The Sacred and the Profane

Landmark work by Mircea Eliade (1957 in French, 1959 in English) articulating the fundamental distinction between sacred and profane space, time, and experience; argues that the sacred irrupts into ordinary reality through hierophanies and that humans are irreducibly homo religiosus.

Established the theoretical framework of sacred vs. profane as the organizing binary of religious experience; introduced the concept of the hierophany (the manifestation of the sacred) and axis mundi; argued that even secular modernity carries cryptic religious structures.