Eliade and Ontology of Sacred

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

University of Tehran

Abstract

                           
This paper studies the ontology of Mircea Eliade. Eliade’s historical-religious hermeneutic method explores the meaning and interpretation of messages hidden in religious myths, symbols and rituals. According to him, question of the meaning of existence is an important and real question for human being. Every religion, even in its most primitive form, is ontology. He divides human beings into two categories: the man of traditional society, who is definitely homo religious and the modern man. He denies that of the thinking of archaic man is illusory. He wants to live in a real and effective world. There are two modes of being in the world: sacred and profane. The sacred represents the real, order and the significant. Profane being is the opposite of the sacred mode of being: amorphous, relative and heterogeneous. He indicates that the sacred is equivalent to the real, to absolute truth, and to being. Eliade’s exposition of archaic ontology suggests several unspecified implications: it is relational, non-derivable, non-reducible, non-contingent, dynamic and static. The essence precedes existence. It means that homo religious is what one is precisely because of primal events at the beginning of time. The sacred appears in the forms of myths, gods, symbols, creation and human beings. The manifestation of the sacred is dialectical, by which the ordinary things are transformed to sacred. Symbols and myths reveal the "Being". The basis of myth is ontology. Since archaic and primitive myths account for the origin of realities, they are considered sacred and likewise eternally true. Homo religious, in the light of myths sees the manifestation of the "Being". He considers himself its shepherd. It appears that he construes the profane, at least for the archaic or primitive person, to be unreal or illusory

Keywords

References

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Journal of Ontological Researches
Volume 3, Issue 5 - Serial Number 5
September 2014
Pages 1-21

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