Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/270286
The Art of Manliness Continued JOBS for TEAMS | 16 www.jobsfor teams.com world: the sacred and the profane. This post will be much more esoteric and specifically religiously-oriented than the next, but it is impossible to discuss ritual without understanding its most basic underpinnings. While the sacred and profane are rooted in religion (and the lack thereof), as Mircea Eliade, the profes- sor who made these categories famous, wrote, "they are of concern both to the philosopher and to anyone seeking to dis- cover the possible dimensions of human existence." So pretty much everybody. The Sacred and the Profane We would argue that today's world often seems flat and one-dimensional because modern existence lacks a layer of the sacred and exists solely on the plane of the profane, i.e. secular, in a more religious term. For Eliade, the sacred and the profane constitute the "two modes of being in the world." The sacred represents fascinating and awe-inspiring mystery — a "manifestation of a wholly differ- ent order" from our natural (or profane) everyday lives. Traditionally, the religious man (and here we're really talking about those who live/d in pre-modern societ- ies) seeks to experience the sacred as much as possible, for he sees it as the realm of reality, the source of power, and that which is "saturated with being." For the religious man, the profane feels unreal, and leads to a state of "nonbeing." In contrast, the nonreligious man refuses any appeal to mystery or to the super- natural. As a humanist, he believes "man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacral- izes himself and the world." If you've ever felt a sense of "nonbeing," it may be because the modern world has become desacralized, or as Max Weber put it, "disenchanted." In a traditional so- ciety, all of man's vital functions not only had a practical purpose but could also po- tentially be transfigured into something charged with sacredness. Everything from eating to sex to work could "become a sacrament, that is, a communion with the sacred." In the modern world, such activi- ties have been desacralized; we live in a thoroughly profane world. While Eliade associated the religious man with the sacred and the nonreligious man with the profane, he argued that even "the most avowedly nonreligious man, still, in his deep being, shares in a religiously oriented behavior." What he meant was that even a man who doesn't believe in the supernatural realm experi- ences things like a wedding, a mountain top, or the birth of a baby as extra- ordinary. He still fills movies and books with the "mythical motifs — the fight between hero and monster, initiatory combats and ordeals, paradigmatic figures and images (the maiden, the hero, the paradisal landscape, hell, and so on)." The nonreligious man still seeks renewal and rebirth in different forms. Rather than sa- cred, however, he would call these things significant or special. If he seeks a life of greater texture, he has just as much need as the religious man to interpose such significant experiences with everyday life, and to seek to make such extra-ordinary events as distinct from his workaday world as possible. "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul." ~John Muir As an example, the famed naturalist John Muir believed in the sacred, religious beauty of nature. In fact some experts have theorized that he abandoned his Christian roots altogether and became solely a congregant of the church of na- ture. He turned away from the tradition- ally religious, and injected the spiritual, or sacred, into his own life, in his own way. He created ritual for himself by climb- JobsForTeams0314_manliness.indd 2 2/5/14 9:04 AM