''Profanum'' is the
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
word for "profane". The state of being profane, or "profanity," refers to a lack of respect for things that are held to be
sacred
Sacred describes something that is dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity; is considered worthy of spiritual respect or devotion; or inspires awe or reverence among believers. The property is often ascribed to objects (a ...
, which implies anything inspiring or deserving of
reverence, as well as
behaviour showing similar disrespect or causing
religious offense
Religious offense is any action which offends religious sensibilities and arouses serious negative emotions in people with strong belief.
Causes
Different religions are sensitive to different things in different measure, particularly such to ...
.
The distinction between the sacred and the profane was considered by
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim ( or ; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, al ...
to be central to the social reality of human
religion
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, ...
.
Etymology
The term ''profane'' originates from classical Latin ''profanus'', literally "before (outside) the temple", "pro" being outside and "fanum" being temple or sanctuary. It carried the meaning of either "desecrating what is holy" or "with a secular purpose" as early as the 1450s. Profanity represented secular indifference to religion or religious figures, while
blasphemy
Blasphemy is a speech crime and religious crime usually defined as an utterance that shows contempt, disrespects or insults a deity, an object considered sacred or something considered inviolable. Some religions regard blasphemy as a religiou ...
was a more offensive attack on religion and religious figures, considered
sin
In a religious context, sin is a transgression against divine law. Each culture has its own interpretation of what it means to commit a sin. While sins are generally considered actions, any thought, word, or act considered immoral, selfish, s ...
ful, and a direct violation of
The Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments ( Biblical Hebrew עשרת הדברים \ עֲשֶׂרֶת הַדְּבָרִים, ''aséret ha-dvarím'', lit. The Decalogue, The Ten Words, cf. Mishnaic Hebrew עשרת הדיברות \ עֲשֶׂרֶת הַדִּבְ ...
. Moreover, many
Bible verses speak against swearing.
In some countries, profanity words often have
Pagan
Paganism (from classical Latin ''pāgānus'' "rural", "rustic", later "civilian") is a term first used in the fourth century by early Christians for people in the Roman Empire who practiced polytheism, or ethnic religions other than Judaism. ...
roots that after
Christian
Christians () are people who follow or adhere to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. The words ''Christ'' and ''Christian'' derive from the Koine Greek title ''Christós'' (Χρι ...
influence were turned from names of deities and spirits to profanity and used as such, like famous
Finnish profanity
Profanity in Finnish is used in the form of intensifiers, adjectives, adverbs and particles. There is also an aggressive mood that involves omission of the negative verb ' while implying its meaning with a swear word.Eero Voutilainen. ''.'' K ...
word ''
perkele'', which was believed to be an original name of the thunder god
Ukko
Ukko (), Äijä or Äijö ( Finnish for 'male grandparent', 'grandfather', 'old man'), parallel to Uku in Estonian mythology, is the god of the sky, weather, harvest and thunder in Finnish mythology.
Ukkonen, the Finnish word for thunder, ...
, the chief god of the
Finnish pagan pantheon.
Profanities, in the original meaning of ''blasphemous profanity'', are part of the ancient tradition of the comic cults which laughed and scoffed at the deity or deities: an example of this would be Lucian's ''
Dialogues of the Gods
''Dialogues of the Gods'' ( grc, Θεῶν Διάλογοι) are 25 miniature dialogues mocking the Homeric conception of the Greek gods written in the Attic Greek dialect by the Greek author Lucian of Samosata. There are 25 dialogues in total. ...
'' satire.
Sacred-profane dichotomy
The sacred-profane dichotomy is a concept posited by the French
sociologist Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim ( or ; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, al ...
, who considered it to be the central characteristic of
religion
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, ...
: "religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to ''sacred things'', that is to say, things set apart and forbidden." In Durkheim's theory, the
sacred
Sacred describes something that is dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity; is considered worthy of spiritual respect or devotion; or inspires awe or reverence among believers. The property is often ascribed to objects (a ...
represents the interests of the group, especially unity, which were embodied in sacred group symbols, or
totems
A totem (from oj, ᑑᑌᒼ, italics=no or ''doodem'') is a spirit being, sacred object, or symbol that serves as an emblem of a group of people, such as a family, clan, lineage, or tribe, such as in the Anishinaabe clan system.
While ''the wo ...
. The profane, however, involves mundane individual concerns. Durkheim explicitly stated that the sacred–profane dichotomy is not equivalent to
good-evil, as the sacred could be either good or evil, and the profane could be either as well.
Durkheim's claim of the universality of this dichotomy for all religions and
cult
In modern English, ''cult'' is usually a pejorative term for a social group that is defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals, or its common interest in a particular personality, object, or goal. This ...
s has been criticized by scholars such as the British
anthropologist
An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...
Jack Goody. Goody also noted that "many societies have no words that translate as sacred or profane and that ultimately, just like the distinction between natural and supernatural, it was very much a product of European religious thought rather than a universally applicable criterion." According to
Tomoko Masuzawa
Tomoko Masuzawa is professor emerita of comparative literature and history at the University of Michigan. In 1979, she received her MA in religious studies at Yale University
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, ...
any
cosmology
Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount (lexicographer), Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in ...
without a sacred–profane binary was rendered invisible by the field of
religious studies, privileging
Christianity
Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the world's largest and most widespread religion with roughly 2.38 billion followers representing one-third of the global pop ...
at the expense of non-Christian systems because the binary was supposed to be "universal",
The profane world consists of all that people can know through their senses; it is the natural world of everyday life that people experience as either comprehensible or at least ultimately knowable — the ''
Lebenswelt
Lifeworld (or life-world) (german: Lebenswelt) may be conceived as a universe of what is self-evident or given, a world that subjects may experience together. The concept was popularized by Edmund Husserl, who emphasized its role as the ground o ...
'' or lifeworld.
In contrast, the sacred, or ''sacrum'' in Latin, encompasses all that exists beyond the everyday, natural world that people experience with their senses. As such, the sacred or
numinous
Numinous () is a term derived from the Latin ''numen'', meaning "arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring."Collins English Dictionary -7th ed. - 2005 The term was given its present sense by the German theologian and ph ...
can inspire feelings of awe, because it is regarded as ultimately unknowable and beyond limited human abilities to perceive and comprehend. Durkheim pointed out however that there are degrees of sacredness, so that an
amulet
An amulet, also known as a good luck charm or phylactery, is an object believed to confer protection upon its possessor. The word "amulet" comes from the Latin word amuletum, which Pliny's ''Natural History'' describes as "an object that protects ...
for example may be sacred yet little respected.
Transitions
Rites of passage
A rite of passage is a ceremony or ritual of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another. It involves a significant change of status in society. In cultural anthropology the term is the Anglicisation of ''rite ...
represent movements from one state — the profane – to the other, the sacred; or back again to the profanum.
Religion is organized primarily around the sacred elements of human life and provides a collective attempt to bridge the gap between the sacred and the profane.
Profane progress
Modernization and the
Enlightenment project have led to a
secularisation
In sociology, secularization (or secularisation) is the transformation of a society from close identification with religious values and institutions toward non-religious values and secular institutions. The ''secularization thesis'' expresses the ...
of culture over the past few centuries – an extension of the profanum at the (often explicit) expense of the sacred. The predominant 21st-century global worldview is as a result empirical, sensate, contractual, this-worldly – in short profane.
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philo ...
expressed the same thought more subjectively when he wrote that "I know – and here I am expressing what countless other people know – that the present time is the time of God's disappearance and death".
Counter reaction
The advance of the profane has led to several countermovements, attempting to limit the scope of the profanum.
Modernism
Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...
set out to bring
myth
Myth is a folklore genre consisting of Narrative, narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or Origin myth, origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not Objectivity (philosophy), ...
and a sense of the sacred back into secular reality —
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance compa ...
speaking for much of the movement when he wrote that "if nothing was divine then all things were, the world itself".
Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism is a tendency among certain groups and individuals that is characterized by the application of a strict literal interpretation to scriptures, dogmas, or ideologies, along with a strong belief in the importance of distinguish ...
– Christian, Muslim, or other – set its face against the profanum with a return to sacred writ.
Psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...
too has set out to protect the
boundaries of the individual self from profane intrusion, establishing ritual places for inward work in opposition to the
postmodern loss of privacy.
Cultural examples
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney (; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. considered that "the desacralizing of space is something that my generation experienced in all kinds of ways".
[Denis O'Driscoll, ''Stepping Stones'' (2008) p. 309]
See also
References
Further reading
*
Ernest Gellner
Ernest André Gellner FRAI (9 December 1925 – 5 November 1995) was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist described by ''The Daily Telegraph'', when he died, as one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals, and by ''The Ind ...
, ''Postmodernism, Reason and Religion'' (1992)
*
Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade (; – April 22, 1986) was a Romanians, Romanian History of religion, historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who establ ...
, ''Patterns in Comparative Religion'' (1993)
* Acquaviva, S. S., and Patricia Lipscomb. ''The Decline of the Sacred in Industrial Society''. (Review: ).
*
Bakhtin, Mikhail
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin ( ; rus, Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н, , mʲɪxɐˈil mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪdʑ bɐxˈtʲin; – 7 March 1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic and scholar who worked on literary the ...
.
9411993 ''
Rabelais and His World
''Rabelais and His World'' (Russian: Творчество Франсуа Рабле и народная культура средневековья и Ренессанса, ''Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaja kul'tura srednevekov'ja i Renessan ...
'', translated by
H. Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
* Barber, C. Renate. 1965. "Sacred and Profane: Some Thoughts on the Folk-Urban Continuum of This Dichotomy." ''
Man
A man is an adult male human. Prior to adulthood, a male human is referred to as a boy (a male child or adolescent). Like most other male mammals, a man's genome usually inherits an X chromosome from the mother and a Y chromo ...
'' 65:45–46.
* Colpe, Carsten.
The Sacred and the Profane" translated by R. M. Stockman. In the ''Encyclopedia of Religion''. via Encyclopedia.com.
*
Durkheim, Emile. 1912. ''
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
''The Elementary Forms of Religious Life'' (french: Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse), published by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in 1912, is a book that analyzes religion as a social phenomenon. Durkheim attributes the deve ...
'',
**
9151965, translated by
Joseph Swain. The Free Press:
** 1995, translated by Karen E. Fields. The Free Press:
*
Eliade, Mircea. 1957.
The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion', translated by W. R. Trask. New York:
Harcourt Brace & World.
* Pals, Daniel. 1996. ''Seven Theories of Religion.'' New York: Oxford University Press. (pbk).
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sacred-profane dichotomy
Sociology of religion
Dichotomies
Émile Durkheim
Sociological theories