Three Brief Topics - Essay Example

Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane are enlightens three categories. The Sacred which is a transcendent referent such as God or Nirvana, hierophany which is the advancement of the sacred into human experience where he discusses the revelation of the sacred in a person's life and the third category is idea of homo religiosus where Eliade considers the appreciation and devotion of one to such a breakthrough of supreme power. He describes numinous experience as an appropriate experience of the Sacred by religious human beings or homo religiosus.

When a person can experience the amazing, mysterium tremendum and fascinans, both are awesomely fearful and the enthrallingly captivating aspects of the Holy or the wholly other. In expanding and expounding the phenomenological dimensions of the Sacred, Eliade describes the sacred experience in human being as a crucial point of orientation and at the same time it also reveals the ontological reality which is its source of homo religiosus experience. For an instance the space is characterized as the boundary between sacred and profane and thus locates the axis mundi as centre.

Thus temples and tepees, homes and hearths become sacralized for homo religiosus. . According to Gerardus even the most ordinary events such as the customary associations with one's neighbors or similarly one's long familiar tasks prove to be replete with mystic interconnections if one examines them more closely. One can completely ignore his own scheme of explanation in terms of single causes and can misconceive life as a broad current of mighty powers. If, for instance, one of the Toradja tribes in Celebes is preparing for an expedition and an earthen pot is broken, then they remain at home, saying that it is measa.

This may be translated as a sign, indicating some future misfortune, but that the current of life has been interrupted: If then one thing has been broken, why not more Similarly, when a Ewe tribesman finds refuge from his enemies on a white ant hill he ascribes his escape to the power residing there. Thus the place, the action, the person in which the power reveals itself receives a specific character. Bearers of mana, for example, are sharply distinguished from the rest of the world: they are self-sufficient.

2References: - The Nature of Religion. The Sacred and The Profane Pages 8-18 by Eliade MirceaReligion in Essence and Manifestation, volume 1 Chapter 4 Potency. Awe. Tabu. by Gerardus Van Der Leeuw, (1967) Pages 43-51The nature and elements of mythQ2. Discuss the nature and elements of myth and explore a particular myth using the frameworks in the following texts:Chapter 2- Myth and Religion. In Myths: God, Heroes, and Saviors by Billias Leonard J (1986).Chapter 3 'Five monolithic theories'. The Nature of Greek Myths by Kirk G S (1974).

Answer: - Myths are the stories from the remote past as in another world or an earlier stage of this