The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

“It could be said that the history of religion—from the most primitive to the most highly developed—is constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities.”

Small-scale religious cultures are typically organized around shamanistic cults. These practice rituals of trance or other altered states of consciousness in which it is believed the participant enters a spirit realm to interact with gods, spirits, or ancestors. Larger-scale world religions are typically organized around divinatory cults or prophets who receive visions from God. New doctrines, new religions or new sects within these religions, are similarly birthed by subsequent revelations. In both the cases of small- and large-scale, religion is organized around hierophanies: a manifestation of divine reality to human beings. Hierophany is in this sense the foundation of all religious history.

“The man of archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacity.”

Sacred objects, ideas, events and landscapes are demarcated from “natural reality” by their divine enduringness and transcendence. Whereas individual human generations age, wither, and die, the sacred is constant and inviolable. This sacred reality is more real than daily reality: it is the generative force from which reality is created. Therefore, participation in genuine reality requires participation in the sacred. In the religious perspective, the closer humans come to the sacred, the more genuine the reality humans live within.