Study Questions:



Study Questions: Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

General Opening Questions

1. What does the title mean and what does it indicate about Eliade’s definition of religion? (See p. 14 of the Introduction.)

2. What is Eliade’s method? (See Cunningham & Kelsay, pp. 3-8.)

3. What are religious symbols and what do they do? (I will give some background here.)

Chapter I: Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred

4. How does the religious person experience space?

5. Give an example of sacred space and how it was disclosed as sacred.

6. What is the axis mundi?

7. What is a hierophany?

8. What is profane space and how is it characterized?

9. What does a threshold indicate?

10. Give an example of a theophany, a sign, and an evocation.

11. Can human beings choose or create sacred space?

12. Why would people wish to create, or at least consecrate, sacred space?

13. What does consecrating a place repeat? (Define cosmogony.)

14. What does the example of the Achilpa clan show about the effect of losing the connection between their world and the transcendent realm? (pp. 33-34)

15. What two functions does a sacred center serve?

16. How do cosmic pillars symbolize these functions?

17. How does Eliade describe the system of the world, i.e., the whole set of interconnected concepts developed thus far? (See p. 37.)

18. How do mountains figure into Eliade’s analysis, and how does this fact about mountains affect the construction of temples?

19. Where is “our world” situated and why?

20. How is the city connected to the cosmos in the minds of the religious?

Chapter II: Sacred Time and Myths

1. What does it mean to say sacred time is “recoverable” or “reversible”?

2. What does it mean to say sacred time is “cyclical”?

3. What does it mean to say sacred time is “discontinuous”?

4. How does time connect to the cosmos?

5. What social effects do New Year rituals have and why?

6. How are cosmogonic myths used as archetypes for other types of creation?

7. How does the effort to become contemporary with the gods not amount merely to a wish-fulfillment?

8. What is the means of participation in the gods’ time?

9. What happens when mythic actions become desacralized?

Chapter III: The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion

1. What does the world tell us about the gods/God?

2. What does the sky reveal to the religious person?

3. How and why does the Creator God become remote?

4. How do religious people change their focus on life and thereby change their symbolism of the gods?

5. What does water symbolize? What do symbols do (p. 130)?

6. What three meanings of the baptism ritual does Eliade highlight?

7. How is the earth symbolized and why? 

8. How is the connection between earth and sky symbolized?

9. What is the primary mystery for religious people, and how do they think about it symbolically?

10. Is there any religious dimension even among secular/profane views of nature?

11. What about other natural phenomena like stones, the moon, and the sun?

Chapter IV: Human Existence and Sanctified Life

1. What is the ultimate aim of the historian of religions?

2. What does it mean to say that the cosmos “lives” and “speaks” for homo religiosus?

3. Does the religious worldview of archaic civilizations have any place in the modern world?

4. What does “modern” mean and how is it related to “desacralization”?

5. What role does cinema continue to play in modern consciousness?

6. How is psychology relevant for understanding religion in the modern world?

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