Mircea Eliade

Picture:

a piece from Murillo's painting called Allegory of Charity.1655.

Reading Mircea Eliade's Chapter 1 from

The Sacred and the Profane. 1957:

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred

"OUR WORLD" IS ALWAYS SITUATED AT THE CENTER.

From all that has been said, it follows that the true world is always in the middle, at the Center, for it is here that there is a break in plane and hence communication among the three cosmic zones. Whatever the extent of the territory involved, the cosmos that it represents is always perfect. An entire country (e.g., Palestine), a city (Jerusalem), a sanctuary (the Temple in Jerusalem), all equally well present an imago mundi. Treating of the symbolism of the Temple, Flavius Josephus wrote that the court represented the sea (i.e., the lower regions), the Holy Place represented earth, and the Holy of Holies heaven (Ant. Jud., 111, 7, 7). It is clear, then, that both the imago mundi and the Center are repeated in the inhabited world. Palestine, Jerusalem, and the Temple severally and concurrently represent the image of the universe and the Center of the World. This multiplicity of centers and this reiteration of the image of the world on smaller and smaller scales constitute one of the specific characteristics of traditional societies.

To us, it seems an inescapable conclusion that the religious man sought to live as near as possible to the Center of the World. He knew that his country lay at the midpoint of the earth; he knew too that his city constituted the navel of the universe, and, above all, that the temple or the palace were veritably Centers of the World. But he also wanted his own house to be at the Center and to be an imago mundi. And, in fact, as we shall see, houses are held to be at the Center of the World and, on the microcosmic scale, to reproduce the universe. In other words, the man of traditional societies could only live in a space opening upward, where the break in plane was symbolically assured and hence communication with the other world, the transcendental world, was ritually possible. Of course, the sanctuary- the Center par excellence- was there, close to him, in the city, and he could be sure of communicating with the world of the gods by entering the temple.

But he felt the need to live at the Center always- like the Achilpa, who, as we saw, always carried the sacred pole, the axis mundi, with them, so that they should never be far from the Center and should remain in communication with the supraterrestrial world. In short, whatever the dimensions of the space with which he is familiar and in which he regards himself as situated -his country, his city, his village, his house- religious man feels the need always to exist in a total and organized world, in a cosmos.

A universe comes to birth from its center; it spreads out from a central point that is, as it were, its navel. It is in this way that, according to the Rig Veda (X, 1491, the universe was born -and developed- from a core, a central point. Hebrew tradition is still more explicit: "The Most Holy One created the world like an embryo. As the embryo grows from the navel, so God began to create the world by the navel and from there it spread out in all directions." And since the "navel of the earth," the Center of the World, is the Holy Land, the Yoma affirms that "the world was created beginning with Zion."

Rabbi ben Gorion said of the rock of Jerusalem: "it is called the Foundation Stone of the Earth, that is, the navel of the Earth, because it is from there that the whole Earth unfolded."

Then too, because the creation of man is a replica of the cosmogony, it follows that the first man was fashioned at the "navel of the earth" or in Jerusalem (Judaeo-Christian traditions). It could not be if we remember that the Center is precisely the place where a break in plane occurs, where space becomes sacred, hence preeminently real. A creation implies a superabundance of reality, in other words an irruption of the sacred into the world.

It follows that every construction or fabrication has the cosmogony as paradigmatic model. The creation of the world becomes the archetype of every creative human gesture, whatever its plane of reference may be.

We have already seen that settling in a territory reiterates the cosmogony. Now that the cosmogonic value of the Center has become clear, we can still better understand why every human establishment repeats the creation of the world from a central point (the navel).

Just as the universe unfolds from a center and stretches out toward the four cardinal points, the village comes into existence around an intersection. In Bali, as in some parts of Asia, when a new village is to be built the people look for a natural intersection, where two roads cross at right angles.

A square constructed from a central point is an imago mundi. The division of the village into four sections -which incidentally implies a similar division of the community- corresponds to the division of the universe into four horizons. A space is often left empty in the middle of the village; there the ceremonial house "it'll later be built, with its roof symbolically representing heaven (in some cases, heaven is indicated by the top of a tree or by the image of a mountain). At the other end of the same perpendicular axis lies the world of the dead, symbolized by certain animals (snake, crocodile, etc.) or by ideograms expressing darkness.

The cosmic symbolism of the village is repeated in the structure of the sanctuary or the ceremonial house. At Waropen, in New Guinea, the "men's house" stands at the center of the village; its roof represents the celestial vault, the four walls correspond to the four directions of space. In Ceram, the sacred stone of the village symbolizes heaven and the four stone columns that support it incarnate the four pillars that support heaven.

Similar conceptions are found among the Algonquins and the Sioux. Their sacred lodge, where initiations are performed, represents the universe. The roof symbolizes the dome of the sky, the floor represents earth, the four walls the four directions of cosmic space. The ritual construction of the space is emphasized by a threefold symbolism: the four doors, the four windows, and the four colors signify the four cardinal points. The construction of the sacred lodge thus repeats the cosmogony, for the lodge represents the world. We are not surprised to find a similar concept in ancient Italy and among the ancient Germans.

In short, the underlying idea is both archaic and widely disseminated: from a center, the four horizons are projected in the four cardinal directions. The Roman mundus was a circular trench divided into four parts; it was at once the image of the cosmos and the paradigmatic model for the human habitation. It has been rightly proposed that Roma quadrata is to be understood not as being square in shape but as being divided into four parts.

The mundus was clearly assimilated to the omphalos, to the navel of the earth; the city (urbs) was situated in the middle of the orbis terrarum. Similar ideas have been shown to explain the structure of Germanic villages and towns. In extremely varied cultural contexts, we constantly find the same cosmological schema and the same ritual scenario: settling in a territory is equivalent to founding a world.

EXERCISE after reading:

After reading this text, send me a Word.doc to my email with a review on the topic explaining the main points you've learned from Mircea Eliade. You can add pictures to your text.

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