Theory : Mircea Eliade

1. Theory:Mircea Eliade “A purely rational man is an abstraction; he is never found in real life.” (Sociology 156)

2. Recap • “By its very nature sacred time is reversible, in the sense that, properly speaking, it is a primordial mythical time made present.” (68) • Religious man “experiences intervals of time that are ‘sacred,’ that have no part in the temporal duration that precedes and follows them, that have a wholly different structure and origin” (69-70)

3. Recap • Depending on the religion concerned, sacred time may be circular, reaching back to the time of myth, as it does in archaic religion... • “Paradigmatic” acts of the gods • Buddhism and Hinduism are concerned with escape from desacralized circular time • ...Or linear, with discontinuous moments of sacred time interspersed in profane time, as in Judaism and Islam • According to Eliade, Christianity renders linear history itself sacred, as God moves it from creation to the incarnation in Christ to the Second Coming • But even these faiths may have aspects of circular time, for example Passover or the Eucharist

4. The Immanent Frame • For the modern believer... • Eliade says “Christian” but means religious believer in a fully industrialized society • “Their religious experience is no longer open to the cosmos. In the last analysis, it is a strictly private experience; salvation is a problem that concerns man and his god; at most, a man recognizes that he is responsible not only to his God but also to history. • “But in these man-God-history relationships there is no place for the cosmos. From this it would appear that, even for a genuine Christian, the world is no longer felt as the work of God.” (179)

5. Rites of Passage • “Religious man wants to be other than he finds himself on the ‘natural’ level and undertakes to make himself in accordance with the ideal image revealed to him by myths. Primitive man undertakes to attain a religious ideal of humanity, and his effort already contains the germs of all the ethics later elaborated in evolved societies.” (187-188)

6. Rites of Passage • “‘Rites of passage’ play a considerable part in the life of religious man.” • Birth • Puberty • Marriage • Death • “Each of these always involves an initiation, for each of them implies a radical change in ontological and social presence.” • Before birth-rite, a child only physically existent, unrecognized by family or community. After, fully “living person.” • Marriage always presents a crisis and danger between groups, so have their own rites (184-185)

7. Rites of Passage • “The initiatory sicknesses of future shamans ... have often been regarded as real attacks of insanity. There is, in fact, a total crisis, which sometimes leads to disintegration of the personality. This psychic chaos is the sign that the profane man is undergoing dissolution and that a new personality is on the verge of birth.” (196) • Rites as ways to mediate psychic and social stress cause by radical change in status

8. Rites of Passage • “The man of primitive societies has sought to conquer death by transforming it into a rite of passage. In other words, for the primitives, men die to something that was not essential; men die to the profane life. • “In short, death comes to be regarded as the supreme initiation, that is, as the beginning of a new spiritual existence.” (196)

9. Rites of Passage • Death rites are more complex, because not only is there a “natural phenomenon,” “but also a change in both ontological and social status.” • Leave the community, join the community of the dead • “For some peoples, only ritual burial confirms death; he who is not buried according to custom is not dead. Elsewhere a death is not considered valid until after the funerary ceremonies have been performed, or until the soul of the dead person has been ritually conducted” to the next world. (185) • Ghosts & vampires

10. Rites of Passage • But death and rebirth can also be symbolic, the change in status can be so radical that the individual must “die” to be born anew: • “From one religion to another, from one gnosis or one wisdom to another, the immemorial theme of the second birth is enriched with new values, which sometimes profoundly change the content of the experience. Nevertheless, a common element, an invariable remains. It could be defined as follows: access to the spiritual life always entails death to the profane condition, followed by a new birth.” (201)

11. Rites of Passage • “For nonreligious man, birth, marriage, death are events that concern only the individual and his family.” • “In a nonreligious view of life, all these ‘passages’ have lost their ritual character; that is, the signify no more than is visible in the concrete act of a birth, a death, or an officially recognized sexual union.” • But such a fully nonreligious experience is rare, more commonly there are vague memories of religious experience, and nostalgia for it (186)

12. “To know the situations assumed by religious man, to understand his spiritual universe, is, in sum, to advance our general knowledge of man.” • While most of these things have passed away, “they have not vanished without a trace; they have contributed toward making us what we are today, and so, after all, they form part of our own history.” (202)

13. Religious man “always believes that there is an absolute reality, the sacred, which transcends this world but manifests itself in this world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real.” • Nonreligious man, “refuses transcendence, accepts the relativity of ‘reality,’ and may even come to doubt the meaning of existence.” • “He accepts no model for humanity outside the human condition as it can be seen in the various historical situations.” • “He will become free only when he is totally demysticized.” (203) • Marx

14. Nonreligious Man • “To acquire a world of his own, he has desacralized the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt the opposite of an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present for him, in one form or another, ready to be reactualized in his deepest being.” (204) • Religion present in the negative space • Further: “The modern man who feels and claims that he is nonreligious still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals.” (204) • Wedding celebrations, birth ceremonies, New Year’s Eve

15. Nonreligious Man • “Marx takes over and continues one of the great eschatological myths of the Asiatico-Mediterranean world—the redeeming role of the Just (the ‘chosen,’ the ‘anointed,’ the ‘innocent,’ the ‘messenger’; in our day, the proletariat), whose sufferings are destined to change the ontological status of the world.” (206-207) • Teleology & eschatology • Moscow Victory Parade, 1945 • See also: Utopians, nudists, free love activists “nostalgic for Eden” (207)

16. Nonreligious Man • “In short, the majority of ‘men without religion’ still hold to pseudo religions and degenerated mythologies. • “Profane man is the descendent of homo religiosus and he cannot wipe out his own history—that is, the behavior of his religious ancestors which has made him what he is today. • “A purely rational man is an abstraction; he is never found in real life. • “Every human being is made up at once of his conscious activity and his irrational experiences.” (209)