Sacred Space Essay

Sacred Space There are many skeptics in this world who would argue that mankind’s religious impulses to be religious are solely a product of our natural process. If that is the case then evidence should support the idea that the profane gives birth to the sacred; that the profane is basically incapable of being moved, while the sacred is lacking definite form and not lasting or eternal, but Eliade ideas in The Sacred and the Profane show something different. For example when Eliade mentions sacred space he considers it to be a “really” real part of the universe as a whole, while a space that is not sacred is open to having several possibilities of meaning and having no structure. This is to say that the sacred is the solid which all else

The sacred is believed to reveal absolute reality, something unaffected by the perception of any being and at the same time makes orientation possible. The sacredness of a space can also be seen in Lame Deer when he talks about the sacredness of the Inipi. “The sweat house is small, but to those crouching inside it represents the whole universe. The spirit of all living things is in this hut. This we believe. The earth on which we sit is our grandmother; all life comes from her” (p.g 185). Connecting with nature was something that was very important to lame deer, using the ground to represent a grandmother shows how he believed how connected we are to this earth whether we understand it or not, we can be considered nature, although we shy away from nature we are related to this world. “Everything we do during our ceremonies has a deeper meaning for us and, in one way or another symbolizes the universe, the powers of nature, the spirits, all of which are ever present in our mind.”(PG 186” The meaning of connecting to a higher power is also very similar to the Buddha shrine