Sunday, January 23, 2011

Eliade: Theopanies and Signs



The Last Judgment by Gislebertus exemplifies Eliades described threshold that separates the spaces of the profane and the religious. It is the boundary that distinguishes and opposes two worlds while at the same time represents the place where passage from the profane to the sacred is possible (Eliade 25).This essentially is the judgment place where God in the middle decides if you rise to heaven or sink to hell, as represented by the weighing of souls. This idea of judgment acting as a threshold to the entrance of the church stems from earlier times in Babylon, Egypt, and Israel.


Again this idea of profane space being separated from religious space is still prevalent in todays society. Such as the faith of catholicism. With the entrance into the church, one uses holy water and blesses themselves, symbolic of purifying themselves. It is representative of passage from one space to another, the church. For a believer, the church shares in a different space from the street in which it stands (Eliade 25). This is a concept in which to keep in mind when thinking of sacred space and its symbolic rituals. 

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