The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, novelist, and philosopher of religion. His book The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion is central in his academic oeuvre, and was first published in English in 1961, translated from its original French. Other work by this author includes The Myth of the Eternal Return.

The Sacred and the Profane is an investigation into the universal structures of religious experience that are shared across all cultures. Eliade proposes that the central aspect uniting all religions is the experience of the sacred, a divine creative force. Experiences of the sacred emerge from hierophanies—manifestations of the sacred within the sphere of human life such as through ritual, the experience of a vision, or contact with a sacred object such as a stone or tree.

For ‘religious man’—whom Eliade calls ‘homo religiosus’— all aspects of life are opportunities for hierophany. As such, human life is not only a simple material existence but one in which all material things contain a transcendent essence connecting them to the divine. For homo religiosus, therefore, human life must be lived in constant pursuit of communion with this divine force, which, in religious thinking, is more genuinely real than the temporary and contingent aspects of the material world humans perceive as reality. This pursuit radically transforms life from a profane mode—which sees nothing beyond material existence—into a sacred mode, in which all things are participants in a cosmic order and must be interacted with as such. 

After introducing the concepts of the sacred and hierophany in the Introduction, Eliade explores how homo religiosus interacts with the sacred across four crucial dimensions: space, time, the natural world, and the human life/death cycle. Eliade explores each of these concepts in an individual chapter. In so doing, Eliade explicates how the structure of the sacred penetrates all the core dimensions of human life. Through references to human activities as varied as dwelling-construction, agriculture and sex, Eliade shows how the concept of the sacred and human orientation towards it is crucial to make life meaningful, potent and fertile within religious cultures.

Methodologically, Eliade describes the core structures of religious experience through references to varied cultures and periods in the world’s religious history. As such, The Sacred and the Profane is a work in comparative religion. Simultaneously, Eliade departs from the scriptural analysis of religious texts to an experiential analysis of religious thought and behavior. Therefore, Eliade’s work is also one of the phenomenology—or behavioral, emotional and mental analysis— of religion, a field he helped to found and promote. Eliade spends a great majority of his text discussing religious formulations in small-scale, preagricultural and tribal societies. He argues such cultures are analogies for the structure of all human societies in our archaic past, and that the religious nature of these societies is the true foundation of contemporary, large-scale religions. Innovative in Eliade’s time, this form of analogy is commonplace in the study of religion today.