# The Sacred and the Profane  ## Metadata - Author: [[Mircea Eliade and Willard R. Trask]] - Full Title: The Sacred and the Profane - Category: #books ## Highlights - The numinous presents itself as something wholly other”, something basically and totally different. ([Location 11](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=11)) - The sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from “natural” realities. It is true that language naively expresses the tremendum, or the majestas, or the mysterium fascinans by terms borrowed from the world of nature or from man’s secular mental life. But we know that this analogical terminology is due precisely to human inability to express the ganz andere; all that goes beyond man’s natural experience, language is reduced to suggesting by terms taken from that experience. ([Location 14](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=14)) - Note: Recount of Otto's exposition on what is sacred or holy. - The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane. ([Location 21](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=21)) - Note: Thesis statement - The aim of the following pages is to illustrate and define this opposition between sacred and profane. ([Location 22](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=22)) - Man becomes aware of the sacred because it itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane. ([Location 24](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=24)) - The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophies, because they show some thing that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred, the ganz andere. ([Location 33](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=33)) - By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently, nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany. ([Location 35](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=35)) - The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacy. ([Location 42](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=42)) - For religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of’ space are qualitatively different from others. ([Location 100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=100)) - The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center. ([Location 111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=111)) - Revelation of a sacred space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation in the chaos of homogeneity, to “found the world” and to live in a real sense. ([Location 131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=131)) - Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different. ([Location 161](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=161)) - A sign is asked, to put an end to the tension and anxiety caused by relativity and disorientation in short, to reveal an absolute point of support. ([Location 178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=178)) - Note: What being in sacred space could accomplish. - Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illusion. ([Location 187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=187)) - The sacred reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world. ([Location 205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=205)) - To settle in a territory is, in the last analysis, equivalent to consecrating it. ([Location 248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=248)) - “our is holy ground because it is the place nearest to haven, because from here, from our abode, it is possible to reach heaven; hence our world is a high place. ([Location 294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=294)) - Something of the religious conception of the world still persists in the behavior of profane man, although he is not always conscious of this immemorial heritage. ([Location 404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BFBS8G5K&location=404))