Profane (religion)

Part of a series on
Anthropology of religion
Two ancient anthropomorphic figures from Peru
Basic concepts Afterlife Animism Augury Communitas Comparative religion Divination Divine language Evolutionary origin of religion Fetishism Great Spirit Henotheism Initiation Laying on of hands Liminality Magic Mana Monotheism Nympholepsy Oracle Pilgrimage Polytheism Rite of passage Ritual Sacred language Sacred–profane dichotomy Sacred site Shamanism Soul dualism Superstition Theories about religion Totem Transtheism Veneration of the dead
Case studies Magic Coral Gardens and Their Magic Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants Neo-Paganism Ritual Angakkuq Babaylan Bobohizan Bomoh Bora Dukun Miko Jhākri Pawang Slametan Wu Revitalization movements Cargo cult Ghost Dance Handsome Lake
Related articles The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life Purity and Danger Myth and ritual Archaeology of religion and ritual Poles in mythology Lived religion Elite religion
Major theorists Augustin Calmet Akbar S. Ahmed Talal Asad Joseph Campbell Mary Douglas Émile Durkheim Mircea Eliade Arnold van Gennep René Girard E. E. Evans-Pritchard James Frazer Fustel de Coulanges Clifford Geertz Robin Horton Claude Lévi-Strauss Robert Marett Steven Ozment Roy Rappaport Saba Mahmood Marshall Sahlins Melford Spiro Stanley Tambiah Victor Turner Edward Burnett Tylor Daniel Martin Varisco Anthony F. C. Wallace
Journals Anthropological Perspectives on Religion Folklore The Hibbert Journal The Journal of Religion Oceania
Religions Ethnic and folk religions Afro-American religion Alaska Native religion Anito Atua Böö mörgöl Chinese folk religion Hanitu Hausa Kejawèn Native American religion Noaidi Shindo Shamanism in Siberia Shinto Tengrism Traditional African religions Buddhism Mahayana Nichiren Pure Land Shingon Theravada Tiantai Tibetan Vajrayana Zen Christianity Adventism Anglicanism Armenian Apostolic Church Baptists Calvinism Catholic Church Coptic Orthodoxy Eastern Orthodoxy Ethiopian Orthodoxy Greek Orthodoxy Lutheranism Methodism Nestorianism Oriental Orthodoxy Pentecostalism Protestantism Quakers Russian Orthodoxy Hinduism Hindu denominations Shaivism Shaktism Smartism Vaishnavism Ayyavazhi Islam Ahmadiyya Ibadi Mahdavia Non-denominational Quranists Shia Sufism Sunni Yazdânism Judaism Conservative Haredi Hasidic Haymanot Karaite Orthodox Reform Jainism Digambara Śvetāmbara Sikhism
Social and cultural anthropology
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Profane, or profanity in religious use may refer to a lack of respect for things that are held to be sacred, which implies anything inspiring or deserving of reverence, as well as behaviour showing similar disrespect or causing religious offense.^[1] The word is also used in a neutral sense for things or people not related to the sacred; for example profane history, profane literature, etc.^[2] In this sense it is contrasted with "sacred", with meaning similar to "secular".

The distinction between the sacred and the profane was considered by Émile Durkheim to be central to the social reality of human religion.^[3]

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.^[2][4] Profanity represented secular indifference to religion or religious figures, while blasphemy was a more offensive attack on religion and religious figures, considered sinful, and a direct violation of The Ten Commandments. Moreover, many Bible verses speak against swearing.^[5] In some countries, profanity words often have pagan roots that after Christian influence were turned from names of deities and spirits to profanity and used as such, like famous Finnish profanity word perkele, which was believed to be an original name of the thunder god Ukko, the chief god of the Finnish pagan pantheon.^[6][7][8][9]

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 satire.^[10]

Part of a series on
Anthropology of religion
Two ancient anthropomorphic figures from Peru
Basic concepts Afterlife Animism Augury Communitas Comparative religion Divination Divine language Evolutionary origin of religion Fetishism Great Spirit Henotheism Initiation Laying on of hands Liminality Magic Mana Monotheism Nympholepsy Oracle Pilgrimage Polytheism Rite of passage Ritual Sacred language Sacred–profane dichotomy Sacred site Shamanism Soul dualism Superstition Theories about religion Totem Transtheism Veneration of the dead
Case studies Magic Coral Gardens and Their Magic Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants Neo-Paganism Ritual Angakkuq Babaylan Bobohizan Bomoh Bora Dukun Miko Jhākri Pawang Slametan Wu Revitalization movements Cargo cult Ghost Dance Handsome Lake
Related articles The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life Purity and Danger Myth and ritual Archaeology of religion and ritual Poles in mythology Lived religion Elite religion
Major theorists Augustin Calmet Akbar S. Ahmed Talal Asad Joseph Campbell Mary Douglas Émile Durkheim Mircea Eliade Arnold van Gennep René Girard E. E. Evans-Pritchard James Frazer Fustel de Coulanges Clifford Geertz Robin Horton Claude Lévi-Strauss Robert Marett Steven Ozment Roy Rappaport Saba Mahmood Marshall Sahlins Melford Spiro Stanley Tambiah Victor Turner Edward Burnett Tylor Daniel Martin Varisco Anthony F. C. Wallace
Journals Anthropological Perspectives on Religion Folklore The Hibbert Journal The Journal of Religion Oceania
Religions Ethnic and folk religions Afro-American religion Alaska Native religion Anito Atua Böö mörgöl Chinese folk religion Hanitu Hausa Kejawèn Native American religion Noaidi Shindo Shamanism in Siberia Shinto Tengrism Traditional African religions Buddhism Mahayana Nichiren Pure Land Shingon Theravada Tiantai Tibetan Vajrayana Zen Christianity Adventism Anglicanism Armenian Apostolic Church Baptists Calvinism Catholic Church Coptic Orthodoxy Eastern Orthodoxy Ethiopian Orthodoxy Greek Orthodoxy Lutheranism Methodism Nestorianism Oriental Orthodoxy Pentecostalism Protestantism Quakers Russian Orthodoxy Hinduism Hindu denominations Shaivism Shaktism Smartism Vaishnavism Ayyavazhi Islam Ahmadiyya Ibadi Mahdavia Non-denominational Quranists Shia Sufism Sunni Yazdânism Judaism Conservative Haredi Hasidic Haymanot Karaite Orthodox Reform Jainism Digambara Śvetāmbara Sikhism
Social and cultural anthropology
v t e

The sacred–profane dichotomy is a concept posited by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in 1912, who considered it to be the central characteristic of religion: "religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden."^[11] In Durkheim's theory, the sacred represents the interests of the group, especially unity, which were embodied in sacred group symbols, or totems. 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.^[12]

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 or lifeworld.^[13]

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 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 for example may be sacred yet little respected.^[14]

Rites of passage represent movements from one state—the profane—to the other, the sacred; or back again to the profanum.^[15]

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.^{[citation needed]}

Modernization and the Enlightenment project have led to a secularisation of culture over the past few centuries – an extension of the profanum at the (often explicit) expense of the sacred.^[16] The predominant 21st-century global worldview is as a result empirical, sensate, contractual, this-worldly – in short profane.^[17]

Carl Jung 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".^[18]

The advance of the profane has led to several countermovements, attempting to limit the scope of the profanum. Modernism set out to bring myth and a sense of the sacred back into secular reality^[19] — Wallace Stevens speaking for much of the movement when he wrote that "if nothing was divine then all things were, the world itself".^[20]

Fundamentalism – Christian, Muslim, or other – set its face against the profanum with a return to sacred writ.^[21]

Psychology too has set out to protect the boundaries of the individual self from profane intrusion,^[22] establishing ritual places for inward work^[23] in opposition to the postmodern loss of privacy.^[24]

Seamus Heaney considered that "the desacralizing of space is something that my generation experienced in all kinds of ways".^[25]

• Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992)
• Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (1993)
• Acquaviva, S. S., and Patricia Lipscomb. The Decline of the Sacred in Industrial Society. (Review: JSTOR 1202830).
• Bakhtin, Mikhail. [1941] 1993 Rabelais and His World, 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 65:45–46. doi:10.2307/2797525 JSTOR 2797525
• 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,
  • [1915] 1965, translated by Joseph Swain. The Free Press: ISBN 0-02-908010-X
  • 1995, translated by Karen E. Fields. The Free Press: ISBN 0-02-907937-3
• 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. ISBN 0-19-508725-9 (pbk).