EMILE DURKHEIM’S CONCEPT OF THE SACRED & THE PROFANE:

The Sacred is ideal and transcends everyday existence; it is extra-ordinary potentially dangerous, awe-inspiring, fear inducing.
The sacred refers to things set apart by man including religious beliefs, rites, duties or anything socially defined as requiring special religious treatment.
Almost anything can be sacred: a god, a rock, a cross, the moon, the earth, a king, a tree, an animal or bird.
Once established as sacred they become symbols of religious beliefs, sentiments and pratices.
Eating the totemic animal or plant is usually forbidden and as a sacred object the totem is believed to have divine properties.

Émile Durkheim and Joseph Ward Swain. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology (George Allen & Unwin, 1915). 

The profane is the realm of routine experience.
The profane or ordinary or unholy embraces those ideas, persons, practices and things that are regarded with an everyday attitude of commonness, […]

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In religious traditions, the Sacred is perceived as The Holy.  And in some religions, the Holy is personal – GOD.  Rudolf Otto explores the perception and experience of the Holy.
The HOLY is at the same time (1) Numinous, (2) Mysterium Tremendum, et (3) Fascinans
The Holy as numinous:
•‘Numinous’ = numen (latin) = something that is perceived by the mind beyond the senses (beyond appearances).  Something that is known a priori (Kant).
•Hebrew: qadosh, Greek: hagios, Latin: sanctus/sacer = the absolute good – the wholly other!
•The experience of it is “ineffable – in the sense that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts” (Otto, 1950 p.5). The experience is of its own kind (sui generis).

•Creature-consciousness: what Schleiermacher called, ‘feeling of absolute dependence’. It not just a feeling but openly expressed, and experienced as the present, a numen praesens:
§Abraham pleading with God (Gen 18:27): “Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak […]

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Weber: WHAT IS CHARISM?
“a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader. . . . What alone is important is how the individual is actually regarded by those subject to charismatic authority by his followers or disciples.” (Weber 1947, 358–359).
CHARISMA & IRRATIONALITY:

Charisma exhibits a strangeness (unusual) and irrationality.
Status quo, institutional authority, bureaucratic authority seems very rational – usual and regular.
Charisma seems irregular and unsystematic.

LEGITIMIZATION OF CHARISM

Depending on the exceptional personal qualities or the demonstration of extraordinary insight the charismatic person gathers followers.  Thus s/he gathers a charismatic authority.
As the followers increase the charismatic authority gets […]

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LOSS OF SENSE OF SYMBOL: “One of the gravest problems of our day is the lack of commitment to common symbols… Ritual has become a bad word signifying empty conformity. We are witnessing a revolt against formalism, even against form… Shades of Luther! Shades of Reformation and its complaint against meaningless rituals, mechanical religion, Latin as the language of cult, mindless recitation of litanies.  We find ourselves, here and now, reliving a worldwide revolt against ritualism.”  M. Douglas,1970/2003, Natural symbols. London: Routledge Classics, p.1.
WHAT IS A SYMBOL?
•A Symbol is something that stands for something else.
•Some authors make a distinction between sign and symbol; others understand sign is representational (eg. green = go) and symbol is presentational (eg. the cross = suffering).
•Signs are arbitrary and functional, symbols are part of reality, evoke emotions, and are archetypal.
Eliade: Functions of Symbols
1.Symbols are capable of revealing a modality of the real or a condition of […]

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WHAT ARE MYTHS?
Myths are defined as tales believed as true, usually sacred, set in the distant past or other worlds or parts of the world, and with extra-human, inhuman, or heroic characters. William Bascom
Types of Myths:
•Origin Myths
•Hero Myths
•Myth of Fall
•Myth of “Eternal Return”
Joseph Campbell: Four Functions of myths

1.Myths elicit and support “a sense of awe before the mystery of being.” (Eliade: they mediate a religious experience).
2.They render a cosmology, an image of the universe that will support and be supported by this sense of awe ; it is different from scientific explanations.
3.Myths support the current social order, to integrate the individual organically with his group. (Eliade: myths demand a certain behaviour – Hero myths).
4.Myths initiate the individual into the order of realities of his own psyche, guiding him toward his own spiritual enrichment and realization.
Campbell, J. (1991). Occidental Mythology, pp. 519-21.
DOWNLOAD LECTURE NOTES IN PDF: 7 Phenomenology of Religious Myths

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