The Sacred and the Profane: Understanding Hierophanies in Religious Experience
The Scope of the Sacred and the Profane
The observer of religious experience will notice two vital areas in which the religious subject moves differently: the world of ordinary life and the world apart, defined by objects and symbols of religious life.
- In the first, the subject moves spontaneously.
- In the second, with a sense of amazement. To designate this second field of religion, we use the term “sacred.”
Speaking of the sacred, we do not refer to a reality different from the profane. The natural reality of the sacred is the same as the latter; the difference appeals to a presence.
In the realm of the sacred, we could compare it metaphorically to a different space, one which you enter through a hidden door, in search of something that is supremely present. The sacred does not allude to the end of the religious attitude, or what this involves subjectively and objectively, but to a different climate or atmosphere in which all these things are embedded in the religious experience.
The sacred is not a bounded form of reality, but a peculiar way of being for both man and reality as a whole, which arises when religion appears.
The step that takes things from a neutral conduct to religious behavior has been described by Mircea Eliade as a “rupture of levels,” which allows man access to a definitively different order of being.
This rupture results in the formation of the sacred as a specific world in relation to the profane.
Example of a Ruptured Level
Consider a large walnut tree. A hungry man thinks of eating its fruit, a logger calculates the price of its wood, a carpenter projects furniture he could build, an agricultural engineer dreams of reforestation… all these are moving in a profane sphere.
The religious man, however (perhaps the very hungry man, logger, carpenter, or engineer from before), at a precise moment is overcome by the secret forces that reside in that tree, by its ancient, secular signs of strength, by the way it resists the natural elements… and he is surprised to see himself also affected by the same superior forces. He rests in a sacred context.
Characteristics of the Sacred
The Sacred is Original and Holistic
In the sacred, religious experience presents man as the reason for the profane and its very inception. All that is profane, in its innermost essence, is sacred, invaded by transcendence. Hence the holistic nature of the sacred.
The Sacred is Preliminary and Earlier
The believer does not see the sacred as a projection of internal subjectivity outward, but as something that encompasses both pre-subjective aspects of religious experience (psychic reactions, attitudes, institutions, people…) and also as something prior to any particular religious denomination.
The Sacred Does Not Alter the Physical Entity of Beings
The things and people who are immersed in the realm of the sacred do not, for this reason, experience any change in their nature, their properties, or their appearance.
Reality Determining the Scope of the Sacred: The Mystery
Christianity identifies the mystery as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” But other traditions refer to it by other names, such as “the Unspeakable.” Therefore, to cover all the religions of history, we shall designate it as “the Mystery,” as coined by R. Otto in his book entitled The Idea of the Holy. Given the absolute superiority of the Mystery, it is not possible to describe it by direct or immediate contemplation: in that case, it would be controllable, and it is not. You can only approach it as a religious subject.
Characteristics of the Mystery
Real and Unprovable
Real because the Mystery is not an invention of a religious person to explain what is humanly inexplicable. It’s there when it wants to be, and it arguably requires the full weight of its existence. This explains why, when the human mind has tried to express the existence of the Mystery, it has used formulas such as “pure being” or “necessary being,” that which owes its existence to nothing and no one, only itself.
Yet the experience of the Mystery is unprovable, because the religious man cannot resort to any rational evidence to show others a presence that is imposed in complete independence of his effort to obtain it, nor may he use scientific explanations to account for its nature. It is what it is, i.e., the unnamable.
Transcendent and Immanent
The Mystery is transcendent because our world lacks a point of comparison to explain its being and a technical means to control its action. Therefore, some authors refer to it with the phrase “wholly other,” quite unlike anything known or unknown.
Without losing its transcendence, the Mystery is inherent in all, becoming present in the subjective background of man himself. Saint Augustine says that while remaining “higher than the highest and most inward part of me,” it is at once “more inward than my innermost self.”
Active and Involved
Active because the presence of the Mystery inherent in our world is not merely passive, but is presented to the religious consciousness endowed with a dynamic power and an effective force that gives reason for being and doing to all other beings existing. Therefore, some authors have placed this active power at the worldwide center of the sacred.
Involved because this powerful force does not cancel human freedom or cause a reaction mechanically. On the contrary, respecting the freedom of man, it claims his response and encourages their voluntary engagement in order to endorse the action of the Mystery in this world.
Valuable and Free
Indeed, the Mystery is an invaluable reality, self-worth, and gives value to everything that exists. Or, in the words of Juan Martin Velasco, “that which is worthy of being in itself and worthy of being made to all that is.”
Free, for the highest good is what the Mystery pursues, but not always to possess that goodness in the extreme. We could say that it makes sense in the last instance, but not for immediate profits. Okay, so it is not something that procures or promises anything to man. It is not manipulated by man to clear up their unknowns or to satisfy their desires. That’s why we call it free.
Tremendous and Fascinating
The Mystery is tremendous because absolute transcendence occurs with majesty and power, and effective action on man.
It is fascinating because the Mystery has an irresistible attraction for its immaculate beauty, supreme goodness, immaculate holiness, and immense value. I exploit these terms.
Personal and Quiet
Many depictions of the divine Mystery have historically adopted inanimate forms or elements of creation: stars, mountains, rivers, trees, animals…
This fact, however, is not opposed to the personal nature that we attribute to the Mystery. The reason is that what matters is not the attribution to the divinity of spiritual properties, but the quality of relationship the person establishes with the Mystery through the mediation of any image.
This interpersonal relationship is truly the moment that the Mystery makes its presence felt in the religious man, acting on him and his surroundings, interpreting their attitudes, raising his response, causing his choice: all functions typical of an intersubjective relationship.
The personal structure that provides the Mystery does not prevent the religious experience of its silence. Although the divinity in Christianity has been characterized as “word” or “verb,” the silence of God has not ceased to be reported on, even in recent times, giving rise to many schools of thought: Deism, secularism, and even atheism, or the “death of God.” “If God is silent, it may be due to absence, or because he is already dead.”
The Objective Mediation of the Mystery: Hierophanies
Transcendence is the determinant of sacred reality, and this transcendence maintains a constant relationship with man. Without it, the scope of the sacred would not emerge.
For this relationship to be possible, mediations are needed, which would be impossible without both the presence of the Mystery in the present world order, as well as the awareness of that presence by man and his response to it. We call these mediations “hierophanies.”
Hierophanies are present realities of all kinds in the world of religions, and they agree on the function of making present to man the mundane reality of belonging to a wholly different order, which we have designated with the name “Mystery.”
Therefore, it is a series of mundane relationships that, while still being what they are, refer to the invisible reality of the Mystery.
The existence of the hierophany is a readily observable fact in all religions. In all, there are numerous realities through which the subject has recognized the presence of ultimate reality. Such were the sky, stars, earth and natural phenomena, the events of history, the same people and their works.
Besides being numerous, these variables are varied. In the history of religions, hierophanies have undergone major transformations. All religious history is an ongoing process of socialization of certain realities, taken before as profane, and a secularization of those previously taken as sacred.
Essential Features of Hierophanies
- They appear as constellations or sets of interrelated realities. These constellations make up three main groups, which characterize the great families of religions: nature (the sky and stars, earth and fertility), history and the events that take place, and the human person, and his most important functions and actions.
- They show a close correspondence with the cultural and social situation of the man or the people that live them. A diverse culture often has its own hierophanies, usually taken from the sky and its components. A sedentary farming culture usually takes its land and phenomena relating to fertility as hierophanies, etc. And frequently, changing situations represent a change in the realities held by the hierophany.
Types of Hierophanies
Space and Sacred Places
The places that experienced the emergence of deity, by which it shares space with men, are regarded as sacred in all religions, and constitute a vocal center in reference to which all the surrounding space is ordered. The altars and temples erected there are the eternal memorial of the event. Think back to the known examples of Jerusalem, Mecca, Fatima…
From here on, throughout the history of religions, there are numerous examples of sacred symbols from natural elements:
- Heaven has a special religious significance because it expresses the inaccessibility, the importance, and the dynamics of the Mystery. Therefore, the Christian faith puts God in heaven metaphorically.
- The stars, especially the sun and moon, whose symbolism is linked to the telluric forces that govern the progress of the vital, rhythmic nature of plants, animals, and humans, marking the recurrence of days, months, and years.
- Water has been deified by religions as ambivalent as the origin of life (water from rain or rivers), embodied in the river gods, and the origin of death (the devastating storm and its water, the bitter sea water…), which are the home of evil powers.
- Fire, with its properties of light and heat, and its effects of destruction and purification, has been seen in many religions as a special theophany, a sign of divine presence, God’s gift to men or the result of the theft of a mythical character like Prometheus, an expression of divine wrath (the lightning bolt), an object of consecration and worship, and the incarnation of demons or household gods.
- The air: its elusive subtlety symbolizes the transcendent character of divinity, without identification and without a body; in its impetuosity as a hurricane, it manifests God’s power, uncontrolled by man; in breathing, it is a sign of the vital principle or spirit from God.
- The earth represents both the heart and the nurturing parent for all living beings, hence the spontaneous symbolism of fertility and, more specifically, of motherhood in this equation: earth-mother-wife, as bringing vital powers subject to alternating instinctual cycles. But while the mother’s womb gives birth to the living, the earth is the grave for the dead, hence the symbolism that appeals to the experience of death.
- The tree: its religious meaning depends on the analysis of spontaneous symbolism, making it one of the holy places. The tree’s height makes it the preferred home of divinity. Its form and its development, linked to the cosmic sky of life (seed, flower, fruit), represent human failure, a point of concentration of vital forces: the tree of life.
- Animals: in the religions of hunters or ranchers, the sacralization of animals stands out. The affinity of nature between animals and men, the fact that men have depended on sea or land animals for their subsistence, the belief in the transmigration of human souls into animal bodies, etc… these are all factors that have led man to regard certain animals as sites for the presence of supernatural forces and to give them cult under representations of animals.
Sacred Time
All points in time that especially mark the cyclical nature and progress of human history spontaneously suggest the involvement of mysterious forces that are regarded as sacred by almost all religions:
- The night, with its occult powers.
- The dawn, in the wake of activity.
- Spring, with the renovation of nature.
So in all religions, there are dates in which the believer understands that divinity is involved in repeating its primary performance or anticipating its final performance. These dates are the holidays.
Humans and Their Activities
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The love is a human power that belongs to all religions the order of the realities of the divine. The reason for this is the huge impact emotional m isomAttic loving the experience that goes from the ecstasy of death and leads to the most sublime heroism to the most blind selfishness. This ambivalence explains the dual assessment has been made of love in the historical religions. All personal realities associated with the love of a character involved hierofánico: gender, motherhood, marriage, family, etc.. As evidenced by either the existence of male and female fertility, the curse of sterility or impotence.
The family provides the first access to the world of the relationshipón mother-son puts us in contact with unknown sources and protectors of life. The paternal relationship means authority, providence, demand for order and discipline. The relationship between blood brothers is community and imposed loyalty and solidarity. Accordingly recurrence title God-Father-Mother God, in human religious history proves that they are suitable for your character figures hierofánico to refer to the relationship with the divinity, the ultimate object pointed to by any other interpersonal relationship.
We refer to ethnic, cultural, religious, political, union and so on. Wider than the family and in which the individual is integrated by necessity or desire. The society is mediating in the man’s religious experience in several ways:
Sanctifying its beginnings when the group in question is understood founded by an express decision of divinity.
By becoming a creditor of a utopian future of splendor through the intervention of God.
Monopolizing in this encounter with transcendence and therefore disqualifying the other groups for the same purpose.
Enabling the encounter with the sacred tradition of the elders and ancestors.
Taking a backup of the inviolability of the social institutions themselves, their values absolutising creating patterns of behavior, binding and so on.
HUMAN ACTIVITY in its broadest condition:
Knowledge liberal artistic creation handiwork. He has always reacted with religious stupor of their intelligence or their ability to see in his work a particular area of manifestation of superhuman powers to overcome their innate ability: intellectual understanding is the result of the inspiration of a divine Logos
Moral conduct: At each end of manifest holiness or the lack active fault divine powers, beneficent or maleficent. The heroic virtue unaffordable for the ordinary man can only emerge free of a supernatural force that makes the saints, belief in his interception, devotion to their graves or their relics. In the sense of guilt on the other hand the believer understands that a taboo has been transgressed or broke a friendly relationship with their God, the first is concerned unclean or stained and the second in wicked enemy of God. In any case you feel you must put into place mechanisms to ward ritual and divine wrath for forgiveness.
The death and all its cognates such as pain, disease and sleep with another hierofánico field of special significance in which the man is committed to the unknown world beyond where it dwells on the importance and entering the dead.
The dead therefore fall within the divine sphere, which justifies in religions veneration as gods.