"The Basic Ideas of Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane"

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sun. If, by some chance, that time were shortened by one week to 358 days and we did not alter the calendar, within a dozen years the first day of spring would fall on what is now the first day of winter. When you measure time by space, you see how much goes in cycles. Every day the sun rises, climbs into the sky, hits its peak, descends, sets, disappears, and then rises the next day. Every month the moon waxes and wanes; every year the earth goes through the cycle of the seasons. This led some traditional societies to speak of time itself as cyclical (e.g., Hindu culture). Eastern cultures in general are inclined toward this view of time. Because of the Biblical tradition, Western cultures view time as linear, that is, when something happens, it has happened once and for all. Similar things might happen again, but they are not identical. They may be coincidences or be caused by similar circumstances. Eliade suggested that traditional societies see the forces of the earth recurring on a regular basis without change. Obviously, there might be individual changes as rivers changed their courses or plants grew where seeds had been planted, but the overall cycle of life was unchanging. This leads to a central point in Eliade's theory. The great event, as we noted above, is the cosmogony, when the Gods created the world. For societies which share this cyclical view of time (where the world moves through cycles), the cosmogony was repeated annually. We have already seen that a cosmogony means a creation of a cosmos, an ordered world. In the cycle of the seasons, winter represents chaos, the time when the earth is dying (although in this case chaos is a preparation for cosmos). In the spring, the world comes back to life, cosmos has returned. In traditional societies, New Year's rites usually take place in the spring because that is when the year actually begins. (Our own calendar reflects this slightly. The word September means the seventh month because in the old Roman calendar the first month was March.) Eliade further suggested that this belief in the annual repetition of the cosmogony resulted in several now-familiar religious customs. For example, as the time for the festival approached, the entire world went into decline and returned to chaos. This meant that, at the New Year, the entire world and the people in it were born again. The basic idea behind this is that people are part of the natural world and are caught up in the movement of nature; if the world is renewed, so are we. The cleansing of the "old leaven" before Passover for Jews, and the kindling of the "new fire" at the Christian Easter Vigil are two example of religious traditions based on this idea. This idea that time can begin again and we, as part of nature, are caught up in this return to the cosmogony may sound like a cosmic time machine, but that is not really what this means. We find ideas like this in everyday language and customs. For example, if you become run down and constantly fatigued (probably from reading too much about Eliade), a physician may tell you to get some recreation. Look at what the word means: re-creation, that is, to be created again. Similar words are renew, to become new again,
and rejuvenation, literally, to become young again. The governing idea is that by doing certain things, such as exercising, we can return ourselves to that time when we were younger, healthier, and the like. Consider also the notion of New Year's resolutions. If there is something about yourself which must be corrected, why wait until January 1st to do something about it? Why not resolve now to study more, watch television less, etc.? Yet the tradition of making resolutions as one begins a new year still is meaningful for people. There must be some way that a new time somehow affects us, so we think we will be different because the time is different. This may be merely self-deception if we don't actually do something different with the new time -- the way someone who has not studied since kindergarten says confidently, "Next semester I'll do better." -- but it may actually lead to real changes if we seize the opportunity. Planning how to "put the right foot forward" at the beginning of a new semester, or a new job, or when moving into a new social group is a similar kind of thing. Each "new" time opens up possibilities that really were not available before, in the "old" time and old situation. And starting off "on the wrong foot" makes it much harder to establish good relationships. E.g., it may take a month of being on time before someone forgets that you were late for the first date. From these examples you can see that, like sacred space, the notion of sacred time is also paradigmatic and can be extended. For example, the repetition of the cosmogony may be the great sacred day, but there are many individual sacred days, such as Christmas or Passover in which time is qualitatively different from profane time for those, such as Christians and Jews, who belong to those religious traditions. The prevailing notion for Eliade is that the time of creation was a good one, that all the divine forces were at work on the earth (as, for example, in the Genesis 2 story of the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve lived in harmony with God and nature before they ate the forbidden fruit). This may sound like nothing more than nostalgia, the belief that somehow everything was so much better at an earlier time in history, like the way older people might idealize the time of their youth. But the examples above show that this notion of a "time of creation" is not merely that. In fact, in some ways the idea of "sacred time" takes its meaning as much from the open-endedness of the future as it does from the treasured experiences of the past. This is a key example of how a "religious" phenomenon is religious precisely because it highlights a common human phenomenon. There are two important consequences to this theory of sacred time. First, the cosmogony is actually repeated during foundational religious rituals. These are not simply acts of "memory" in the sense of thinking about something that happened in the past. A preacher might urge a congregation to "picture yourselves listening to Jesus telling a parable," but that is basically an intellectual exercise where people try to imagine what those events might have been like. "Sacred time," however, is the ritualized experience where participants actually do go "back in time" or, more accurately, bring that "past" sacred time "forward" into the present reality of the celebrating community. Obviously, if participants were to "step outside" the ritual event, they could see that they did not physically change the place where they were and that time actually continued to pass
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"The Basic Ideas of Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane"

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