The Sacred And The Profane Analysis

The Sacred and the Profane by Eliade, focuses on the human experience of both the sacred and the profane. I will specifically focus on the sacred, because I can relate best to it. Eliade focuses on how the religious person experiences the world in regards to space, time, the cosmos, and the body/self. Throughout this paper I will elaborate on Eliade's main points, and how the religious person can make an effect on the world in which they live. According to Eliade, there are four main ways that the religious person experiences the world. Those four ways are through space, time, the cosmos, and the body/self. In the first few chapters he focuses on space and how people make the world sacred. He makes it clear that the sacred is not the same as the profane. The profane person views space as homogenous and neutral (Eliade 22). This means that all space is the same, and the only thing that can be done to space is change it geometrically. …show more content…
The religious person believes that there is a big difference between normal space, and sacred space. Sacred space shapes how the religious person views the world, and the religious person views sacred space as a center where everything else is founded upon. It is a place where they can meet with the divine, and it becomes their reality. Eliade then relates sacred space to sacred places. He claims that often sacred places are revealed through various signs. He gives us multiple examples of sacred places, such as churches and temples. Often there is a lot of symbolic meaning behind the structure and building of different sacred places. For the Christian church, Eliade says “the door that opens on the interior of the church actually signifies a solution of continuity (25). Another example is the temple, or steeples. It is symbolic that they are all pointing upward towards the