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Mircea eliade the sacred and the profane
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Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, and philosopher who is best known for his work on the concept of the sacred and the profane. In his book, "The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion," Eliade argued that human beings have a fundamental need for the sacred, which he defined as the experience of the transcendent or the numinous. He contrasted the sacred with the profane, which he saw as the profane world of everyday life and material reality.
According to Eliade, the sacred is not limited to religious experiences or traditions, but is present in all cultures and can be found in various forms, such as myths, rituals, and symbols. He believed that the sacred is experienced as a break from the profane world and provides a sense of meaning and purpose to human life. Eliade argued that the sacred is a fundamental aspect of human experience and that it is essential for human well-being.
Eliade's concept of the sacred has been influential in the study of religion and has had a significant impact on the field of anthropology. His ideas have been particularly influential in the study of indigenous religions and non-Western cultures, where the sacred is often experienced in more holistic and encompassing ways than in modern Western societies.
Eliade's concept of the sacred has also been criticized by some scholars who argue that it is too broad and universalizing and does not adequately account for the diversity of religious traditions and practices around the world. Others have argued that Eliade's distinction between the sacred and the profane is overly dichotomous and fails to consider the complex and often overlapping nature of religious and secular experiences.
Despite these criticisms, Eliade's concept of the sacred remains an important and influential part of the study of religion and continues to be widely debated and discussed by scholars and students of religion.
Mircea Eliade Flashcards
The sacred is saturated with being. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men! 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. They become deities of last resort, only supplicated in times of extreme crisis. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? Even in modern societies, with their high degree of desacralization, 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. It is in such symbols of a cosmic tree, or tree of immortality or knowledge, that the religious valences of vegetation are expressed with the greatest force and clarity.
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The Sacred And The Profane : Mircea Eliade : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Yahweh no longer manifests himself in cosmic time like the gods of other religions but in a historical time, which is irreversible. There is, then, a sacred space, and hence a strong, significant space; there are other spaces that are not sacred and so are without struc- ture or consistency, amorphous. Celestially structured supreme beings 2 On this see ibid. According to the traditions of an 33 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 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.
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Mircea Eliade: The Sacred & The Profane
Which is why in these book review paper I will emphasize more in some chapters rather than the book itself in one big paragraph. According to Eliade, heavenly Supreme Beings are actually less common in more advanced cultures. However, one of the things I liked the most about her writing style is that she avoided limited explanations, explained everything in details and giving examples making it easier for the Apache Categories: A Comparison 839 Words 4 Pages Additionally, in this article, Ball details the importance of understanding Apache sacred places, along with how they play a role in continuation and development of their culture. This is why the cosmos was imaginedI 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. Eliade traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times in terms of space, time, nature, and the cosmos.
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Mircea Eliade
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. 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. Then, too, symbolic thinking finds no difficulty in assimilating the human enemy to the devil and death. 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 life. Now, what it is possible to observe in respect to a non- religious man is that he too experiences a certain dis- 71 Sacred, Time and Myths continuity and heterogeneity of time. Sanskrit div, to shine, day; dyaus, sky, day; Dyaus, Indian god of heaven.
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The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion
Water Water performed a symbolic role in religion, according to Eliade. Yet this experience of profane space still includes values that to some extent recall the nonhomogeneity peculiar to the religious experience of space. It exists absolutely because it is high, infinite, eternal, powerful. 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. Among the Koryak, the supreme divinity is called the One on High, the Master of the High, He Who Exists.
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Mircea Eliade The Sacred And The opportunities.alumdev.columbia.edu [4qz3ok728g0k]
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The Babylonian Anu also expresses the idea of sky. 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. The social and cultural phenomenon known as matriarchy is connected with the discovery of agriculture by woman. We cannot even consider writing that history here, in a few pages. It could not be otherwise, if we remember that the Center is precisely the place where a break in plane occurs, where space becomes sacred, hence pre-eminently real. 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 23 antiquity are a wholly different problem, upon which we shall not enter here.
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Mircea Eliade: The Sacred & The Profane 3 Sacred Nature (Summary)
Then, too, in vegetation cults the emphasis is not always on the natural phenomenon of spring and the appearance of vegetation but on the prophetic s i p of the cosmic mystery. For God's interventions in history, and above all his Incarnation in the historical person of Jesus Christ, have a transhistorical p u r p o s e ~ t h esalvation of man. 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. When the Scandinavian colonists took possession of Iceland land-nama and cleared it, they regarded the enterprise neither as an original undertaking nor as human and profane work. To inquire why and in consequence of what degradations and misunderstandings certain religious activities deteriorate and become aberrant is an entirely different prob. Going back to the imago mundi, the cosmic order represented in construction, Eliade points out that religious man saw it in his dwelling. Now, human existence is possible only by virtue of this permanent communication with the sky.
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Mircea Eliade: The Sacred And The Profane
This is one of my favorite books. In either case, material reality is not transformed so much as perceived in a new way - a sacred stone is still a stone 12. Natu- rally, we must not confuse the concept of homogeneous and 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. 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. Pet- tazoni, Dio , Rome, 1921; id. We find this, for example, among the Algonquins and the Sioux. The sick man becomes well because he begins his life again with its sum of energy intact.
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