The Profane: The Nature Of Religion And The Eternal Return

All religions do not matter which, are composed of many components which make each religion different and unique in its own way. Rituals and myths are one of the main components of religion. Mythology is known as the study of myths, and myths are most commonly defined to be ancient/ traditional stories. Rituals are a sequence of activities involving ancient objects, spiritual words, and gestures. Even after defining these two components there is still a big question that religious studies scholars have not been able to solve for centuries. Are there any direct relationships between myths and rituals, apart from being main components of religion? Scholars tried to solve this questions by creating/ supporting theories that matched their views …show more content…
Mircea Eliade is one of those scholars. One of his most significant work was “The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion and The Myth of the Eternal Return” . Eliade saw religion as a difficult category of human experience. He was one of the scholars to say that religion should not be studied as a part of something and that it should be studied as it one area of study and should be understood through comparison of patterns. He studied religion from the view of others. He went on to say that religious people always saw nature as a part of God’s creation. To add on to that “Looked at in this way, religious myths, symbols, and rituals can be seen as deliberately constructed and communicable experiences, the aim of which is to transform our normal, mundane perception of the world into a perception (or more properly an apperception) of the sacred.” (Perception of the Sacred in the Profane: Intention, Reduction, and Cognitive Theory journal) This is his view of both rituals and myths. His theory is that myths and rituals were created to take a man away from the reality they are living in the reality where they wanted to be in. Another scholar who has studied both rituals and myths inside religion is E.B Taylor. According to Taylor, religions are all connected by one thing and that is the belief in a …show more content…
This theory measures the gap between beliefs and practices. This theory states that the more than they are apart than they are closer together. It states that beliefs are a part of practices. Scholars such as W. Robertson-Smith, James George Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, S.H. Hooke where given the name “myth and ritual school” because they focused their philological studies on “ritual purposes of myths”. Euhemerism was a theory stating that myths were told as primitive explanations of the natural world. Meaning to say that myths were actually stories told of real human kings but as time went on they were retold as the stories of god. These theories had different effects on the thought process of scholars. There are many more theories out there that are not yet discovered, and the thing is that as of right now no one can prove if these theories are right or