Anthropology of Religion: “The sacred and the profane are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history.”
Sacred space: “For religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.”
The sacred as reality: “The sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being.”
Cosmic religion: “Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences.”
Hierophany: “Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different.”
Time and the sacred: “For religious man, time, like space, is neither homogeneous nor continuous. There are intervals of sacred time, and there are also intervals of profane time.”
The sacred in nature: “The cosmic liturgy, the mystery of nature’s participation in the drama of the divine, is a constant feature of the religious experience of archaic man.”
Symbolism of the center: “The religious experience of the nonhomogeneity of space is a primordial experience, homologizable to a founding of the world.”
Modern man and the sacred: “Modern nonreligious man assumes a new existential situation; he regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence.”
The sacred in human life: “The sacred does not necessarily imply belief in God, in gods, or spirits, but refers to the experience of a reality and the source of a consciousness of existing in the world.”
Related:
History of Western Civilization Told Through the Acoustics of its Worship Spaces
