(8) MIRCEA ELIADE –
THE SACRED & THE PROFANE / SHAMANISM (1957 / 1964)
“The nostalgia for Paradise…the desire to find oneself always and without effort in the center of the world, at the heart of reality”.
Behold the monomyth!
Campbell’s term of monomyth may be somewhat unfair for Eliade, since he established multiple paradigms in mythology or religion “that persist to this day” – hierophany, sacred space and time, the nostalgia for Paradise, the axis mundi or Center of the World, all myths as creation or origin myths, the eternal return, the terror of history, the coincidence of opposites, deus otiosus, and homo religiosus.
On the other hand, all of his paradigms might be considered permutations of his core concept of hierophany, the manifestation – or intrusion – of the sacred in the world, including but not limited to the earlier concept of theophany or manifestation of a god. In turn, it is hierophany that creates sacred space and time, or rather, divides the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time.
And the rest of his paradigms really flow from that. The mythic or religious connotes the nostalgia for Paradise or desire to return to sacred space or time, which is also the axis mundi or center of the world.
“Myth, then, is always an account of creation” – the primordial time “when the Sacred first appeared, establishing the world’s structure”. By enacting myths and rituals, one doesn’t simply commemorate them but participates in them – one “detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time”, or the eternal return.
On the other hand, “yearning to remain in the mythical age causes a terror of history” – the desire “to escape the linear succession of events” – “Eliade suggests that the abandonment of mythical thought and the full acceptance of linear, historical time, with its terror, is one of the reasons for modern man’s anxieties”.
As for the coincidence of opposites, “Eliade claims that many myths, rituals, and mystical experiences involve a “coincidence of opposites” or “twofold revelation” – “they express on the one hand the diametrical opposition of two divine figures sprung from one and the same principle and destined, in many versions, to be reconciled…the very nature of the divinity, which shows itself, by turns or even simultaneously, benevolent and terrible, creative and destructive, solar and serpentine, and so on”.
Deus otiosus – the inactive (or leisurely) god – is perhaps my favorite paradigm by Eliade. Contrary to those who proposed that religions evolve from polytheism to monotheism, Eliade argued that supreme heavenly beings were less common in advanced cultures.
“Eliade speculates that the discovery of agriculture brought a host of fertility gods and goddesses into the forefront, causing the celestial Supreme Being to fade away and eventually vanish from many ancient religions. Even in primitive hunter-gatherer societies, the High God is a vague, distant figure, dwelling high above the world. Often he has no cult and receives prayer only as a last resort, when all else has failed. Eliade calls the distant High God a deus otiosus (idle god)”.
His book on shamanism, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, is the second of his landmark duo of books after The Sacred and the Profane. It applied his ongoing ideas to shamanism, whicn in turn he saw as the ongoing death and resurrection of shamanic figures.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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