The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

Like the dimension of space, time is experienced differently in a sacred than in a profane mode. Sacred time is “a primordial mythical time made present” (68), the time of cosmogony, or the god’s creation of the world. Through participation in ritual events such as festivals, homo religiosus accesses this mythical time and brings it into the present moment. As such, sacred time, unlike ordinary time, is non-linear, since it is “endlessly repeatable, endlessly recoverable” (69) and often re-entered at scheduled times throughout the year or a lifetime. This life in two different times—the sacred and the profane—distinguishes a religious life from a profane life, which lives only in perfectly linear profane time. This is like the break in profane space that sacred space offers: “Just as a church constitutes a break in plane in the profane space of a modern city, the service celebrated inside it [by reviving the time of myths] marks a break in profane temporal duration” (72).

The “mythical time” brought forward in festivals is the cosmogony, the time of the creation of the world. Christianity is somewhat unique in this respect, since their mythic time is an actual historical event: “the time in which the historical existence of Jesus Christ occurred” (72). Traditional religions, however, locate sacred time in a non-historical, mythical time.

This mythical time is mapped onto the profane time of human life through a sacred calendar. Given the natural life cycle of crop birth and death that a year contains, many religions hold the calendar year to represent a complete life cycle of the cosmos, such that each year is a rebirth of existence and a “recover[y of the] original sanctity” (75) of creation. Yearly festivals repeat the cosmogony, therefore, to revivify existence through the creative force that emerges from the cosmogony, as if each new year is a new cycle of the living cosmos. At the same time, yearly festivals also offer opportunities for personal purification and the re-actualization of bonds or goals. A prominent example of such a festival is the yearly reading of the creation myth The Enuma Elish in Ancient Mesopotamia, accompanied by rituals of purification (77). Another example is the modern “New Year,” where humans similarly reactualize their goals for the year.

In some festivals the resanctification of reality first requires a metaphorical annihilation of the world, in which all of society ritually “dies” before being created anew, much like how a crop withers and then regrows. In this model, it is profane time that needs to be destroyed to access sacred time. During festivals, humans also rehearse the same actions as those undertaken by the gods during the creation, such as in Australian aboriginal rituals of travelling between sacred sites in the order that the ancestors did. Experientially, this allows participants to “recover the sacred dimension of existence, by learning again how the gods or mythical ancestors created man” (90). This explains the scripted, ritualistic aspects of many festivals and public ritual events.

The insertion of events of sacred time into profane time sanctifies and regenerates profane time, making time habitable. In this regeneration, it also participates in the deeper authorization of reality that all other sacred dimensions, such as sacred space, do: “it is sacred time that makes possible [. . .] ordinary time [. . .] It is the eternal present which makes possible the profane duration of historical events” (89). Because sacred time has such authoring power, other important events such as coronations of a new ruler, preparations for war, or even medical procedures are accompanied by rituals recasting the cosmogony. In ritual healing, such as that of the Tibetan Na’khi people, the cosmogonic myth is recited, and the “myth of the origin of the medicines employed is always incorporated” (83). All active power on this earth emerges from the power of creation, and it is therefore necessary to call upon this power imbued in the medicines at creation to employ their effects.

It is important to recognize that the ontological supremacy of sacred over profane time is not equivalent to a rejection of history or progress in these cultures. Instead, it is a constant appraisal of historical events of progress as “new divine revelations” (90) made possible by the sacred. However, the “nostalgia” (92) for the time of the gods exemplified by sacred time can be seen to “lead to a limited number of gestures and patterns of behavior” (93) scripted by ritual and tradition. While such “paraly[sis]” (93) could be interpreted as anxiety over change and therefore a shirking of the responsibility of history, it is best to understand religious activity as assuming a different kind of responsibility—responsibility for maintaining the order of the cosmos by maintaining sacred relationships between humanity and the divine. This is an “optimistic vision of existence [. . .] a total cleaving to being” (94), which does not rely on forward historical progress, but on balance, to mark human success.

Myths are recitals of the events and logic of creation, which explain how and why events and activities exist as they do. Once proclaimed, myths become absolute and inviolable truths upon which all other truth claims are founded. “Once told, that is revealed, the myth becomes apodictic truth; it establishes a truth that is absolute” (95). Human acts, as such, become sacred when they are prescribed by mythic events, such as mythic origins of agriculture making certain agricultural activity sacred. “The supreme function of the myth is to ‘fix’ the paradigmatic models for all rites and all significant human activities” (98). This allows man to sacralize the world through their activities, but often requires a great degree of dedication to difficult acts. Cannibalism, for instance, “is not a natural behavior for primitive man [. . .] it is a cultural behavior [. . .] based on a religious [belief that] for the vegetable world to continue, man must kill and be killed” (103). This is so because myths in these cultures prescribe slaying as the origin of all plant life, such as through the creation of the earth from the body of a slain monster. Therefore, acts of cannibalism are taken as sacred responsibilities in these cultures.

Sacred time offers the opportunity for regeneration of humanity and their place in the cosmos, and therefore even when the acts necessary in ritual are brutal, the relationship to reality is ultimately optimistic. However, when “a sense of the religiousness of the cosmos becomes lost” (107), such as in modern secular society, the repetition of cycles of regeneration and their attendant acts become meaningless. This “necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence” (107) and the unending cyclical nature of reality becomes terrifying and inescapable.

Such philosophies of the infinite cycle of existence complete with the endless repetition of all events are known through the concept “eternal return” (108) emerging in late-stage Indic Brahminism and Greek philosophy. Judaism and Christianity depart from this logic, as their deity is understood to have arrived at a particular point in time, with existence therefore linear and leading to an eventual end-time. Later philosophies of historical time emerge from this religious foundation, but when robbed of its sacrality, such a conception of time “presents itself as a precarious [. . .] duration, leading irremediably to death” (113).