The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion was first published in German by Rowohlt in 1957 (Das Heilige und das Profane), translated into English by Willard R. Trask in 1959 (Harcourt, Brace). The book represents Eliade’s attempt to synthesize his life’s work in the history of religions into a single accessible volume — a distillation of the categories and patterns he had developed across thousands of pages of scholarship.
Eliade’s central thesis is that religious humanity (homo religiosus) experiences reality as divided into two modes: the sacred (hierophany — the manifestation of the holy in the world) and the profane (ordinary, undifferentiated, homogeneous experience). Sacred space is qualitatively different from profane space (a church is not merely a building; an axis mundi connects earth to heaven); sacred time is qualitatively different from profane time (ritual does not merely commemorate the past but re-creates it, making participants contemporary with mythical events).
The book covers four dimensions of sacred experience: sacred space (the consecration of territory, the symbolism of the center, the cosmic mountain), sacred time (myth as model, the ritual return to origins, the sacredness of nature’s cycles), the sacredness of nature (sky, water, earth, and vegetation as hierophanies), and human existence itself (the sacralization of birth, sexuality, death, and daily activities).
Eliade’s argument is that modern secular humanity has not merely rejected these categories but has lost the capacity to experience them — that “desacralization” is not liberation but impoverishment.
Collecting The Sacred and the Profane
First edition in German (Rowohlt, Hamburg, 1957): Paper wrappers.
First English edition (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1959): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First English edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- First German edition: $20–$50
- Signed copies (any edition): $80–$200