hierophany

[Jonathan Lighter]

50,000 Googlits. Not in OED. Tsk.

1958 Mircea Eliade _Patterns in Comparative Religion_ (N.Y.: Sheed & Ward)
2: We have to deal with a vast and ill-assorted mass of material, with a
Melanesian cosmogony myth or a Brahman sacrifice...the mystical writings of
a St. Teresa or a Nichiren, an Australian totem, a primitive initiation
rite...[etc.]. Each must be considered in some way a hierophany in as much
as it expresses in some way some modality of the sacred and some moment in
its history.

1959 Mircea Eliade _The Sacred and the Profane_ (N.Y.: Harcourt) 11: To
designate the _act of manifestation_ of the sacred, we have proposed the
term _hierophany_....From the most elementary hierophany - e.g.,
manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree - to
the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in
Jesus Christ) - there is no solution of continuity.

JL





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