With Eliade, I felt his purpose of the reading was to convey that myths were models of behavior that ensured that the religious man remained in touch with the sacred reality.
He quotes, "What we find as soon as we place ourselves in perspective of religious man of the ordeal societies is that the world exists because it was created by the gods, and that the existence of the world itself 'means' something, 'want to say' something and the world is neither mute nor opaque, that it is not an inert thing without purpose of significance." (165) What I got out of this was that we see the world and what it contains as something with a purpose to which we must find in our own sight. He uses an example of marriage and how it is valorized as a hierogamy of heaven and earth. The woman is to be assimilated to soil, seed, to semen virile, an agricultural work to conjugal union. He brought in how Hindu's in the Indian culture follow this by saying that, "India illustrates how a physiological act can be transferred into ritual... I am heaven, thou are art..." (pg. 170) is the transfiguration of wife into the vedic sacrificial altar. …show more content…
This means a.) that he is in communication with the gods; b.) he shares sanctity of the world. It is like him describing the house analogy, the house-cosmo-human body, reason: ," in the last analysis, the body, like the cosmos is a 'situation': a system of condition influence that the individual assumes." (pg. 173) What I understood out of this is that we should treat and respect our bodies with the utmost respect, as if it were a high deity. He notes that the building of a sacred space is not a work of man in the sense that man designed it or consecrated it through his own will or effort. Rather, sacred spaces are built on the model of the gods. In building a sacred place, man is emulated the creation of the world by the
He quotes, "What we find as soon as we place ourselves in perspective of religious man of the ordeal societies is that the world exists because it was created by the gods, and that the existence of the world itself 'means' something, 'want to say' something and the world is neither mute nor opaque, that it is not an inert thing without purpose of significance." (165) What I got out of this was that we see the world and what it contains as something with a purpose to which we must find in our own sight. He uses an example of marriage and how it is valorized as a hierogamy of heaven and earth. The woman is to be assimilated to soil, seed, to semen virile, an agricultural work to conjugal union. He brought in how Hindu's in the Indian culture follow this by saying that, "India illustrates how a physiological act can be transferred into ritual... I am heaven, thou are art..." (pg. 170) is the transfiguration of wife into the vedic sacrificial altar. …show more content…
This means a.) that he is in communication with the gods; b.) he shares sanctity of the world. It is like him describing the house analogy, the house-cosmo-human body, reason: ," in the last analysis, the body, like the cosmos is a 'situation': a system of condition influence that the individual assumes." (pg. 173) What I understood out of this is that we should treat and respect our bodies with the utmost respect, as if it were a high deity. He notes that the building of a sacred space is not a work of man in the sense that man designed it or consecrated it through his own will or effort. Rather, sacred spaces are built on the model of the gods. In building a sacred place, man is emulated the creation of the world by the