Summary of Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred, Mircea Eliade

Sacred space and making the world sacred, is an extract from theorist Mircea Eliade’s 1987 book The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion. Mircea Eliade’s argument is that there is no such thing as a homogeneous space, even for the non-religious man. He presents this argument that all religions share something in common, by identifying the difference between the sacred and the profane it gives us a meaning of life. According to Eliade, “Where the sacred manifests it-self in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence,” this manifestation can occur in the form of a hierophany or a theophany; both allow us to identify our axis mundi or absolute fixed. Hierophany being the manifestation of the holy and theophany means manifestation of God or the divine into the mundane world. To support his argument, Eliade presents us with his five key points regarding religion. To the religious man, religion differentiates between sacred and profane space through hierophany and theophany. Second, as presented in creation stories it has the ability to orients us; allowing us to identify our place in the cosmos. “Life is not possible without and opening toward the transcendent; in other words, human beings cannot live in chaos”. According Elaide, the religious man hungers after the transcendent and for that reason he needs an axis mundi; a sacred world center that permits him to communicate with the divine. His fourth key point is the consecration of sacred space, for the religious man it is the repeating of the cosmogony in the name of their God. In his final key point Eliade compares and contrasts the religious man and the modern man. According to him, “religious man can live only in a sacred world…it is there that he has real existence,” for that reason he hungers after the transcendent. According to Eliade, non-religious man on the other hand leaves us disoriented about our existence. Their idea of a sacred space differs from that of the religious man;