The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, The Nature of Religion, translated by Willard R. Trask and published by Harcourt, Brace and World in 1957, argues that religious experience across cultures centers on a fundamental distinction between sacred space and time, set apart and charged with meaning, and ordinary profane space and time, a framework Eliade built from comparative examples spanning many unrelated traditions. Eliade was among the twentieth century's most influential historians of religion and this book helped establish sacred and profane as working categories still used across the field. Its strength is the accessibility and reach of the comparative framework it lays out. Its limit is Eliade's own comparative method, drawing selected examples from many different cultures to support one universal pattern, an approach later historians of religion have substantially criticized for flattening genuine differences between traditions, so a claim about how a specific culture actually experienced sacred space needs that culture's own record, not Eliade's synthesis alone.