienta-
Ren6           in Revue des Traditions Populaires, XXI, 1907, p. 287.
     Sacred and the Profane
sanctuary is built at the place where it is killed. Or a domestic animal-such as a bull-is turned loose; some
and find it by the help of mysterious signs.
point. But' since religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnated with the sacred, we must
pre-eminently the real, at once power, efficacity, the source of life and fecundity. Re-ligious man's desire
to live in the sacred is in fact equiva- lent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let
                                  Sacred Space and              the World Sacred
the gods. But the better to under- stand the need for ritual construction of a sacred space, we must dwell a
little on the traditional concept of the
"world"; it will then be apparent that for religious man every world is a sacred world.
One of the outstanding characteristics of tradi- tional societies is the opposition that they assume be-
tween their inhabited territory and the unknown and indeterminate space that surrounds it. The former is
the world (more precisely, our world), the cosmos; every- thing outside it is no longer a cosmos but a sort
of "other world," a foreign, chaotic space, peopled by ghosts, demons, "foreignersw (who are assimilated
to demons and the souls of the dead). At first sight this cleavage in space appears to be due to the
opposition between an inhabited and organized-hence cosmicized "-territory and the unknown space that
extends beyond its frontiers; on one side there is a cosmos, on the other
The Sacred         the Profane
a chaos. But we shall see that if every inhabited terri- tory is a cosmos, this is precisely because it was
first consecrated, because, in one way or another, it is the work of the gods or is in communication with
the world of the gods. The world (that is, our world) is a universe within which the sacred has already
manifested itself, in which, consequently, the break-through from plane to plane has become possible and
repeatable. It is not difficult to see why the religious moment implies the cosmogonic moment. The sacred
reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the
sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world.
All this appears very clearly from the Vedic ritual for taking possession of a territory; possession becomes
legally valid through the erection of a fire altar conse- crated to Agni. "One says that 'one is installed
when one has built a fire altar [garhapatya] and all those who build the fire altar are legally established"
(Shatapatha Brahmans, VII, 1,1,1-4).By the erection of a fire altar Agni is made present, and
communication with the world of the gods is ensured; the space of the altar be- comes a sacred space. But
the meaning of the ritual is far more complex, and if we consider all of its ramifications we shall
understand why consecrating a territory is equivalent to making it a cosmos, to cosmicizing it. For, in
fact, the erection of an altar to Agni is nothing but the reproduction-on the microcosmic scalmf the Crea-
tion. The water in which the clay is mixed is assimilated
                                  Sacred Space                 the World Sacred
to the primordial water; the clay that forms the base of the altar symbolizes the earth; the lateral walls
represent the atmosphere, and so on. And the building of the altar is accompanied by songs that proclaim
which cosmic region has just been created (Shatapatha Brahmana I, 9,2, 29, etc.) Hence the erection of a
fire altar-which alone validates taking possession of a new territory-is quivalent to a cosmogony.
An unknown, foreign, and unoccupied territory (which often means, "unoccupied by our people") still
shares in the fluid and larval modality of chaos. By occupying it and, above all, by settling in it, man sym-
bolically transforms it into a cosmos through a ritual repetition of the cosmogony. What is to become "our
world" must first be "created," and every creation has a paradigmatic model-the creation of the universe
by the gods. "When the Scandinavian colonists took possession of Iceland (land-ndma) and cleared it,
they regarded the enterprise neither as an original undertaking nor as human and profane work. For them,
their labor was only repetition of a primordial act, the transformation of chaos into cosmos by the divine
act of creation. When they tilled the desert soil, they were in fact repeating the act of the gods who had
organized chaos by giving it a structure, forms, and norms.'
Whether it is a case of clearing uncultivated ground
=f-MirceaEliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, New York, Pan-theon Books, Bollingen Series XLVI, 1954, pp.
Cited hereafter
    Sacred and the Profane
or of conquering and occupying a territory already in- habited by "other" human beings, ritual taking
posses- sion must always repeat the cosmogony. For in the view of archaic societies everything that is not
"our world" is not yet a world. A territory can be made ours only by creating it anew, that is, by
consecrating it. This religious behavior in respect to unknown lands continued, even in the West, down to
the dawn of modem times. The Span- ish and Portuguese conquistadores, discovering and con- quering
territories, took possession of them in the name of Jesus Christ. The raising of the Cross was equivalent to
consecrating the country, hence in some sort to a "new birth." For through Christ "old things are passed
away; behold, all things are become new" (I1 Corinthians, 5, 17).The newly discovered country was
"renewed," "re-created" by the Cross.
 It must be understood that the cosmicization of unknown territories is always a consecration; to organize
a space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods. The close connection between cosmicization and
conse- cration is already documented on the elementary levels of culture~for example, among the
nomadic Australians whose economy is still at the stage of gathering and small-game hunting. According
to the traditions of an
                                 Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred
Arunta tribe, the Achilpa, in mythical times the divine being Numbakula cosmicized their future territory,
created their Ancestor, and established their institutions. From the trunk of a gum tree Numbakula
fashioned the sacred pole (kauwa-auwa) and, after anointing it with blood, climbed it and disappeared
into the sky. This pole represents a cosmic axis, for it is around the sacred pole that territory becomes
habitable, hence is transformed into a world. The sacred pole consequently plays an important role
ritually. During their wanderings the Achilpa always carry it with them and choose the direc- tion they are
to take by the direction toward which it bends. This allows them, while being continually on the move, to
be always in "their world" and, at the same time, in communication with the sky into which Numba- kula
For the pole to be broken denotes catastrophe; it is like "the end of the world," reversion to chaos.
Spencer and Gillen report that once, when the pole was broken, the entire clan were in consternation; they
wandered about aimlessly for a time, and finally lay down on the ground together and waited for death to
overtake them.8 This example admirably illustrates both the cosmo- logical function of the sacred pole
and its soteriological For on the one hand the kauwa^uiwa reproduces the pole that Numbakula used to
cosmicize the world,
  Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Arunta, London, 1926,   p. 388.
The Sacred and the Profane
and on the other the Achilpa believe it to be the means by which they can communicate with the sky
realm. Now, human existence is possible only by virtue of this perma- nent communication with the sky.
The world of the Achilpa really becomes their world only in proportion as it reproduces the cosmos
organized and sanctified by Nurnbakula. Life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent;
in other words, human beings cannot live in chaos. Once contact with the transcendent is lost, existence in
the world ceases to be possibleand the Achil~alet themselves die.
To settle in a territory is, in the last analysis, equiva- lent to consecrating it. When settlement is not
temporary, as among the nomads, but permanent, as among seden- tary peoples, it implies a vital decision
that involves the existence of the entire community. Establishment in a particular place, organizing it,
inhabiting it, are acts that presuppose an existential choiceÃ‘th choice of the uni-verse that one is
prepared to assume by "creating" it. Now, this universe is always the replica of the paradig- matic
universe created and inhabited by the gods; hence it shares in the sanctity of the gods' work.
The sacred pole of the Achilpa supports their world and ensures communication with the sky. Here we
have the prototype of a cosmological image that has been very widely disseminated-the cosmic pillars
that support heaven and at the same time open the road to the world
                                 Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred
of the gods. Until their conversion to Christianity, the Celts and Germans still maintained their worship of
  such sacred pillars. The Chronicum Laurissense breve, written about 800, reports that in the course of
   one of his wars against the Saxons (772), Charlemagne de- stroyed the temple and the sacred wood of
their "famous ~~insul"in the town of Eresburg. Rudolf of Fulda (c. 860) adds that this famous pillar is the
 "pillar of the universe which, as it were, supports all things" (universalis columna quasi sustinens omnia).
    The same cosmological image is found not only among the Romans (Horace, Odes, 111, 3) and in
  ancient India, where we hear of the skambha, the cosmic pillar             Veda, I, 105; X, 89, 4; etc.), but
       also among the Canary Island- ers and in such distant cultures as those of the Kwakiutl (British
  Columbia) and of the Nad'a of Flores Island (Indonesia). The Kwakiutl believe that a copper pole passes
 through the three cosmic levels (underworld, earth, sky) ;the point at which it enters the sky is the door
 to the world above." The visible image of this cosmic pillar in the sky is the Milky Way. But the work of
the gods, the universe, is repeated and imitated by men on their own scale. The axis            seen in the sky
the form of the Milky Way, appears in the ceremonial house in the form of a sacred pole. It is the trunk of
a Cedar tree, thirty to thirty-five feet high, over half of wbch projects through the roof. This pillar plays a
The Sacred and the Profane
primary part in the ceremonies; it confers a cosmic structure on the house. In the ritual songs the house is
called "our world" and the candidates for initiation, who live in it, proclaim: "I am at the Center of the
World.   .. . I am at the Post of the World," and so on.' The same assimilation of the cosmic pillar to the
sacred pole and of the ceremonial house to the universe is found among the Nad'a of Flores Island. The
sacrificial pole is called the "Pole of Heaven" and is believed to support the sky.'
The cry of the Kwakiutl neophyte, "I am at the Center of the World!" at once reveals one of the deepest
meanings of sacred space. Where the break-through from plane to plane has been effected by a
hierophany, there too an opening has been made, either upward (the divine world) or downward (the
underworld, the world of the dead). The three cosmic levels~earth, heaven, underworld-have been put in
communication. As we just saw, this communication is sometimes expressed through the image of a
universal pillar, axis mundi, which at once connects and supports heaven and earth and whose base is
fixed in the world below (the infernal
4 Werner Miiller, Weltbild und Kult der Kwakiutl-lndianer, Wiesbaden, 1955, pp. 17-20. 5 P. Arndt, "Die Megalithenkultur des
Nad'an (Anthropos 27, 1932), pp 61-62.
                                 Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred
-regions). Such a cosmic pillar can be only at the very center of the universe, for the whole of the
habitable world extends around it. Here, then, we have a sequence of religious conceptions and
cosmological images that are inseparably connected and form a system that may be called the "system of
the world" prevalent in tradi- tional societies: (a) a sacred place constitutes a break in the homogeneity of
space; (6) this break is symbolized by an opening by which passage from one cosmic region to another is
made possible (from heaven to earth and vice versa; from earth to the underworld) ; (c) com-munication
with heaven is expressed by one or another of certain images, all of which refer to the axis mundi: pillar
(cf. the universalis columna) ,ladder (cf. Jacob's ladder), mountain, tree, vine, etc. ;(d) around this cos-
mic axis lies the world (= our world), hence the axis is located "in the middle," at the "navel of the earth";
it is the Center of the World.
Many different myths, rites, and beliefs are derived from this traditional "system of the world." They
cannot all be mentioned here. Rather, we shall confine our-selves to a few examples, taken from various
civiliza- tions and particularly suited to demonstrate the role of sacred space in the life of traditional
societies. Whether "^t space appears in the form of a sacred precinct, a ceremonial house, a city, a world,
we everywhere find the smbolism of the Center of the World; and it is this symbolism which, in the
majority of cases, explains re
       Sacred and the Profane
ligious behavior in respect to the space in which one lives.
We shall begin with an example that has the advan- tage of immediately showing not only the consistency
but also the complexity of this type of symbolism-the cosmic mountain. We have just seen that the
mountain occurs among the images that express the connection between heaven and earth; hence it is
believed to be at the center of the world. And in a number of cultures we do in fact hear of such
mountains, real or mythical, situ- ated at the center of the world; examples are Meru in India,
Haraberezaiti in Iran, the mythical "Mount of the Lands" in Mesopotamia, Gerizim in Palestine-which,
moreover, was called the "navel of the earth."6 Since the sacred mountain is an axis d i connecting earth
with heaven, it in a sense touches heaven and hence marks the highest point in the world; consequently
the territory that surrounds it, and that constitutes "our world,"is held to be the highest among countries.
This is stated in Hebrew tradition: Palestine, being the highest land, was not submerged by the Flood.'
According to Islamic tra- dition, the highest place on earth is the Iw'aba, because "the Pole Star bears
witness that it faces the center of Heaven."' For Christians, it is~ol~otha
                                        that is on the summit of the cosmic mountain. All these beliefs
6See the bibli~~raphical
                 references in Eliade, Myth, pp. 10 ff. 7A.   Wensinck and E. Burrows, cited in ibid., p. 10. 8 Wensinck, cited in
ibid., p. 15.
                                 Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred
the same feeling, which is profoundly religious: "our
is holy ground because it is the place nearest to haven, because from here, from our abode, it is
possible to reach heaven; hence our world is a high place. In cos- mological terms, this religious
conception is expressed by the projection of the favored territory which is             onto the summit of
the cosmic mountain. Later specula- tion drew all sorts of conclusions-for example, the one just cited for
Palestine, that the Holy Land was not sub- merged by the Flood.
This same symbolism of the center explains other series of cosmological images and religious beliefs.
Among these the most important are: (a) holy sites and sanctuaries are believed to be situated at the
center of the world; (6) temples are replicas of the cosmic moun- tain and hence constitute the
pre-eminent "link" between earth and heaven; (c) the foundations of temples de- scend deep into the lower
regions. A few examples will suffice. After citing them, we shall attempt to integrate all these various
aspects of the same symbolism; the remarkable consistency of these traditional conceptions of the world
will then appear with greater clarity.
The capital of the perfect Chinese sovereign is located at the center of the world; there, on the day of the
summer solstice, the gnomon must cast no shadow.' It is ^king that the same symbolism is found in regard
         Granet, in Eliade, Patterns, p. 376.
The Sacred and the Profane
the Temple of Jerusalem; the rock on which it was built was the navel of the earth. The Icelandic pilgrim,
Nicho. las of Thverva, who visited Jerusalem in the twelfth cen- tury, wrote of the Holy Sepulcher: "The
Center of the World is there; there, on the day of the summer solstice, the light of the Sun falls
perpendicularly from Heaven."1Â The same conception occurs in Iran; the Iranian land
(Airyanam Vaejah) is the center and heart of the world. Just as the heart lies at the center of the body, "the
land of Iran is more precious than all other countries             it is set at the middle of the world."ll This
is why Shiz, the "Jerusalem" of the Iranians (for it lay at the center of the world) was held to be the
original site of the royal power and, at the same time, the birthplace of Zarathustra.12
As for the assimilation of temples to cosmic mountains and their function as links between earth and
heaven, the names given to Babylonian sanctuaries themselves bear witness; they are called "Mountain of
the House," 'House of the Mountain of all Lands," "Mountain of Storms," "Link between Heaven and
Earth," and the like. The ziggurat was literally a cosmic mountain; the seven stories represented the seven
planetary heavens; by ascending them, the priest reached the summit of the
10 L.
    I. Ringbom, Graltempel       Parodies, Stockholm, 1951, p. 255. 11Sad-dar, 84, 4-5, cited in Ringbom, p. 327. 12See the
material assembled and discussed in Ringbom, pp. 294 S. and passim.
                                 Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred
universe. A like symbolism explains the immense temple of Borobudur, in Java; it is built as an artificial
moun-               Ascending it is equivalent to an ecstatic journey to the center of the world; reaching the
highest terrace, the pilgrim experiences a break-through from plane to plane; he enters a "pure region"
transcending the pro- fane world.
Dw-are-ki, "Link between Heaven and Earth," was a name applied to a number of Babylonian sanctuaries
(it ' occurs at Nippur, Larsa, Sippara, and ,elsewhere). Babylon had many names, among them "House of
the Base of Heaven and Earth," "Link between Heaven and Earth." But it was also in Babylon that the
connection between earth and the lower regions was made, for the city had been built on bib apsi, "the
Gate of Apsii," apsii being the name for the waters of chaos before Crea- tion. The same tradition is found
among the Hebrews; the rock of the Temple in Jerusalem reached deep into the tehom, the Hebrew
equivalent of apsii. And, just as Babylon had its Gate of Apsii, the rock of the temple in Jerusalem
contained the "mouth of the tehiim.9913
The apsii, the tehom symbolize the chaos of waters, the preforml modality of cosmic matter, and, at the
same time, the world of death, of all that precedes and
life. The Gate of Apsii and the rock containing the "mouth of the tehiim" designate not only the point of
the references in Eliade,         pp. 15
The Sacred and the Profane
intersection-and hence of communication-between the lower world and earth, but also the difference in
onto- logical status between these two cosmic planes. There is a break of plane between the teh6m and
the rock of the Temple that blocks its mouth, passage from the virtual to the formal, from death to life.
The watery chaos that preceded Creation at the same time symbolizes the retro- gression to the formless
that follows on death, return to the larval modality of existence. From one point of view, the lower
regions can be homologized to the unknown and desert regions that surround the inhabited territory; the
underworld, over which our cosmos is firmly estab- lished, corresponds to the chaos that extends to its

  From all that has been said, it follows that the true world is always in the middle, at the Center, for it is
here that there is a break in plane and hence com- munication among the three cosmic zones. Whatever
the extent of the territory involved, the cosmos that it repre- sents is always perfect. An entire country
(e.g., Pales-tine), a city (Jerusalem), a sanctuary (the Temple in Jerusalem), all equally well present an
imago di. Treating of the symbolism of the Temple, Flavius Jose- phus wrote that the court represented
the sea (i.e., the
                                 Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred
lower regions), the Holy Place represented earth, and the Holy of Holies heaven (Ant. Jud., 111, 7, 7).
It is clear, then, that both the imago mdi and the Center are repeated in the inhabited world. Palestine,
Jerusalem, and the Temple severally and concurrently represent the image of the universe and the Center
of the World. This
of centers and this reiteration of the image of the world on smaller and smaller scales constitute one of the
specific characteristics of traditional societies.
To us, it seems an inescapable conclusion that the re- ligious man sought to live        near     possible to
the Center of the World. He knew that his country lay at the midpoint of the earth; he knew too that his
city consti- tuted the navel of the universe, and, above all, that the temple or the palace were veritably
Centers of theorld. But he also wanted his own house to be at the Center and to be an imago mundi. And,
in fact, as we shall see, houses are held to be at the Center of the World and, on the microcosmic scale, to
reproduce the universe. In other words, the man of traditional societies could only live in a space opening
upward, where the break in plane was symbolically assured and hence communication with the other
world, the transcendental world, was ritually Possible. Of course the sanctuary-the Center par excel-
lenswas there, close to him, in the city, and he could      sure of communicating with the world of the
gods by entering the temple. But he felt the need to at the Center ofaws-like the Achilpa, who, as we
      The Sacred and the Profane
saw, always carried the sacred pole, the axis di, with them, so that they should never be far from the
Center and should remain in communication with the supraterrestrial world. In short, whatever the
dimensions of the space with which he is familiar and in which he regards himself as situated-his country,
his city, his village, his housereligious man feels the need always to exist in a total and organized world,
in a cosmos.
A universe comes to birth from its center; it spreads out from a central point that is, as it were, its navel. It
is in this way that, according to the Rig Veda (X,               the universe was born and developed-from a
core, a central point. Hebrew tradition is still more explicit: "The Most Holy One created the world like
an embryo. As the embryo grows from the navel, so God began to create the world by the navel and from
there it spread out in all directions." And since the "navel of the earth," the Center of the World, is the
Holy Land, the Yoma affirms that "the world was created beginning with Zion."14 Rabbi ben Gorion said
of the rock of Jerusalem: "it is called the Foundation Stone of the Earth, that is, the navel of the Earth,
because it is from there that the whole Earth ~nfolded."~' Then too, because the creation of man is a
replica of the cosmogony, it follows that the
first man was fashioned at the "navel of the earth" or in
14 References  in ibid., p. 16.   Cited in   W. Roscher, "Neue Omphalosstudien" (Abh. der KSnigl-    Ges. d. Viss.,
Phil.-hist. Kfusse, 31, 1, 1915), p. 16.
                                       Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred
~~~~~alem It could not
                                        (Judaeo-Christian traditions).
      if we remember that the Center is precisely the place where a break in plane occurs, where space
becomes sacred, hence preeminently real. A creation im-plies a superabundance of reality, in other
words an irruption of the sacred into the world.
1t follows that every construction or fabrication has the cosmogony as paradigmatic model. The
creation of the world becomes the archetype of every creative human gesture, whatever its plane of
reference may be. We have already seen that settling in a territory reiterates the cosmogony. Now that the
cosmogonic value of the Center has become clear, we can still better understand why every human
establishment repeats the creation of the world from a central point (the navel). Just as the uni- verse
unfolds from a center and stretches out toward the four cardinal points, the village comes into existence
around an intersection. In Bali, as in some parts of Asia, when a new village is to be built the people look
for a natural intersection, where two roads cross at right angles. A square constructed from a central point
is an imago mundi. The division of the village into four sections-which incidentally implies a similar
division of the community~corresponds to the division of the universe into four horizons. A space is often
left empty in the middle of the village; there the ceremonial house "ill later be built, with its roof
symbolically represent- ing heaven (in some cases, heaven is indicated by the
      Sacred and the Profane
his city, his village, his house~religious man feels the need always to exist in a total and organized world,
in a cosmos.
Holy Land, the            affirms that "the world was created beginning with Zion."14 Rabbi ben Gorion
said of the rock of Jerusalem: "it is called the Foundation Stone of the Earth, that is. the navel of the
a replica of the cosmogony, it follows that the
14References  in ibid., p. 16. 16Cited in   W. Roscher. "Neue Omphalosstudienn (Abh. der KSnigl- Sachs. Ges. d. Viss.,
Phil.-hist. Klasse, 31, 1, 19151, p. 16.
                             Sacred Space and              the World Sacred
~~-1em (Judaeo-Christian traditions). It could not if we remember that the Center is precisely

the place where a break in plane occurs, where space becomes sacred, hence pre-eminently real. A
creation im- plies a superabundance of reality, in other words an irruption of the sacred into the world.
It follows that every construction or fabrication has the cosmogony as paradigmatic model. The
is an &go mudi. The division of the village into four sections-which incidentally implies a similar
division of the community~corres~onds
to the division of the universe into four horizons. A space is often left empty in the middle of the village;
there the ceremonial house "ill later be built, with its roof symbolically represent- "'6 heaven (in some
cases, heaven is indicated by the
The Sacred and the Profane
top of a tree or by the image of a mountain). At the other end of the same perpendicular axis lies the
world of the dead, symbolized by certain animals (snake, crocodile, etc.) or by ideograms expressing
The cosmic symbolism of the village is repeated in the structure of the sanctuary or the ceremonial house.
At Waropen, in New Guinea, the "men's house" stands at the center of the village; its roof represents the
celestial vault, the four walls correspond to the four directions of space. In Ceram, the sacred stone of the
village sym- bolizes heaven and the four stone columns that support it incarnate the four pillars that
support heaven.17 Similar conceptions are found among the Algonquins and the Sioux. Their sacred
lodge, where initiations are per-formed, represents the universe. The roof symbolizes the dome of the sky,
the floor represents earth, the four walls the four directions of cosmic space. The ritual construc- tion of
the space is emphasized by a threefold symbol-
ism: the four doors, the four windows, and the four colors signify the four cardinal points. The
construction of the sacred lodge thus repeats the cosmogony, for the lodge represents the world.18
We are not surprised to find a similar concept in an-
16Cf.  C. T. Bertling, Vierzahl, Kreuz and               in Asien, Amster-dam, 1954, pp. 8 ff. 17 See the references in Bertling, op.
cit., pp. 4-5. 18 See the material and interpretations in Werner Miiller, Die bb HGtte, Wiesbaden, 1954, pp. 60 ff.
                                   Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred
Italy and among the ancient Germans. In short, the underlying idea is both archaic and widely dissemi-
nated: from a center, the four horizons are projected in the four cardinal directions. The Roman mundus
was a circular trench divided into four parts; it was at once the image of the cosmos and the paradigmatic
model for the human habitation. It has been rightly proposed that Roma quadrata is to be understood not
as being square in shape but as being divided into four parts.19 The mun- dus was clearly assimilated to
the omphalos, to the navel of the earth; the city (urbs) was situated in the middle of the orbis terrarum.
Similar ideas have been shown to explain the structure of Germanic villages and towns.20 In extremely
varied cultural contexts, we constantly find the same cosmological schema and the same ritual scenario:
settling in a territory is equivalent to founding a world.
Since "our world" is a cosmos, any attack from without threatens to turn it into chaos. And as "our world"
was founded by imitating the paradigmatic work of the gods, the cosmogony, so the enemies who attack it
are assimilated to the enemies of the gods, the demons, and especially to the archdemon, the a                           rim or
dial dragon
em, in Weer MUer, Kreis and Kreuz, Berlin, 1938, PP- 60
        Maer, op. cit, pp. 65
    Sacred and the Profane
conquered by the gods at the beginning of time. An at-tack on "our world" is equivalent to an act of
revenge by the mythical dragon, who rebels against the work of the gods, the cosmos, and struggles to
annihilate it. "Our" enemies belong to the powers of chaos. Any de- struction of a city is equivalent to a
retrogression to chaos. Any victory over the attackers reiterates the parch- dig~icvictory of the
gods over the dragon (that is,
over chaos).
                             This is the reason the Pharaoh was assimilated to the
                             God Re, conqueror of the dragon Apophis, while his
                           enemies were assimilated to the mythical dragon. Darius
                              regarded himself as a new Thraetaona, the mythical
                            Iranian hero who was said to have slain a three-headed
dragon. In Judaic tradition the pagan kings were repre-
sented in the likeness of the dragon; such is the Nebu-
chadnezzar described by Jeremiah (51, 34) and the
Pompey presented in the Psalms of Solomon (9,29).
As we shall see later, the dragon is the paradigmatic
figure of the marine monster, of the primordial snake,
symbol of the cosmic waters, of darkness, night, and
death-in short, of the amorphous and virtual, of every-
thing that has not yet acquired a "form." The dragon
must be conquered and cut to pieces by the gods          that
the cosmos may come to birth. It was from the body of
the marine monster Tiamat that Marduk fashioned the
world. Yahweh created the universe after his victory over
the primordial monster Rahab. But, as we shall see, this
                                  Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred
victory of the gods over the dragon must be symbolically repeated each year, for each year the world must
be created anew. Similarly the victory of the gods over the forces of darkness, death, and chaos is
repeated with every victory of the city over its invaders.
1t is highly probable that the fortifications of inhabited places and cities began by being magical defenses;
for fortifications-trenches, labyrinths, ramparts, etc.-were designed rather to repel invasion by demons and
the souls of the dead than attacks by human beings. In North India, during epidemics, a circle is drawn
around the village to keep the demons of sickness from entering the enclosure.21 In Europe, during the
Middle Ages, the walls of cities were ritually consecrated as a defense against the devil, sickness, and
death. Then, too, sym- bolic thinking finds no difficulty in assimilating the human enemy to the devil and
death. In the last analysis the result of attacks, whether demonic or military, is always the same-ruin,
disintegration, death.
It is worth observing that the same images are still used in our own day to formulate the dangers that
threaten a certain type of civilization; we speak of the chaos, the disorder, the darkness that will

overwhelm our world." All these terms express the abolition of an order, a cosmos, an organic structure,
and reimmersion the state of fluidity, of formlessness-in short, of
Biade, Patterns, p.
     Sacred and the Profane
chaos. This, in our opinion, shows that the paradigmatic images live on in the language and cliches of
nonreli- gious man. Something of the religious conception of the world still persists in the behavior of
profane man, although he is not always conscious of this immemorial heritage.
Let us consider the basic difference observable between these two types of behavior-traditional re-ligious
and profanein respect to the human habitation. There is no need to dwell on the value and function of the
habitation in industrial societies; they are well known. According to the formula of a famous contem-
porary architect, Le Corbusier, the house is "a machine to live in." Hence it takes its place among the
countless machines mass-produced in industrial societies. The ideal house of the modem world must first
of all be functional; that is, it must allow men to work and to rest in order that they may work. You can

change your machine to live in" as often as you change your bicycle, your refrigerator, your automobile.
You can also change cities or provinces, without encountering any difficulties aside from those that arise
from a difference in climate.
It does not lie within our province to write the history of the gradual desacralization of the human
                                  Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred
The process is an integral part of the gigantic transfor- mation of the world undertaken by the industrial
socie- ties, a transformation made possible by the desacraliza- tion of the cosmos accomplished by
scientific thought and above all by the sensational discoveries of physics and chemistry. We shall later
have occasion to inquire
this secularization of nature is really final, if no possibility remains for nonreligious man to rediscover
the sacred dimension of existence in the world. As we just saw, and as we shall see still more clearly
later, certain traditional images, certain vestiges of the be- havior of archaic man still persist, in the
condition of "survivals," even in the most highly industrialized socie- ties. But for the moment our
concern is to describe, in its pure state, religious behavior in respect to the habitation, and to discover the
Welta~tschauungthat it implies.
As we saw, to settle in a territory, to build a dwelling, demand a vital decision for both the whole
community and the individual. For what is involved is undertaking the creation of the world that one
has chosen to inhabit.
Hence it is necessary to imitate the work of the gods, the cosmogony. But this is not always easy, for
there are also tragic, blood-drenched cosmogonies; as imitator of he divine gestures, man must reiterate
them. Since the gods had to slay and dismember a marine monster or a primordial being in order to create
the world from it, man in his turn must imitate them when he builds his world, his city or his house.
Hence the necessity for
The Sacred and the Pro fane
bloody or symbolic sacrifices on the occasion of con-structions, the countless forms of the Bauopfer
(build- ing sacrifice), concerning which we shall have to say a few words further on.
Whatever the structure of a traditional society-be it a society of hunters, herdsmen, or cultivators, or
already at the stage of urban civilization-the habitation always undergoes a process of sanctification,
because it consti- tutes an imago mundi and the world is a divine creation. But there are various ways of
homologizing the dwell- ing place to the cosmos, because there are various types of cosmogonies. For our
purpose, it will suffice to dis- tinguish two methods of ritually transforming the dwell- ing place (whether
the territory or the house) into cos- mos, that is, of giving it the value of an imago mdi:
(a) assimilating it to the cosmos by the projection of the four horizons from a central point (in the case of
a village) or by the symbolic installation of the axis mundi (in the case of a house) ;(6) repeating, through
a ritual of construction, the paradigmatic acts of the gods by virtue of which the world came to birth from
the body of a marine dragon or of a primordial giant. We need not here dwell on the basic differences in
Weltanschauung underlying these two methods of sanctifying the dwell- ing place, nor on their historical
and cultural presup- positions. Suffice it to say that the first method-cosmicizing a space by projection of
the horizons or by installation of the axis mdi-is already documented
                                  Sacred Space and              the World Sacred
inthe most archaic stages of culture (cf. the kauwa-auwa poleof the Australian Achilpa), while the second
method seems to have been developed in the culture of the earliest cultivators. What is important for our
investiga- tion is the fact that, in all traditional cultures, the habitation possesses a sacred aspect by the
simple fact that it reflects the world.
Thus, in the habitation of the primitive peoples of the North American and North Asian Arctics we find a
cen- tral post that is assimilated to the axis mundi, i.e., to the cosmic ~illar or the world tree, which, as we
saw, con- nect earth with heaven. In other words, cosmic symbol-              is found in the very structure of
the habitation. The house is an imugo mundi. The sky is conceived as a vast tent supported by a central
pillar; the tent pole or the central post of the house is assimilated to the Pillars of the World and is so
named. This central pole or post has an important ritual role; the sacrifices in honor of the celestial
Supreme Being are performed at the foot of it. The same symbolism has been preserved among the
herdsmen-breeders of Central Asia, but since here the conical-roofed habitation with central pillar is
replaced by the yurt, the mythico-ritual function of the pillar is transferred to the upper opening for the
escape of smoke. Like the pole (= axis mundi), the stripped tree                 whose top emerges through the
upper opening of the
(and which symbolizes the cosmic tree) is            ceived as a ladder leading to heaven; the shamans climb
     Snored and the Profane
it on their celestial journeys. And it is through the upper opening that the shamans set out on their
flights.22The sacred pillar, set in the middle of the habitation, is found again in Africa among the
Hamitic and Hamitoid pas- toral peoples.23
                                      COSMOGONY AND BUILDING SACRIFICE
    A similar conception is found in such a highly evolved culture as that of India: but here there is also
an exemplification of the other method of homologizing the house to the cosmos, to which we referred
briefly above. Before the masons lay the first stone the astronomer shows them the spot where it is to be
placed, and this spot is supposed to lie above the snake that supports the world. The master mason
sharpens a stake and drives it into the ground, exactly at the indicated spot, in order to fix the snake's
head. A foundation stone is then laid above the stake. Thus the cornerstone          at the exact center of the
world.^ But, in addition, the act of founda- tion repeats the cosmogonic act; for to drive the stake into the
snake's head to "fix9' it is to imitate the primor- dial gesture of Soma or Indra, when the latter, as the
Vedaexpresses it, "struck the Snake in his lair" (IV, 17,
     Eliade, Le Chamanismc et les techniques 0rckffUJuesde l'extase, Paris, 1951, pp. 238 %. Cited hereafter as Le
Chumanisme. Wilhelm Schmidt, "Der heilige Mittelpfahl des Hauses," Anthropos, 35-36, 1940-1941, p. 967. 2* S.
Stevenson, The Rites of the Twice-Born, Oxford, 1920, p. 354.
                                   Snored Space and Making the World Sacred
91, when his lightning bolt "cut off its head" (1,52,10).
   said, the snake s yrnbolizes chaos, the formless, the unm&fested. To behead it is equivalent to an
act of creation, passage from the virtual and the amorphous to that which has form. Again, it was from
the body of a
marine monster, Tiamat, that the god Mar- duk fashioned the world. This victory was symbolically
repeated each year, since each year the cosmos was re- newed. But the paradigmatic act of the divine
victory was likewise repeated on the occasion of every construction, for every new construction
reproduced the creation of the world.
This second type of cosmogony is much more complex, and it will only be outlined here. But it was
necessary to cite it, for, in the last analysis, it is with such a cos-mogony that the countless forms of the
building sacrifice are bound up; the latter, in short, is only an imitation, often a symbolic imitation, of the
primordial sacrifice that gave birth to the world. For, beginning with a cer- tain stage of culture, the
cosmogonic myth explains the Creation through the slaying of a giant (Ymir in Ger- manic mythology,
Purusha in Indian mythology, Pan-ku 1 China) ;his organs give birth to the various cosmic regions.
According to other groups of myths, it is not

the cosmos that comes to birth in consequence of the immolation of a primordial being and from his own
       stance, but also food plants, the races of man, or different
classes. It is on this type of cosmogonic myth that
      Sacred and the Profane
building sacrifices depend. If a "construction" is to en- dure (be it house, temple, tool, etc.), it must be ani-
mated, that is, it must receive life and a soul. The trans- fer of the soul is possible only through a blood
sacrifice. The history of religions, ethnology, folklore record countless forms of building sacrifices-that is,
of sym- bolic or blood sacrifices for the benefit of a structure.? In southeastern Europe, these beliefs have
inspired ad- mirable popular ballads describing the sacrifice of the wife of the master mason in order that
a structure may be completed (cf. the ballads on the Arta Bridge in Greece, on the Monastery of Argesh
in Romania, on the city of Scutari in Yugoslavia, etc.)         .
We have said enough about the religious significance of the human dwelling place for certain
conclusions to have become self-evident. Exactly like the city or the sanctuary, the house is
sanctified, in whole or part, by a cosmological symbolism or ritual. This is why settling
somewhere~building a village or merely a house-represents a serious decision, for the very existence
of man is involved; he must, in short, create his own world and assume the responsibility of
maintaining and renew- ing it. Habitations are not lightly changed, for it is not easy to abandon one's
world. The house is not an object, a "machine to live in? it is the universe that man con-structs for
himself by imitating the paradigmatic crea-
26     Paul Sartori, "Ober das Bauopfer," Zeitschrift fik Ethnologic, 30, 1938, pp. 1-54.
Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred turn of the gods, the cosmogony. Every construction and
every inauguration of a new dwelling are in some measure equivalent to a new beginning, a new life.
And every beginning repeats the primordial beginning, when the universe first saw the light of day.
Even in modern societies, with their high degree of demoralization, the festivity and rejoicing that
accompany settling in a new house still preserve the memory of the festival exuber- ance that, long
ago, marked the incipit vita nova. Since the habitation constitutes an imago mundi, it is
symbolically situated at the Center of the World. The multiplicity, or even the infinity, of centers of
the world raises no difficulty for religious thought. For it is not a matter of geometrical space, but of
an existential and sacred space that has an entirely different structure, that admits of an infinite
number of breaks and hence is capable of an infinite number of communications with the
transcendent. We have seen the cosmologica1 mean- ing and the ritual role of the upper opening in
various forms of habitations. In other cultures these cosmologi- cal meanings and ritual functions are
transferred to the chimney (= smoke hole) and to the part of the roof that lies above the "sacred area"
and that is removed or even broken in cases of prolonged death-agony. When we come to the
homologation cosmos-house-human body, we shall have occasion to show the deeper meaning of
 breaking the roof." For the moment, we will mention

that the most ancient sanctuaries were hypaethral or
The Sacred and the Profane
built with an aperture in the roof-the "eye of the dome,"symbolizing break-through from plane to plane,
communication with the transcendent.
Thus religious architecture simply took over and de-veloped the cosmological symbolism already
present         the structure of primitive habitations. In its turn, the human habitation had been
chronologically preceded by the provisional "holy place," by a space provisionally consecrated and

cosmicized (cf. the Australian Achilpa ) This is as much as to say that all symbols and rituals having to
do with temples, cities, and houses ore finally derived from the primary experience of sacred space.
     In the great oriental civilizations-from Mesopo-tamia and Egypt to China and India-the temple re-
ceived a new and important valorization. It is not only an imago mundi; it is also interpreted as the
earthly repro- duction of a transcendent model. Judaism inherited this ancient oriental conception of the
temple as the copy of a celestial work of architecture. In this idea we probably have one of the last
interpretations that religious man has given to the primary experience of sacred space in con- trast to
profane space. Hence we must dwell a little on the perspectives opened by this new religious concep-
To summarize the essential data of the problem: If
Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred the temple constitutes an imago mundi, this is because the
world, as the work of the gods, is sacred. But the cosmological structure of the temple gives room for a
new valorization; as house of the gods, hence holy place above all others, the temple continually
resanctifies the world, because it at once represents and contains it. In the last analysis, it is by virtue of
the temple that the world is resanctified in every part. How-ever impure it may have become, the
world is continually purified by the sanctity of sanctuaries. Another idea derives from this increasingly
accepted ontological difference between the cosmos and its sancti- fied image, the temple. This is the
idea that the sanctity of the temple is proof against all earthly corruption, by virtue of the fact that the
architectural plan of the temple is the work of the gods and hence exists in heaven, near to the gods. The
transcendent models of temples enjoy a spiritual, incorruptible celestial existence. Through the grace of
the gods, man attains to the dazzling vision of these models, which he then attempts to reproduce on
earth. The Babylonian king Gudea saw in a dream the goddess Nidaba showing him a tablet on which
were written the names of the beneficent stars, and a god re- vealed the plan of the temple to him."
Sennacherib built Nineveh according to "the plan established from most distant times in the configuration
of the Heavens." This
^ct Eliade. Myth, pp.
The Sacred and the Profane
means not only that celestial geometry made the fast constructions possible, but above all that since the
archi- tectonic models were in heaven, they shared in the sacral- ity of the sky.
For the people of Israel, the models of the tabernacle, of all the sacred utensils, and of the temple itself
had been created by Yahweh who revealed them to his chosen, to be reproduced on earth.
Yahweh says to Moses: "And let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them. According to
so shall ye make it"
(Exodus, 25,8-9). "And look that thou make them after their pattern, which was shewed thee in the
mount"               25, 40). When David gives his son Solomon the plans for the Temple buildings, the
tabernacle, and all the utensils, he assures him that "all this    . . .the Lord made me understand in writing
by his hand upon me" (I1 Chronicles, 28, 19). He must, then, have seen the celestial model created by
Yahweh from the beginning of time. This is what Solomon affirms: "Thou hast com- manded me to build
a temple upon thy holy mount, and an altar in the city wherein thou dwellest, a resem- blance of the holy
tabernacle which thou hast prepared from the beginning" (Wisdom of Solomon, 9, 8).
The Heavenly Jerusalem was created by God at the same time as Paradise, hence in uetemum. The city
of Jerusalem was only an approximate reproduction of the
                                   Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred
transcendent model; it could be polluted by man, but the model was incorruptible, for it was not involved
      time. 'This building now built in your midst is not hat which is revealed with Me, that which was
prepared beforehand here from the time when I took counsel to make Paradise, and showed it to Adam
before he sinned" (11 Baruch, 4,            trans. R. H. Charlesz7).
The Christian basilica and, later, the cathedral take over and continue all these symbolisms. On the one
hand, the church is conceived as imitating the Heavenly Jeru- salem, even from patristic times; on the
other, it also reproduces Paradise or the celestial world. But the cos- mological structure of the sacred
edifice still persists in the thought of Christendom; for example, it is obvious in the Byzantine church.
"The four parts of the interior of the church symbolize the four cardinal directions. The interior of the
church is the universe. The altar is paradise, which lay in        East. The imperial door to the altar was
also called the Door of Paradise. During Easter week, the great door to the altar remains open during the
entire service; the meaning of this custom is clearly expressed in the Easter Canon: 'Christ rose from the
grave and opened the doors of Paradise unto us.' The West, on the contrary, is the realm of darkness, of
grief, of death, the realm of the eternal mansions of Â¥hdead, who await the resurrection of the flesh and
. me, ed he Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old fn English, Oxford, 1913, Vol. 11. p.
The Sacred and the Profane
Last Judgment. The middle of the building is the earth. According to the views of Kosmas Indikopleustes,
the earth is rectangular and is bounded by four walls, which are surmounted by a dome. The four parts of
the interior of the church symbolize the four cardinal direction^."^^ As "copy of the cosmos," the
Byzantine church incar- nates and at the same time sanctifies the world.
    From the thousands of examples available to the historian of religions, we have cited only a small
num- ber but enough to show the varieties of the religious experience of space. We have taken our
examples from different cultures and periods, in order to present at least the most important mythological
constructions and ritual scenarios that are based on the experience of sacred space. For in the course of
history, religious man has given differing valorizations to the same fundamental experience. We need
only compare the conception of the sacred space (and hence of the cosmos) discernible
among the Australian Achilpa with the corresponding conceptions of the Kwakiutl, the Altaic peoples, or
the Mesopotamians, to realize the differences among them. There is no need to dwell on the truism that,
since the religious life of humanity is realized in history, its expressions are inevitably conditioned by the
variety of
28 Hans   Sedlmayr, Die Entstehung der Kathedrale, Zurich, 1950, p. 119.
                                     Sacred Space and                    the World
historical moments and cultural styles. But for our pm-nose it is not the infinite variety of the religious
expe- rience~ of space that concerns us but, on the contrary, their elements of unity. Pointing out the
contrast between the behavior of nonreligious man with respect to the space in which he lives and the
behavior of religious man in respect to sacred space isenough to make the difference in structure between
the two attitudes clearly apparent.
If we should attempt to summarize the result of the descriptions that have been presented in this chapter,
we could say that the experience of sacred space makes possible the "founding of the world": where the
sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence. But the irruption of
the sacred does not only project a fixed point into the formless fluidity of profane space, a center into
chaos; it also effects a break in plane, that is, it opens communication between the cosmic planes
(between earth and heaven) and makes possible ontological passage from one mpde of

being to another. It is such a break in the heterogeneity of profane space that creates the center through
with the transmundane is established, a, consequentb, founds the world, for the center renders orientation
possible. Hence the manifestation of
sacred in space has a cosmological valence; every spatial &erophany or consecration of a space is equiva-
lent to a cosmogony. The first conclusion we might draw
The Sacred and the Profane
would be: the world becomes apprehensible as world, as cosmos,               the measure in which it
reveals itself as-a sacred world.
Every world is the work of the gods, for it was either created directly by the gods or was consecrated,
hence cosmicized, by men ritually reactualizing the paradig- matic act of Creation. This is as much as
to say that religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he
participates in being, that he has a real existence. This religious need expresses an unquenchable
ontological thirst. Religious man thirsts for being. His terror of the chaos that surrounds his in-
habited world corresponds to his terror of nothingness. The unknown space that extends beyond his
uncosmicized because unconsecrated space, a mere amor- phous extent into which no orientation has
yet been pro- jected, and hence in which no structure has yet arisen -for religious man, this profane
space represents abso- lute nonbeing. If, by some evil chance, he strays into it, he feels emptied of his
ontic substance, as if he were dissolving in Chaos, and he finally dies.
This ontological thirst is manifested in many ways.
'In the realm of sacred space which we are now consider- ing, its most striking manifestation is
religious man's will to take his stand at the very heart of the real, at the Center of the World-that is,
exactly where the cosmos came into existence and began to spread out toward the four horizons, and
where, too, there is the possibility of communication with the gods; in short, precisely where
Sacred Space and             the World Sacred
he is closest to the gods. We have seen that the symbol- ism of the center is the formative principle
not only of countries, cities, temples, and palaces but also of the humblest human dwelling, be it the
tent of a nomad hunter, the shepherd's yurt, or the house of the sedentary cultivator. This is as much
as to say that every religious man places himself at the Center of the World and by the same token at
the very source of absolute reality, as close as possible to the opening that ensures him com-
munication with the gods.
But since to settle somewhere, to inhabit a space, is equivalent to repeating the cosmogony and hence
to imi- tating the work of the gods, it follows that, for religious man, every existential decision to
situate himself in space in fact constitutes a religious decision. By assuming the responsibility of
creating the world that he has chosen to inhabit, he not only cosmicizes chaos but also sancti- fies his
little cosmos by making it like the world of the gods. Religious man's profound nostalgia is to inhabit
-a "divine world," is his desire that his house shall be like the house of the gods, as it was later
represented in temples and sanctuaries. In short, this religious nostalgia
the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos,     m~in the beginning, when       came fresh from the
Bator's hands.
The experience of sacred time will make it possible for religious man periodically to experience the
cosmos it was in principk, that is, at the mythical moment of ' Creation.
Sacred Time and Myths
  For religious man time too, like space, is neither homogeneous nor continuous. On the one hand
there are the intervals of a sacred time, the time of fes- tivals (by far the greater part of which are
periodical) ; on the other there is profane time, ordinary temporal duration, in which acts without
religious meaning have their setting. Between these two kinds of time there is, of course, solution of
continuity; but by means of rite3 religious man can pass without danger from ordinary temporal
duration to sacred time.
One essential difference between these two qualities
 of time strikes us immediately: by its very nature sacred
 time is reversible in the sense that. properly speaking*
 it is a primordial mythical time*made present. Ever?
religious festival, any liturgical time, represents the
reactualization of a sacred event that took r lace in a mythical past, "in the beginning." Religious
participa- tion in a festival implies emerging from ordinary tem- poral duration and reintegration of
the mythical time reactualized by the festival itself. Hence sacred time is indefinitely recoverable,
indefinitely repeatable. From one point of view it could be said that it does not "pass," that it does not

constitute an irreversible duration. It is an ontological, Parmenidean time; it always remains Val to
itself, it neither changes nor is exhausted. With each periodical festival, the participants find the same
sacred timethe same that had been manifested in the festival of the previous year or in the festival of
a en- '^y earlier; it is the time that was created and sanctified by tie gods at the period of their gesta,
of which the
1 Sacred Time and Myths 71
70 The Sacred and the Profane
festival is precisely a reactualization. In other words the participants in the festival meet in it the first

                                                           I     of sacred time, as it appeared ah origin<,
in illo tempore. For the sacred time in which the festival runs its course

did not exist before the divine gestu that the festival commemorates. By creating the various realities

today constitute the world, the gods also founded sacred time, for the time contemporary with a
creation was necessarily sanctified by the presence and activity of the gods.

                           Hence religious man lives in two kinds of time, of
which the more important, sacred time, appears under
the paradoxical aspect of a circular time, reversible and
recoverable, a sort of eternal mythical present that is
periodically reintegrated by means of rites. This attitude
in regard to time suffices to distinguish religious from
nonreligious man; the former refuses to live solely in
what, in modem terms, is called the historical present; 1
he attempts to regain a sacred time that, from one point    1
of view, can be homologized to eternity.

What time is for the
nonreligious man of modem
societies would be more
difficult to put into a few
words. I                      We do not intend to discuss the modem philosophies of time nor the

concepts that modem science uses in its own investigations. Our aim is to compare not systems or
philosophies but existential attitudes and behaviors' Now, what it is possible to observe in respect to
a nap religious man is that he too experiences a certain di3
continuity and heterogeneity of time. For him too there is the comparatively monotonous time of his
work, and the time of celebrations and spectacles-in short, "festal time.w He too lives in varying
temporal rhythms and is aware of times of different intensities; when he is listen- ing to the kind of
music that he likes or, being in love, waits for or meets his sweetheart, he obviously expe- riences a
different temporal rhythm from that which he
                                       when he is working or bored.
But., in comparison with religious man, there is an essential difference. The latter experiences
intervals of time that are "sacred," that have no part in the temporal duration that precedes and
follows them, that have a wholly different structure and origin, for they are of a primordial time,
sanctified by the gods and capable of being made present by the festival. This transhuman quality of
liturgical time is inaccessible to a nonreligious man. This is as much as to say that, for him, time can
present neither break nor mystery; for him, time con- stitutes man's deepest existential dimension; it
is linked to his own life, hence it has a beginning and an end, which is death, the annihilation of his
life. However
the temporal rhythms that he experiences, however great their differences in intensity, nonreligious
man knows that they always represent a human experience, ln which there is no room for any divine
                          For religious man, on the contrary, profane temporal
can be periodically arrested; for certain rituals
                              The Sacred and the Profane Sacred Time and Myths 73
have the power to interrupt it by periods of a sacred time that is nonhistorical (in the sense that it does not

belong to the historical present). Just as a church con. stitutes a break in plane in the profane space of a
modem city, the service celebrated inside it marks a    ,
break in profane temporal duration. It is no longer to- day's historical time that is present-the time that is

experienced, for example, in the adjacent streets-but   ,   the time in which the historical existence of Jesus
Christ occurred, the time sanctified by his preaching, by his passion, death, and resurrection. But we must
add that this example does not reveal all the difference between sacred and profane time; Christianity
radically changed the experience and the concept of liturgical time, and this is due to the fact that
Christianity affirms                toricity of the person of Christ. The Christian liturgy unfolds in a

historical time sanctified by the incarnation     1
of the Son of God. The sacred time periodically reactu- I alized in pre-Christian religions (especially in
the 1 archaic religions) is a mythical time, that is, a primor- 1 dial time, not to be found in the historical
past, an original         in the sense that it came into existence all at once, that it was not receded by
another time, because no time could exist before the appearance of the reality norrated in the myth.
It is this archaic conception of mythical time that is of chief concern to us. We shall later see how it
differs from the conceptions held by Judaism and Christianity,
We shall begin our investigation by presenting certain facts that have the advantage of immediately
revealing religious man's behavior in respect to time. First of all, an observation that is not without impor-
tance: in a number of North American Indian languages the term world (= Cosmos) is also used in the
sense of year. The Yokuts say "the world has passed," meaning "a year has gone by." For the Yuki, the
year is expressed by the words for earth or world. Like the Yokuts, they say "the world has passed" when
a year has passed. This vocabulary reveals the intimate religious connec- tion between the world and
cosmic time. The cosmos is conceived as a living unity that is born, develops, and
dies on the last day of the year, to be reborn on New Year's Day. We shall see that this rebirth is a birth,
that the cosmos is reborn each year because, at every New Year, time begins ab initio.
The intimate connection between the cosmos and time is religious in nature: the cosmos is homologizable
to cosmic time (= the Year) because they are both sacred realities, divine creations. Among some North
American peoples this cosmic-temporal connection is revealed even            the structure of sacred buildings.
Since the temple ^presents the image of the world, it can also comprise
    symbolism. We find this, for example, among A1gonquing and the Sioux. As we saw, their sacred
The Sacred and the Profane
lodge represents the universe; but at the same time it symbolizes the year. For the year is conceived as a
jour- ney through the four cardinal directions, signified by the four doors and four windows of the lodge.
The Dakotas say: "The Year is a circle around the world9'- that is, around their sacred lodge, which is an
imago mdi.'
A still clearer example is found in India. We saw that the erection of an altar is equivalent to a repetition
of the cosmogony. The texts add that "the fire altar is the year" and explain its temporal system as
follows: the 360 bricks of the enclosure correspond to the 360 nights of the year, and the 360 yajusmati
bricks to the 360 days
(Shatapatha Brahmcma, X, 5, 4, 10; etc.). This is as
much as to say that, with the building of each fire alter,
not only is the world remade but the year is built too;
in other words, time is regenerated by being created
anew. But then, too, the year is assimilated to Prajiipati,
the cosmic god; consequently, with each new altar Pra-
jzpati is reanimated-that is, the sanctity of the world
is strengthened. It is not a matter of profane time, of
mere temporal duration, but of the sanctification of
cosmic time. What is sought by the erection of the fire
altar is to sanctify the world, hence to place it in a sacred
We find a similar temporal symbolism as part of ^?
Sacred Time and Myths
cosin~logical symbolism of the Temple at Jerusalem.
According to Flavius Josephus (Ant.               111, 7,
the twelve loaves of bread on the table signified the
~1vemonths of the year and the candelabrum with
seventy branches represented the decans (the zodiacal
division of the seven planets into tens). The Temple was
an imago mundi; being at the Center of the World, at
~erusalem, it sanctified not only the entire cosmos but
also cosmic life-that is, time.
                              Hermann Usener has the distinction of having been
the first to explain the etymological kinship between
&mplum and tempus by interpreting the two terms through the concept of "intersection," (Schneidmg,
Kreuzung) .2 Later studies have refined the discovery;
ittemplum designates the spatial, tempus the temporal

aspect of the motion of the horizon in space and time."'
The underlying meaning of all these facts seems to be the following: for religious man of the archaic
year it recovers its original sanctity, the sanctity that it possessed when it came from the Creator's hands.
This symbolism is clearly indicated in the architectonic structure of sanctuaries. Since the temple is at
once the
place par excellence and the image of the world, it sanctifies the entire cosmos and also sanctifies cosmic
life-This cosmic life was imagined in the form of a
  Gotternamen, 2nd. ed., Bonn, 1920, pp. 191   MiiUer, Kreis and Kreux, Berlin, 1938. p. 39; cf. also pp. 33
The Sacred and the Profane
circular course; it was identified with the year. The year was a closed circle; it had a beginning and an
end, but it also had the peculiarity that it could be reborn in the form of a new year. With each New Year,
a time that was "new," "pure," "holyw-because not yet worn Ã‘cam into existence.
But time was reborn, began again, because with each New Year the world was created anew. In the
preceding chapter we noted the considerable importance of the cosmogonic myth as paradigmatic model
for every kin   f of creation and construction. We will now add that thte cosmogony equally implies the
creation of time. Nor is this all. For just as the cosmogony is the archetype of all creation, cosmic time,
which the cosmogony brings forth, is the paradigmatic model for all other times- that is, for the times
specifically belonging to the various categories of existing things. To explain this further: for
religious man of the archaic cultures, every creation, every existence begins in time; before a thing exists,
its particular time could not exist. Before the cosmos came into existence, there was no cosmic time.
Before a par-ticular vegetable species was created, the time that now causes it to grow, bear fruit, and die
did not exist. It is for this reason that every creation is imagined as hav- ing taken place at the beginning
of time, in principio- Time gushes forth with the first appearance of a new category of existents. This is
why myth lays such an important role; as we shall show later, the way in which
                               a reality came into existence is revealed by its myth.
Sacred Time and Myths
It is the cosmogonic myth that tells how the cos- mos came into existence. At Babylon during the course
of the akitu ceremony, which was performed during the lasfdays of the year that was ending and the first
days of the New Year, the Poem of Creation, the Enuma elish, was solemnly recited. This ritual recitation
reactualized the combat between Marduk and the marine monster Tiamat, a combat that took place ab
origine and put an end to chaos by the final victroy of the god. Marduk created the cosmos from Tiamat's
dismembered bodv and created man from the blood of the demon Kingu, Tiamat's chief ally. That this
commemoration of the Creation was in fact a reactualization of the cosmogonic act is shown both by the
rituals and in the formulas recited during the ceremony.
The combat between Tiamat and Marduk, that is, was mimed by a battle between two groups of actors, a
cere- monial that we find again among the Hittites (again in the frame of the dramatic scenario of the New
Year), among the Egyptians, and at Ras Shamra. The battle between two groups of actors repeated the
passage from chaos to cosmos, actualized the cosmogony. The mythical event became present once
again. "May he continue to conqiier Tiamat and shorten his days!" the priest cried. The combat, the
victory, and the Creation took place      that              hic et num.
she the New Year is a reactualization of thecos-
The Sacred and the Profane
mogony, it implies starting time over again       its be& ning, that is, restoration of the primordial
time, the "pure" time, that existed at the moment of Creation. This is why the New Year is the
occasion for "purifica- tions,"for the expulsion of sins, of demons, or merely of a scapegoat. For it is
not a matter merely of a certain temporal interval coming to its end and the beginning of another (as a
modem man, for example, thinks) ;it is also a matter of abolishing the past year and past time.
Indeed, this is the meaning of ritual purifications; there is more than a mere "purification"; the sins
and faults of the individual and of the community as a whole are annulled, consumed             by fire.
The Nawrbthe Persian New Year-commemorates the day that witnessed the creation of the world and
man. It was on the day of Nawroz that the "renewal of the Creation" was accomplished, as the Arabic
historian a1-Biriini expressed it. The king proclaimed: "Here is a new day of a new month of a new
year; what time has worn must be renewed." Time had worn the human being, society, the
cosmos-and this destructive time was profane time, duration strictly speaking; it had to be abolished
in order to reintegrate the mythical moment in which the world had come into existence, bathed in a

 pure," "strong," and sacred time. The abolition of pro- fane past time was accomplished by rituals
that signified a sort of "end of the world." The extinction of fires, the return of the souls of the dead,
social confusion of the
Sacred Time and Myths
of the cosmos into chaos. On the last day of the year the universe           dissolved in the primordial
waters. The marine monster ~i~~~t-symbol
of darkness, of the formless, the non-
rnanifested-revived and once again threatened. The
world that had existed for a whole year really disap
peared. Since Tiamat was again present, the cosmos was
and Marduk was obliged to create it once
again, after having once again conquered Tiarna~~
The meaning of this periodical retrogression of the world into a chaotic modality was this: all the
"sins" of the year, everything that time had soiled and worn, was annihilated in the physical sense of
the word. By sym- bolically participating in the annihilation and re-crea- tion of the world, man too
was created anew; he was reborn, for he began a new life. With each New Year, man felt freer and
purer, for he was delivered from the burden of his sins and failings. He had reintegrated the
fabulous time of Creation, hence a sacred and strong im-sacred because transfigured by the presence
of the gods, strong because it was the time that belonged, and belonged only, to the most gigantic
creation ever accomplished, that of the universe. Symbolically, man became contemporary with the
cosmogony, he was pres- latat the creation of the world. In the ancient Near East,
The Sacred and the Profane
he even participated actively in its creation (cf. the two opposed groups, representing the god and the
marine monster).
It is easy to understand why the memory of that mar- velous time haunted religious man, why he
periodically sought to return to it. In illo tempore the gods had dis- played their greatest powers. The
cosmogony is the supreme divine manifestation, the paradigmatic act           strength, superabundance, and
creativity. Religious man thirsts for the real. By every means at his disposal, he seeks to reside at the very
source of primordial reality, when the world was in statu nascendi.
    All this would warrant detailed study, but for the moment only two features will occupy our attention:
(1)through annual repetition of the cosmogony, time was regenerated, that is, it began again as sacred
time, for it coincided with the ill& tempus in which the world had first come into existence; (2) by
participating ritu-ally in the end of the world and in its re-creation, any man became contemporary with
the illud tempq hence he was born anew, he began life over again with his reserve of vital forces intact, as
it was at the moment of his birth.
These facts are important; they reveal the secret of
Sacred        and Myths
religious man's attitude and behavior in respect to time.
Since the sacred and strong time is the time of origins,
the stupendous instant in which a reality was created,
was for the first time fully manifested, man will seek
periodically to return to that original time. This ritual
reactualizing of the ill& tempus in which the first epi-
phany of a reality occurred is the basis for all sacred
calendars; the festival is not merely the commemoration
of a mythical (and hence religious) event; it reactual-
izes the event.
The paramount time of origins is the time of the cos- mogony, the instant that saw the appearance of the
most immense of realities, the world. This, as we saw in the preceding chapter, is the reason the
cosmogony serves as the paradigmatic model for every creation, for every kind of doing. It is for this
same reason that cosmogonic              serves as the model for all sacred times; for if sacred time is that in
which the gods manifested them- selves and created, obviously the most complete divine manifestation
and the most gigantic creation is the crea-tion of the world.
Consequently, religious man reactualizes the cosmog- ony not only each time he creates something (his
"own ~~rld"--theinhabited territory~or a city, a house, etc.),        also when he wants to ensure a fortunate
above the ritual recitation of the cosmogonic myth plays
The Sacred and the Profane
an important role in healing, when what is sought is the regeneration of the human being. In Fiji, the
ceremony for installing a new ruler is called creation of the world, and the same ceremony is repeated to
save threatened crops. But it is perhaps Polynesia that exhibits the widest application of the cosmogonic
myth. The words that 10 spoke in illo tempore to create the world have become ritual formulas. Men
repeat them on many occasions- to fecundate a sterile womb, to heal (mental as well as physical
ailments), to prepare for war, but also on the occasion of a death or to stimulate poetic inspiration?
Thus the cosmogonic myth serves the Polynesians as the archetypal model for all creations, on whatever
plane -biological, psychological, spiritual. But since ritual recitation of the cosmogonic myth implies
reactualiza- tion of that primordial event, it follows that he for whom it is recited is magically projected in
illo tempore, into the "beginning of the World"; he becomes contemporary with the cosmogony. What is
involved is, in short, a return to the original time, the therapeutic purpose of which is to begin life once
again, a symbolic rebirth. The conception underlying these curative rituals              to be the following:
life cannot be repaired, it can only be recreated through symbolic repetition of the cosmog
ony, for, as we have said, the cosmogony is the paradig- matic model for all creation.
6 Cf.   the bibliographical reference in Myth, pp. 82 ff. and in Patterns,
p. 410.
Sacred Time and Myths
The regenerative function of the return to the time of origins becomes still more clear if we make a
of an archaic therapy, such, for example, as that of the Na-khi, a Tibeto-Burmese people living in
southwest China (Yun-nan Province). The therapeutic ritual proper consists in the solemn recitation of the
of the creation of the world, followed by myths of the origin of maladies from the wrath of the snakes
and the appearance of the first Shaman-Healer who brought humanity the necessary medicines. Almost all
the rituals invoke the mythical beginning, the mythical illud tem- pus, when the world was not yet made:
"In the begin- ning, at the time when the heavens, sun, moon, stars, planets and the land had not yet
appeared, when nothing had yet come forth," etc. Then comes the cosmogony and the appearance of the
snakes: "At the time when heaven came forth, the sun, moon, stars and planets, and the earth was spread
out; when the mountains, valleys, trees and rocks came forth                 . . . at that time there came forth the
Nagas and dragons," etc. The birth of the First Healer and the appearance of medicines is then narrated.
After this it is said: "Unless its origin is related one should not speak about itY6
The important fact to be noted in connection with these magical healing chants is that the myth of the
origin of themedicines employed is always incorporated into the
"J.       Rock, The Na-khi N& Cult and Related Ceremonies, Rome, ^VOl. 11, pp. 279
The Sacred and the Profane
cosmogonic myth. It is well known that in all primitive and traditional therapies a remedy becomes
efficacious only if its origin is ritually rehearsed in the sick person's presence. A large number of Near
Eastern and European incantations contain the history of the sickness or of the demon who has provoked
it, at the same time that they evoke the mythical moment in which a divinity or a saint succeeded in
conwering the malady. But we consider it certain that the origin myth was copied after the cos- mogonic
myth, for the latter is the paradigmatic model
for all origins. This, moreover, is why, in therapeutic incantations, the origin myth is often preceded by
the cosmogonic myth and even incorporated into it. An Assy- rian incantation against toothache rehearses
that "after Anu made the heavens, the heavens made the earth, the earth made the rivers, the rivers made
the canals, the canals made the pools, the pools made the worm." And the worm goes "weeping" to
Shamash and Ea and asks them what will be given it to eat, to destroy. The gods offer it fruits, but the
worm asks them for human teeth. "Since thou hast spoken thus, 0 Worm, may Ea break thee with his
powerful hand!"' Here are presented': (1) the creation of the world; (2) the birth of the worm and of the
sickness; (3)the primordial and paradigmatic ges- ture of healing (Ea's destruction of the worm). The
1Campbell Thompson, Assyrian Medical Texts, London, 1932, p. 59. Cf.    Eliade, "Kosrn~~onischeMythen und
magische ~eilun~en,'' Paidewna. 1956, pp. 194-204.
Sacred Time and Myths
efficacy of the incantation lies in the fact that, ritually uttered, it reactualizes the mythical time of origins,
both the origin of the world and the origin of toothaches and their treatment.
The time of origin of a reality-that is, the time inaugurated by the first appearance of the reality-has a
~aradigmatic value and .function; that is why man               to reactualize it periodically by means of
appro- priate rituals. But the "first manifestation" of a reality is equivalent to its creation by divine or
semidivine be- ings; hence, recovering this time of origin implies ritual repetition of the gods' creative
act. The periodic reactu- alization of the creative acts performed by the divine beings in ill0 tempore
constitutes the sacred calendar, the series of festivals. A festival always takes place in rile original time. It
is precisely the reintegration of this original and sacred time that differentiates man's be havior during the
festival from his behavior before or after it. For in many cases the same acts are performed during the
festival as during nonfestival periods. But religious man believes that he then lives in another time,
has succeeded in returning to the mythical illud
During their annual totemic ceremony, the Intichiwna,
The Sacred and the Profane
the Australian Arunta repeat the journey taken by the particular clan's divine Ancestor in the mythical
time (alcheringa, literally, the dream time). They stop at all the countless places at which the Ancestor
stopped and repeat the same acts and gestures that he performed in illo tempore. During the entire
ceremony they fast, carry no weapons, and avoid all contact with their women and with members of other
clans. They are completely im- mersed in the dream time.'
The festivals annually celebrated in a Polynesian island, Tikopia, reproduce the "works of the Godsw-
that is, the acts by which in the mythical time the gods fashioned the world as it is today.9 The festival
time in which the Tikopia live during the ceremonies is char- acterized by certain prohibitions (tubus)
:noise, games, dancing cease. The passage from profane to sacred time is indicated by ritually cutting a
piece of wood in two. The numerous ceremonies that make up the periodical festivals-and which, once
again, are only the reitera- tion of the paradigmatic acts of the gods-seem not to be different from normal
activities; they comprise ritual
repairing of boats, rites relative to the cultivation of food plants (yam, taro, etc.), repairing of sanctuaries.
But in reality all these ceremonial activities differ from similar labors performed at ordinary times by the
     J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia. 2nd   London, 1938, pp. 170 ff.   Cf. Raymond Firth, The Work
of the Gods in Tikopia, I, London,
Sacred Time and Myths
that they are performed on only a few objects (which in some sort constitute the archetypes of their
respective classes) and also because the ceremonies take place in an atmosphere saturated with the sacred.
The natives, &at is, are conscious that they are reproducing, to the smallest detail, the paradigmatic acts
of the gods as they were performed in illo tempore.
This is as much as to say that religious man periodi- cally becomes the contemporary of the gods in the
meas- ure in which he reactualizes the primordial time in which the divine works were accomplished On
the level of primitive civilizations, whatever man does has a trans- human model; hence, even outside of
the festival time, his acts and gestures imitate the paradigmatic models established by the gods and the
mythical ancestors. But this imitation is likely to become less and less accurate. The model is likely to be
distorted or even forgotten. It is the periodical reactualizations of the divine acts-in short, the religious
festivals-that restore human knowl- edge of the sacrality of the models. The ritual repairing of ships and
the ritual cultivation of the yam no longer resemble the similar operations perf orrned outside of the
sacred periods. For one thing, they are more precise, closer to the divine models; for another, they are
            -that is, their intent is religious. A boat is repaired eremonially not because it is in need of
repair but be- muse, in illo tempore, the gods showed men how to ^pair boats. It is a case not of an
empirical operation
The Sacred and the Profane
clans. They are completely im-
mersed in the dream time.'
                               The festivals annually celebrated in a Polynesian
                             island, Tikopia, reproduce the "works of the Gods9'-
                            fashioned the world as it is today? The festival time in
                             which the Tikopia live during the ceremonies is char-
                           acterized by certain prohibitions (tabus) :noise, games,
                           dancing cease. The passage from profane to sacred time
                            is indicated by ritually cutting a piece of wood in two.
                            The numerous ceremonies that make up the periodical
                             festivals-and which, once again, are only the reitera-
                             tion of the paradigmatic acts of the gods-seem not to
                           be different from normal activities; they comprise ritual
                          repairing of boats, rites relative to the cultivation of food
                             plants (yam, taro, etc.) ,repairing of sanctuaries. But
in reality all these ceremonial activities differ from
similar labors performed at ordinary times by the fact
SF. J.Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, 2nd    London,
1938, pp.
                                 Raymond Firth, The Work of the Gods in Tikopiu, I, London, 1940.
Sacred Time and Myths 87 /
The natives, hat is, are conscious that they are reproducing, to the smallest detail, the paradigmatic acts of
the gods as they were performed in illo tempore.
meas- ure in which he reactualizes the primordial time in which the divine works were accomplished^ On
the level of
~rimitive civilizations, whatever man does has a trans-
human model; hence, even outside of the festival time,
his acts and gestures imitate the paradigmatic models established by the gods and the mythical ancestors.
But this imitation is likely to become less and less accurate. The model is likely to be distorted or even
forgotten. It is the periodical reactualizations of the divine acts-in short, the religious festivals-that restore
human knowl- edge of the sacrality of the models. The ritual repairing of ships and the ritual cultivation
of the yam no longer resemble the similar operations performed outside of the sacred periods. For one
thing, they are more precise, closer to the divine models; for another, they are ritual -that is, their intent is
religious. A boat is repaired *remonially not because it is in need of repair but be   in ill0 tempore,
the gods showed men how to ""pair boats. It is a case not of an empirical operation
The Sacred and the Profane
constitute the class "boats" but a mythical archetype-the very boat that the gods manipulated in
ill0ternpore. Hence the time in which the ritual repairing of boats is performed co-heres with primordial
time; it is the same time in which the gods labored.
Obviously, not all varieties of periodical festivals can be reduced to the type just examined. But it is not
with the morphology of the festival that we are concerned; it is with the structure of the sacred time
actualized in fes- tivals. It can be said of sacred time that it is always the same, that it is "a succession of
eternities" (Hubert and Mauss) For, however complex a religious festival may be, it always involves a
sacred event that took place ah origine and that is ritually made present. The partici- pants in the festival
become contemporaries of the myth- cal event. In other words, they emerge from their.,his- torical
time-that is, from the time constituted by the
sum total of profane personal and intrapersonal events -and recover primordial time, which is always the
same, which belongs to eternity. Religious man periodi- cally finds his way into mythical and sacred time,
re-enters the time of origin, the time that "floweth not" because it does not participate in profane temporal
duration, because it is composed of an eternal present, which is indefinitely recoverable.
Religious man feels the need to plunge periodically
Sacred Time and Myths
into this sacred and indestructible time. For him it is sacred time that makes possible the other time,
ordinary time, the profane duration in which every human life takes its course. It is the eternal present of
the mythical event that makes possible the profane duration of his- torical events. To give only one
example: it is the divine h-erogamy, which took place in illo tempore, that made human sexual union
possible. The union between the god and goddess occurs in an atemporal instant, in an eternal present;
sexual unions between human beings- when they are not ritual unions-take place in duration, in profane
time. Sacred, mythical time also originates and supports existential, historical time, for it is the latter's
paradigmatic model. In short, it is by virtue of the divine or semidivine beings that everything has come
into existence. The origin of realities and of life itself is religious. The yam can be cultivated and eaten in
the ordinary way because it is periodically cultivated and eaten ritually. And these rituals can be
performed be- cause the gods revealed them in illo tempore, by creating
       and the yam and by showing men how to cultivate and eat that particular food plant.
In the festival the sacred dimension of life is re-covered, the participants experience the sanctity of human
existence as a divine creation. At all other tima Â¥Iter is always the danger of forgetting what is funda-
mental-that existence is not given by what modem men call Nature but is a creation of Others, the gods or
90 The Sacred and the Profane
divine beings. But in festivals the participants recover the sacred dimension of existence, by learning
again how the gods or the mythical ancestors created man and taught him the various kinds of social
behavior and of practical work.
From one point of view this periodical emergence from historical time-and especially the
consequences that it has for the total existence of religious man-may appear to be a refusal of history,
hence a refusal of creative freedom. After all, what is involved is an eter- nal return in illo tempore,
to a past that is mythical, completely unhistorical. It could be concluded that this eternal repetition of
the paradigmatic acts and gestures revealed by the gods ab origine is opposed to any human progress
and paralyzes any creative spontaneity. Cer- tainly, the conclusion is justifiable in part. But only in
part. For religious man, even the most primitive, does
not refuse progress in principle; he accepts it but at the same time bestows on it a divine origin and
dimension. Everything that from the modern point of view seems to us to have signified progress (of
whatever kind- whether social, cultural, technical, etc.) in comparison with a previous situation, all
this the various primitive societies have accepted in the course of their long his- tory as a series of
new divine revelations. But for the moment we shall leave this aspect of the problem aside.
What is of primary importance to us is to understand the religious meaning of this repetition of divine
Sacred       and
and gestures. Now, it seems obvious that, if religious
man feels the need of indefinitely reproducing the same
acts and gestures, this is because he desires
and attempts to live close to his gods.
In the preceding chapter, when we studied the cosmological symbolism of cities, temples, and
houses, we showed that it is bound up with the idea of a Center of the World. The religious
symbolism implicit in the symbolism of the center appears to be this: man desires to have his abode
in a space opening upward, that is, communicating with the divine world. To live near to a Center of
the World is, in short, equivalent to living as close as possible to the gods.
We find the same desire for a close approach to the gods if we analyze the meaning of religious
festivals. To reintegrate the sacred time of origin is equivalent to becoming contemporary with the
gods, hence to living in their presenceÃ‘eve if their presence is mysterious in the sense that it is not
always visible. The intention that can be read in the experience of sacred space and sacred time
reveals a desire to reintegrate a primordial situation-that in which the gods and the mythical an-
castors were present, that is, were engaged in creating he world, or in organizing it, or in revealing
the foun-
The Sacred and the Profane
dations of civilization to man. This primordial situation is not historical, it is not calculable
chronologically; what is involved is a mythical anteriority, the time of origin, what took lace "in the
beginning," in principio.
Now, what took place "in the beginning" was this: the divine or semidivine beings were active on earth.
Hence the nostalgia for origins is equivalent to a religious nos-talgia. Man desires to recover the active
presence of the gods; he also desires to live in the world as it came from the Creator's hands, fresh, pure,
and strong. It is the nostalgia for the perfection of beginnings that chiefly explains the periodical return
    illo tempore. In Chris- tian terms, it could be called a nostalgia for paradise, although on the level of
primitive cultures the religious and ideological context is entirely different from that of
Judaeo-Christianity. But the mythical time whose reactualization is periodically attempted is a time
/^   fied by the divine presence, and we may say that the desire to live in the divine presence and in a

perfect world (perfect because newly born) corresponds to the nostalgia for a paradisal situation.
As we noted above, this desire on the part of religious man to travel back periodically, his effort to
reintegrate a mythological situation (the situation as it was in the beginning) may appear intolerable and
humiliating to modem eyes. Such a nostalgia inevitably leads to the continual repetition of a limited
number of gestures and patterns of behavior. From one point of view it may even
Sacred Time and Myths
be said that religious man-especially the religious man
of primitive societies-is above all a man paralyzed by
the myth of the eternal return. A modem psychologist
would be tempted to interpret such an attitude as anxiety
before the danger of the new, refusal to assume responsi-
bility for a genuine historical existence, nostalgia for a
situation that is paradisal precisely because it is embry-
onic, insufficiently detached from nature.
That problem is too complex to be discussed here. In any case, it lies outside the field of our investigation,
for, in the last analysis, it implies the problem of the opposition between premodern and modem man. Let
us rather say that it would be wrong to believe that the religious man of primitive and archaic societies
refuses to assume the responsibility for a genuine existence. On the contrary, as we have seen and shall
see again, he courageously assumes immense responsibilities-for example, that of collaborating in the
creation of the cos- mos, or of creating his own world, or of ensuring the life of plants and animals, and so
on. But it is a different kind of responsibility from those that, to us modems,
to be the only genuine and valid responsibilities. It is a responsibility on the cosmic plane, in contradis-
hction to the moral, social, or historical responsibilities that are alone regarded as valid in modem
civilizations. From the point of view of profane existence, man feels no responsibility except to himself
and to society. For him, the universe does not properly constitute a cosmos
The Sacred and the Profane
-that is, a living and articulated unity; it is simply the sum of the material reserves and physical
energies of the planet, and the great concern of modern man is to avoid stupidly exhausting the
economic resources of the globe. But, existentially, the primitive always puts him- self in a cosmic
context. His personal experience lacks neither genuineness nor depth; but the fact that it is expressed
in a language unfamiliar to us makes it appear spurious or infantile to modem eyes.
To revert to our immediate subject: we have no war- rant for interpreting periodic return to the sacred
time of origin as a rejection of the real world and an escape into dream and imagination. On the
contrary, it seems to us that, here again, we can discern the ontological' obsession to which we have
referred and which, more- over, can be considered an essential characteristic of the man of the
primitive and archaic societies. For to wish to reintegrate the time of origin is also to wish to return to
the presence of the gods, to recover the strong, fresh, pure world that existed in illo tempore. It is at
once thirst for the sacred and nostalgia for being.
 On the existential plane this experience finds expression in the certainty that life can be periodically
   begun over again with a maximum of good fortune. Indeed, it is not \ only an optimistic vision of
    existence, but a total cleav- ing to being. By all his behavior, religious man pro- claims that he
       believes only in being, and that his participation in being is assured him by the primordial
Sacred          and Myths
of which he is the guardian.           sum total of revelations is constituted by his myths.
The myth relates a sacred history, that is, a pri-mordial event that took place at the beginning of time,
ab initio. But to relate a sacred history is equivalent to revealing a mystery. For the persons of the
mysteries; man could not know their acts if they were not revealed to him. The myth, then, is the
history of what took place in ilk tem-pore, the recital of what the gods or the semidivine beings did
at the beginning of time. To tell a myth is to proclaim what happened ab origine. Once told, that is,
revealed, the myth becomes apodictic truth; it establishes a truth that is absolute. "It is so because it is
said that it is so," the Netsilik Eskimos declare to justify the valid- ity of their sacred history and
religious traditions. The
myth proclaims the appearance of a new cosmic situa- tion or of a primordial event. Hence it is
always the recital of a creation; it tells how something was accom- plished, began- to be. It is for this
reason that myth is
up with ontology; it speaks only of realities, of really happened, of what was fully manifested.
these realities are sacred realities, for it is the sacred that is pre-eminently die real. Whatever
96       Sacred and the Profane
belongs to the sphere of the profane does not participate in being, for the profane was not ontologically
estab- lished by myth, has no perfect model. As we shall soon see, agricultural work is a ritual revealed by
the gods or culture heroes. This is why it constitutes an act that is at once real and significant. Let us
think, by compari- son, of agricultural work in a desacralized society. Here, it has become a profane act,
justified by the economic profit that it brings. The ground is tilled to be exploited; the end pursued is
profit and food. Emptied of religious symbolism, agricultural work becomes at once opaque and
exhausting; it reveals no meaning, it makes possi- ble no opening toward the universal, toward the world
of spirit. No god, no culture hero ever revealed a profane act. Everything that the gods or the ancestors
did, hence everything that the myths have to tell about their creative activity, belongs to the sphere of the
sacred and there- fore participates in being. In contrast, what men do on their own initiative, what they do
without a mythical model, belongs to the sphere of the profane; hence it is
1 a vain and illusory activity, and, in the last analysis, unreal. The more religious man is, the more
paradig- matic models does he possess to guide his attitudes and actions. In other words, the more
religious he is, the more does he enter into the real and the less is he in danger of becoming lost in actions

that, being nonpara- digmatic, "subjective," are, finally, aberrant. This is the aspect of myth that demands
particular emphasis here. The myth reveals absolute sacrality, be
Sacred         and Myths
cause it relates the creative activity of the gods, unveils of their work. In other words, the myth
the describes the various and sometimes dramatic irruptions of the sacred into the world. This is why,
among many myths cannot be recited without regard for time or place, but only during the seasons that
are ritu- allyrichest (autumn, winter) or in the course of reli- gious ceremonies-in short, during a sacred
period of time. It is the irruption of the sacred into the world, an irruption narrated in the myths, that
establishes the world as a reality. Every myth shows how a reality came into existence, whether it be the
total reality, the cosmos, or only a fragment-an island, a species of plant, a human institution. To tell how
things came into existence is to explain them and at the same time indirectly to answer another question:
Why did they come into exist- ence? The why is always implied in the how-for the simple reason that to
tell how a thing was born is to reveal an irruption of the sacred into the world, and the sacred is the
ultimate cause of all real existence. Moreover, since every creation is a divine work and hence an
irruption of the sacred, it at the same time represents an irruption of creative energy into the world. Every
creation springs from an abundance. The gods create out of an excess of power, an overflow of energy. is
accomplished by a surplus of ontological substance. This is why the myth, which narrates this sacred
ontophany, this victorious manifestation of a plenitude of being, becomes the paradigmatic model for
98 The Sacred and the Profane
all human activities. For it
alone reveals the real, the
superabundant, the effectual.
"We must do what the
Gods did in the beginning,"
says an Indian text (Shata.
path Briihmand, VII, 2, 1,
4). "Thus the Gods did;
thus men do," the Taittiriya
Briihmana adds (I, 5,9,4).
Hence the supreme function
of the myth is to "fix" the
paradigmatic models for all
rites and all significant
human activities-eating,
sexuality, work, education,
and so on. Acting as a fully
responsible human being,

man imitates the
paradigmatic gestures of the

repeats their actions,
whether in the case of a
physiological function such
as eating or of a social, eco-
nomic, cultural, military, or
other activity.
In New Guinea a great many
myths tell of long sea
voyages, thus providing
"exemplars for the modern
agers," as well as for all
other activities, "whether of
love, or war, or rain-making,
or fishing, or whatever
else. . . The narrative
gives precedents for the
of construction, the tabu on
sexual intercourse, etc."
When a captain goes to sea
he personifies the mythical
hero Aori. "He wears the
costume which Aori is sup-
posed to have worn, with

blackened face     ...  [and]
same kind of love in his hair
which Aori plucked from
Iviri's head. He dances on
the platform and extends his
arms like Aori's wings.      ..
. A man told me that when
he went fish shooting (with
bow and arrow) he
to be Kivavia himself."1Â
He did not pray to the

lo F. E. Williams, cited in Lucien Levy-Bruhl, La mythologie :I'*   Harrington, cited in ibid., p. 165. Paris, 1935, pp. 162,
Sacred Time and Myths
hero for aid and favor; he identified himself with him.
This symbolism of mythical precedents is also found in other primitive cultures. Writing on the Karuk In-
dians of California, J. P. Harrington says: "Everything that the Karuk did was enacted because the
Ikxareyavs were believed to have set the example in story times. The Ikxareyavs were the people who
were in America before the Indians came. Modem Karuks, in a quandary now to render the word,
volunteer such translations as 'the princes,' 'the chiefs,' 'the angels.'       . . . [The Ikxareyavs] remainred]
with the Karuk only long enough to state and start all customs, telling them in every instance, 'Humans
will do the same.' These doings and sayings are still related and quoted in the medicine formulas of the
Karuk."ll This faithful repetition of divine models has a two-
fold result: (1)by imitating the gods, man remains in the sacred, hence in reality; (2) by the continuous
reactualization of paradigmatic divine gestures, the
world is sanctified. Men's religious behavior contributes to maintaining the sanctity of the world.
It is not without interest to note that religious ^an assumes a humanity that has a transhuman, tran-
scendent model. He does not consider himself to be

100 The Sacred and the
truly        except in so far as
he imitates the gods, the
culture heroes, or the
mythical ancestors. This is as
much as to say that religious
man wishes to be other than
he is on the plane of his
profane experience. Religious
man is not given; he makes
himself, by approaching the
divine models. These models,
as we said, are preserved
in myths, in the history of the
divine gesta. Hence reli-
gious man too regards himself
as made by history, just
as profane man does; but the
only history that concerns
him is the sacred history
revealed by the myths-that is,
the history of the gods;
whereas profane man insists
that                               I

he is constituted only by
human history, hence by the
sum of the very acts that, for
religious man, are of no
importance because they
have no divine models. The
point to be emphasized is
that, from the beginning,
gious man sets the model he
is to attain on the trans-
human plane, the plane
revealed by his myths. One
comes truly a man only by
conforming to the teaching
of the myths, that is, by
imitating the gods.
We will add that, for the
primitives, such an imith
dei sometimes implies a
very grave responsibility.
have seen that certain blood
sacrifices find their justifi-
cation in a primordial divine
act; in illo tempore the god
had slain the marine monster
and dismembered its body
in order to create the
cosmos. Man repeats this
with human victims-when
has to build a village, a
temple, or simply a house.
the consequences of this
imitatio dei can be is clearly       I
shown by the mythologies
and rituals of numerous

"A-E. lensen, Dos religtzse Weltbild einer frohen Kultur, Stuttgart, lgW-borrowed the word dem from the Marind-anim
Sacred Time and Myths 101
live peoples. To give only one example: according to the myths of the earliest cultivators, man became
what he is ~y-mortal, sexualized, and condemned to work-in
consequence of a primordial murder; in illo tempore a divine being, quite often a woman or a maiden,
some-times a child or a man, allowed himself to be immolated in order that tubers or fruit trees should
grow from his body. This first murder basically changed the mode of being of human life. The
immolation of the divine being inaugurated not only the need to eat but also the doom of death and, in
consequence, sexuality, the only way to
ensure the continuity of life. The body of the immolated divinity was changed into food; its soul
descended under gound, where it established the Land of the Dead. A. E. Jensen, who has devoted an
important book to this type of divinities-which he calls dema divinities-has con-clusively shown that in
eating and in dying man partici- pates in the life of the dema~.~~ For all these palaeo-agricultural
peoples, what is essential is ~eriodically to evoke the primordial event that established the present
condition of humanity. Their whole religious life is a commemoration, a re-membering. The memory
reactualized by the rites (hence by reiterating the primordial murder) plays a decisive role; what happened
in illo tempore must never be forgotten. The true sin is forgetting. The girl who at
                                                           Jen*n of
               Sacred and the Profane
her first menstruation spends three days in a dark hut without speaking to anyone does so because the
mur. dered maiden, having become the moon, remains three days in darkness; if the menstruating girl
breaks the tabu of silence and speaks, she is guilty of forgettine a primordial event. Personal memory is
not involved; what matters is to remember the mythical event, the only event worth considering because
the only creative event. It falls to the primordial myth to preserve true history, the history of the human
condition; it is in the myth that the principles and paradigms for all conduct must be
1 sought and recovered.
It is at this stage of culture that we encounter ritual cannibalism. The cannibal's chief concern would seem
to be essentially metaphysical; he must not forget what happened in illo tempore. Volhardt and Jensen
have shown this very clearly; the killing and devouring of sows at festivals, eating the first fruits when
tubers are harvested, are an eating of the divine body, exactly as       is eaten at cannibal feasts. Sacrifice
of sows, head- hunting, cannibalism are symbolically the same as har- vesting tubers or coconuts. It is
Volhardt's accomplish- ment to have demonstrated the religious meaning of anthropophagy and at the
same time the human respon- sibility assumed by the ~annibal.'~ The food plant is not

     Volhardt, Kannibalisrnus. Stuttgart, 1939. Cf. Eliade, "Le mythe da boa sauvage on les prestiges de l'origine," in id.,

Mythes, rgw   '' mydres,          1957, pp. 36 ff.

Sacred          and Myths        eivea          nature; it is the product of a slaying, for it was busthat it was
created in the dawn of time. Head-                   human sacrifices, cannibalism were all accepted          man
to ensure the life of plants. Volhardt's insistence on this point is fully justified. The cannibal assumes his
responsibility in the world; cannibalism is not a "natoral" behavior in primitive man (moreover, it is not
found on the oldest levels of culture) ; it is cultural
behavior, based on a religious vision of life. For the vegetable world to continue, man must kill and be
killed; in addition, he must assume sexuality to its extreme limit-the orgy. An Abyssinian song declares
this: "She who has not yet engendered, let her engender; he who has not yet killed, let him kill!" This is a
way of saying that the two sexes are doomed to assume their destiny.
Before passing judgment on cannibalism, we must always remember that it was instituted by divine
beings. But they instituted it to give human beings the oppor- tunity to assume a responsibility in the
cosmos, to enable them to provide for the continuity of vegetable life. The responsibility, then, is
religious in nature. The Uito cannibals affirm it: "Our traditions are always alive among us, even when we
are not dancing; but we work
that we may dance." Their dances consist in repeat- '"6 all the mythical events, hence also the first
slaying, by anthropophagy. We have cited this example in order to show that, among primitives as in the
~alaeo-oriental civilizations,
104 The Sacred and the Profane
the imitatio dei is not conceived idyllically, that,,on the contrary, it implies an awesome human
responsibility, In judging a "savage" society, we must not lose sight of the fact that even the most
barbarous act and the most aberrant behavior have divine, transhuman models. To inquire why and in
consequence of what degradations and misunderstandings certain religious activities deteri- orate and
become aberrant is an entirely different prob. lem, into which we shall not enter here. For our
purpose, what demands emphasis is the fact that religious man sought to imitate, and believed that he
was imitating, his gods even when he allowed himself to be led into acts
that verged on madness, depravity, and crime.
Let us recapitulate:
 Religious man experiences two kinds of, time- profane and sacred. The one is an evanescent
duration, the other a "succession of eternities," periodically recov- erable during the festivals that
made up the sacred calendar. The liturgical time of the calendar flows in a closed circle; it is the
cosmic time of the year, sanctified by the works of the gods. And since the most stupendous divine
work was the creation of the world, commemora- tion of the cosmogony plays an important part in
many religions. The New Year coincides with the first day of Creation. The year is the temporal
dimension of the
Sacred Time and            105
cosmos. "The world has passed" expresses that a year
has run its COUlXe.
~t each New Year the cosmogony is reiterated, the world re-created, and to do this is also to create
time that is, to regenerate it by beginning it anew. This is why the cosmogonic myth serves as
paradigmatic model for every creation or construction; it is even used as a ritual means of healing. By
symbolically becoming con- temporary with the Creation, one reintegrates the pri- mordial plenitude.
The sick man becomes well because he begins his life again with its sum of energy intact.
The religious festival is the reactualization of a pri- mordial event, of a sacred history in which the
actors are the gods or semidivine beings. But sacred history is recounted in the myths. Hence the
participants in the festival become contemporaries of the gods and the semidivine beings. They live
in the primordial time that

sanctified by the presence and activity of the gods.
                                                       ^ The sacred calendar periodicaUy regenerates
time, be- cause it makes it coincide with the time of origin, the strong, pure time. The religious
experience of the festi- val-that is, participation in the sacred~enables man periodically to live in the
presence of the gods. This is the reason for the fundamental importance of myths in ~reMosaic
religions, for the myths narrate the gesta
  : of the gods and these gesta constitute paradigmatic for all human activities. In so far as he imitates
                                                  his gods, religious man lives in the      of origin, the
106 TheSacredandtheProjane
time of the myths. In other words, he emerges from pra fane duration to recover an unmoving time,
Since, for religious man of the primitive societies, myths constitute his sacred history, he must not forget
them; by reactualizing the myths, he approaches his gods and participates in sanctity. But there are also
tragic divine histories, and man assumes a great responsibility toward himself and toward nature by
periodically reactualizing them. Ritual cannibalism, for example, is
\the consequence of a tragic religious conception.
In short, through the reactualization of his myths, religious man attempts to approach the gods and to
participate in being; the imitation of paradigmatic divine models expresses at once his desire for sanctity
and his ontological nostalgia.
In the primitive and archaic religions the eternal repetition of the divine exploits is justified as an imitatio
dei. The sacred calendar annually repeats the same festivals, that is, the commemoration of the same
mythi- cal events. Strictly speaking, the sacred calendar proves to be the "eternal return" of a limited
number of divine gesta-and this is true not only for primitive religions but for all others. The festal
calendar everywhere con- stitutes a periodical return of the same primordial situa- tions and hence a
reactualization of the same sacred time. For religious man, reactualization of the same mythical events
constitutes his greatest hope; for with each reactualization he again has the opportunity to
Sacred Time and Myths 107
n-ansfigure his existence, to make it like its divine model.
1n short, for religious man of the primitive and archaic
societies, the eternal repetition of paradigmatic gestures
and the eternal recovery of the same mythical time of
rigi in, sanctified by the gods, in no sense implies a pessimistic vision of life. On the contrary, for him it
is by virtue of this eternal return to the sources of the sacred and the real that human existence appears to
be saved from nothingness and death.
The perspective changes completely when the sense of the religiousness of the cosmos becomes lost.
This is what occurs when, in certain more highly evolved socie- ties, the intellectual elites progressively
detach them- selves from the patterns of the traditional religion. The ~eriodical sanctification of cosmic
time then proves use- less and without meaning. The gods are no longer acces- sible through the cosmic
rhythms. The religious mean- ing of the repetition of paradigmatic gestures is for- gotten. But repetition
emptied of its religious content necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence.
men it is no longer a vehicle for reintegrating a pri- mordial situation, and hence for recovering the
mysteri- ous presence of the gods, that is, when it is desacralized,
time becomes terrifying; it is seen as a circle for- ever turning on itself, repeating itself to infinity. This is
what happened in India, where the doctrine of cosmic cycles (yugas) was elaborately developed. A
108 The Sacred and the Profane
complete cycle, a mahdyuga, comprises 12,000 years.

    It ends with a dissolution, a pralaya, which is repeated more drastically (mahapralaya, the Great Dissolution) at the

     end of the thousandth cycle. For the paradigmatic schema creation-destruction-creation-etc." is repro. duced ad
infinitum. The 12,000 years of a mah6yuga were regarded as divine years, each with a duration of 360 years, which
    gives a total of 4,320,000 years for a single cosmic cycle. A thousand such mahayugas make up a kalpa (form) ;14
                    kalpas make up a manvanthra (so named because each munvant6ra is supposed to be

ruled by Manu, the mythical Ancestor-King.) A kqlpa is
equivalent to a day in the life of Brahma; a second
kalpa to a night. One hundred of these "years" of
Brahma, in other words 311,000 milliards of human
years, constitute the life of Brahma. But even this dura-
tion of the god's life does not exhaust time, for the gods
are not eternal and the cosmic creations and destructions
succeed one another forever.14
This is the true eternal return, the eternal repetition of
the fundamental rhythm of the cosmos-its periodical
destruction and re-creation. In short, it is the
conception of the Year-Cosmos, but emptied of its reli-
gious content. Obviously, the doctrine of yugas was
elaborated by intellectual elites, and if it became a pan-
Indian doctrine, we must not suppose that it revealed its
14   Cf. Eliade, Myth, pp. 113      see       id.. Images et symboles, Paris.
Sacred Time and Myths
terrifying aspect to all the peoples of India. It was chiefly
the and philosophical elites who felt despair in the presence of cyclic time repeating itself ad infiniturn.
For to Indian thought, this eternal return implied eternal
return to existence by force of karma, the law of univer- sal causality. Then, too, time was homologized
to the cosmic illusion (mayo}, and the eternal return to exist- ence signified indefinite prolongation of
suffering and slavery. In the view of these religious and philosophical elites, the only hope was
nonreturn-to-existence, the abolition of karma; in other words, final deliverance (mksha), implying a
transcendence of the
Greece too knew the myth of the eternal return, and the Greek philosophers of the late period carried the
conception of circular time to its furthest limits. To quote the perceptive words of H. C. Puech:
"According to the celebrated Platonic definition, time, which is deter- mined and measured by the
revolution of the celestial spheres, is the moving image of unmoving eternity, which it imitates by
revolving in a circle. Consequently all cosmic becoming, and, in the same manner, the dura- tion of this
world of generation and corruption in which we live, will progress in a circle or in accordance with
indefinite succession of cycles in the course of which
same reality is made, unmade, and remade in con-
^ua transcendence is achieved through the "fortunate   (faftana), which implies a   of   Time that
permits emergence
from time; see Images et symboles, pp. 10 ff.
1952, pp. 80

110 The Sacred and the Profane
formity with an immutable law and immutable alterna- tives. Not only is the same sum of existence
preserved in it, with nothing being lost and nothing created, but in addition certain thinkers of declining
antiquity-Pvtiia- goreans, Stoics, Platonists-reached the point of admit- ting that within each of these
cycles of duration, of these

aiones, these aeua, the same situations are reproduced that have already been produced in previous cycles
and will be reproduced in subsequent cycles-& infiniturn.

No event is unique, occurs once and for all (for example, the condemnation and death of Socrates), but it
has occurred, occurs, and will occur, perpetually; the same individuals have appeared, appear, and will
reappear at every return of the cycle upon itself. Cosmic duration is

Irepetition and anakuklosis, eternal return."16             I   Compared with the archaic and palaeo-oriental reli-
gions, as well as with the mythic-philosophical concep- tions of the eternal return, as they were elaborated
in India and Greece, Judaism presents an innovation of the first importance. For Judaism, time has a
beginning and will have an end. The idea of cyclic time is left be- hind. Yahweh no longer manifests
himself in cosmic time (like the gods of other religions) but in a historical time, which is irreversible.
Each new manifestation of Yahweh in history is no longer reducible to an earlier manifestation. The fall
of Jerusalem expresses Yahweh's
^Henri Charles Puech, "La gnose et le temps," Eranos-J/ihrhnrh,Xx 1952, pp. 60-61.
Sacred Time and Myths 111
wrath against his people, but it is no longer the same wrath that Yahweh expressed by the fall of Samaria.
His gestures are personal interventions in history and reveal their deep meaning only for his people, the
people that yahweh had chosen. Hence the historical event acquires a new dimension; it becomes a
Christianity goes even further in valorizing historical time. Since God was incarnated, that is, since he
The illud tempus evoked by the Gospels is a clearly defined his- torical time-the time in which Pontius
Pilate was Gov- ernor of Judaea-but it was sanctified by the presence of Christ. When a Christian of our
day participates in liturgical time, he recovers the illud tempus in which Christ lived, suffered, and rose
again-but it is no longer a mythical time, it is the time when Pontius Pilate governed Judaea. For the
Christian, too, the sacred calendar indefinitely rehearses the same events of the existence of Christ-but
these events took place in his- tory; they are no longer facts that happened at the origin of time, "in the
beginning." (But we should add that, for he Christian, time begins anew with the birth of Christ, for the
Incarnation establishes a new situation of man in he cosmos). This is as much as to say that history re-
veals itself to be a new dimension of the presence of God
Cf. Eliade, Myth, pp. 102 ff., on the valorization of history in Judaism, "Peciall~ by the prophets.

112 The Sacred and the Profane in the world. History becomes sacred history once more -as it was
conceived, but in a mythical perspective, in primitive and archaic religions.''

Christianity arrives, not at a philosophy but at a the-ology of history. For God's interventions in
history, and

above all his Incarnation in the historical person of
Jesus Christ, have a transhistorical purpose~the salva-tion of man.
Hegel takes over the Judaeo-Christian ideology, and applies it to universal history in its totality: the
universal spirit continually manifests itself in historical events and manifests itself only in historical
events. Thus the whole of history becomes a theophany; everything that has happened in history had
to happen as it did, because the universal spirit so willed it. The road is thus opened to the various
forms of twentieth-century historicistic, phi- losophies. Here our present investigation ends, for all
these new valorizations of time and history belong to the history of philosophy. Yet we must add that
historic- ism arises as a decomposition product of Christianity; it accords decisive importance to the
is, by denying it any possi- bility of revealing a transhistorical, soteriological in- tent."
As for the conceptions of time on which certain his-
Sacred Time and Myths 113
and existentialist philosophies have insisted, the following observation is not without interest:
al-though no longer conceived as a circle, time in these modern philosophies once again wears the
terrifying aspect that it wore in the Indian and Greek philosophies of the eternal return. Definitively
descralized, time pre- sents itself as a precarious and evanescent duration, leading irremediably to
18 Cf.   Eliade, lmages et symboles, pp. 222 ff. 19 On the difficulties of historicism, see Myth, pp. 147
The Sacredness
of Nature
and Cosmic Religion

     For religious man, nature is never only nat-ural"; it is always fraught with a religious value. This is
easy to understand, for the cosmos is a divine creation; coming from the hands of the gods, the world is
impreg- nated with sacredness. It is not simply a sacrality corn-municated by the gods, as is the case, for
example, with a place or an object consecrated by the divine presence. The gods did more; they
manifested the different modali- ties of the sacred in the very structure of the world and of cosmic
The world stands displayed in such a manner that, in contemplating it, religious man discovers the many
modalities of the sacred, and hence of being. Above all, the world exists, it is there, and it has a structure;
it is not a chaos but a cosmos, hence it presents itself as
creation, as work of the gods. This divine work always preserves its quality of transparency, that is, it
taneously reveals the many aspects of the sacred. The sky directly, "naturally," reveals the infinite
distance, the transcendence of the deity. The earth too is trans- parent; it presents itself as universal
mother and nurse.
The cosmic rhythms manifest order, harmony, penna- nence, fecundity. The cosmos as a whole is an
organism at 'once real, living, and sacred; it simultaneously re- veals the modalities of being and of
sacrality. Ontophany and hierophany meet.
In this chapter we shall try to understand how the world presents itself to the eyes of religious man-or,
more precisely, how sacrality is revealed through the
structures of the world. We must not forget that for
118 The Sacred and the Profane
religious man the supernatural is indissolubly connected with the natural, that nature always
expresses somethin? that transcends it. As we said earlier: a sacred stone is venerated because it is
sacred, not because it is a stone; it is the sacrality manifested through the mode of being of the stone
that reveals its true essence. This is why we cannot speak of naturism or of natural religion in the
sense that the nineteenth century gave to those terms; for it is b'supernature" that the religious man
apprehends through the natural aspects of the world.
 Simple contemplation of the celestial vault already provokes a religious experience. The sky shows
itself to be infinite, transcendent. It is pre-eminently the "wholly other" than the little represented by
man and his environment. Transcendence is revealed by simple awareness of infinite height. "Most
high" spontaneously becomes an attribute of divinity. The higher regions in- accessible to man, the
sidereal zones, acquire the mo- mentousness of the transcendent, of absolute reality, of eternity.
There dwell the gods; there a few privileged mortals make their way by rites of ascent; there, in the
conception of certain religions, mount the souls of the dead. The "most high" is a dimension
inaccessible to man as man; it belongs to superhuman forces and be-
I The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion 119 1 ings. He who ascends by mounting the steps
of a sane-tuavor the ritual ladder that leads to the sky ceases to         a man; in one way or another,
he shares in the divine condition. All this is not arrived at by a logical, rational opera- tion. The
transcendental category of height, of the super- terrestrial, of the infinite, is revealed to the whole
         to his intelligence and his soul. It is a total awareness on man's part; beholding the sky, he
simultaneously dis- covers the divine incommensurability and his own situa-
tion in the cosmos. For the sky, by its own mode of being,
I reveals transcendence, force, eternity. It exists absolutely because it is high, infinite, eternal,
powerful. This is the true significance of the statement made abovethat the gods manifested the

different modalities

of the sacred in the very structure of the world. In other words, the cosmos-paradigmatic work of the
gods-is so constructed that a religious sense of the divine tran-
        scendence is aroused by the very existence of the sky. And since the sky exists absolutely,
many of the supreme gods of primitive peoples are called by names designat- ing height, the celestial
vault, meteorological phenom- ena, or simply Owner of the Sky or Sky Dweller.
The supreme divinity of the Maori is named Iho; iho means elevated, high up. Uwoluwu, the
supreme god of the Akposo Negroes, signifies what is on high, the upper regions. Among the
Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego God is called Dweller in the Sky or He Who is in the Sky.
120          Sacred and the Profane
Puluga, the supreme being of the Andaman Islanders, dwells in the sky; the thunder is his voice, wind his
breath, the storm is the sign of his anger, for with his lightning he punishes those who break his
command- ments. The Sky God of the Yoruba of the Slave Coast is named Olorun, literally Owner of the
Sky. The Samoyed worship Num, a god who dwells in the highest skyand whose name means sky.
Among the Koryak, the supreme divinity is called the One on High, the Master of the High, He Who
Exists. The Ainu know him as the Divine Chief of the Sky, the Sky God, the Divine Creator of the
Worlds, but also as Kamui, that is, Sky. The list could
easily be extended.'
We may add that the same situation is found in the religions of more civilized peoples, that is, of peoples
who have played an important role in history. The Mon- gol name for the supreme God is Tengri, which
means sky. The Chinese T'ien means at once the sky and the god of the sky. The Sumerian term for
divinity,               originally meant a celestial epiphany-clear, brilliant. The Babylonian Anu also
expresses the idea of sky. The Indo-European supreme god, Dieus, denotes both the celestial epiphany
and the sacred (cf. Sanskrit div, to shine, day; dyaus, sky, day; Dyaus, Indian god of heaven). Zeus and
Jupiter still preserve in their names the memory of the sacredness of the sky. The Celtic Taranis (from
taran, to thunder), the Baltic Perbas
1 Examples   and bibliography in Eliade, Patterns, pp. 38-67.
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion 121
(lightning), and the proto-Slavic Perun (cf. Polish
+run, lightning) are especially revealing for the later
                                          of sky gods into storm gods.2
There is no question of naturism here. The celestial
is not identified with the sky, for he is the same god who, creating the entire cosmos, created the sky too.
This is why he is called Creator, All-powerful, Lord, Chief, Father, and the like. The celestial god is a
person, not a uranian epiphany. But he lives in the sky and is manifested in meteorological
phenomena-thunder, lightning, storm, meteors, and so on. This means that certain privileged structures of
the cosmos-the sky, the atmosphere~constitute favorite epiphanies of the su-preme being; he reveals his
presence by what is specifi- cally and peculiarly his-the majesty (majestas) of the celestial immensity, the
terror (tremendum) of the storm.
The history of supreme beings whose structure is celestial is of the utmost importance for an under-
standing of the religious history of humanity as a whole. We cannot even consider writing that history
here, in a few pages? But we must at least refer to a fact that to us seems primary. Celestially structured
supreme beings
*On this see ibid., pp. 66 ff., 79     etc. 3For basic data, cf. Elide, Patterns, pp. 38-123. Cf. especially R. Pet- koni, Dio, Rome,
1921; id., L'onniscienza di Dio,          1955; Wilhelm                   Vrsprung der Gottesidee, I-XII, Monster, 1926-1955.
122 The Sacred and the Profane
tend to disappear from the practice of religion, from cult; they depart from among men, withdraw to the
sky, and become remote, inactive gods (dei otiosi). In short, it may be said of these gods that, after
creating the cos- mos, life, and man, they feel a sort of fatigue, as if the immense enterprise of the
Creation had exhausted their resources. So they withdraw to the sky, leaving a son or a demiurge on earth
to finish or perfect the Creation. Gradually their place is taken by other divine figures-the mythical
ancestors, the mother-goddesses, the fecun- dating gods, and the like. The god of the storm still preserves
a celestial structure, but he is no longer a creating supreme being; he is only the fecundator of the earth,
sometimes he is only a helper to his com- panion (paredros) , the earth-mother. The celestially
structured supreme being preserves his preponderant place only among pastoral peoples, and he attains a
unique situation in religions that tend to monotheism (Ahura-Mazda) or that are fully monotheistic
(Yahweh, Allah).
The phenomenon of the remoteness of the supreme god is already documented on the archaic levels of
cul- ture. Among the Australian Kulin, the supreme being Bunjil himself created the universe, animals,
trees, and man; but after investing his son with power over the earth and his daughter with power over the
sky, Bunjil withdrew from the world. He remains among the clouds, like a lord, holding a huge sword.
Puluga, the supreme

The Sacredness of Nature and       1
Cosmic Religion                    2
             being of the Andaman
          Islanders, withdrew after
       the world and the first man.
        The mystery of his remote
      ness has its counterpart in an
          almost complete absence
       of cult; there is no sacrifice,
         no appeal, no thank offer-
          ing. The memory of           f
      Puluga survives in only a e

     customs-f example, the
              or sacred silence of
          hunters returning to their
          village after a successful
     The Dweller in the Sky or He
               Who Is in the Sky of
       the is eternal, omniscient,
     Selk' all-powerful, the
,     creator; but the Creation was
           finished by the mythical
      ancestors, who had also been
            made by the supreme god
I       before he withdrew to a place
             above the stars. For now
         this god has isolated himself
            from men, is indifferent to
           the affairs of the world. He
I                has neither images nor
        priests. Prayers are addressed
                  to him only in case of
I              sickness. "Thou who art
         above, take not my child; he
          still too young!"4 Offerings
            are rarely made to him ex-
                     cept during storms.
           It is the same among many
             African peoples; the great
    ,      celestial god, the supreme
          being, all-powerful creator,
          plays only a minor role m
            in the religious life of o
          tribes. He is too far away or
            too good to need an actual
          cult, and he is invoked only
           in extreme cases. Thus, for
          example, Olorun (Owner of
               the Sky) of the Yoruba,
         after beginning the Creation
         of the world, deputed finish-
        % and ruling it to a lower
           god, Obatala. For his part,
        n Gusinde.        b d
        i                 e e Selk'na
        a h%hste          i n m
           Wesen              Feuer-
        d Festschrift       Schmidt,
        , Vienna, 1928, pp. 269-274.
124 The Sacred and the Profane
Olorun withdrew from human and earthly affairs, and the supreme god has neither temples nor statues nor
priests. Nevertheless, he is invoked as a last resource in times of calamity.
Withdrawn into the sky, Ndyambi, the supreme god of the Herero, has abandoned humanity to lower
divinites. "Why should we sacrifice to him?" a member of the tribe explained. "We do not need to fear
him, for he does not do us any harm, as do the spirits of our dead."' The supreme being of the Tukumba is
"too great for the common affairs of men."6 The case is the same with Njankupon among the
Tshi-speaking Negroes of West Africa; he has no cult, and homage is paid to himonly under unusual
circumstances, in case of famines or epi- demics or after a violent storm; men then ask him how they have
offended him. Dzingbe (the Universal Father), the supreme being of the Ewe, is invoked only during
droughts: "0 Sky, to whom we owe thanks, great is the drought; make it rain, so that the earth will be
refreshed and the fields fl~urish!"~ The remoteness and passivity of the supreme being are admirably
expressed in a say- ing of the Gyriama of East Africa, which also describes their god: "Mulugu
is up above, the ghosts are down be lo^!"^ The Bantu say: "God, after creating man,
BCf. Frazer, The Worship of Nature, I, London, 1926, pp. 150        Vbid., p.           7 J.   Spieth, Die Religion der Eweer,
Gottingen-Leipzig,        pp. 46     8A.     Roy, La religion des primitifs, 7th ed.,                1925, p.
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion 125
no longer cares about him." And the Negritos repeat: "God has gone far away from us."9 The Fang
peoples of the grasslands of Equatorial Africa sum up their reli-gious philosophy in a song:
God (Nzame) is above, man below.
God is God, man is man.
Each at home, each in his house.1Â
It is useless to multiply examples. Everywhere in these primitive religions the celestial supreme being
appears to have lost religious currency; he has no place in the cult, and in the myths he draws farther
and farther away from man until he becomes a deus otiosus. Yet he is re- membered and entreated as the
last resort, when all ways of appealing to other gods and goddesses, the ancestors, and the demons,
have failed. As the Oraons express it:
iiNow we have tried everything, but we still have you to

help us." And they sacrifice a white cock to him, crying, God, thou art our creator, have mercy on us."ll
The divine remoteness actually expresses man's
increasing interest in his own religious, cultural, and economic discoveries. Through his concern with
hiero- ~hanies of life, throu& discovering the sacral fertility
126       Sacred and the Profane
  of the earth, and through finding himself exposed to religious experiences that are more concrete (more
      car- nal, even orgiastic), primitive man draws away from the celestial and transcendent god. The
  discovery of agriculture basically transforms not only primitive man's economy but also and especially
 his economy of the sacred. Other religious forces come into play-sexu- ality, fertility, the mythology of
woman and of the earth, and so on. Religious experience becomes more concrete, that is, more intimately
      connected with life. The great mother-goddesses and the strong gods or the spirits of fertility are
                                   markedly more dynamic and more accessi-
ble to men than was the Creator God.
Yet, as we have just seen, in cases of extreme distress, when everything has been tried in vain, and
especially in cases of disaster proceeding from the sky-drought, storm, epidemic-men turn to the supreme
being again and entreat him. This attitude does not obtain only among primitives. Each time that the
ancient Hebrews experienced a period of peace and prosperity, they abandoned Yahweh for the Baals and
Astartes of their neighbors. Only historical catastrophes forced them to turn to Yahweh. "And they cried
unto the Lord, and said, We have sinned, because we have forsaken the Lord, and have served Baalim and
Ashtaroth: but now deliver us out of the hands of our enemies, and we will serve thee" (I Samuel, 12, 10).
The Hebrews turned to Yahweh after historical catas-

The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion


trophes and under the threat of an annihilation deter- mined by history; the primitives remember their
beings in cases of cosmic catastrophe. But the meaning of this return to the celestial god is the same in
both cases: in an extremely critical situation, in which the very existence of the community is at stake,
the divinities who in normal times ensure and exalt life are abandoned in favor of the supreme god.
Seemingly, this is a great paradox: the deities that, among the primitives, took the place of the celestially
structured gods were like the Baals and Astartes among the Hebrews-divini- ties of fertility, of opulence,
of fullness of life; in short, divinities that exalted and amplified life, both cosmic lifevegetation,
agriculture, cattleand human life. These divinities seemed to be strong, powerful. Their religious
currency was explained precisely by their strength, their unlimited vital reserves, their fertility.
And yet their worshippers-primitives and Hebrews
1        alikehad the feeling that all these great goddesses and all these vegetation gods were unable to
save them, that is, to ensure them existence in really critical moments. These gods and goddesses could
only reproduce and wigment life; and they could perform that function only during normal times; in
short, they were divinities who governed the cosmic rhythms admirably, but who proved incapable of
saving the cosmos or human society in moments of crisis (historical crisis among the He-
128 The Sacred and the Profane


The various divinities who took the place of
supreme beings were the repository of the most concrete and striking powers, the powers of life. But by
that very fact they had become "specialists" in procreation and lost the subtler, nobler, more spiritual
powers of the Creator Gods. In discovering the sacredness of life, man let himself be increasingly carried
away by his own dis- covery; he gave himself up to vital hierophanies and turned from the sacrality that
transcended his immediate and daily needs. ',
                                   PERENNIALITY OF CELESTIAL SYMBOLS,
   Yet we must note that even when the celestial gods no longer dominate religious life, the sidereal
regions, uranian symbolism, myths and rites of ascent, and the like, retain a preponderant place in the
economy of the sacred. What is "above," the "high," continues to reveal the transcendent in every
religious complex. Driven from the cult and replaced in mythologies by other themes, in the religious life
the sky remains ever present by virtue of its symbolism. And this celestial symbolism in turn infuses and
supports a number of rites (of ascent, climbing, initiation, royalty, and so on), of myths (the cosmic tree,
the cosmic mountain, the chain of arrows connecting earth with heaven, and so on), of legends (e.g.,
magical flight). The symbolism of the Center of the World-whose immense dissemination we
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion
have seen-likewise illustrates the importance of celes- tid symbolism; for it is at a center that
communication with the sky is effected, and the sky constitutes the para- digmatic image of
It could be said that the very structure of the cosmos keeps memory of the celestial supreme being alive. It
is as if the gods had created the world in such a way that it could not but reflect their existence; for no
world is possible without verticality, and that dimension alone is enough to evoke transcendence.
Driven from religious life in the strict sense, the celes-tial sacred remains active through symbolism. A
reli- gious symbol conveys its message even if it is no longer consciously understood in every part. For a
symbol speaks to the whole human being and not only to the intelligence.
Before treating of the earth, we must present the religious valorizations of the waters.12 There are two
reasons for this: (1) The waters existed before the earth (as in Genesis, 1, 2, "Darkness was upon the face
of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters"). (2) By analyzing the religious
values of the waters we shall better grasp the structure and func-
     all the following   Eliade,                188             Images et *ymAofc*.
I30      Sacred and the Profane
tion of symbols. Now, symbolism plays a decisive pan in the religious life of humanity; it is through
symbols that the world becomes transparent, is able to show the transcendent.
The waters symbolize the universal sum of virtuali- ties; they are fons et origo, "spring and origin," the
res- ervoir of all the possibilities of existence; they precede every form and support every creation. One of
the para- digmatic images of creation is the island that suddenly manifests itself in the midst of the waves.
On the other hand, immersion in water signifies regression to the preformal, reincorporation into the
undifferentiated mode of pre-existence. Emersion repeats the cosmogonic act of formal manifestation;
immersion is equivalent to a dissolution of forms. This is why the symbolism of the waters implies both
death and rebirth. Contact with water always brings a regeneration-on the one hand because dissolution is
followed by a new birth, on the other be- cause immersion fertilizes and multiplies the potential
of life. The aquatic cosmology has its counterpart-on the human level-in the hylogenies, the beliefs
accord- ing to which mankind was born of the waters. The Flood, or the periodical submersion of the
continents (myths of the Atlantis type) have their counterpart, on the human level, in man's "second
death" (the "dampness" and the leimon-the "humid field9'-of the Underworld, and so on) or in initiatory
death through baptism. But both on the cosmological and the anthropological planes im-
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion 131
mersion in the waters is equivalent not to a final extinc- tion but to a temporary reincorporation into the
indis- tinct, followed by a new creation, a new life, or a "new man," according to whether the moment
involved is cos- mic, biological, or soteriological. From the point of view of structure, the flood is
comparable to baptism, and the funeral libation to the lustrations of the newborn or to the spring ritual
baths that procure health and fertility.
In whatever religious complex we find them, the waters invariably retain their function; they disintegrate,
abolish forms, "wash away sins"; they are at once puri- fying and regenerating. Their destiny is to precede
the Creation and to reabsorb it, since they are incapable of transcending their own mode of being,
incapable, that is, of manifesting themselves in forms. The waters cannot pass beyond the condition of the
virtual, of germs and latencies. Everything that is form manifests itself above the waters, by detaching
itself from the waters.
One point is essential here: both the sacrality of the waters and the structure of aquatic cosmogonies and
apocalypses can be completely revealed only through aquatic symbolism, which is the only system
capable of integrating all of the articular revelations of innumer- able hierophanies.13 This law,
moreover, holds for every s~dolisrn;it is the symbolism as a whole that valorizes
laon this symbolism, cf. Eliade, Patterns, pp. 437   especially PP.
132 The Sacred and the Profane
the various significations of hierophanies. The Waters of Death, for example, reveabheir deeper meaning
only to the extent to which the structure of aquatic symbolism is known.
    The Fathers of the Church did not fail to exploit certain pre-Christian and universal values of aquatic
symbolism, although enriching them with new meanings connected with the historical existence of Christ.
For Tertullian water, "before all the furnishing of the world,

     [was] quiescent with God in a yet unshapen state.   ... Water was the first to produce that which had life, that it
    might be no wonder in baptism if waters knew how to give life.    . . . All waters, therefore, in virtue of the pristine
     privilege of their origin, do, after invocation of God, attain the sacramental power of sanctification; for the Spirit
     immediately supervenes from the heavens, and rests over the waters, sanctifying them from, Him-self; and being
thus sanctified, they imbibe at the ,same time the power of sanctifying .      . .They [that] were wont to remedy bodily
     defects, now heal the spirit; they [that] used to work temporal salvation, now renew eternal" (De Baptism, 111-V;

                      trans. S. Thelwal, in Tfc Writings of   ...Tertullianw, Edinburgh, 1869, Vol. 1,
pp. 233-238.).
The "old man" dies through immersion in water, and
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion 133
gives birth to a new, regenerated being. This symbolism

is admirably expressed by John Chrysostom (Homil. in Job., XXV, 2) who, writing of the multivalence of
bap- tism, says: "It represents death and burial, life and
. . .When we plunge our heads into the water as into a sepulcher, the old man is immersed, buried
wholly; when we come out of the water, the new man appears at the same time."
As we see, the interpretations reached by Tertullian and John Chrysostom are in perfect accord with the
structure of aquatic symbolism. However, into the Chris- tian valorization of the waters there enter certain
new elements connected with a "history," specifically with sacred history. First of all, there is the
valorization of baptism as a descent into the abyss of the waters for a combat with the marine monster.
This descent has a model-Christ's descent into the Jordan, which was at the same time a descent into the
Waters of Death. As
I       Cyril of Jerusalem writes: "According to Job, the dragon Behemoth was in the Waters and
received the Jordan into his jaws. Now, since the heads of the dragon must be
broken, Jesus, having gone down into the Waters, bound the Strong One, so that we should have the
power to walk on scorpions and snakes."14
Next comes the valorization of baptism as repetition of the Flood. According to Justin, Christ, a new
Commentary and text in J. Daniklou, Bible et liturgie, Paris, 1951, pp. 58
134 The Sacred and the Profane
emerged victorious from the waters to become the head of another race. The Flood figures both the
descent into the watery depths and baptism. "The Flood, then, was an image which baptism comes to

fulfill.   . . .        Just as Noah had confronted the Sea of Death in which sinful humanity had been
destroyed, and had emerged from it, so the newly baptized man descends into the baptismal piscina to
confront the water Dragon in a supreme com- bat from which he emerges victorious."16
But in further connection with the baptismal rite, Christ is also placed in parallel with Adam. The parallel
Adam-Christ already has a considerable place in the theology of Saint Paul. "By baptism," Tertullian
affirms, "man recovers the likeness of God" (De Bapt., V). For Cyril, "baptism is not only purification
from sins and the grace of adoption, but also antitype of the Passion of Christ." Baptismal nudity too
bears a meaning that is at once ritual and metaphysical. It is abandoning "the old garment of corruption
and sin, which the baptized per- son takes off in imitation of Christ, the garment with which Adam was
clothed after his sin"16; but it is also return to primitive innocence, to Adam's state before the fall. "0
admirable!" Cyril writes. "Ye were naked be- fore the eyes of all and felt no shame. Because verily ye
bear within you the image of the first Adam, who was naked in Paradise, and felt no shame."17
    J. Daniklou, Sacramenturn futuri, Paris, 1950, p. 65.
    1. Danihlou, Bible et litwgie, pp. 61.        See also the texts in ibid., pp. 56 ff.
The Sacredness of Nature and           Religion 135
From these few texts, we realize the direction of the Christian innovations. On the one hand, the Fathers
sought for correspondences between the two Testaments; on the other, they showed that Jesus had in truth
fulfilled God's promises to the people of Israel. But it is im- portant to note that these new valorizations
of baptismal symbolism are nowhere in contradiction to the univer- sally disseminated aquatic
symbolism. Nothing is miss- ing: Noah and the Flood have their counterpart, in              -.
                                                                                        countless traditions,
in the cataclysm that put an end to a humanity (society) except for one man who would be- come the
mythical Ancestor of a new humanity. The Waters of Death are a leitmotiv of palaeo-oriental, Asi- atic,
and Oceanic mythologies. Water is pre-eminently the slayer; it dissolves, abolishes all form. It is just for
this reason that it is so rich in germs, so creative. No more is baptismal nudity the exclusive property of
the Judaeo-Christian tradition; Paradise implies the absence of garments, that is, the absence of attrition,
wear (arche-

typal image of time). All ritual nudity implies an atemporal model, a paradisal image.
The monsters of the abyss recur in many traditions. Heroes, initiates descend into the depths to confront
marine monsters; this is a typical initiatory ordeal. To be sure, variants abound in the history of religions:
sometimes dragons mount guard over a treasure, sensory image of the sacred, of absolute reality; the
ritual (= initiatory) victory over the guardian monster is
136 The Sacred and the Profane
equivalent to a conquest of immortality.'" For the Chris- tian, baptism is a sacrament because it was
instituted by Christ. But it none the less repeats the initiatoryritual of the ordeal (= fight with the
monster), of symbolic death and resurrection (= birth of the new man). We do not say that Judaism or
Christianity borrowed these or similar myths and symbols from the religions of neighboring peoples.
They had no need to; Judaism in- herited both a religious prehistory and a long religious history, in which
all these things already existed. It was not even necessary that Judaism should have preserved one or
another myth or symbol "awake," in its integrity. It was enough if a group of images survived, even
though only obscurely, from pre-Mosaic times. Such images and symbols were capable of recovering a
powerful religious
currency at any moment.

    Certain Fathers of the primitive Church had seen the value of the correspondence between the
symbols advanced by Christianity and the symbols that are the common property of mankind. Addressing
those who denied the resurrection of the dead, Theophilus of Anti- och appealed to the signs (tekmeria)
that God had set before them in the great cosmic rhythms~seasons, days, nights. He wrote: "Is there not a
resurrection for seeds
18On   these rnythico-ritual motifs, see Eliade, Patterns, pp. 207 fL, 283 8.

The Sacredness of Nature and
Cosmic Religion 137
     and fruits?" For Clement
     of Rome, "day and night
     us the resurrection; night
     sets, day rises; day departs,
     night comes."19
     For the Christian
     apologists, symbols were
     with messages; they
     showed the sacred through
     the cos-
     mic rhythms. The
     revelation brought by the
     faith did
     not destroy the
     pre-Christian meanings of
     symbols; it
     simply added a new value
     to them. True enough, for
     the believer this new
     meaning eclipsed all the
     others; it
     alone valorized the
     symbol, transfigured it into
    tion. It was the resurrection
    of Christ that counted, not
    the signs that could be read
    in cosmic life. Yet it re-
    mains true that the new
    valorization was in some
    conditioned by the very
    structure of the symbolism;
    could even be said that the
    aquatic symbol awaited the
    fulfillment of its deepest
    meaning through the new
    contributed by
    The Christian faith hangs
    upon a historical
    it is the incarnation of God
    in historical time that, in
    Christian view, guarantees
    the validity of symbols.
    the universal aquatic
    symbolism was neither
    nor dismembered by the
    historical (=
    interpretations of
    baptismal symbolism. In
    other words:
    History cannot basically
    modify the structure of an
    archaic symbolism.
    History constantly adds
    new mean-
    ings, but they do not
    destroy the structure of the
    Cf-      Beimaert, "La
    dimension m~thiquedans le
    hetien," Eranos-Jahrbuch,
             1950, p. 275.
138 The Sacred and the Profane
All this is comprehensible if we bear in mind that, for religious man, the world always presents a
super-natural valence, that is, it reveals a modality of the sacred. Every cosmic fragment is transparent; its
own mode of existence shows a particular structure of being, and hence of the sacred. We should never
forget that, for religious man, sacrality is a full manifestation of being. The revelations of cosmic sacrality
are in some sort primordial revelations; they take place in the most distant religious past of humanity, and
the innovations later introduced by history have not had power to abol- ish them.
   An Indian prophet, Smohalla, chief of the Wana- pum tribe, refused to till the ground. He held that it
was a sin to mutilate and tear up the earth, mother of all. He said: "You ask me to plow the ground! Shall
I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.
You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die, I cannot enter her
body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men! But
how dare I cut off my mother's hair?"20
20      Mooney, 'The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890,"Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology.    2, Washington, 18%. pp. 721, 724.
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion 139

I    1
These words were spoken scarcely fifty years ago. But
        bey come to us from very far. The emotion that we feel on bearing them arises primarily from their
    revealing to us, with incomparable freshness and spontaneity, the image of Mother Earth. The image is
the world in countless forms and variants. It is the Terra Mater or Tellus Mater so familiar to Medi-
terranean religions, who gives birth to all beings. "Con- cerning Earth, the mother of all, shall I sing," we
read in the Homeric Hym to Earth, "firm earth, eldest of pds, that nourishes all things in the world. .      .
.Thine it is to give or to take life from mortal men" (1 ff.; trans. A. Lang, Homeric Hymns, p. 246). And
in the Choephori Aeschylus celebrates the earth "who bringeth all things to birth, reareth them, and
receiveth again into her womb" (127-128; trans. Verrall, 'Choephori',
p. 214).
The prophet Smohalla does not tell us in what way men are born of the telluric mother. But North
myths reveal how things happened in the beginning, in ill0 tempore. The first men lived for a certain time
in the breast of their mother, that is, in the depths of the earth. There in the telluric abyss they led a
half-human life; in some sort they were still imperfectly formed embryos. At least so said the
Lenni-Lenape or Delaware Indians, who once inhabited Pennsylvania. According to their mylhs, although
the Creator had already prepared on the surface of the earth all the things that men now enjoy
140           Sacred and the Profane
there, he had decided that these first men should remain yet a while hidden in the bosom of the telluric
mother, so that they might better develop, might ripen. Other American Indian myths speak of an ancient
time when Mother Earth brought forth human beings in the same way that she now produces bushes and
That human beings are born of the earth is a uni-versally disseminated belief.22 In a number of languages

man is called the earthborn. It is believed that children come" from the depths of the earth, from caverns,
caves, ravines, but also from ponds, springs, rivers. In the form of legends, superstitions, or merely as
meta- phors, such beliefs still survive in Europe. Every dis- trict, and almost every town and village,
knows of a brook or a spring that "brings" children; they are the Kinderbrunnen, Kinderteiche,
Bubenquellen, and so on. Even the European of today still preserves an obscure sense of mystial
solidarity with his native soil. It is the religious experience of autochthony; the feeling is that of belonging
to a place, and it is a cosmically struc- tured feeling that goes far beyond family or ancestral solidarity.
The dying man desires to return to Mother Earth, to
21Cf. Eliade, "La terre-mere et les hihrogamies cosrniquq" Eranos-Jahrbuch, XXII, 1954, pp. 59    also in
Mythes, rbes et rnysteres, pp. 207-252, especially pp. 208    22A. Dieterich, Mutter Erde, 3rd ed., Leipzig-Berlin, 1925; B.
Nyberg~ Kind und Erde, Helsinki, 1931; cf. Eliade, Patterns, pp. 239
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion 141
be buried in his native soil. "Crawl to the Earth, thy
mother," says the Rig Veda (X, 18,lO). "Thou who art I put thee in the Earth!" we read in the Atharva Veda

(XVIII, 4, 48). "Let flesh and bones return again I to the Earth!" is solemnly intoned at Chinese funeral ceremonies.
And Roman sepulchral inscriptions express fear lest the dead man's ashes be buried far from home and, above all,
the joy of reincorporating them into the fatherland: Hie natus hie situs est (C.I.L., V, 5595: "Here was he born,
here is he laid") ;hie situs est
1        ~atriae (VIII, 2885: "Here he is laid in his native land") ;hie quo                    fuerat optans era illo
reverti (V, 1703: "Here where he was born he desired to re- turn").
HUM1                 LAYING THE INFANT            THE GROUND
This fundamental experiencethat the human
,        mother is only the representative of the telluric Great Mother-has given rise to countless customs.
We will mention, as an example, giving birth on the ground (humi positio), a ritual that is found almost
all over the world, from Australia to China, from Africa to South America. Among the Greeks and
Romans the custom had disappeared by historical times, but there is no doubt ^W it existed in a more
remote past; certain statues of          goddesses (Eileithia, Damia, Auxeia) represented
142 The Sacred and the Profane

them on their knees, exactly in the position of a wornan
giving birth on the ground. In demotic Egyptian text- the expression "to sit on the ground" meant to
give bid, childbi~th.'~
The religious meaning of the custom is easy to see: generation and childbirth are microcosmic
versions of a paradigmatic act performed by the earth; every human mother only imitates and repeats
this primordial act of the appearance of life in the womb of the earth'. Hence every mother must put
herself in contact with the Great Genetrix, that she may be guided by her in accomplish- ing the
mystery that is the birth of a life, may receive her beneficent energies and secure her maternal pro-
Still more widely disseminated is the laying of the infant on the ground. In some parts of Europe it is
still the custom today to lay the infant on the ground as soon as it has been bathed and swaddled. The
father then takes the child up from the ground (de terra tollere) to show his gratitude. In ancient
China "the dying man, like-the newborn infant, is laid on the ground. .To be born or to die, to enter
the living family or the ances- tral family (and to leave the one or the other), there is a common
threshold, one's native Earth.           ...When the newborn infant or the dying man is laid on the Earth,
23 Cf.   the references in Eliade, "La terre-mere et les hierogamie~ cos- miques," in Mythes, r5ves et mystsres, p. 222, n. 1.
                                               Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion
it is for her to say if the birth or the death are valid,
if hey are to be taken as accomplished and normal facts.                     ...The rite of laying on the Earth implies a
substan- tial identity between the Race and the Soil. And in fact this idea finds expression in the
feeling of autochthony that is the strongest feeling among those that we can detect at the beginnings
of Chinese history: the idea of an intimate connection between a country and its inhabi- tants is a
belief so profound that it has remained at the heart of religious institutions and civil law."24
Just as the infant is placed on the ground immediately after birth so that its true Mother shall
legitimize it and confer her divine protection on it, so, too, infants, chil- dren, and grown men are
placed on the ground~or sometimes buried in it-in case of sickness. Symbolic burial, partial or
complete, has the same magico-reli- gious value as immersion in water, baptism. The sick person is
regenerated; he is born anew. The operation has the same efficacy in wiping out a sin or in curiq a
mental malady ("the latter representing the same danger to "the collectivity as does crime or somatic
sickness). The sinner is laced in a cask or in a trench dug in the ground, and when he emerges he is
said to "be born a second time, from his mother's womb." This explains the Scandinavian belief that a
witch can be saved from eter-
24   Mace1 Granet, "Le depot de l'enfant          le sol," Revue Arch~ologique, 19S^s~tudes sociologiques    suf   la Chine. Paris, 1953,
pp. 192            197
144          Sacred and the Profane

nal damnation if she is buried alive, seed is sown over 1 her, and the resulting crop harve~ted.~'
Initiation includes a ritual death and resurrection. This is why, among numerous primitive peoples, the
novice is symbolically "killed," laid in a trench, and covered with leaves. When he rises from the grave he
is looked upon as a new man, for he has been brought to birth once more, this time directly by the cosmic
     Woman, then, is mystically held to be one with the earth, childbearing is seen as a variant, on the
human scale, of the telluric fertility. All religious experiences connected with fecundity and birth have a
cosmic struc- ture. The sacrality of woman depends on the holiness of the earth. Feminine fecundity has a
cosmic model-that of Terra Mater, the universal Genetrix.
                           In some religions Mother Earth is imagined as capable
    of conceiving alone, without the assistance of a coadju-
    tor. Traces of such archaic ideas are still found in the
   myths of the parthenogenesis of Mediterranean god-
   desses. According to Hesiod, Gaia (= Earth) gave birth
   to Ouranos "a being equal to herself, able to cover her
   completely" (Theogony, 126 f.). Other Greek goddesses
28 A.   Dieterich, Mutter Erde, pp. 28 ff.; B. Nyberg, Kind   Erde, Pa
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion 145
likewise gave birth without the help of gods. This is a mythical expression of the self-sufficiency and
fecundity of Mother Earth. Such mythical conceptions have their counterparts in beliefs concerning the
spontaneous fe- cundity of woman and in her occult magico-religious powers, which exert a determining
influence on plant life. The social and cultural phenomenon known as matriarchy is connected with the
discovery of agriculture by woman. It was woman who first cultivated food plants. Hence it is she who
becomes owner of the soil and crops.26 The magico-religious prestige and conse-quent social
predominance of woman have a cosmic model-the figure of Mother Earth.
In other religions the cosmic creation, or at least its completion, is the result of a hierogamy between the
Sky-God and Mother Earth. This cosmogonic myth is quite widely disseminated. It is found especially in
Oceania-from Indonesia to Micronesia-but it also occurs in Asia, Africa, and the two Ameri~as.~~
Now, as we have seen, the cosmogonic myth is re-eminently the paradigmatic myth; it serves as model
for human be- havior. Thisis why human marriage is regarded as an imitation of the cosmic hierogamy. "I
am Heaven," the
%J. J.Bachofen, Dm Mutterrecht, Basel, 1861, 3rd ed. 1948; Wilhelm Schmidt,       Mutterrecht, Vienna, 1955. 27Cf. made,
Patterns, pp. 240 ff. But it should be noted that, although     widely disseminated, the myth of the cosmic hierogarny is
not "mversal and does not appear in the most archaic cultures (Australians, Fuegians, Arctic peoples, etc.).
1% The Sacred and the Profane

husband proclaims in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (VI, 4, 20), "thou art Earth!" Even so early as the
Atharva Veda (XIV, 2,71) groom and bride are a~~irni- lated to heaven and earth. Dido celebrates her
marriage to Aeneas in the midst of a violent storm (Aeneid, IV, 165                 ;their union coincides with that
of the elements; the Sky embraces his wife, dispensing the fertilizing rain. In Greece marriage rites
imitated the example of Zeus's secret union with Hera (Pausanias, 11, 36, 2). As we should expect, the
divine myth is the paradigmatic model for the human union. But there is another aspect which requires
emphasis-the cosmic structure of the conjugal ritual, and hence of human sexual behavior. For
nonreligious man of the modern societies, this simul- taneously cosmic and sacred dimension of conjugal
union is difficult to grasp. But as we have had occasion to say more than once, it must not be forgotten
that religious man of the archaic societies sees the world as fraught with messages. Sometimes the
messages are in cipher, but the myths are there to help man decipher them. As we shall see later, the
whole of human expe- rience can be homologized to cosmic life, hence can be sanctified, for the cosmos
is the supreme creation of the gods.
Ritual orgies for the benefit of crops likewise have a divine model-the hierogamy of the Fecundating God
and Mother Earth.28 The fertility of the fields is stirnu- 28 Cf. Eliade, Patterns, pp. 356
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic                   147
lated by an unlimited genetic frenzy. From one point
view the orgy corresponds to the pre-Creation state of nondifferentiation. This is why certain New Year
cere- monies include orgiastic rites: social confusion, sexual license, and Saturnalia symbolize regression
to the
condition that preceded the Creation of the World. In the case of a creation on the level of vegetable life,
this cosmologico-ritual scenario is repeated, for the new crop is equivalent to a new creation. The idea of
renewal-which we encountered in New Year rituals whose purpose was at once the renewal of time and
the regeneration of the world-recurs in orgiastic argricul- tural scenarios. Here too the orgy is a return to
the cos- mic night, the preformal, the waters, in order to ensure complete regeneration of life and hence
the fertility of the earth and an abundance of crops.
As we have just seen, the myths and rites of the Earth-Mother chiefly express ideas of fecundity and
abundance. These are religious ideas, for what the vari- ous aspects of universal fertility reveal is, in sum,
the mystery of generation, of the creation of life. For reli- gious man, the appearance of life is the central
of the world./Life comes from somewhere that is not this World and finally departs from here and goes to
148 The Sacred and the Profane
beyond, in some mysterious way continues in an un. known place inaccessible to the majority. of mortals.
Human life is not felt as a brief appearance in time, between one nothingness and another; it is preceded
by a pre-existence and continued in a postexistence. Little is known about these two extraterrestrial stages
of human life, yet they are known to exist. Hence, for religious man, death does not put a final end to life.
Death is but another modality of human existence.
All this, moreover, is ciphered in the cosmic rhythms; man need only decipher what the cosmos says in its
many modes of being, and'he will understand the mystery of life. But one thing seems clear beyond
doubt: that the cosmos is a living organism, which renews itself peri- odically. The mystery of the
inexhaustible appearance of life is bound up with the rhythmical renewal of the cosmos. This is why the
cosmos was imagined in the
form of a gigantic tree; the mode of being of the cosmos,
and first of all its capacity for endless regeneration, are
symbolically expressed by the life of the tree.
We should note, however, that all this does not repre-
sent a mere transposition of images from the micro-
cosmic to the macrocosmic scale. As a natural object,
the tree could not suggest the whole of cosmic life; on
the level of profane experience its mode of being does
not coincide with the mode of being of the cosmos in all
its complexity. On the level of profane experience vege-
table life displays merely a series of births and deaths-
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religkn 149
Only the religious vision of life makes it possible to decipher other meanings in the rhythm of vegetation,
first of all the ideas of regeneration, of eternal youth, of health, of immortality. The religious idea of
absolute reality, which finds symbolic expression in so many other images, is also expressed by the figure
of a miracu- lous fruit conferring immortality, omniscience, and limitless power, a fruit that can change
men into gods.
The image of the tree was not chosen only to symbolize the cosmos but also to express life, youth,
immortality, wisdom. In addition to cosmic trees like the Yggdrasil of Germanic mythology, the history
of religions records trees of life (e.g., in Mesopotamia), of immortality (Asia, Old Testament), of
knowledge (Old Testament), of youth (Mesopotamia, India, Iran), and so on.29 In other words, the tree
came to express everything that religious man regards as re-eminedy real and sacred, everything that he
knows the gods to possess of their own nature and that is only rarely accessible to privileged individuals,
the heroes and demigods. This is why myths the quest for youth or immortality give prominent place to
a tree with golden fruit or miraculous leaves, a tree growing "in the distant land" (really in the other
world) and guarded by monsters (griffins, dragons, snakes). He who would gather its fruits must confront
and slay the guardian monster. This in itself tells us
ibid., pp. 273        Widengren, The King and the Tree of Life in    Near Eastern Religion, Uppsala, 1951.
150 The Sacred and the Profane
that we here have an initiatory ordeal of the heroic type; it is by violence that the victor obtains the
superhuman, almost divine condition of eternal youth, invincibility, and unlimited power.
It is in such symbols of a cosmic tree, or tree of im- mortality or knowledge, that the religious valences of
vegetation are expressed with the greatest force and clarity. In other words, the sacred tree or sacred
plants display a structure that is not to be seen in the various concrete vegetable species. As we noted
before, it is sacrality that unveils the deepest structures of the world. The cosmos appears as a cipher only
in the religious perspective. It is for religious man that the rhythms of vegetation simultaneously reveal
the mystery of life and creation and the mystery of renewal, youth, and immor- tality. It could be said that
all trees and plants that are regarded as sacred (e.g., the ashvatha tree in India) owe their privileged
situation to the fact that they incar- nate the archetype, the paradigmatic image of vegetation. On the

other hand, what causes a plant to be noticed and cultivated is its religious value. According to some
writers, all of the plants that are in cultivation today were originally regarded as sacred plants.30
What are called vegetation cults do not depend on a profane, "naturistic" experience, connected, for
exam- ple, with spring and the reawakening of vegetation. On
  A. G. Haudricourt and Hedin, L'homme et les pZuntes cultiu~e~, Paris, 1946, p. 90.
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion 151
                             I       the contrary, the religious experience of renewal (= re-
beginning, re-creation) of the world precedes and justi- fies the valorization of spring as the resurrection
of nature. It is the mystery of the periodical regeneration of the cosmos that is the basis for the religious
signifi- cance of spring. Then, too, in vegetation cults the empha- sis is not always on the natural
phenomenon of spring and the appearance of vegetation but on the prophetic sip of the cosmic mystery.
Bands of young men pay ceremonial visits to the houses of their village and show a green branch, a
bunch of flowers, a bird.31 It is the sign of the imminent resurrection of vegetable life, testimony that the
mystery has been accomplished, that spring will soon come. The majority of these rituals take place
before the natural phenomenon of spring.
As we have said before, for religious man nature is never only natural. Experience of a radically desacral-
ized nature is a recent discovery; moreover, it is an experience accessible only to a minority in modem
socie- ties, especially to scientists. For others, nature still exhibits a charm, a mystery, a majesty in which
it is possible to decipher traces of ancient religious values. No modern man, however irreligious, is
entirely insensi- ble to the charms of nature. We refer not only to the
  EUade, Patterns, pp. 316
152        Sacred and the Profane
esthetic, recreational, or hygienic values attributed to nature, but also to a confused and almost indefinable
feeling, in which, however, it is possible to recognize the memory of a debased religious experience.
A definite example of these changes and deteriorations in the religious values of nature will not be
without value. We have taken our example from China, for two reasons. (1)In China, as in the. West, the
desacralization of nature is the work of a minority, especially of the literati; (2) nevertheless in China and
in the entire Far East, the process of desacralization has never been car- ried to its final extreme. Even for
the most sophisticated men of letters, "esthetic contemplation" still retains an aura of religious prestige.
From the seventeenth century, arranging gardens in
  pottery bowls became the fashion among Chinese schol-
The bowls were filled with water, out of which rose
  a few stones bearing dwarf trees, flowers, and often
  miniature models of houses, pagodas, bridges, and
 human figures; they were called "Miniature Mountains"
in Annamese and "Artificial Mountains" in Sino-Anna-
 mese. These names themselves suggest a cosmological
 signification; for, as we have seen, the mountain is a
 symbol of the universe.
But these miniature gardens, which became objects
       the following, cf. Rolf Stein, "Jardins en miniature d'Extrcme    Bulletin de FEcole Franyaise d'ExtrJme
Orient, 42, 1943,
26 5. and passim.
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion 153
valuedby esthetes, had a long history, or even a pre- history, which reveals a profound religious feeling
for the world. Their ancestors were bowls whose perfumed water represented the sea and their cover the
mountain. The cosmic structure of these objects is obvious. The mystical element was also present, for the
mountain in fie of the sea symbolized the Isles of the Blessed, a sort of Paradise in which the Taoist
Immortals lived. So that we have here a world apart, a world in miniature, which the scholar set up in his
house in order to partake in its concentrated mystical forces, in order, through meditation, to re-establish
harmony with the world. The mountain was ornamented with grottoes, and the folklore of caves played an
important role in the construction of these miniature gardens. Caves are secret retreats, dwell- ings of the
Taoist Immortals and places of initiation. They represent a paradisal world and hence are difficult to enter
(symbolism of the "narrow gate," to which we shall return in the next chapter).
But this whole complex-water, trees, mountain, grotto~which had played such a considerable role in
Taoism was only the development of a still older reli- gious idea: that of the perfect place, combining
corn- pleteness (mountain and water) with solitude, and thus perfect because at once the world in
miniature and Para- ^% source of bliss and place of immortality. But the Perfect land~ca~e~mountain
only the
and water-was sacred place where, in China, at every re-
154 The Sacred and the Profane
turning spring, youths and girls met to intone alternating ritual chants and for amorous encounters. It is
possible to divine the successive valorizations of the primordial sacred place. In the earliest times it
was a privileged space, a closed, sanctified world, where the youths and girls met periodically to
participate in the mysteries of life and cosmic fecundity. The Taoists took over this archaic cosmological
schema-mountain and water-and elaborated it into a richer complex (mountain, water, grotto, trees), but
reduced to the smallest scale; it was a paradisal universe in miniature, which was charged with mystical
forces because apart from the profane world and in contemplation of which the Taoists

sank into meditation.
The sanctity of the closed world is still discernible in the covered bowls of perfumed water symbolizing
the sea and the Isles of the Blessed. This complex still served for meditation, just as the miniature
gardens did in the beginning, before the fashion for them among scholars in the seventeenth century
transformed them into art objects.
Yet it is worth noting that in this example we never witness a complete desacralization of the world, for in
the Far East what is called the "esthetic emotion" still retains a religious dimension, even among
intellectuals- But the example of the miniature gardens shows us in what direction and by what means the
desacralization of the world is accomplished. We need only imagine
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion 155
what an esthetic emotion of this sort could become in a modem society, and we shall understand how the
expe- rien~eof cosmic sanctity can be rarefied and transformed until it becomes a purely human
emotion-that, for
example, of art for art's sake.
Considerations of space have obliged us to dis- cuss only a few aspects of the sacrality of nature. Many
cosmic hierophanies have necessarily been passed over. ~hus, for example, we have not been able to
discuss solar and lunar symbols and cults, nor the religious
significance of stones, nor the religious role of animals, and so on. Each of these groups of cosmic
hierophanies reveals a articular structure of the sacrality of nature; or, more ~recisely, a modality of
the sacred expressed through a specific mode of existence in the cosmos. For example, we need only
analyze the various religious 1 values attributed to stones to understand what stones,      hierophanies, are
able to show to man; they reveal power, hardness, permanence. The hierophany of a stone re-eminently
an ontophany; above all, the stone is, it always remains itself, it does not change~and it strikes man by
what it possesses of irreducibility and absolute- ness and, in so doing, reveals to him by analogy the
irreducibility and absoluteness of being. Perceived by "'*ue of a religious experience, the specific mode of
       The Sacred and the Profane
existence of the stone reveals to man the nature of an absolute existence, beyond time, invulnerable to be.
In the same way a rapid analysis of the many and various religious valorizations of the moon shows all
that men have deciphered in the lunar rhythms. It is through the moon's phases-that is, its birth, death, and
resur- rection-that men came to know at once their own mode of being in the cosmos and the chances for
their survival or rebirth. It is through lunar symbolism that religious man was led to compare vast masses
of apparently un- related facts and finally to integrate them in a single system. It is even probable that the
religious valorization of the lunar rhythms made possible the first great an- thropo-cosmic syntheses of
the primitives. It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things
as: birth, becoming, death, and resurrection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the
cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by a rebirth of lunar type
("light coming out of darkness") ;weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death;
and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of
reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of
lunar symbolism. We
33 On    sacred stones, cf. Eliade, Patterns, pp. 216-238.
The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion
even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the
mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in
becoming, growth and waning, death and resurrection. For we must not forget that what the moon reveals
to religious man is not only that death is indissolubly linked with life but also, and above all, that death is
not final, that it    always followed by a new birth.34
The moon confers a religious valorization on cosmic becoming and reconciles man to death. The sun, on
the contrary, reveals a different mode of existence. The sun does not share in becoming; although always
in motion, the sun remains unchangeable; its form is always the same. Solar hierophanies give expression
to the religious values of autonomy and power, of sovereignty, of intelli- gence. This is why, in certain
cultures, we witness a process of solarization of the supreme beings. As we saw, the celestial gods tend to
disappear from current reli- gion, but in some cases their structure and prestige still survive in the solar
gods, especially in the highly devel- oped civilizations that have played an important role in history
(Egypt, the Hellenistic East, Mexico).
        Many heroic mythologies are solar in structure. The is assimilated to the sun; like the sun, he fights
                                                     darkness, descends into the realm of death and emerges
34   Cf. ibid., pp. 154-187.
       The Sacred and the Profane
victorious. Here darkness is no longer, as it is in lunar mythologies, one of the modes of being of divinity;
instead, it symbolizes all that the god is not, hence the adversary par excellence. Darkness is no longer
valor. ized as a necessary phase in cosmic life; in the perspec- tive of solar religion, it is opposed to life,
to forms, and to intelligence. In some cultures the luminous epiphanies of solar gods become the sign of
intelligence. In the end sun and intelligence will be assimilated to such a degree that the solar and
syncretistic theologies of the end of antiquity become rationalistic philosophies; the sun is proclaimed to
be the intelligence of the world, and Macrobius sees in the sun all the gods of the Graeco-
oriental world, from Apollo and Jupiter to Osiris, Horus, and Adonis (Saturnalia, I, ch. 17-23). In the
Emperor Julian's treatise On the Sun King, as in Proclus'            to the Sun, solar hierophanies give place
to ideas, and religious feeling almost completely disappears after this long process of rationalizati~n.~~
This desacralization of solar hierophanies is only one among many other similar processes through whose
operation the entire cosmos is finally emptied of its reli-gious content. But, as we said, the complete
seculariza- tion of nature is a fact only for a limited number of moderns-those devoid of all religious
feeling. Despite the deep and sweeping changes that Christianity made

    The Sacredness of Nature and
i                Religion 159
1    the religious valorization of
          the cosmos and life, it

    did not reject them. That the
        whole of cosmic life can
        be felt as a cipher of the
        divinity is shown         a
        Christian author such as
    Leon Bloy, when he writes:
      'Whether life is in men, in
       animals, or in plants, it is
     Life, and when the minute,
             the inapprehensible
         pint that is called death
       comes, it is always Jesus
       departs, alike from a tree
    and from a human being."30

35 Cf.          pp. 124-153.
               Existence and Sanctified Life
The ultimate aim of the historian of religions is to understand, and to make understandable to others, religious man's behavior and mental
                      I                                                               I

                always an easy undertaking. For the modern world, religion as form of life and
universe. It is not
Weltanschavung is repre- sented by Christianity. By making a considerable effort, a Western intellectual
has at most some chance of famil- iarizing himself with the religious vision (riE classical antiquity and
even with certain great oriental religions -for example, Hinduism or Confucianism. But such an effort to
broaden his religious horizon, though it may be, does not take him far enough; Greece, India, China do
not take the Western intellectual beyond the sphere of complex and highly developed religions with a
large written sacred literature. To know some
part of these sacred literatures, to become familiar with some oriental or classical mythologies and
theologies does not yet suffice for a comprehension of the mental universe of homo religiosus. These
mythologies and theologies are already only too clearly marked by the long labor of scholars; even if,
strictly speaking, they are not "religions of the Book" (as are Judaism, Zoroas- trianism, Christianity, and
Islam), they possess sacred books (India, China) or at least have ben influenced by revered writers of
genius (e.g., in Greece, Homer).
To gain a broader religious perspective, it is more Ueful to become familiar with the folklore of European
Peoples; in their beliefs and customs, their attitude to- ward life and death, many archaic religious
situations are still recognizable. Studying the rural societies of
164 The Sacred and the Profane
Europe provides some basis for understanding the reli. gious world of the neolithic cultivators. In many
cases the customs and beliefs of European peasants represent a more archaic state of culture than that
documented in the mythology of classic Greece.' It is true that most of these rural European populations
have been Christian- ized for over a thousand years. But they succeeded in incorporating into their
Christianity a considerable part

'of their pre-Christian religious heritage, which was of immemorial antiquity. It would be wrong to
suppose that for this reason European peasants are not Chris- tians. But we must recognize that their
religion is not confined to the historical forms of Christianity, that it still retains a cosmic structure that
has been almost en- tirely lost in the experience of urban Christians. We may speak of a primordial,
ahistorical Christianity; becoming Christians, the European cultivators': incor- porated into their new faith
the cosmic religion that they had preserved from prehistoric times. But for the historian of religions who
would under- stand and make understandable all of the existential situations of homo religwsus, the
problem is more corn- plex. A whole world stretches beyond the frontiers of the agricultural cultures-the
truly ''primitive'? world of nomadic herdsmen, of totemistic hunters, of peoples still at the stage of
gathering and small-game hunting.
1      is, for example, the finding of Leopold Schmidt's studyi Gestalt-heiligkeit im biuerlichen Arbeitsmythos, Vienna, 1952.

1 Human Existence and Sanctified Life 165
come to know the mental universe of             religiosus, we must above all take into account the men of
these primitive societies. Now, to us in this day their culture Seems eccentric if not positively aberrant; in
any case it is difficult to grasp. But there is no other way of under- standing a foreign mental universe
than to place oneself inside it, at its very center, in order to progress from there to all the values that it
What we find as soon as we place ourselves in the perspective of religious man of the archaic societies is
that the world exists because it was created by the gods, and that the existence of the world itself
"means" some-thing, "wants to say" something, that the world is neither mute nor opaque, that it is not an
inert thing without purpose or significance. For religious man, the cosmos

"lives" and "speaks." The mere life of the cosmos is proof of its sanctity, since the cosmos was created by
the gods and the gods show themselves to men through cosmic life.
This is why, beginning at a certain stage of culture,

man conceives of himself as a microcosm. He forms part of the gods' creation; in other words, he finds in
himself the same sanctity that he recognizes in the cosmos. It follows that his life is homologized to
cosmic life; as a divine work, the cosmos becomes the paradigmatic image of human existence. To cite a
few examples: We have seenthat marriage is valorized as a hierogamy of heaven md earth. But among
the cultivators, the homology
      The Sacred and the Profane
earth-woman is still more complex. Woman is assimi-

lated to the soil, seed to the semen virile, and agricul. tural work to conjugal union. "This woman has
come like living soil: sow seed in her, ye men!" says the Atharva Veda (XIV, 2,14). "Your women are as
fields for you" (Koran, 11,225). A sterile queen laments, "I am like a field where nothing grows!" On
the contrary, in a twelfth-century hymn the Virgin Mary is glorified as "ground not to be plowed, which
brought forth fruit"
(terra       arabilis quae fructum parturiit).
Let us attempt to understand the existential situation of one for whom all these homologies are
experiences and not simply ideas. Clearly, his life has an additional dimension; it is not merely human, it
is at the same time cosmic, since it has a transhuman structure. It could be

termed an open existence, for it is not strictly confined to man's mode of being. (We know too that the
primitive places his model for himself on the transhuman plane revealed by myths). The existence of
homo religiosus, especially of the primitive, is open to the world; in living, religious man is never alone,,
part.-oÂ£..the-worl lives in him. But we cannot say, as Hegel did, that primi- tive man is "buried in
nature," that he has not yet found himself as distinct from nature, as himself. The Hindu who, embracing
his wife, declares that she is Earth and he Heaven is at the same time fully conscious of his humanity and
hers. The Austroasiatic cultivator who uses the same word, lak, to designate phallus and spade
Human Existence and Sanctified Life 167
and, like so many other agriculturalists, assimilates seed to the semen virile knows perfectly well that his
spade is an instrument that he made and that in tilling his field he performs agricultural work involving
knowledge of a certain number of techniques. In other words, cosmic symbolism adds a new value to an
object or action, with- out affecting their peculiar and immediate values. An existence open to the world
is not an unconscious exist- ence "buried in nature." Openness to the world enables religious man to know
himself in knowing the world- and this knowledge is precious to him because it is reli- gious, because it
pertains to being.
The above example helps us to understand the perspective adopted by the man of the archaic societies; for
him, the whole of life is capable of being sanctified. The means by which its sanctification is brought
about are various, but the result is always the same: life is lived on a twofold plane; it takes its course as
human exist- ence and, at the same time, shares in a transhuman life, that of the cosmos or the gods.
Probably, in a very dis- tant past, all of man's organs and physiological expe- riences, as well as all his
acts, had a religious meaning. This is understandable, for all human behavior was established by the gods
or culture heroes in illo tempore; hey instituted not only the various kinds of work and
168 The Sacred and the Profane
the various ways of obtaining and eating food, of making love, of expressing thought and feeling, and so
on, but even acts apparently of no importance. In the myth of the Australian Karadjeri the two culture
heroes took a particular position to urinate, and the Karadjeri still imitate this paradigmatic gesture
today.2 Needless to say, there is nothing corresponding to this on the level of the profane experience of

life. For nonreligious man, all vital experiences-whether sex or eating, work or play -have been
desacralized. This means that all these physiological acts are deprived of spiritual significance, hence
deprived of their truly human dimension.
But aside from this religious meaning that physiologi- cal acts receive as imitation of divine models, the
organs and their functions were given religious valorization by
being assimilated to the various cosmic regions and
phenomena. We have already seen a classic example-
woman assimilated to the soil and to Mother Earth, the
sexual act assimilated to the hierogamy Heaven-Earth
and to the sowing of seed. But the number of such
homologies established between man and the univprse is
very large. Some of them seemto force themselves on
the mind spontaneously, as, for example, the homology
between the eye and the sun, or of the two eyes to sun
and moon, or of the cranium to the full moon; or again,
2 Cf.   Ralph Piddington, "Karadgeri Initiation," Oce& TO, 1932-1933, pp. %a7.
Human Existence and Sanctified Life 169
of breath to the winds, of bones to stones, of hair to grass, and so on. ~ut
the historian of religions encounters other homol- ogies that presuppose a more developed symbolism, a
whole system of micro-macrocosmic correspondences. such, for example, is the assimilation of the belly
or the womb to a cave, of the intestines to a labyrinth, of breathing to weaving, of the veins and arteries to
the sun and moon, of the backbone to the                     and so on. Of course all these homologies
between the human body and the macrocosm are not documented among primitives. Some systems of
man-universe correspond- ences were fully elaborated only in the higher cultures (India, China, the
ancient Near East, Central America). Yet their point of departure is already present in archaic cultures.
Primitive peoples have revealed to the investigator systems of anthropo-cosmic homologies of
extraordinary complexity, which bear witness to an in- exhaustible capacity for speculation. Such is the
case, for example, with the Dogon in French West Afri~a.~
These anthropo-cosmic homologies concern us particu-larly in so far as they are ciphers of various
existential situations. We said that religious man lives in an open world and that, in addition, his existence
is open to the world. This means that religious man is accessible to an infinite series of experiences that
could be termed cos-
'Cf.            Griaule, Dieu d'eau. Entretiens avec Ogotemm&U,
170          Sacred and the Profane
mic. Such experiences are always religious, for the world

is sacred. If we would understand them, we must remem- ber that the principal physiological functions
can become sacraments. Eating is a ritual, and food is van. ously valorized by various religions and
cultures. Food- stuffs are regarded as sacred, or as gifts of divinity, or as an offering to the gods of the
body (for example, in India). Sexual life, as we saw, is also ritualized and hence also homologized to
divine acts (Heaven-Earth hierogamy) Sometimes marriage is valorized on a three- fold planeindividual,
social, and cosmic. For example, among the Omahas, the village is divided into two halves, respectively
named Heaven and Earth. Marriages can be contracted only between the two exogamic halves, and each
new marriage repeats the primordial hieros gamos,
the union of Heaven and EarthO4
Such drawing of anthropo-cosmic homologies and, especially, the sacramentalization of physiological life
that ensues have all their vitality even in highly evolved religions. For but one example, we need only
think of the prestige that sexual union as ritual acquired in Indian tantrism. India strikingly illustrates how
a physiological act can be transformed into ritual and how, when the ritualistic period has ended, the same
act can be valorized as mystical technicpe. The h~s- band's exclamation in the Brihadaranyaka
4 Cf.   Werner Miiller, Die blaue Hitte, Wiesbaden, 1954, pp. 115
Human Existence and Sanctified Life 171
"1 am Heaven, thou art Earth," follows the transfigura- tion of the wife into the Vedic sacrificial altar (VI,
4,3). BU~in tantrism woman ends by incarnating Prakriti (= nature) and the cosmic goddess, Shakti, while
the maleis identified with Shiva, the pure, motionless, serene spirit. Sexual union (maithww) is above all
an Integra- tion of these two principles, cosmic nature-energy and spirit. As a tantric text expresses it:
"The true sexual union is the union of the supreme Shakti with the Spirit (atmcm.) ; other unions represent
only carnal relations with women" (KiilEmava Tantra, V, 111-112). There is no longer any question of a
physiological act, there is a mystical rite; the partners are no longer human beings, they are detached and
free, like the gods. The tantric texts never tire of emphasizing that a transfigura- tion of carnal experience
occurs. "By the same acts that cause some men to bum in hell for thousands of years, the yogin gains his
eternal salvation.775 The Brihadaran- yaka Upanishad already declared: "He who knows this, though he
seem to commit sin, is pure, clean, ageless, immortal" (V, 14,8). In other words, "he who knows" has at
command an entirely different experience from that of the profane man. This is as much as to say that
every human experience is capable of being transfigured, lived on a different, a transhuman plane.
he texts in Elide, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, New York, Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series   1958, pp. 262-263,
411-412. Cited hereafter as Yoga.
172 The Sacred and the Profane
The Indian example shows to what a degree of mysti- I

cal refinement sacramentalization of the organs and of physiological life can be brought-a
sacramentalization that is already amply documented on all the archaic
levels of culture. We should add that the valorization of sexuality as a means of participating in the
sacred (or, in India, of gaining the superhuman state of abso- lute freedom) is not without its danger's.
In India itself, tantrism has provided the occasion for aberrant and infamous ceremonies. In the
primitive world too, ritual sexuality has been accompanied by many orgiastic forms. Nevertheless,
the example still retains its sugges- tive value, for it reveals an experience that is no longer accessible
in a desacralized society-the experience of a sanctified sexual life.
We have seen that religious man lives in open cosmos and that he is open to the world. This
(a) that he is in communication with the gods; (A) that he shares in the sanctity of the world. That
religious man can live only in an open world, we saw when we analyzed the structure of sacred
space; man desires to dwell at a center, where there is the possibility of communicating with the
gods. His dwelling is a microcosm; and so too is his body. The homology house-body-cosmos
presents itself very early. We shall dwell on this example a little,
      Existence and Sanctified Life 173
for it shows how the values of archaic religious feeling and practice can be reinterpreted by later
religions and even philosophies.
Indian religious thought made ample use of this tra- ditional homology, house-cosmos-human body.
And the reason is clear: in the last analysis, the body, like the cosmos, is a "situation," a system of
conditioning influ- ences that the individual assumes. The spinal column is assimilated to the cosmic
pillar (skambha) or to Mount Mem; the breaths are identified with the Winds; the navel or heart with
the Center of the World, and so on. But homologies are also established between the human body and
the entire ritual; the place of sacrifice, the sacrificial utensils and gestures are assimilated to the
various physiological functions and organs. The human body, ritually homologized to the cosmos or
the Vedic altar (which is an imago mundi), is also assimilated to a house. A hatha-yogic text refers to
the human body as "a house with a pillar and nine doors" (Goraksha Shataka, 14).
All this amounts to saying that by consciously estab- lishing himself in the paradigmatic situation to
which he is, as it were, predestined, man cosmicizes himself; in other words, he reproduces on the
human scale the system of rhythmic and reciprocal conditioning influ- ences that characterizes and
constitutes a world, that, in short, defines any universe. The homology also applies the reverse
direction; in their turn the temple or the
174 The Sacred and the Profane
house are regarded as a human body. The "eye" of the dome is a term that occurs in several architectural
tradi- tion~.~
 A fact to be emphasized is that each of these equivalent images~cosmos, house, human b~dyÃ‘dis plays,
or is capable of receiving, an upper opening that makes passage to another world possible. The upper
opening of an Indian tower bears, among other names, that of brahmarandhra.This term designates the
openine at the top of the skull, which plays a primary role in ~o~ico-tantric
          techniques and through which the soul takes flight at the moment of death. In this connection we
may mention the custom of breaking the skulls of dead yogins, to facilitate the departure of the souL7
This Indian custom has counterparts in beliefs that are widely disseminated in Europe and Asia-that the I soul
of the dead person departs through the chimney (= smoke hole) or the roof and especially through the part of
the roof that lies above the "sacred area."' In

cases of prolonged death agony, one or more boards are removed from the roof, or the roof is even
broken. The meaning of this custom is patent: the soul will more
6Cf. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "Symbolism of the Dome," Indian                   torical Quarterly, XIV, 1938, pp. 34 ff. 7 Eliade,
Yoga, p. 423; see also A. K. Coomaraswamy, foe. cit., p. 53,
n. 60. 8That part of the sacred space which, in certain types of Eurasiatic habitations, corresponds to the central post and
therefore plays the role of a Center of the World. See S. G. Rink, Die heilige Hintereeke in Hauskult der Volker Nordosteuropas
und Nordasiens, Helsinki, 1949.
          Existence and Sanctified Life 175 easily quzl    body if the other            of body-cosmos, the
house, is broken open above. Obviously all these are inaccessible to nonreligious man, not only
because, for him, death has become desacralized, but also because he no longer lives in a cosmos in the
proper sense of the word and is no longer aware that having a body and taking up residence in a house are
equivalent to assuming an existential situation in the cosmos (see below). It is noteworthy that the
mystical vocabulary of India has preserved the homology man-house and especially the assimilation of
the skull to the roof or dome. The fundamental mystical experiencethat is, transcending the human
condition-is expressed in a twofold image, breaking the roof and flight. Buddhistic texts refer to Arhats
who "fly through the air and break the roof of the palace," who, "flying by their own will, break and pass
through the roof of the house and travel through the air," and so 0x1.' These vivid formulas are capable of a
twofold interpretation: on the plane of mystical experience there is an "ecstasy" and hence the flight of the
soul through the brahmaraadhra; on the metaphysi- cal plane there is abolition of the conditioned world.
But both the meanings of the Arhat's flight express a break in ontological level and passage from one
mode of being to another, or, more precisely, passage from
*Cf. Eliade, Mythes, rives et mystires, pp. 133
      The Sacred and the Profane
conditioned existence to an unconditioned mode of being, that is, to perfect freedom.
In the majority of archaic religions, flight signifies access to a superhuman mode of being (god,
magician, spirit)-in the last analysis, freedom to go wherever one will, hence an appropriation of the
condition of the spirit. For Indian thought, the Arhat who "breaks the roof of the house" and flies
away through the air shows figuratively that he has transcended the cosmos and attained a
paradoxical and even inconceivable mode of being, that of absolute freedom (by whatever name it
may be called: nirvana, asamskrita, sadhi, sahaja, etc.). On the mythological plane the paradigmatic
ges- ture of transcending the world is illustrated by Buddha proclaiming that he has "broken" the
cosmic egg, the "shell of ignorance," and has obtained "the blessed, universal dignity of Buddha."1Â
This example shows the importance of the ~erennial I life of the archaic symbolisms connected with
the human habitation. These symbolisms express primordial reli- gious situations, but they are
capable of altering their values, can be enriched with new meanings and enter increasingly complex
systems of thought.          inhabits the body in the same way that he inhabits a house or the
10Suttaw.bhanga,"Pkijika," I, I, 4, discussed in Paul Mua,     notion du temps reversible dans la mythologie bouddkique,"
Annuuire de l'Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes, Section des Sciences Religieases, Melon, 1939, p. 13.
Human ExIStence and Sanctified                177 cosmos that he has himself created (cf. Chapter           1). Every
lawful and permanent situation implies location          a cosmos, in a universe perfectly organized and
hence imitated from the paradigmatic model, the Creation. Inhabited territory, temple, house, body
are all, as we have seen, cosmoses. But each of these cosmoses keeps an opening, however this idea
may be expressed in different cultures (the eye of the temple, chimney, smoke hole, brahmarandhra,
etc.). In one way or another, the cosmos that one inhabits-body, house, tribal territory, the whole of
this world-communicates above with a different plane that is transcendent to it. It can come about
that in a noncosmic religion, such as that of India after Buddhism, the opening to the higher plane no
longer represents passage from the human to the superhuman condition, but instead expresses
tran-scendence, abolition of the cosmos, absolute freedom. There is an immense difference between
the philosophi- cal meaning of the Buddha's broken egg or the roof shattered by the Arhats and the
archaic symbolism of passage from earth to heaven along the axis mundi or through the smoke hole.
Yet the fact remains that, among symbols capable of expressing ontological break-through and
transcendence, both Indian philosophy and Indian mysticism chose this primordial image of shat-
tering the roof. This means that passing beyond the human condition finds figural expression in the
destruo. tion of the "house," that is, of the personal cosmos that
       The Sacred and the Profane
one has chosen to inhabit. Every fixed abode in which one has settled is, on the philosophical plane,
equivalent to an existential situation that one has assumed. The image of shattering the roof signifies that
one has abol- ished all situation, has rejected settling in the world and chosen absolute freedom, which,
for Indian thought, implies annihilation of any conditioned world.
Without entering into any lengthy analysis of the values that one of our nonreligious contemporaries at-
tributes to his body, his house, and his universe, we can already sense the vast distance that separates him
from men belonging to the primitive and oriental cultures that we have been discussing. Just as a modern
man's habitation has lost its cosmological values, so too his body is without religious or spiritual
significance. In a summary formula we might say that for the nonreligious men of the modern age, the
cosmos has become opaque, inert, mute; it transmits no message, it holds no cipher.
The feeling of the sanctity of nature survives today in Europe chiefly among rural populations, for it is
among them that a Christianity lived as a cosmic liturgy still exists.
As for the Christianity of the industrial societies and especially the Christianity of intellectuals, it has long
since lost the cosmic values that it still possessed in the Middle Ages. We must add that this does not
necessarily imply that urban Christianity is deteriorated or inferior, but only that the religious sense of
urban populations is
Human Existence and Sanctified Life
gravely impoverished. The cosmic liturgy, the mystery of nature's participation in the Chri~tolo~ical
drama, have become inaccessible to Christians living in a mod- em city. Their religious experience is no
longer open to the cosmos. In the last analysis, it is a strictly private experience; salvation is a problem
that concerns man and his god; at most, man recognizes that he is responsi- ble not only to God but also
to history. But in these man- God-history relationships there is no place for the cosmos. From this it
would appear that, even for a genuine Christian, the world is no longer felt as the work of God.
All that we have just said concerning the body- house symbolism and the anthro~o-cosmic homologies
that are bound up with it is far from having exhausted the extraordinary richness of the subject; we have
had to confine ourselves to only a few of its many aspects. The "house"-since it is at once an imago
mundi and a replica of the human body-plays a considerable role in rituals and mythologies. In some
cultures (e.g., proto- historic China, Etruria, etc.) funerary urns are made in the shape of a house; they
have an opening above to per- mit the dead man's soul to enter and leave." The
   C. Hentze, Bronzegerit, Kultbauten, Religion im iiltesten China der Chang-~eit,Antwerp,             id.
Sinologica, 111,                                 Figs. 2-3. .
180 The Sacred and the Profane
house in some sort becomes the dead man's new "body." But it is also from a house (in this case
cap-shaped) that the mythical Ancestor comes; and it is always in such a house-urn-cap that the sun hides
at night to come forth again in the morning.12 Thus there is structural corre- spondence between the
different modes of passage~from darkness to light (sun), from a human race's pre-existence to its
manifestation (mythical Ancestor), from life to death and to the new existence after death (the soul).
We have more than once stressed the fact that all forms of cosmos-universe, temple, house, human body
-have an "opening" above. The meaning of this sym- bolism now becomes still clearer; the opening
makes possible passage from one mode of being to another, from one existential situation to another.
Passage is pre- destined for every cosmic existence. Man passes from pre-life to life and finally to death,
just as the mythical Ancestor passed from pre-existence to existence and the sun passes from darkness to
light. We must note that this type of passage is part of a more complex system, the chief characteristics of
which we examined in discussing the moon as archetype of cosmic becoming, vegetation as symbol of
universal renewal, and especially the many ways of ritually repeating the cosmogony-that is, the
paradigmatic passage from virtual to formal. All these
12C. Hentze,   Tod, Auferstehung, Weltordnung.   mythische Bild im altesten China. Zurich, 1955, pp. 47   Figs.
Human Existence and Sanctified Life 181
and symbolisms of passage, we must add, express a particular conception of human existence: when
brought to birth, man is not yet completed; he must be born a second time, spiritually; he becomes
complete man by passing from an imperfect, embryonic state to a perfect, adult state. In a word, it may be
said that human existence attains completion through a series of "passage
in short, by successive initiations.
We shall discuss the meaning and function of initia- tion further on. Here we will dwell for a moment on
the symbolism of "passage" as religious man reads it in his familiar surroundings and his daily life~in his
house, for example, in the paths that he takes to go to his work, in the bridges he crosses, and so on. This
symbolism is present even in the structure of his habitation. As we saw, the upper opening signifies the
ascending direction to heaven, the desire for transcendence. The threshold concentrates not only the
boundary between outside and inside but also the possibility of passage from one zone to another (from
the profane to the sacred; cf. Chapter 1). But it is especially the images of the bridge and the narrow gate
which suggest the idea of a dangerous pas- sage and which, for this reason, frequently occur in initiatory
and funerary rituals and mythologies. Initia- tion, death, mystical ecstasy, absolute knowledge, "faith" in
Judaeo-Christianity-all these are equivalent to pas- sage from one mode of being to another and bring
about a veritable ontological mutation. To suggest this para-
      The Sacred and the Profane
doxical passage (for it always implies a break and a transcendence), the various religious traditions
have made plentiful use of the symbolism of the Perilous Bridge or the Narrow Gate. In Iranian
mythology the Cinvat Bridge is traversed by the dead in their post mortem journey; it is nine
lance-lengths wide for the just, but for the wicked it becomes as narrow as "the blade of a razor"
(Dmkart, IX, 20,3). Under the Cinvat Bridge lies the mouth of the deep pit of hell (Videvdat, 3, 7).
The mystics always pass overrthis bridge on their ecstatic journeys to heaven; over it, for example,
passed the spirit of Ardii Viriif.13
The Vision of St. Paul presents a bridge "narrow as a hair" connecting our world with Paradise. The
same image is found in Arabic writers and mystics; the bridge is "narrower than a hair," and links the
earth to the astral spheres and Paradise. Just as in Christian traditions, sinners cannot cross it and are
cast down into' hell. Medieval legends tell of a "bridge under water," and of the sword bridge which
the hero (Lancelot) has to cross barefoot and with bare hands; it is "sharper than a scythe" and is
crossed in "pain and agony." In Finnish tradition a bridge covered with needles, nails, and razor
blades crosses hell; the dead, as well as shamans in ecstasy, use it in their journeys to the other world.
Similar descriptions are found practically all over the
            Eliade, Le Chamanisme, pp. 357
Human Existence and SancAfied Life
world.14 But it is important to note that the same imagery was still used when it became a question
of expressing the difficulty of metaphysical knowledge and, in Christi- anity, of faith. "A sharpened
edge of a razor, hard to traverse, a difficult path is this-poets declare" (Katha Upanishad, 111, 14; tr.
Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, p. 353). "Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which
leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" (Matthew, 7, 14).
These few examples of the initiatory, funerary, and metaphysical symbolism of the bridge and the
gate have shown in what way ordinary life and the "little world" that it implies-the house with its
utensils, the daily routine with its acts and gestures, and so on-can be valorized on the religious and
metaphysical plane. It is his familiar everyday life that is transfigured in the ex-perience of religious
man; he finds a cipher everywhere. Even the most habitual gesture can signify a spiritual act. The
road and walking can be transfigured into religious values, for every road can symbolize the "road of
life," and any walk a "pilgrimage," a peregrination to the Center of the World.15 If possessing a
house im- plies having assumed a stable situation in the world, those who have renounced their
houses, the pilgrims and ascetics, proclaim by their "walking," by their constant
l4Cf.   ibid., pp. 419      Maarti Haavio, VZinamSiaen, Eternal Sage,   sinki, 1952, pp. 112   Cf. Eliade, Patterns, pp.
184 The Sacred and the Profane
movement, their desire to leave the world, their refusal of any worldly situation. The house is a "nest,"
and, the Puficuvimshu Brahmans says (XI, 15,l), the "nest" implies flocks, children, and a "home"; in a
word, it symbolizes the world of the family, of society, of getting a living. Those who have chosen the
Quest, the road that leads to the Center, must abandon any kind of family and social situation, any nest,"
and devote themselves wholly to "walking" toward the supreme truth, which, in highly evolved religions,
is synonymous with the Hid-
den God, the Deus ~bsconditus.~~
   It was long ago observed that "rites of passage" play a considerable part in the life of religious man."
Certainly, the outstanding passage rite is represented by the puberty initiation, passage from one age
group to another (from childhood or adolescence to youth). But there is also a passage rites at birth, at
marriage, death, and it could be said that each of these cases alw involves an initiation, for each of them
implies a radio change in ontological and social status. When a child born, he has only a physical
existence; he is not recognized by his family nor accepted by the communi
   16Cf. Ananda        Coomaraswamy,             Pilgrim's Way." Journal of
   Bihar and Orissa Oriental Research Society, XXIII, 1937. Part IV,
   17 Cf. Arnold van Gennep, Les rites de passage, Paris, 1909.
Human Existence and Sanctified Life 185
1t is the rites performed immediately after birth that give the infant the status of a true "living person"; it
is only by virtue of those rites that he is incorporated into the community of the living.
At marriage there is also a passage from one socio- religious group to another. The young husband leaves
the group of bachelors and is thenceforth part of the group of heads of families. Every marriage implies a
tension and a danger and hence precipitates a crisis; this is why it is ~erformed by a rite of passage. The
Greeks called marriage telos, consecration, and the marriage ritual resembled that of the mysteries.
In regard to death, the rites are all the more complex because there is not only a "natural phenomenon"
(life -or the soul-leaving the body) but also a change in both ontological and social status; the dead person
has to undergo certain ordeals that concern his own destiny in the afterlife, but he must also be recognized
by the com- munity of the dead and accepted among them. For some peoples, only ritual burial confirms
death; he who is not buried according to custom is not dead. Elsewhere a death is not considered valid
until after the funerary cere- monies have been performed, or until the soul of the dead person has been
ritually conducted to its new dwell- ing in the other world and there been accepted by the community of
the dead. For nonreligious man, birth, marriage, death are events that concern only the indi- vidual and his
family; or occasionally-in the case of
   Sacred and the Profane
Human Existence and Sanctified Life
heads of governments or political leaders-events that have political repercussions. In a nonreligious view
of life, all these "passages" have lost their ritual character; that is, they signify no more than is visible in
the con- crete act of a birth, a death, or an officially recognized sexual union. However, we must repeat
that a drastically nonreligious experience of the whole of life is seldom found in the pure state, even in the
most secularized societies. Possibly such a completely nonreligious ex- perience will become commoner
in a more or less distant future; for the present, it is still rare. What is found in the profane world is a
radical secularization oftdeath, marriage, and birth; but, as we shall soon see, there re- main vague
memories of abolished religious practices and even a nostalgia for them.
As for initiatory rituals proper, a distinction must be made between puberty initiations (age group) and
cere- monies for entrance into a secret society. The most im- portant difference lies in the fact that all
adolescents are obliged to undergo an age initiation, whereas only a certain number of adults enter the
secret societies. It seems certain that the institution of puberty initiation is older than that of the secret
society; it is more widely disseminated and is documented on the most archaic levels of culture, as, for
example, among the Australians and the Fuegians. We need not here describe initiation ceremonies in all
their complexity. What concerns US is to show that, even in the archaic stages of culture, initia-
'         tion plays a leading role in the religious formation of man, and more especially that in essence it
consists in a complete change in the novice's ontological status. This fact seems to us of the greatest
importance for an under- standing of religious man; it shows that the man of the

primitive societies does not consider himself "finished" as he finds himself "given" on the natural level of
existence. To become a man in the proper sense he must die to this first (natural) life and be reborn to a
, life, which is at once religious and cultural. In other words, the ideal of humanity that the primi- tive
wishes to attain he sets on a superhuman plane. This
means: (1) one does not become a complete man until one has passed beyond, and in some sense
abolished, "natural" humanity, for initiation is reducible to a para- doxical, supernatural experience of
death and resurrec- tion or of second birth; (2) initiation rites, entailing

ordeals and symbolic death and resurrection, were insti- tuted by gods, culture heroes, or mythical
ancestors; hence these rites have a superhuman origin, and by per- forming them the novice imitates a
superhuman, divine action. It is important to note this, for it shows once again that religious man wants to
be other than he finds himself on the "natural" level and undertakes to make himself in accordance with
the ideal image revealed to him by myths. Primitive man undertakes to attain a religious ideal of
humanity, and his effort already con- bins the germs of all the ethics later elaborated in
188 The Sacred and the Profane Human Existence and Sanctified Life 189
evolved societies. Obviously, in modern nonreligious humanity we constantly find this theme: the
initiate, he societies initiation no longer exists as a religious act. who has experienced the mysteries,
is he who knows. But, as we shall see later, the patterns of initiation still The ceremony everywhere
begins with the separation
survive, although markedly desacralized, in the modern of the candidate from his family and a period
of retire- world. merit in the bush. Here already there is a symbol of

     death; the forest, the jungle, darkness symbolize the be- PHENOMENOLOGY OF INITIATION pnd, the
          "infernal regions." In some places it is believed that a tiger comes and carries the candidates

Initiation usually comprises a threefold revela-
into the jungle on his back; the feline incarnates the
tion: revelation of the sacred, of death, and of sex.

mythical Ancestor, the master of the initiation, who con-
uality.18 The child knows nothing of these experiences;
ducts the boys to the underworld. Elsewhere the novice
the initiate knows and assumes them, and incorporates
is believed to be swallowed by a monster. In the mon-
them into his new personality. We must add that, if the
ster's belly there is cosmic night; it is the embryonic
novice dies to his infantile, profane, nonregenerate life
mode of existence, both on the cosmic plane and the
to be reborn to a new, sanctified existence, he is also
lane of human life. In many places there is an initia-
reborn to a mode of being that makes learning, knowl-
tory hut in the bush. Here the young candidates undergo
edge, possible. The initiate is not only one newborn or
                                                                   part of their ordeals and are
instructed in the secret resuscitated; he is a man who knows, who has learned
                                                                   traditions of the tribe. Now, the
initiatory hut symbolizes the mysteries, who has had revelations that are meta-
                                                                   the maternal womb1'; the novice's
symbolic death signi- physical in nature. During his training in the bush he
                                                                   fies a regression to the embryonic
state. But this is not learns the sacred secrets: the myths that tell of the gods
                                                                           to be understood only in terms of
human physiology but and the origin of the world, the true names of the gods,
                                                                           also in cosmological terms; the fetal
state is equivalent the role and origin of the ritual instruments employed in
                                                                           to a temporary regression to the
virtual, precosmic mode. the initiation ceremonies (the bull-roarers, the flint Other rituals illuminate
the symbolism of initiatory
                            knives for circumcision, etc.). Initiation is equivalent to death. Among
some peoples candidates are buried, or a spiritual maturing. And in the religious history of
laid in newly dug graves. Or they are covered with
19R. Thurnwald, "Primitive Initiations- und Wiedergeburtsriten," Era-
18On the following, see Eliade, Birth and Rebirth. The Religious  nos-Jahrbuch, VII, 1950, p. 393.
ings of Initiation in Human Culture, New York, Harper,
190 The Sacred and the Profane
branches and lie motionless like dead men. Or they are daubed with a white powder to make them look
like ghosts. In addition, the novices imitate the behavior of ghosts; they do not use their fingers to eat but
taketfood directly with their teeth, as the souls of the dead are be- lieved to do. Finally, the tortures that
they undergo-- which, of course, have many meanings-have this mean- ing too: the tormented and
mutilated novice is believed to be tortured, cut to pieces, boiled or roasted by the   1 demons who are
masters of the initiation, that is, by the mythical ancestors. These physical sufferings correspond to the
situation of one who is "eaten" by the feline demon, is cut to pieces in the maw of the initiatory mon- ,
ster, is digested in its belly. The mutilations (knocking out of teeth, amputation of fingers, etc.) also carry
a symbolism of death. Most of them are connected with lunar divinities. The moon periodically
disappears- that is, dies-to be reborn three nights later. The lunar symbolism emphasizes the conception
that death is the preliminary condition for any mystical regeneration.
In addition to specific operationsauch as circum- cision and subincision-and to initiatory mutilations,
other external signs, such as tattooing or scarring, indi- cate death and resurrection. As for the symbolism
of mystical rebirth, it appears in many forms. Candidates are given new names, which will be their true
names thenceforth. Among some tribes the young initiates are supposed to have forgotten their former
lives corn-
                                            Existence and Sanctified Life 191
pletely; immediately after the initiation they are fed like infants, led about by the hand, and reinstructed in
    all forms of behavior, like babies. Usually they learn a new language in the bush, or at least a secret
      vocabulary, kept from all but the initiate. It is clear that with initia- tion everything begins anew.
    Sometimes the symbolism of the second birth is expressed by concrete gestures. Among some Bantu
   peoples, before being circumcised the boy is the object of a ceremony called "being born again."* His
   father sacrifices a ram and three days later wraps the boy in the animal's stomach membrane and skin.
  Just before this is done, the boy must get into bed and cry like an infant. He remains in the ramskin for
  three days. The same peoples bury their dead in ram- skins and in the fetal position. The symbolism of
    mysti- cal rebirth by ritually donning the skin of an animal is also attested in highly evolved cultures
                                                  (India, ancient
Egypt). In the scenarios of initiations the symbolism of birth is almost always found side by side with that
of death. In initiatory contexts death signifies passing beyond the profane, unsanctified condition, the
condition of the
                              natural man," who is without religious experience, who
is blind to spirit. The mystery of initiation gradually reveals to the novice the true dimensions of
existence; by introducing him to the sacred, it obliges him to assume
Camey, "The Skin of Rebirth," Man,      91, July        pp. 104-105.
192 The Sacred and the Profane
the responsibility that goes with being a man. Here          , have a fact of the first importance: for all arc
ties, access to spirituality finds expression in a ism of death and a new birth.
   Rites for entrance into men's societies employ thea, same ordeals and the same initiatory scenarios.
But, we said, membership in a men's society already implies

a choice; not all those who have undergone the puberty i initiation will enter the secret society, though
they may all wish to.21
To cite one example: Among the Mandja Banda of Africa, there is a secret society named NgaL kola.
According to the myth told to the candidates duri their initiation, Ngakola was a monster who had the
power of swallowing men and then disgorging them renewed. The candidate is put in a hut that
symbolizes the ; monster's body. There he hears Ngakola's eerie voice, there he is whipped and tortured,
for he is told that he is now in Ngakola's belly and is being digested. Morn, ordeals follow; then the
master of the initiation pro' claims that Ngakola, who had devoured the c has disgorged him.22
       Schurtz, Altersklassen und Mannerbunde, Berlin, 1902; Htifler, Kultische Geheimbiinde der Germanen, I, Fr 1934; R.
21Cf. H.
Wolfram, Schwerttanz und Mannerbund, 1-111,
W. E. Peuckert, Geheimkulte, Heidelberg, 1951. 22 E. Andersson, Contribution 2 l'ethnographie des Kuta, 1953, pp. 264
Human Existence and Sanctified Life 193
This is another instance of the symbolism of death by being swallowed into the belly of a monster, a
symbolism that plays so great a role in puberty initiations. We may note again that the rites for entrance
into a secret society correspond in every respect to puberty initiations-seclusion, initiatory ordeals and
torture, death and res- urrection, bestowal of a new name, instruction in a secret language, and so on.
There are also initiations for girls and women. In these feminine rites and mysteries we must not expect to
find the same symbolism, or, more precisely, the same symbolic expressions, as those found in men's
initiations and confraternities. But it is easy to discern a common element: the foundation for all these
rites and mysteries is always a deep religious experience. It is access to sacrality, as it is revealed to her
who assumes the condi- tion of womanhood, that constitutes the goal both of feminine initiation rites and
of women's secret societies.
Initiation begins at the first menstruation. This physio- logical symptom imposes a break, the girl's
forcible removal from her familiar world; she is immediately isolated, separated from the community. The
segregation takes place in a special cabin, in the bush, or in a dark comer of the house. The catamenial
girl is obliged to remain in a particular and quite uncomfortable position, and must avoid exposing herself
to the sun or being touched by anyone. She wears a special dress, or a sign or color allotted to her, and
must eat only raw foods.
Segregation and seclusion out of daylight-in a dark
194      The Sacred and the Profane
hut, in the bushauggest the symbolism of the initiatory death of boys isolated in the forest or shut up in
huts. Yet there is a difference: among girls, segregation occurs immediately after the first menstruation,
hence it is in-dividual; whereas boys are segregated in a group. But the difference is explained by the fact
that in girls the end of childhood has a physiological manifestation. However, in the course of time the
girls make up a group, and they are then initiated collectively by old
women who act as their instructors.
As for the women's societies, they are always con- nected with the mystery of birth and fertility. The
mys- tery of childbearing, that is, woman's discovery that she is a creator on the plane of
constitutes a religious experience that cannot be translated into masculine terms. This makes it clear why
childbirth has given rise to secret feminine rituals, which sometimes attain the complex organization of
real mysteries. Traces of such mysteries are still preserved even in Europe.
As in the case of men's societies, women's associations are found in various forms, in which secrecy and
mys- tery progressively increase. To begin, there is the general initiation that every girl and every young
married woman undergoes; this eventually produces the institu- tion of the women's societies. Next come
the women's mystery associations, as in Africa or, in antiquity, the
  Cf.     Wolfram, "Weiberbiinde," Zeitschrift fw Volkskunde, 42, 1933, pp. 143
Human Existence and Sanctified Life
closed groups of the Maenads. Women's mystery asso- ciations of this type were long in disappearing.
We need only think of the witches of the Middle Ages and their ritual meetings.
The initiatory symbolism and ritual of being swallowed by a monster has played a considerable role
both in initiations and in heroic myths and the mythology of death. The symbolism of return to the ventral
       cavity always has a cosmological valence. It is the entire world 1 that symbolically returns, with the
      candidate, into cosmic   1 night, in order that it may be created anew, that is, regen- erated. As we saw
       (Chapter 2), the cosmogonic myth is recited for therapeutic purposes. To be cured, the vic- tim of an
                                                              illness must be brought to a second birth, and
the archetypal model of birth is the cosmogony. The

         work of time must be undone, the auroral moment im- mediately preceding the Creation must be
reintegrated; on the human plane, this is as much as to restore the
itblank page" of existence, the absolute beginning, when

1        nothing was yet sullied, nothing spoiled.
Entering the belly of the monster-ar being sym-
bolically "buried," or shut up in the initiatory hut-is
equivalent to a regression to the primordial nondistinc-
tion, to cosmic night. To emerge from the belly or the


dark hut or the initiatory "grave" is equivalent to a cos-
1% The Sacred          the Profane
mogony. Initiatory death reiterates the paradigmatic return to chaos, in order to make possible a repetition
of the cosmogony-that is, to prepare the new birth. Re- gression to chaos is sometimes literal-as, for
example, in the case of the initiatory sicknesses of future shamans, which have often been regarded as real
attacks of in- sanity. There is, in fact, a total crisis, which sometimes leads to disintegration of the
                                               This psychic chaos is the sign that the profane man is
undergoing dissolution and that a new personality is on the verge of birth.
We understand why the same initiatory schema-com- prising suffering, death, and resurrection (=
rebirth)-is found in all mysteries, no less in puberty rites than in the rites for entrance into a secret society,
and why the same scenario can be deciphered in the overwhelming inner experiences that precede a
mystical vocation (among primitives, the "initiatory sicknesses" of future shamans). Above all, we
understand this: the man of the primitive societies has sought to conquer death by trans- forming it into a
rite of passage. In other words, for the primitives, men die to something that was not essential; men die to
the profane life. In short, death comes to be regarded as the supreme initiation, that is, as the begin- ning
of a new spiritual existence. Nor is this all. Genera- tion, death, and regeneration (= rebirth) were under-
24     Eliade, Le Chisme, pp.
                            Sanctified Life
stood as three moments in a single mystery, and the entire spiritual effort of archaic man was exerted to
show that there must be no intervals between these mo-ments. One cannot stay in one of the three.
Movement, regeneration continue perpetually. Man constantly re-performs the cosmogony-the
paradigmatic making-in order to be sure that he is making something well-a child, for example, or a
house, or a spiritual vocation. This is why rites of initiation always present a cosmo- gonic valence.
The scenario of initiationÃ‘deat to the profane condition, followed by rebirth to the sacred world, the
world of the gods-also plays an important role in highly evolved religions. A celebrated example is the
Indian sacrifice. Its purpose is to obtain heaven after death, residence among the gods or the quality of a
god (devatma). In other words, through the sacrifice the celebrant creates a superhuman condition for
himself, a result that may be homologized to that of archaic initia- tions. Now the sacrificer must first be
consecrated by the priests, and this preliminary consecration (diksha) car-ries an initiatory symbolism
obstetric in structure; strictly speaking, the dikshu ritually transforms the sacri- ficer into an embryo and
causes him to be born a second tune.
198      Sacred and the Profane
The texts dwell at length on the system of homologies by virtue of which the sacrificer undergoes a
"return to the womb," regressus ad uterum, followed by a        birth.'' The relevant passage in the
Aitareya Brdhmana, for example, runs: "Him whom they consecrate (with the diksha) the priests
make into an embryo again. With waters they sprinkle; the waters are seed.               .. .
                                                                                   They con- duct him
to the hut of the consecrated; the hut of the consecrated is the womb of the consecrated; verily thus
they conduct him to his womb.   ...With a garment they cover him; the garment is the caul.
...Above that is the black antelope skin; the placenta is above the caul. .. . He closes his hands;
verily closing its hands the embryo lies within; with closed hands the child is born.26 . . . Having
loosened the black antelope skin, he descends to the final bath; therefore embryos are born freed
from the placenta; with the garment he descends; therefore a child is born with a caul" (I, 3; trans. A.
B. Keith, Rig-veda Brahmanus, pp. 108-109).
Sacred knowledge and, by extension, wisdom are con- ceived as the fruit of an initiation, and it is
significant that obstetric symbolism is found connected with the awakening of consciousness both in
ancient India and in Greece. Socrates had good reason to compare himself to
Sylvain Uvi, La doctrine du sacrifice duns les Brihmanas, Paris, 1898, pp. 104 ff.; H. Lommel, "Wiedergeburt aus
embryonalem Zustand in der Symbolik des altindischen Rituals" in C. Hentze, Tod, Aujerstehung, Weltordnung, pp. 107-130;
Eliade, Birth and Rebirth, pp. 53 ff.      the                                 of the closed hand, see C. Hentze, 'Tod,
Aujerstehung, Weltordnung, pp.        ff. and passim.
        Existence and Sonetifled
a midwife, for in fact he helped men to be       to con-sciousness of self; he delivered the "new
man." The           symbolism is found in the Buddhist tradition. The monk abandoned his family
name and became a "son of the Buddha" (scikya-putto), for he was "born among the saints" (ariya)                     .
So Kassapa said of himself: "Natural Son of the Blessed One, born of his mouth, born of the
Dhamma [the Doctrine], fashioned by the Dhamma," etc. (Samyutta Nikiiya, 11, 221, trans. in A. K.
Coom-araswamy, "Some Pili Words," p. 147).
This initiatory birth implied death to profane exist- ence. The schema was maintained in Hinduism as
well as in Buddhism. The yogin "dies to this life" in order to be reborn to another mode of being, that
represented by liberation. The Buddha taught the way and the means of dying to the profane human
condition-that is, to slavery and ignorance-in order to be reborn to the freedom, bliss, and
nonconditionality of nirvana. The Indian terminology of initiatory rebirth is sometimes remi-
niscent of the "new body" that the novice obtains through initiation. The Buddha himself proclaims
it: "Moreover, I have shown my disciples the way whereby they call into being out of this body
(composed of the
four elements) another body of the mind's creation
(rupim manomayam), complete in all its limbs and members and with transcendental faculties
(abhinindri' yarn) ."27
                200 The Sacred and the Profane   Human Existence and Sanctified Life
The symbolism of the second birth or of generation as access to spirituality was adopted and
valorized by Alex- andrian Judaism and by Christianity. Philo freely uses the theme of generation to
refer to birth to a higher life, the life of the spirit (cf., for example, Abraham, 20,99). In his turn,
Saint Paul speaks of "spiritual sons," of sons whom he has procreated by faith. 'Titus, mine own son
after the common faith" (Epistle to Titus, 1,4). ''I beseech thee for my son Onesimus, whom I have
begot- ten in my bonds" (Epistle to Philemon, 10).
There is no need to insist on the differences between the "sons" that Saint Paul "begot" "after the
faith" and the "sons of the Buddha" or those whom Socrates "deliv- ered" or the "newborn7' of
primitive initiations. The differences are obvious. It was the power of the rite itself that "killed" and
"resuscitated" the candidate in archaic societies, just as the power of the rite trans- formed the Hindu
sacrificer into an "embryo." The Buddha, on the contrary, "engendered" by his "mouth," that is, by
imparting his doctrine (dhamma) ;it was by virtue of the supreme knowledge revealed by the
dhamma that the disciple was born to a new life that could lead him to the threshold of nirvana.
Socrates, for his part, claimed to do no more than exercise the art 'of the midwife; he helped to
"deliver" the true man that each man bore deep within him. For Saint Paul, the situation is different;
he engendered "spiritual sons* by the faith, that is, by virtue of a mystery established by Christ.
From one religion to another, from one gnosis or one wisdom to another, the immemorial theme of
the second birth is enriched with new values, which sometimes pro- foundly change the content of
the experience. Neverthe- less, a common element, an invariable, remains. It could be defined as
follows: access to spiritual life always entails death to the profane condition, followed by a new birth.

I       Although we have dwelt on initiation and rites
        of passage, the subject is far from exhausted; we have done scarcely more than to suggest a
few of its essential aspects. And yet, by deciding to discuss initiation at some little length, we have
had to pass over a whole series of socio-religious situations that are of consider-

able interest for an understanding of homo religiosus. For example, we have not discussed the
sovereign, the shaman, the priest, the warrior, and so on. The fact is that this little book is necessarily
summary and incom-

plete; it represents only a rapid introduction to a vast 1 subject.
It is a vast subject because, as we have said, it con-
cerns not only the historian of religions, the ethnologist,
the sociologist, but also the political and social historian,
I I the psychologist, the philosopher. To know the situations assumed by religious man, to understand
his spiritual
202          Sacred and the Profane
universe, is, in sum, to advance our general knowledge of man. It is true that most of the situations
assumed by religious man of the primitive societies and archaic civilizations have long since been
left behind by history. But they have not vanished without a trace; they have contributed toward
making us what we are today, and so, after all, they form part of our own history.
As we said before, religious man assumes a particular and characteristic mode of existence in the
world and, despite the great number of historico-religious forms, this characteristic mode is always
recognizable. What- ever the historical context in which he is placed, homo religiosus always
believes that there is an absolute reality, the sacred, which transcends this world but mani- fests itself
in this world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real. He further believes that life has a sacred
origin and that human existence realizes all of its poten- tialities in proportion as it is religious-that is,
partici- pates in reality. The gods created man and the world, the culture heroes completed the
Creation, and the his- tory of all these divine and semidivine works is pre- served in the myths. By
reactualizing sacred history, by imitating the divine behavior, man puts and keeps him- self close to
the gods-that is, in the real and the signifi- cant.
It is easy to see all that separates this mode of being in the world from the existence of a nonreligious
         First of all, the nonreligious man refuses transcendence,
Human Existence and Sanctified Life 203
accepts the relativity of "reality," and may even come to doubt the meaning of existence. The great
cultures of the past too have not been entirely without nonreligious men, and it is not impossible that
such men existed even on the archaic levels of culture, although as yet no testi- mony to their
existence there has come to light. But it is. only in the modem societies of the West that nonreligious
man has developed fully. Modem nonreligious man
human condition as --
it can be seen in the various historical situations. Man
the world. The

sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will be-
come himself only when he is totally demysticized. He
It does not fall to us to discuss this philosophical posi- tion. We will only observe that, in the last
analysis, modern nonreligious man assumes a tragic existence and that his existential choice is not
without its greatness. But this nonreligious man descends from homo religiosus

and, whether he likes it or not, he is also the work of religious man; his formation begins with the
situations assumed by his ancestors. In short, he is the result of a process of desacralization. Just as
nature is the product
of a progressive secularization of the cosmos as the work
2 The Sacred and the Profane                 Human Existence and        2
0                                                 Sanctified Life       0
4                                                                       5

of God, profane man is the                     rituals. As we remarked
result of a desacralization of           earlier, the festivities that go
human existence. But this                  with the New Year or with
means that nonreligious man              taking up residence in a new
has been formed by opposing             house, although laicized, still
his predecessor, by at-                       exhibit the structure of a
tempting to "empty" himself               ritual of renewal. The same
of all religion and all                 phenomenon is observable in
trans-human meaning. He                           the merrymaking that
recognizes himself in              I       accompanies a marriage or
                                                   the birth of a child or
proportion *    he "frees" and          obtaining a new position or a
"purifies" himself from the
tions" of his ancestors. In                  advancement, and so on.
other words, profane man
not help preserving some                 A whole volume could well
vestiges of the behavior of               be written on the myths of
                 a                              modern man, on the
                 r emptied of            mythologies camouflaged in
man, though
                 e religious                                     the
meaning. Do what he will, he               plays that he enjoys, in the
is an inheritor. He cannot I                 books that he reads. The
utterly abolish his past, since         cinema, that "dream factory,"
he is himself the product                     takes over and employs
                                        countless mythical motifs-the
of his past. He forms himself
by a series of denials and         !           fight between hero and
                                          monster, initiatory combats
refusals, but he continues to
                                            and ordeals, paradigmatic
be haunted by the realities
                                               figures and images (the
that he has refused and
                                                  maiden, the hero, the
denied. To acquire a world,,of
his own, he has desacralized              landscape, hell, and so on).
the world in which his an-                    Even reading includes a
cestors lived; but to do so he             mythological function, not
has been obliged to adopt                 only because it replaces the
the opposite of an earlier type         recitation of myths in archaic
of behavior, and that be-
havior is still emotionally
present to him, in one form or    I
                                    I      societies and the oral liter-
                                            ature that still lives in the
                                        rural communities of Europe,
another, ready to be                          but particularly because,
reactualized in his deepest               through reading, the modem
                                         man succeeds in obtaining c
For, as we said before,                      an "escape from time" o
nonreligious man in the pure                                           m
                                            parable to the "emergence
state is a comparatively rare
                                                from time" effected by
phenomenon, even in the
                                               Whether time with a
most desacralized of modem
                                           modem man          detective
societies. The majority<of
                                                  "kills"         story
the        still behave                        or enters such a foreign
"irrelig   religiously, even             temporal universe as is repre-
ious"      though
they are not aware of the fact.
                                     a   sented by any novel, reading
                                     t         projects him out of his
We refer not only to the
                                         pers   du a inco         h i o
modem man's many                         onal   rat n rpor        i n t
"superstitions" and                              io d ates        m t h
"tabus,"                                          n                  o e
them magico-religious in                   rhythms, makes him live in
structure. But the modem man                          another "history."
who feels and claims that he                Strictly speaking, the great
is nonreligious still retains                majority of the irreligious
                                                  are not liberated from
    large stock of camouflaged
a                                              religious behavior, from
    myths and degenerated
206 The Sacred and the Profane
gies and mythologies. They sometimes stagger under a whole magico-religious paraphernalia, which,
however, has degenerated to the point of caricature and hence is hard to recognize for what it is. The
process of desacrali- zation of human existence has sometimes arrived at hybrid forms of black
magic and sheer travesty of reli- gion. We do not refer to the countless "little religions" that
proliferate in all modem cities, to the pseudo-occult, neospiritualistic, or so-called hermetic churches,
sects, or schools; for all these phenomena still belong to the sphere of religion, even if they almost
always present the aberrant aspects of pseudomorphs. Nor do we allude to the various political
movements and social utopian- isms whose mythological structure and religious fanati- cism are
visible at a glance. For but one example we need only refer to the mythological structure of
com-munism and its eschatological content. Marx takes over and continues one of the great
eschatological myths of the Asiatico-Mediterranean world-the redeeming role of the Just (the
"chosen," the "anointed," the "inno- cent," the "messenger"; in our day, the ~roletariat), whose
sufferings are destined to change the ontological status of the world. In fact, Marx's classless society
and the consequent disappearance of historical tensions find their closest precedent in the myth of the
Golden Age that many traditions put at the beginning and the end of history. Marx enriched this
venerable myth by a whole Judaeo-Christian messianic ideology: on the one hand,
Human Existence and Sanctified Life 207
the prophetic role and soteriological function that he attributes to the proletariat; on the other, the
final battle between Good and Evil, which is easily comparable to the apocalyptic battle between
Christ and Antichrist, followed by the total victory of the former. It is even significant that Marx
takes over for his own purposes the Judaeo-Christian eschatological hope of an absolute end to
history; in this he differs from other historicistic phi-losophers (Croce and Ortega y Gasset, for
example), for whom the tensions of history are consubstantial with the human condition and
therefore can never be completely done away with.
But it is not only in the "little religions" or in the political mystiques that we find degenerated or
camou- flaged religious behavior. It is no less to be seen in movements that openly avow themselves
to be secular or even antireligious. Examples are nudism or the move ments for complete sexual
freedom, ideologies in which we can discern traces of the "nostalgia for Eden," the desire to
re-establish the paradisal state before the Fall, when sin did not yet exist and there was no conflict be
tween the pleasures of the flesh and conscience.
Then, too, it is interesting to observe to what an extent the scenarios of initiation still persist in many
of the acts and gestures of contemporary nonreligious man. We shall, of course, disregard the
situations in which a cer- tain type of initiation survives in degenerate form. A good example is war,
and especially individual combats
208      Sacred and the Profane
(particularly between aviators)~exploits that involve
"ordeals" that can be homologized to those of traditional military initiations, even if in our day the
combatants are no longer aware of the deeper significance of their "ordeals" and hence scarcely
benefit by their initiatory meaning. But even specifically modern techniques, such as psychoanalysis,
still preserve the initiatory pattern. The patient is asked to descend deeply into himself, to make his
past live, to confront his traumatic experiences again; and, from the point of view of form, this
danger- ous operation resembles initiatory descents into hell, the realm of ghosts, and combats with
monsters. Just as the initiate was expected to emerge from his ordeals vic- torious-in short, was to
"die" and be "resuscitated" in order to gain access to a fully responsible existence, open to spiritual
values-so the patient undergoing analysis today must confront his own "unconscious," haunted by
ghosts and monsters, in order to find psychic health and integrity and hence the world of cultural
But initiation is so closely linked to the mode of being of human existence that a considerable
number of mod-em man's acts and gestures continue to repeat initiatory scenarios. Very often the
"struggle for life," the "or- deals" and "difficulties" that stand in the way of a vocation or a career, in
some sort reiterate the ordeals of initiation; it is after the "blows" that are dealt him, the moral and
even physical "suffering" and "torture" he
Human Existence and Sanctified Life 209
undergoes, that a young man "proves" himself, knows his possibilities, grows conscious of his
powers, and finally becomes himself, spiritually adult and creative
(the spirituality is, of course, what is understood as such in the modem world). For every human
existence is formed by a series of ordeals, by repeated experience of "death" and "resurrection." And
this is why, in a reli- gious perspective, existence is established by initiation; it could almost be said
that, in so far as human existence is fulfilled, it is itself an initiation.
In short, the majority of men "without religion" still hold to pseudo religions and degenerated
mythologies. There is nothing surprising in this, for, as we saw, pro- fane man is the descendant of
homo religiosus and he cannot wipe out his own history-that is, the behavior of his religious
existence is fed by impulses that come to him from the depths of his being, from the zone that has
been called the "unconscious." A purely rational man is an abstraction; he is never found in real life.
the contents and struc- tures of the unconscious exhibit astonishing similarities to mythological
images and figures. We do not mean to say that mythologies are the "product" of the uncon- scious,
for the mode of being of the myth is precisely that it reveals itself as myth, that is, it announces that
210 The Sacred and the Profane something has      been munijested in a paradigmatic nun-ncr. A myth
is "produced" by the unconscious in the same sense in which we could say that Madame Bovary is
the "product" of an adultery. Yet the contents and structures of the unconscious are the result of
world and man's presence in the world. This means that the existential crisis is, finally, "religious,"
since on the archaic levels of culture being and the sacred are one. As we saw, it is the experience of
the sacred that founds the world,          even the most elementary religion is, above all, ap , ontology.
In other words, in so far as the unconscious is the result of countless existential experiences, it cannot
but resemble the various religious universes. For religion is the paradigmatic solution for every
existential crisis. It is the paradigmatic solution not only because it can be indefinitely repeated, but
also because it is believed to have a transcendental origin and hence is valorized as, a revelation
received from an other, transhuman world. The religious solution not only resolves the crisis but at
the same time makes existence "open" to values that are no longer contingent or particular, thus
enabling man to transcend personal situations and, finally, gain access to the world of spirit. This is
not the place to develop all the consequences
       Existence and Sanctified Life 211
of this close relation between the content and structures of the unconscious on the one hand and the
values of religion on the other. We were led to refer to it in order to show in what sense even the
most avowedly nonreli- gious man still, in his deeper being, shares in a religiously oriented behavior.
But modem man's "pri-vate mythologiesw-his dreams, reveries, fantasies, and so on-never rise to the
ontological status of myths, precisely because they are not experienced by the whole man and
therefore do not transform a particular situa- tion into a situation that is paradigmatic. In the same
way, modern man's anxieties, his experiences in dream or imagination, although "religious" from the
point of view of form, do not, as in homo religbsus, make part of a Weltanschauungand provide the
basis for a system of behavior. An example will show the differences between these two categories of
experiences. The unconscious activity of modem man ceaselessly presents him with innumerable
symbols, and each of them has a particular message to transmit, a particular mission to accomplish,
in order to ensure or to re-establish the equilibrium of the psyche. As we have seen, the symbol not
only makes the world "open" but also helps religious man to attain to the universal. For it is through
symbols that man finds his way out of his particular situation and "opens him- self to the general and
the universal. Symbols awaken individual experience and transmute it into a spiritual act, into
metaphysical comprehension of the world. In
212 The Sacred and the Profane
the presence of any tree, symbol of the world tree and image of cosmic life, a man of the premodern
societies can attain to the highest spirituality, for, by understand- ing the symbol, he succeeds in living
the universal. It is the religious vision of the world, and the concomitant ideology, that enable him to
make this individual expe- rience bear fruit, to "open" it to the universal. The image of the tree still quite
frequently appears in the imaginary universes of modern nonreligious man; it is a cipher of his deeper life,
of the drama that is played out in his unconscious and that concerns the integrity of his pay-chomental
life and hence his own existence. But as long as the symbol of the tree does not awaken his total con-
sciousness and "open" it to the universe, it cannot be said to have completely fulfilled its function. It has
only partly "saved" him from his individual situation-for example, by enabling him to resolve a deep
crisis and restoring his temporarily threatened psychic equilib- rium; but it has not yet raised him to
spirituality-that is, it has not succeeded in revealing one of the structures of the real to him. @
This example, it seems to us, suffices to show in what way the nonreligious man of modern societies is
still nourished and aided by the activity of his unconscious, yet without thereby attaining to a properly
religious experience and vision of the world. The unconscious offers him solutions for the difficulties of
his own life, and in this way plays the role of religion, for, before
Human Exis~ence and Sanctified Life 213
making an existence a creator of values, religion ensures its integrity. From one point of view it could
almost be said that in the case of those moderns who proclaim that they are nonreligious, religion and
mythology are "eclipsed" in the darkness of their unconscious-which means too that in such men the
possibility of reintegrat- ing a religious vision of life lies at a great depth. Or, from the Christian point of
view, it could also be said that nonreligion is equivalent to a new "fall" of man- in other words, that
nonreligious man has lost the capac- ity to live religion consciously, and hence to understand and assume
it; but that, in his deepest being, he still retains a memory of it, as, after the first "fall," his ancestor, the
primordial man, retained intelligence enough to enable him to rediscover the traces of God that are visible
in the world. After the first "fall," the religious sense descended to the level of the "divided"
consciousness"; now, after the second, it has fallen even further, into the depths of the unconscious; it has

been forgotten."
Here the considerations of the historian of religions end. Here begins the realm of problems proper to the
philosopher, the psychologist, and even the theologian.

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