Sacred and Profane
SACRED AND PROFANE.
In order to define and explain the paired concepts of sacred and profane, it is important to look at these concepts as developed in the influential work of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).
Durkheim's Definition of Religion
In his last great work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim set out "to study the simplest and most primitive religion that is known at present, to discover its principles and attempt an explanation of it" (p. 1) in order to uncover universal properties of religion. But first he needed to define religion, or else "run the risk of either calling a system of ideas and practices religion that are in no way religious, or of passing by religious phenomena without detecting their true nature" (p. 21). Rather than immediately proposing a definition of his own, he began by rejecting two existing definitions. Religion could not be defined, he argued, in terms of the "supernatural," a category that made sense only in opposition to a modern European paradigm of scientific explanation for "natural" phenomena; for most of the world's peoples, including premodern Europeans, religious phenomena were perfectly natural. Nor, he continued, could religion be reduced to ideas of "divinity" or even "spiritual beings." For instance, salvation in Buddhism was not predicated on divine assistance, and many religious practices—Jewish dietary regulations, for example—were "wholly independent of any idea of gods or spiritual beings" (p. 32).
Instead, Durkheim formulated a radical proposition:
Whether simple or complex, all known religious beliefs display a common feature: They presuppose a classification of the real or ideal things that men conceive of into two classes—two opposite genera—that are widely designated by two distinct terms, which the words profane and sacred translate fairly well. The division of the world into two domains, one containing all that is sacred and the other all this is profane—such is the distinctive trait of religious thought. (p. 34)
Unlike definitions in terms of "supernatural," "divinities," or "spiritual beings," Durkheim's definition in no way predicated any specific kind of belief, much less belief in any particular kind of being. On the contrary, for Durkheim, the division into "sacred" and "profane" was a necessary precondition for religious beliefs, indeed their very foundation. "Religious beliefs are those representations that express the nature of sacred things and the relations they have with other sacred things or with profane things … rites are rules of conduct that prescribe how man must conduct himself with sacred things" (p. 38).
Sacred versus Holy; Profane versus Secular
It is helpful to contrast Durkheim's concept of the sacred to that of the holy in the contemporary work of the noted German theologian Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy (1917). The holy, for Otto, derived from a sense of the "numinous" (a word Otto coined): the experience of awe, of the transcendent majesty, energy, and mystery of the wholly other. For Otto, the holy was grounded in individual feeling, the apprehension of something outside the individual and infinitely greater. Durkheim hardly denied the existence, or for that matter the importance, of such an experience but held that it derived from the idea of the sacred rather than constituting its essence. For Durkheim, the concept of sacred was above all intrinsically social, the product of the social classification of all phenomena into the antithetical categories of sacred and profane. Unlike Otto's "holy," Durkheim's sacred was literally unthinkable except in terms of the profane. The content of the category sacred was intrinsically fluid: anything might be classified as sacred. What mattered was the social act of separation from the profane.
At first sight, this dichotomy between sacred and profane seems identical to that between sacred and secular. While Durkheim did not explicitly argue against such assimilation, it is clear that he would have regarded it as analogous to that between natural and supernatural, a historically constituted distinction that made sense only in terms of relatively recent European history, with its emphasis on the separation of church and state. Most important, Durkheim very definitely refused to exempt the secular realm of the state from the domain of the sacred. One of his most powerful images—all the more so when one bears in mind that The Elementary Forms of Religious Life appeared only two years before the outbreak of World War I—was that of the flag: "The soldier who fall defending his flag certainly does not believe he has sacrificed himself to a piece of cloth" (p. 229); "A mere scrap of the flag represents the country as much as the flag itself; moreover, it is sacred in the same right and to the same degree" (p. 231).
Totems, Society, and the Sacred
Durkheim's analysis centered on what he considered to be the simplest and most primitive known religion, namely Australian totemism, and rested on the consideration of what the Australians held sacred: "totemism places figurative representations of the totem in the first rank of the things it considers sacred; then come the animals or plants whose name the clan bears, and finally the members of the clan" (p. 190). It is important to note that representations of totem animals were far more sacred than the animals themselves. Such designs were placed on ritual objects such as churinga (bullroarers), the very sight of which might be forbidden to profane noninitiates—foreigners, but also women and children—on pain of death. The relatively abstract nature of such representations made them particularly appropriate symbols, concrete manifestations of an abstract idea, just as the flag represented the nation; indeed, Durkheim noted, the "totem is the flag of the clan" (p. 222).
More generally, the totem represented a sacred force of energy that Durkheim (borrowing a term from other Melanesian and Polynesian peoples for lack of an appropriate Australian word) named mana. This force, external to the individual but in which he also participated, was nothing else but society itself, Durkheim argued. Ultimately, the sacred was not only social but also the very form in which society represented itself to its members.
The Ambiguity of the Sacred
The sacred was not in any simpleminded way reducible to "the good." Mourning rituals pointed the way to another dimension of the sacred, connected with "[any] misfortune, anything that is ominous, and anything that motivates feelings of disquiet or fear" (p. 392). The domain of the sacred also included "evil and impure powers, bringers of disorder, causes of death and sickness, instigators of sacrilege" (p. 412). Just as the sacred and the profane could be defined only in terms of one another, so the pure and the impure constituted two inextricably linked modalities of sacredness. After all, both holy and polluting things need to be kept separate from the profane realm of everyday reality.
In some cases, Durkheim suggested that the same object could easily pass from one state to another. The impurely sacred, according to Durkheim, was necessary in order to represent inevitable negative facets of social reality. "[The] two poles of religious life correspond to the two opposite states through which all social life passes. There is the same contrast between the lucky and the unlucky sacred as between the states of collective euphoria and dysphoria" (p. 417).
Durkheim's Critics
Despite the profound influence of Durkheim on the structural-functionalist school of British anthropology, many of its practitioners were highly critical of the pertinence of his antithesis between sacred and profane. E. E. Evans-Pritchard proposed "a test of this sort of formulation …: whether it can be broken down into problems which permit testing by observation in field research, or can at least aid in a classification of the observed facts. I have never found that the dichotomy of sacred and profane was of much use for either purpose" (p. 65). Specifically, British anthropologists challenged its applicability to the real-life situations they observed in the course of field research.
Evans-Pritchard argued that among the Azande of central Africa, sacredness might be situational. Shrines erected for the purposes of ancestor worship in the middle of a compound might serve as a focus of ritual offerings on some occasions but on others, might be a convenient place for resting spears. W. E. H. Stanner found that the distinction was impossible to apply unambiguously in studying Australian religion, the very example on which it was ostensibly based. Jack Goody noted that many societies have no words that translate as sacred or profane and that ultimately, just like the distinction between natural and supernatural, it was very much a product of European religious thought rather than a universally applicable criterion.
Sacred and Profane since Durkheim
The American anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, after conducting ethnographic research in Australia, turned in the 1930s to field work in a New England town that he called "Yankee City." He published a series of monographs about American life through the lens of a small town, the last of which, The Living and the Dead (1959), focused on symbols and symbolism. The central chapter of the book, the one that most closely reflects the title of the book, was an analysis of Memorial Day rites, which "are a modern cult of the dead and conform to Durkheim's definition of sacred collective representations" (p. 278). These rites transcended the division of the community in terms of class, ethnicity, and religion, uniting it around sacred symbols, including the cemetery, and national heroes—Lincoln, Washington, the Unknown Soldier. "The graves of the dead are the most powerful of the visible emblems which unify all the activities of the separate groups of the community," whereas the celebration of the deaths of men who sacrificed their lives for their country "become powerful sacred symbols which organized, direct, and constantly revive the collective ideals of the community and the nation" (p. 279).
The sociologist Robert Bellah explicitly built on Warner's analysis of Memorial Day rites to elaborate a concept of "American civil religion"—"a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity" (p. 10). Examining various presidential addresses on ceremonial occasions, from the founding father down to Lyndon Johnson, he notes the strategic invocation of "God" and the complete absence of mentions of "Christ," which he argued signaled the transcendent, sacred nature of the nation while acknowledging the separation of church and state by avoiding references to any particular institutionalized religious faith. Ultimately, these analyses of American civil religion developed the analogies that Durkheim had suggested by stressing the identity of "flag" and "totem" and demonstrated the extent to which this conception of the sacred could not be opposed in any straightforward way to the secular.
More than any other contemporary anthropologists, Mary Douglas has made Durkheim's distinction between sacred and profane a central focus of her work. In Purity and Danger (1966), she proposed a sweeping cross-cultural analysis of rules concerning purity and pollution that stressed Durkheim's central thesis that religious ideas depended on the active separation of antithetical domains, a separation that in turn implied a system of classification. The central premise of her analysis
Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) was the founder of academic sociology in France and a thinker whose contribution to the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology, continues to be fundamental. Born into a family of rabbis in Lorraine, he studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where his fellow students included the future philosopher Henri Bergson and Jean Jaurès, who was to become the leader of the Socialist Party. Philosophy was (and remains) a central focus of the humanities in France; Durkheim's first concern was to establish sociology as a legitimate branch. Consequently, his doctoral thesis and first major work, The Division of Labor in Society, published in 1893, sought to establish a "science of ethics."
The idea of looking for morality in the division of labor was startling, especially in light of the Marxist convictions of Durkheim's socialist friends. With equal daring, Durkheim suggested that such moral principles were reflected in the different types of law, repressive (criminal) and restitutive (civil). Repressive law rested on shared social understandings of "crime" morality, a domain Durkheim labeled the "conscience collective," which can be translated either as "collective consciousness" or "collective conscience." The moral underpinnings of such understandings amounted to "mechanical solidarity," the recognition of essential likeness between fellow members of a society. The increasing scope of the division of labor gave rise to a higher form of "organic" solidarity, reflecting complementarity rather than likeness. Ideally, organic solidarity was expressed by restitutive law stipulating reciprocal rights and obligations and redressing imbalances rather than punishing crimes. Durkheim was acutely aware of the gap between law and justice in modern society, a gap that he named "anomie," the absence of rules or norms. In his view, the economic aspects of the division of labor had temporarily outpaced the development of law and morality.
Two years later, in 1895, he published The Rules of Sociological Method, in which he insisted that "social facts," "ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individuals, and endowed with a power of coercion, by which they control him" (p. 3), could be explained only in social terms and were not reducible to biological or psychological explanations. In 1897 he published Suicide as a dramatic demonstration of the power of his methods; after all, the decision to take one's own life seemed a matter of individual psychology. However, he persuasively argued that psychological, biological, or climactic theories could not explain differences in suicide rates. For example, Protestants were more suicide-prone than Catholics, recently widowed men more so than women; suicide rates climbed during economic depressions and dropped in periods of revolutionary upheaval. Different types of suicide could be classified with respect to two axes: one in terms of the individual's commitment to social norms and the other in terms of the extent to which such norms were available to guide the individual in particular situations.
In 1896 Durkheim founded a journal, the Année Sociologique, which served as a forum not only for his own ideas but also for those of a growing number of brilliant pupils, including his nephew, Marcel Mauss. In 1912 he published his last book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life; in it, he used Australian totemism as his central case on the grounds that native Australians were the simplest society known to humanity and that their religion was consequently free from confusing accretions. In stark contrast to his predecessors, nineteenth-century theorists of social evolution such as E. B. Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, and James Frazer, Durkheim did not use the Australians to demonstrate how far European society had evolved but rather as a means of uncovering universal features of religion and society that we share with them.
As a native of Lorraine, which was annexed by Germany in 1871, Durkheim enthusiastically supported the cause of France in World War I, with tragic consequences. His only son and most of his students died at the front, and he died a broken man in 1917.
was that "dirt is essentially disorder" (p. 12). For this reason, anomalous persons or animals, those that did not fit neatly into preconceived, socially determined categories, were especially powerful or dangerous. Seen in this light, European-American preoccupations with hygiene were not qualitatively different from non-European anxieties about ritual pollution. Such preoccupations with the maintenance of order and the separation of antithetical categories were intimately related to the perpetuation of social boundaries between insiders and outsiders.
Most recently, Durkheim's concepts have reappeared in a heated debate between anthropologists as to whether Captain James Cook, who arrived in the Hawaiian islands in 1778 and was killed by native Hawaiians in 1779, was really considered by his killers to be an avatar of the god Lono. Marshall Sahlins, in Islands of History (1985), asserted that Cook's murder was a direct outgrowth of his deification. Sahlin's analysis centered on the opposition between the god Lono, "associated with natural growth and human reproduction who annually returns to the islands with the fertilizing rains of winter" (p. 105) and the god Ku, associated with kingship, warfare, and human sacrifice.
Each year, the Makahiki festival celebrated the arrival of Lono along with the rains, his journey throughout the islands, and his departure/death, marked by the resumption of human sacrifice to the god Ku. The arrival of Cook in Hawaii, his journey around the island, and his departure all coincided with the ritual trajectory of the god Lono, with whom, Sahlins argued, Cook was literally identified, particularly by the priests of Lono. Disaster struck when, after his departure, Cook was obliged to return to Hawaii. The arrival of "Lono" at the wrong time and from the wrong direction was precisely a violation of rules of separation of antithetical categories, a direct threat to the god Ku and the king, who promptly had Cook killed. "Cook was transformed from the divine beneficiary of the sacrifice to its victim—a change never really radical in Polynesian thought, and in their royal combats always possible" (p. 106).
This analysis has been challenged by Gananath Obeyesekere, who has argued that such accounts of the deification of explorers like Cook were part of European imperial mythologizing rather than "native" thought. Advocating an approach derived from the sociology of Max Weber and emphasizing "practical rationality," he has suggested that Cook's death be interpreted more prosaically in terms of factional power struggles in Hawaii. Sahlins, it must be noted, carefully avoid the assertion that all Hawaiians accepted that Cook was a god. Rather, his point was that the historical events could be understood only in terms of the framework of Hawaiian ideas about the sacred, ideals that revolved around the classification of the social and the physical world in terms of one another, where the mixture of antithetical categories generated either great power or danger.
The debate shows clearly that Durkheim's distinction between sacred and profane continues to inform anthropological analyses of religion (as well as of ostensibly secular ideologies) but also that such approaches continue to be challenged and contested, and that the relevance of such distinctions is far from universally accepted.
See also Animism ; Polytheism ; Secularization and Secularism ; Superstition ; Untouchability: Taboos .
bibliography
Bellah, Robert N. "Civil Religion in America." In Religion in America, edited by William G. McLoughlin and Robert N. Bellah, 3–23. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.
Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labor in Society. Translated by George Simpson. New York: Macmillan, 1933.
———. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen Fields. New York: Free Press, 1995.
———. The Rules of Sociological Method. Translated by Sarah A. Solovay and John H. Mueller; edited by George E. G. Catlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938.
———. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson; edited, with an introduction, by George Simpson. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.
Goody, J. R. "Religion and Ritual: The Definitional Problem." British Journal of Sociology 12, no. 2 (1961): 142–164.
Lukes, Steven. Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, a Historical and Critical Study. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Translated by John W. Harvey. Rev. ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1936.
Sahlins, Marshall. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Stanner, W. E. H. "Reflections of Durkheim and Aboriginal Religion." In Social Organization: Essays Presented to Raymond Firth, edited by Maurice Freedman, 217–240. London: Cass, 1967.
Warner, W. Lloyd. The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959.
Robert Launay
Sacred and Profane
SACRED AND PROFANE
The distinction between the sacred and the profane is of prime importance in all religions. Here the nature of these two concepts will be considered, first from the viewpoint of comparative religion, and then as understood in the Bible.
In Comparative Religion. The sacred may be defined most easily as the opposite of the profane, but it must be kept in mind that this distinction is not applicable in the same way in all cultures and stages of culture. Yet even when all necessary attention has been given to cultural elements special to time and place, it is still evident that man, in respect to the phenomenon of religion, exhibits a kind of psychic reaction that is ambivalent. He feels himself drawn to the sacred and, at the same time, he regards the sacred as awe-inspiring or frightening mystery (cf., e.g., Ex 3.5; Lk 5.8). Accordingly, since R. Otto, the sacred has been called a mysterium fascinans and mysterium tremendum. The rites in the various religions recognize this ambivalence, since they are at once expressions of awe and precautionary measures. Encounter with the sacred is dangerous, and the mingling of the sacred and the profane is avoided everywhere.
Religion as the oldest and most universal phenomenon of mankind is intelligible and explicable only if it is conceived as a reaction of man to a call of the sacred previously made to him. The sacred in the full sense of the word is God. Man understands the sacred as the "wholly Other," and therefore he recognizes himself as a creature dependent and prepared for subjection. At the same time, on the basis of his consciousness of his personality, he feels himself impelled to domination and to initiative action. Man is aware of the sacred, because it manifests itself, appearing in various objects (hierophany), e.g., the firmament, stars, water, trees, vegetation, and stones. These objects are never worshiped in themselves, but always because the sacred reveals itself in them. The sacred stone remains a stone, but through a hierophany it is changed into a supernatural reality for the homo religiosus.
The experience of the sacred is independent of the nature of the object in which it manifests itself, because this experience does not signify a subjective disposition through which the sacred is projected into the objects concerned. The sacred space or area is designated by a hierophany or a theophany (Jgs 6.24–26; 2 Sm 24.16–25) and must be separated from amorphous profane space (Gn 28.17; Ez 42.20). Sacred time is homogeneous, and profane time, heterogeneous. Accordingly, religious feasts can be repeated at any time and frequently, and their mystery can always be represented again or reenacted. The liturgy of Good Friday, for example, makes possible a participation in the event of the first Good Friday. Christianity differs from all other religions in its evaluation of the sacred. For the Christian there are close connections between sacred and good, religion and morality, God and love. He knows no ambivalent attitude toward the sacred. Vacillation between fear and love has its source only in the conscience of the individual; the fear of God signifies reverence exclusively, and not an existential anxiety.
The sacred has a thoroughly personal character, for the sacredness of objects, places, and actions is constituted by their concrete relation to sacred persons, and ultimately, always to God.
Bibliography: r. otto, The Idea of the Holy, tr. j. w. harvey (2d ed. New York 1958). m. eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, tr. w. r. trask (New York 1959); Patterns in Comparative Religion, tr. r. sheed (New York 1958) 1–37. r. caillois, L'Homme et le Sacré (2d ed. Paris 1953). b. hÄring, Das Heilige und das Gute (Freiburg 1950). o. schilling, Das Heilige und Gute im A.T. (Leipzig 1956). j. dillersberger, Das Heilige im N.T. (Kufstein 1926).
[w. j. kornfeld]
In the Bible. The original Hebrew word expressed by holy or sacred is qādôš (holy; qōdeš, holiness), with the general meaning of separated or removed from the profane or unclean and destined for God's service. Profane (ḥōl ) is derived from a root that means permissible for ordinary use. Thus the profane is accessible to all, whereas the sacred is removed from common use.
According to Lv 10.10, priests are to distinguish between sacred and profane, clean and unclean. A person or thing is sacred according to its proximity to Yahweh Himself. Unlike other religions, the OT religion proposes Yahweh as "the holy One of Israel." He is the entirely Other, superior to all, inaccessible to the created world (1 Sm 6.20). The angels are the holy ones of God's court, reserved for His service. Priests who serve His sanctuary are holy (Lv ch. 21).
To be sacred is, in an active sense, to keep oneself free from impurities, and passively, to be set apart as something to be revered. The priest's clothing is sacred (Ex 28.43; Nm 8.7; Ex 29.29; 31.10). The priest's offering is sacred (Lv 6.10–11). Such sacredness is a "state" or "condition" from which men emerge to reenter normal life.
Israel as a nation is holy (Ex 19.5) because Yahweh has chosen it to be "His own" (Lv 20.26; Dt 7.6; Jer 2.3). The land of Israel is holy because it is Yahweh's abode (Hos 8.1; 9.15; 4 Kgs 5.17; Zec 2.16; 2 Mc 1.7); Jerusalem and the Temple are holy (Is 52.1; 3 Kgs 9.3); the dwelling is approachable only by Levites (Nm 1.51); and the ark is untouchable (Lv 16.1–2). To approach the sanctuary or altar in an unclean state is to profane things sacred to Yahweh (Lv 21.23). Times also are sacred. Working on the Sabbath desecrates it (Ex 31.14; Ez 20.13).
The distinction between sacred and profane reaches God Himself. Yahweh is profaned when something sacred to Him or His holy name is profaned (Lv 22.2; Mal 1.12). His name is profaned by the sacrificing of children to Moloch (Lv 18.21) and by idolatry (Ez 20.40). Yahweh is depicted as profaning His heritage (Is 48.6), His sanctuary (Ez 24.21), and His holy gates (Is 43.28). Profane is used as synonymous with and parallel to unclean (Ez 22.26; Lv 10.10).
In the NT the ritualistic distinction between the profane and the sacred is abolished (Mk 7.15; Acts 10.15, 28; Rom 14.14). Christ (Mt 15.11–20) and His Spirit (Acts ch. 10–11) convinced the Apostles that what profanes man is moral impurity.
See Also: holiness (in the bible); pure and impure; sin (in the bible).
Bibliography: Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible, tr. and adap. by l. hartman (New York 1963), from a. van den born, Bijbels Woordenboek 1012–18; 1927–28. j. muilenburg, g. a. buttrick, ed., The Interpreters' Dictionary of the Bible, 4 v. (Nashville 1962) 2:616–625. l. e. toombs, ibid. 3:893.
[j. lachowski]
Sacred and profane
A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. The second element which thus finds a place in our definition is no less essential than the first; for by showing that the idea of religion is inseparable from that of the Church, it makes it clear that religion should be an eminently collective thing. (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912; tr. 1961), 52, 62 f.)
The human inclination to organize the experienced world in terms of this distinction (between sacred and profane) was taken much further in the development of structuralism, especially by Lévi-Strauss, since it was argued that the human mind is under an innate and universal obligation to perceive binary oppositions (up/down, male/female, night/day, etc.), not just in the case of the sacred and the profane, but in general. However, these classifications are bound to leave anomalous or ambiguous cases, so that religion is better understood by attending, not only to the classification systems, but also to the ways in which the anomalous is dealt with, since this will disclose why communities find some things abhorrent and others acceptable. This methodology was applied influentially by Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger, 1966), showing that ‘dirt’ as a concept leads to pollution rules which are not primarily concerned with hygiene. The binary opposition between wholeness (holiness) and imperfection (uncleanness) underlies the biblical laws concerning holiness: to be wholly attached to God brings blessing, to be removed from God brings a curse. Creatures designated as unclean according to the food laws are those which are anomalous or on a borderline between categories (e.g. if they are not clearly domesticated or wild, or belonging to air or sea). In Implicit Meanings (1975) she argued further that pollution beliefs (understood in this way) serve a social function, because they protect society at its most vulnerable points, where ambiguity would erode or undermine social structure.