Hierophany
The concept of hierophany , meaning “the appearance of the sacred in the profane”, was created by Mircea Eliade in 1949 in his treatise on the history of religions ( The religions and the sacred ). Eliade took the view that so-called holy apparitions go back to developments in early Indo-European shamanism that took place in ancient times .
Eliade points out that initiation into some mysteries should be equated with the techniques for gaining out- of -body experiences in shamanism. The hierophany was opposed by Eliade as a single phenomenon to symbolism : "While the hierophany includes discontinuity of religious experience [...], symbolism means the permanent connection of man with the sacred."
The term is derived from the word hierophant .
Web links
- Möde: Theology of Spirituality. (PDF file; 103 kB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mircea Eliade: The religions and the holy. P. 507.