The Construction Of The Profane: The Sacred And Profane

The Sacred and Profane, by Mircea Eliade, divides and distinguishes the world into two existential situations: the sacred and the profane. Eliade describes the sacred as, “always manifesting itself as a reality of a wholly different order from ‘natural’ realities” (10) and inversely describes profane as the “opposite” of the sacred. The sacred involves a level of creation and organization while the profane is in an essence chaotic and disorganized. Eliade also made it apparent that the division between sacred and profane, can also be divided into sacred space and time and profane space and time. Eliade’s idea of creating sacred space involved recreating a primordial act of the divine. “The transformation of the chaos into cosmos by the divine act of creation,” connects sacred and profane time by commemorating the moment at which the sacred space was created through the chaos (31). Through the analysis of The Sacred and the Profane, I will distinguish features of Middle and late Byzantine architecture that have connections to sacred and profane space, as well as discuss other aspects of Eliade’s claims that are most relevant to this time period and to me. Middle and late Byzantine architecture created a foundation for a lot of central buildings that are still being visited today. Other buildings of relevance, such as the
Each building was created with a sacred significance, regardless if it had divine faces, human faces, or trees and vines to hide faces, because overall the purpose was to show significance of a ruler or a higher power. These buildings also showed unification and sacredness throughout the central cities they were built