Building Religions 2: Mircea Eliade

Building Religions 2: Mircea Eliade

There's a lot that can be pulled out of Eliade's work. He was a major influence on the field of comparative religion, and even now, anyone dealing with that field at least has to reckon with his theories even if they don't agree with them. For these little bits of writing, though, I'm not so concerned with whether or not a particular theorist is right in their ideas; just with what it would look like if they were applied to worldbuilding.



The Myth of the Eternal Return is a nice, short book to pick up if you want to get his theories on religious approaches to space and time. To understand either of those, though, you have to start with the sacred. Eliade's a bit coy about exactly what he means by 'the sacred,' which has given him a reputation as a crypto-theologian who's just substituted a generic term in place of 'God,' but he seems to use it to represent meaningful reality that only occasionally manifests in our own mundane lives. This manifestation, he calls a hierophany.

Certain objects, people, or natural phenomena can act as hierophanies, at which point they are set apart from the rest of profane existence and treated with religious respect. (The word 'sacred' has this notion of separation built into it. One of its likely etymologies, running back to Proto Indo-European, links it to separating, cutting: the same root from which we get the words 'section' and 'sex.') For Eliade, some phenomena are inherently more likely to be vessels for manifestations of the sacred than others, which is why he finds common patterns in religious symbolism worldwide. Mountains, for example, are well-suited as manifestations of the axis mundi, the point linking human and divine worlds, so it's easy to find sacred mountains playing that role anywhere you look. Moreover, when we can't be close to these manifestations ourselves, we create imitations of them, so sacred mountains become pyramids, temples, or palaces that at least offer us an echo of the same sacrality.

With regard to time, Eliade argues that sacred time is the only meaningful time. As humans, we recognize the difference between our daily lives and the eternal reality of sacred time, so we try to take part in that time through repetition: that is, we celebrate holy days and festivals to attempt to recapture a sacred moment. The celebration of Easter (and Holy Week before it) is an easy example of this -- a set of ritual observances that re-tell and re-enact a set of historical events for the purpose of allowing participants to "be there" vicariously. By doing so, they anchor themselves in the sacred and temporarily escape from history itself.

Taking this general idea -- that we reconstruct hierophanies artificially in space or in time so as to give our lives some significance -- you can start to play with Eliade's theories in your own worldbuilding. First, his theories work best in a setting where there is some sort of real sacred force that draws people to recognize it in various manifestations. Second, they lend themselves well to settings in which these different manifestations, while they may vary in details, are all aspects of a limited number of archetypes: there might be different names for storm gods in different cultures, but ultimately, they're all the same entity. Religious symbolism should translate fairly smoothly across cultures, so that a mountain always represents an axis mundi, the moon always means regeneration, and the sun always means rulership and power. (If you want Eliade's full rundown on religious symbols, read his lengthy and somewhat tedious Patterns in Comparative Religion.)