‘The sacred and the profane’ is a pair of terms from the study of religion. The sacred is whatever a people sets apart as holy, powerful or forbidden; the profane is everything else, the ordinary world outside the temple. The sociologist Émile Durkheim and the historian of religion Mircea Eliade both held that dividing the world this way lies at the heart of religion, though anthropologists have questioned whether all peoples divide it like that; in animism, and in Therapeutic Shamanism, everything is sacred, so there is no profane world in that sense; the line between the two is seen as part of what the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer brought.
What do ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ mean? #
‘Sacred’ means holy, set apart, treated with reverence. ‘Profane’ comes from the Latin pro fano, literally ‘in front of the temple’, that is, outside it: not consecrated, ordinary, secular.1 Today ‘profane’ often means disrespectful, as in profane language, but in the study of religion it simply means the everyday world that is not sacred.
So the pair describes a boundary. On one side are holy places, objects, times and people; on the other is ordinary life.
What did Durkheim say about the sacred? #
That every religion rests on dividing the world into two domains, one holding all that is sacred and the other all that is profane. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) Durkheim defined religion as a system of beliefs and practices relating to “things set apart and forbidden”, and deliberately did not define it by gods or spirits.2 He built his case on the totemism of Aboriginal Australian peoples, then living largely as hunter-gatherers, which he took to be the simplest religion known, and saw the sacred power of the totem as the power of society itself, felt by its members. See What is totemism?
What did Otto and Eliade add? #
Both looked at the sacred from the inside, as an experience. The theologian Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy, described the holy as the ‘numinous’, something wholly other that is at once awe-inspiring and frightening, and fascinating and attractive, which he called mysterium tremendum et fascinans.2 See What is awe, and why is it good for us?
The scholar of religion Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane (1957), described sacred and profane as two different ways of being in the world. For what he called religious people, the sacred breaks into the ordinary world in what he called a hierophany, at a particular place, object or time, and the whole world is then ordered around it. He held that nature, for such people, is never only natural, and that a completely profane world, with nothing sacred in it, is a recent arrival in human history.3
Do all peoples divide the world this way? #
Not everyone agrees that they do. As the anthropologist Robert Launay sets it out, the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard found the distinction of no use in his fieldwork among the Azande, a farming people of central Africa, whose shrines could be treated differently according to the occasion. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner found it could not be applied cleanly even to Australian religion, the very case Durkheim built it on. And the anthropologist Jack Goody pointed out that many languages have no words that translate ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’, and held that the division reflects European ways of thinking rather than a universal one.2
Others have kept the distinction and built on it. The anthropologist Mary Douglas drew on it in Purity and Danger (1966) to explain why things that do not fit a culture’s categories are treated as dangerous.2 The scholar of religion Veikko Anttonen has proposed a reworking in which the sacred is what a people sets apart at its boundaries, especially the boundaries of the body and of a territory, rather than a special kind of reality.4
How does animism see the sacred? #
As everywhere. The experience that everything is connected and part of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this is the natural state of people who live shamanically, and it is why indigenous people the world over describe everything as alive and everything as sacred.5 For hunter-gatherers, the animals and plants, the stones, hills and rivers, and the land itself were all honoured: everything was alive, everything was sacred, everything was Spirit.6 That includes the things modern people least expect, such as stones, water and soil; all physical things are Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer. See What are Stone People, and what gifts do they bring?
So in animism there is no profane world in Durkheim’s or Eliade’s sense, no ordinary ground beyond the temple waiting for the sacred to break in. Eliade’s own example makes the difference plain. In his account a sacred stone is venerated not as a stone but because the sacred shows itself through it.3 In animism the stone is itself a person, one of the Stone People, alive and conscious in its own very different way. How to live from this is the subject of What does it mean to live as if it is all sacred?
Where did the split between sacred and profane come from? #
In Therapeutic Shamanism, from the Fall. With the first city-states came the sky religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this, which teach that up is good and down is bad: that the sky-god is good and Mother Earth is bad, that spirit is good and matter corrupt.7 Once the sacred is placed above, in heaven and in Spirit, the earth, the body and ordinary life are left below as lesser. The same judgement lives on in everyday speech, wherever ‘higher’ is taken to mean better than ‘lower’, and in the idea that the spiritual task is to raise one’s vibration or rise above the world.8
This is close to Eliade’s claim that a wholly profane world is recent, without being the same claim. Eliade traced the loss to modern secular life; Therapeutic Shamanism traces it much further back, to the hierarchy that came with farming, surplus and the city-states, and sees the split itself as a symptom of that hierarchy. See What is the Fall? and How has spirituality been used to justify domination?
If everything is sacred, is nothing set apart? #
Some things still are, but not because the rest is profane. Shamanic work has its sacred spaces, such as the Medicine Wheel, a space for shamanic work usually laid out to the four directions,9 and some of its work is done in a ceremonial way. Experiences in a journey can feel sacred in a way the same events never would in ordinary life; hunting in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, for instance, feels like a sacred thing and an honour to take part in.10 Such spaces and ceremonies gather attention, respect and care in one place and time. They do not imply that the world outside them is ordinary or unholy, because in animism there is no outside.
