The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

As Eliade writes, “For religious man, nature is never only ‘natural’; it is always fraught with religious value” since it is a manifestation of the essential structures of the world as imbued by the gods (116). This chapter is about exploring the sacred relationship humans have with nature, and how naturally occurring hierophanies serve as representations of the fundamental structure of reality for religious man.

The phenomena present in nature reveal to religious man that reality is imbued with an essential order and logic—it is “not a chaos but a cosmos” (116). As such, all objects manifest an underlying sacred essence which transcends their superficial existence as stone, tree, river etc.: “the gods manifested the different modalities of the sacred in the very structure of the word” (119).

Religious relationships with the celestial vault, or sky, exemplify this logic. Because of the natural appearance of the sky—infinite and transcendent in its vastness above the earth—“‘most high’ spontaneously becomes an attribute of divinity” (118), and a great majority of cultures locate their divinities as living within this transcendent zone of the heavens. “The cosmos…is so constructed that a religious sense of the divine transcendence is aroused by the very existence of the sky” as a natural phenomenon (119).