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

is, the worship of natural phenomena). Rather, it is the belief that various elements in the
natural world are hierophanies, that is, these elements manifest the Gods' presence and
power.
The primal hierophany is the sky. It is omnipresent; you can go to places where there is
no land or no water, no trees or no animals but everywhere on earth there is the sky. The
sky is not only vast but unreachable; no matter how high you climb, you still cannot
reach it. Furthermore, it is powerful. Too much sun, plants wither; not enough sun, they
grow poorly. Not enough rain, the earth dries out; too much rain, there are floods. The
sky and its gifts are essential for life, the primal gift of the Gods. For religions which see
the Gods as essentially very different from human beings, the sky's insubstantiality is
another factor. The earth, like us, is of solid substance; the sky, which is above, has no
"earthly" substance.
The consequences of this are obvious -- in almost every religion the Gods live in the sky.
If not all do, the sky Gods usually are the supreme ones who literally lord it above the
others. In most societies, the sky God is portrayed as male, reflecting the social patriarchy
(that is, a society ruled by men) on the human level. [A society ruled by women is a
matriarchy.] Often the sky God does not intervene directly in human affairs. He is simply
too powerful and, thus, leaves that to Gods with lesser but more specific powers.
This tendency to see the upper regions as the home of the Gods is reflected in much
human behavior. For example, if a company owns an office tower, the higher you climb
the company ladder, the more likely you are to get an office physically higher up --
indeed, even the symbolism of "climbing the ladder" reflects this notion that those with
more power and authority are "higher."
Opposite the sky is the earth, which often pictured as female because it has children
(humans, animals) which it nourishes (with plants); Mother Earth is one of the most
common notions in religious life. This notion is often ambivalent, since the earth also
receives the dead, but, in many societies, this return to Mother Earth is a prelude to rebirth.
Many primitive religions have a hierogamy, literally, a higher marriage, when Father Sky
marries Mother Earth, fertilizing her with the rain. This, not surprisingly, is the paradigm
for all human marriages, and Eliade actually found an Indian marriage formula in which
the man says that he is the sky and his wife is the earth. Most fertility rites in ancient
societies somehow involved veneration of the Earth.
This concept survives in our language. The Latin word for "mother" is mater, from which
we get the English words "matter" and "material," that is, solid substances, things from
the earth, in contrast to the vaporous substance of the sky.
We cannot live without the sky or the earth, but neither can we live without water, and,
for Eliade, water is the third great hierophany. Water is even more ambivalent than the
earth. The earth is solid and has shape; water, on the other hand, is in itself shapeless and