1. Images and Symbols. p. xix. Profane was earlier used to refer to all unholy things. It was also used for ordinary things, times and places. Eliade, Mircea. The word holidays has originated from the word holy so that we could feel the sacred on these days. His book, The Sacred and the Profane, was used in American college courses and was often the first book to introduce readers to the subject of religion and religious studies. Participants would step out of ordinary time and into sacred time, the time of origins. The polarity sacred- profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal or pseudoreal. | Bishop's Encyclopedia of Religion, Society and Philosophy, Follow Bishop's Encyclopedia of Religion, Society and Philosophy on WordPress.com. Eliade intended to do more than just list patterns of religious phenomena as some other phenomenologists, such as C. P. Tiele, had down, but rather, through identifying select patterns wanted to demonstrate an integrated morphology of the sacred.

He has aspirations to teach Religious Studies and World Religion. 1959. A good example of this was the Babylonians who physically acted out their creation story, the Enuma Elish, during the New Year period with drama and performances. But it is only when you step inside that you get a sense of holiness. A critic might ask some penetrating questions as to whether or not Eliade’s theory of religion would essentially make religious studies itself a kind of religion or devotional practice.

Eliade was very interested in the psyche and this led him to theorize concerning the human’s underlying mental structures. For example, The Ganga is a holy sacred river and thus the place from where it flows is also considered as sacred or holy, likewise, the area around the profane or unsuspicious graveyard is also considered and conferred with a value of profanity.

Eliade was much influenced by the German theologian Rudolf Otto and his notion of The Holy (Das Heilige).
The only convictions which should filter through the work are those derived from the religious community, group, or individual being studied.

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Such differed greatly from the profane time denoting the modern, non-religious person who does not experience sacred time. Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power. Understanding Theories of Religion: An Introduction. Eliade was also a very religious individual and this, as we will discover, comes through strongly in his theory of religion. • Today profane has become broader and includes all things that are vulgar or obscene, Filed Under: Religion Tagged With: profane, profanus, Sacred. He argued that there major differences between worldviews informed by religious sensibilities of the sacred and those which are not. The latter worldviews are unconscious of the religious sensibility or deliberately rejected or blocked it. 4. This denoted a transcendent reality which “breaks through” in some tangible form within mundane existence that then becomes an object of devotion in a religious tradition.

These archetypes had accumulated over humanity’s long history and shaped religious data in certain ways. p. 12. It was a tool whose ultimate purpose was to enlighten human beings, so to speak, regarding the necessity of the sacred mode of consciousness, particularly over and above that of the profane modality. Bainbridge […]. Capps, Walter. Scholar of religion Ivan Strenski reveals that “one way to look at Eliade’s approach to the study of religion is, then, as a deliberate (and contrary) religious assault on secularity – a turning of doubts about religion into doubts about secularity at its very roots” (13). Eliade believed that the sacred was universal in that it applied to all human beings and he wanted to prove that the experience of the sacred is fundamental to religion. 1961. However, Eliade believed that the sacred modality could lay dormant, unrecognized, or unconscious in non-religious (profane) attitudes and that even the most profane mode included traces or vestiges of the sacred mode of apprehension.
( Log Out /  Although it was not Eliade’s attempt to convert people to a new religious point of view, his goal was to convince secular people that they are already religious, particularly by showing how human beings depend upon religious archetypes within the inner workings of their cognitive faculty. One scholar says that “Eliade’s popularity as a religious studies scholar was without parallel” and that it is difficult to discuss the phenomenology of religion without referring to him (2). (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Copyright © 2010-2018 Difference Between. 1960.

James Bishop is from South Africa. The church is an obvious example for it “shares a different space from the street in which it stands… the threshold that separates the two spaces… indicates the distance between two modes of being, the profane and the religious” (12). Patterns in Comparative Religion. Eliade, Mircea.

Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacity. To have it evolve in that direction would assure that it would lose any sense of objectivity and attempts at neutrality, and thus become impugned with strong religious points of view. 3. To Eliade, the sacred modality was a pure and unspoiled form of access to reality as opposed to the desacralized and the profane. James Bishop, South Africa, graduate Multimedia, Brand Marketing (CBC), Theology, Psychology, TESOL. This means that all things that are holy are opposite of profane.

This dichotomy in worldview is evident in the different sensibilities between the East and the West.

Somehow we are liberated from the profane (ordinary) on these sacred days and are reminded of the times that were holy. The sacred modality is not only the opposite of the profane but it is also most central to religion. One of Eliade’s goals was to examine the relationship between a worldview motivated by religious attitudes and those worldviews in which this attitude is not given the same place. The term sacred has been used from a wide variety of perspectives and given varying descriptive and evaluative connotations by scholars seeking to interpret the materials provided by anthropology and the history of religions. All rights reserved. It was different for the modern, non-religious person who experiences the spacial aspect of his world as neutral.