Zaharcu Emma

AMST 1st year

Anthropology
07.11.2016

Myths and Rituals

''The Sacred and The Profane''
by Mircea Eliade

SACRED TIME
Eliade claims that for the religious man there were two types of time, sacred and
profane, the former experienced in rituals, the latter in ordinary daily life. Rituals
reactualized sacred events from the mythical origins, so participating in them meant
stepping out of the ordinary time into the time of origins, the sacred one. Because rituals
occurred periodically, the sacred time was circular.
By contrast, the modern man, the non-religious man, cannot experience the sacred
time. He has his periodic celebrations, but they are not experienced as involving contact
with the divine. For instance, for the archaic cultures, cosmos regained its original
sacredness each New Year because the cosmos was recreated and time began afresh.
Thus, for ancient Babylonians, when their creation myth was recited over the New
Year period, the creation of the cosmos out of chaos actually happened. First, the world
fell back into chaos, represented by haotic behaviour - the orgies. Then, through the
ritual, the god Marduk slew the chaos monster Tiamat and created the cosmos out of his
body. Therefore, time seen as profane was abolished and then, once more, recreated as
sacred.
Illud Tempus
Eliade introduces this phrase to refer to the time of origins, the sacred time when
the world was first created. The religious man could access it whenever he ritually recited
his cosmogonic myth, by reacting the creation of the world. In various cultures, this gave
an approach to the healing of the sick: by being taken ritually to the time of origins, the
sick could reborn. ( the Yunnan part from South - West China ) Also, there was an
approach to prepare for the war or to stimulate the poetic inspiration.
As a matter of fact, the myth of the remedies it is always included in the

cosmogonic myth. Traditionally, a remedy becomes useful unless its origin is being
reminded in a ritual to the sick person. It is a sort of incantation, which includes the
history of the sickness or of the demon that caused it and evokes the mythical moment in
which a god or a saint managed to defeat the evil.
Moreover, the religious man needed to enter sacred time periodically because this
was what made ordinary, historical time possible. The events of the sacred time of
origins, enacted in rituals, were paradigms on which the conduct of ordinary life was
based. Moreover, ordinary sexual unions between men and women were possible because
of divine sexual union between god and goddess in the time of origins. Therefore,
existence is not given by what modernists call ''Nature'', but it is a creation of the Others (
Gods / semi-divine heroes) and sacred ceremonies, which restore the sacred dimension of
existence, reminding us about the way in which gods or mythic ancestors created the man
and learned him the social behaviours and practical works.
For example, in Fidji, the ceremony of a new sovereign is called ''The Creation of
the World'' and it is being repeated to save the compromised harvests. Therefore, the
ritual reciting of the cosmogonic myth plays an important role in healing, when the
regeneration of the human being is desired.
For instance, in Babylon, the poem of the creation ''Enuma Elish'' was being
recited. In this way , the fight between Marduk and Tiamat was reactualized. This fight
took place ab origine and ended chaos through the final victory of the God. Marduk
created the cosmos from the chopped body of the marine monster, the man's body was
created from the blood of the demon Kiagu, Tiamat's the main ally. In this way, rituals /
ceremonies make a reactualization of the cosmogonic act.
The conception that underlies these rites is that life cannot be repaired, it can only
be recreated through the symbolic repetition of cosmogony , that is the exemplary model
for every creation.
Eliade rejected the idea that religious man's desire to be constantly going back to
the time of origins in his rites should be seen as escapism. What religious man was doing
in his rituals was participating positively in the cosmos.
Templum - tempus
Templum / temple represents the image of the world ( imagio mundi) / spatial
aspect, found in the center of the Earth, at Jerusalem and it sanctified not only the entire
Cosmos, but also the cosmic life - time.
Man has always desired to be situated in a space close to the divine, in order to
live as closely as possibile near the gods. This is the symbolism of the ''Center of the

World'' and its religious implication so far. The reintegration in the sacred time of the
origin through the celebration of religious ceremonies meant to become contemporary to
gods, to live in their presence, even if this presence was mysterious, in the sense that it is
not always visible. Eliade states that this desire of the men is a sort of nostalgia of a
heavingly situation - to live in a perfect world, in the divine presence of gods.
Tempus / time - the temporal aspect of the horizontal movement in space and time.
As example, we have the cosmological symbolism from the Jerusalim Temple, where the
twelve breads from the table signified the twelve months of the year.
Myth
The events of the time of origins were recorded in myths. Therefore, myths reveal
how the cosmos or some part of it, came into existence and why. In this way, it is
revealed how the sacred was brought into this world, the ultimate cause of every real
existence.
Myth is the exemplary model, the history of what happened in illo tempore, the
story about what the divine beings have done at the beginning of time. To tell a sacred
story means to reveal a mystery and, in this way, the gestures of the gods were considered
mysteries: man couldn't have known them if these mysteries weren't revealed to him.
One of the most important functions of the myth was to store the paradigms for all
rituals and significant human activities. By behaving the way the gods / hero figures did
in myths, the religious man could be sure that he was behaving properly.
Thus, in New Guinea, many myths speak about long sea journeys, offering
models for the captains and for the other activities: love, war, finishing and so on. This
being said, the captains embarking on long sea journeys took on the persona of the
mythical hero, Aori, wearing the sort of costume he wore, performing the dance he
performed.
The role of the reactualizations of the religious ceremonies is to teach people
again about the sacrality of the models. For instance, a boat is being repaired in a solemn
way not because the boat needs to be repaired, but because the gods taught men how to
repair their boats. Therefore, it has become a religious act - imitatio dei. Moreover, the
time in which the ritual repair of the boat is made identifies with the primordial time, illo
tempore.
This sort of imitation of mythic models ensured that the religious man remained
in touch with sacred reality and that he contributed to the sacredness of the world by
reactualizing the divine paradigms. As Eliade admits, the religious man believed he only
truly became a man by imitating the gods and heroes as described in the myths.

Human Sacrifice and Ritual Cannibalism

An issue that Eliade highlights in this context is that of the human sacrifice and
the ritual cannibalism. He sees these as cultural developments associated with the
beginnings of agriculture and no earlier. In the myths of the earliest cultivators, human
mortality, human sexuality and the need for humans to work appeared as a result of
divinities allowing themselves to be sacrificed, so that crops could grow out of their body.
Human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism were the religious reactualization of such illud
tempus events, performed to assure the continuance of crops.
Eliade comments that we need to bear in mind when judging cannibalism that it
had been divinely instituted, though, of course, he deplores religious man going to such
extremes as crime, madness and turpitude, in imitating the gods.
The Eternal Return
Eliade now introduces the notion of the eternal return. In his primitive and less
developed civilized religions, the cyclical, repetitive nature of time according to the
annual calendar, was the cause of optimism. Therefore, it meant the reactualization of
sacred time and the imitation of the gods at annual rituals.
But in some more developed civilised religions, the elites lost the sense that the
cosmos was sacred and were left with a terrifying vision of a cyclical time repeating itself
for all eternity. Elites in India hoped in the possibility of escaping from the cycle of
eternal return to existence, involved in the cosmos being periodically destroyed and
recreated. The ancient Greeks also were familiar with the idea of eternal return.
Historical Time
Judaism, on the other hand, abandoned the theory of a cyclical time - time has a
beginning and it will have an end. For instance, the fall of Jerusalem highlights Yahweh's
anger against his people, but it is not the same anger that happened after the fall of
Samaria. His gestures are personal interventions in history and they have a profound
sense only for his people, the people that Yahweh has chosen. Unlike the gods of other
religions, Yahweh manifested himself to his people in their irreversible, historical time,
thus giving history a certain sacred value.
Christianity went even further. By having the historical events of the Gospels as
its illud tempus, the sacred time of its rituals, Christianity turned history into sacred
history. For example, the time when Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect governed the
province of Judaea. So, the Christian, who takes part in the religious time, meets illud
tempus, in which Jesus lived, suffered and resurrected. In this way, the sacred calendar
retakes the same events of the existence of Jesus, but this events happened in history, they

do not happen ab initio ( for the Christian, time begins again with the birth of Christ). As
a matter of fact, history seems to be a new dimension of the existence of God in the
world.
Eliade notes that Hegel went on again, making the whole of history the work of a
universal spirit. Finally, modern historicism had come to see historical time in a terrifying
light, the way the ancient Indians and Greeks saw the eternal return: in this case leading
unpredictably to death.