The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade

Author:Mircea Eliade [Eliade, Mircea]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Religion, Comparative Religion, Reference
ISBN: 9780156792011
Google: zBzzv977CLgC
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1959-03-14T23:00:00+00:00

The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion

For religious man, nature is never only natural”; it is always fraught with a religious value. This is easy to understand, for the cosmos is a divine creation; coming from the hands of the gods, the world is impregnated with sacredness. It is not simply a sacrality communicated by the gods, as is the case, for example, with a place or an object consecrated by the divine presence.

The gods did more; they manifested the different modalities of the sacred in the very structure of the world and of cosmic phenomena. The world stands displayed in such a manner that, in contemplating it, religious man discovers the many modalities of the sacred, and hence of being. Above all, the world exists, it is there, and it has a structure; it is not a chaos but a cosmos, hence it presents itself as creation, as work of the gods. This divine work always preserves its quality of transparency, that is, it spontaneously reveals the many aspects of the sacred. The sky directly, “naturally,” reveals the infinite distance, the transcendence of the deity. The earth too is transparent; it presents itself as universal mother and nurse.

The cosmic rhythms manifest order, harmony, permanence, fecundity. The cosmos as a whole is an organism at once real, living, and sacred; it simultaneously reveals the modalities of being and of sacrality. Ontophany and hierophany meet. In this chapter we shall try to understand how the world presents itself to the eyes of religious man – or , more precisely, how sacrality is revealed through the structures of the world. We must not forget that for religious man the supernatural is indissolubly connected with the natural, that nature always expresses something that transcends it. As we said earlier: a sacred stone is venerated because it is sacred, not because it is a stone; it is the sacrality manifested through the mode of being of the stone that reveals its true essence. This is why we cannot speak of naturism or of natural religion in the sense that the nineteenth century gave to those terms; for it is ‘‘supernature” that the religious man apprehends through the natural aspects of the world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.