SACRED AND PROFANE IN MIRCEA ELIADE'S THEORY - ALEXIS KARPOUZOS

Sacred and Profane in Mircea Eliade’s Theory

Alexis Karpouzos

Mircea Eliade’s distinction between the sacred and the profane constitutes one of the most influential paradigms in the phenomenology of religion. Within this framework, the sacred emerges not merely as a religious category but as a fundamental structure of human consciousness—an ontological mode through which reality is revealed, ordered, and experienced. In contrast, the profane represents the homogeneous, desacralized space of modern existence, characterized by fragmentation, historical contingency, and existential disorientation. In the research perspective of Alexis Karpouzos, Eliade’s theory is approached as a metaphysical anthropology that transcends historical religion and touches the deeper symbolic architecture of being. The sacred, manifested through hierophanies, interrupts profane time and space, revealing a transhistorical dimension where meaning, origin, and cosmic order converge. These manifestations are not symbolic projections but ontological disclosures—events in which Being itself becomes visible to human awareness.

Karpouzos emphasizes that Eliade’s sacred is inseparable from the experience of cosmic participation. Sacred space establishes a center—an axis mundi—through which the individual aligns with the structure of the cosmos, while sacred time re-enacts mythical origins, allowing human existence to be regenerated through eternal return. In this sense, the sacred functions as a bridge between finitude and transcendence, history and eternity.

Against the background of modernity’s desacralization, this research explores the loss of symbolic consciousness and the eclipse of metaphysical meaning. Yet, following Eliade’s intuition, Karpouzos suggests that the sacred never disappears; it withdraws, disguises itself, and re-emerges in altered forms—through art, philosophy, science, and inner experience. The task of contemporary thought is not to restore archaic religion but to reawaken the latent sacred dimension embedded within human consciousness and the structure of the universe itself. Thus, the sacred–profane polarity is not a rigid dualism but a dynamic tension that defines the human condition. Through Eliade’s vision, reinterpreted in Karpouzos’ cosmological and philosophical horizon, the sacred becomes a call toward ontological awakening—a return to a unified vision of reality where meaning, being, and consciousness are once again inseparable.