Thursday, May 1, 2008

Axis Mundi


Within Mercea Eliade’s and Sigmund Freud’s essays on religion, both use opposing approaches in observing a manifestation of religion and/or the sacred. While one seems to hold an objective observation, a subjective evaluation is held otherwise. Within Eliades’ essay, axis mundi is evaluated, while within Freud’s essay, an egoic axis is examined. This recognition of a sacred axis seems to be identifiable within signs, symbols, locations, legends, and lore. However, all of these demarcations of the sacred remain mysterious and a complexity in evaluation is recognizable.

Within Eliade’s ‘Manifestation of the Sacred’, a Homogenius holiness is an orientation in which a Hierophany of ‘Hans Andere’ is investigated (Eliade:161). Similarly for Eliade, theophanies, hierophanies and various religious entities engage in erecting an ethereal or divine cosmogony of efficacy (162). However, enemies, agriculture, and unique emulations of holiness emulate holiness and an ‘alienuminous’ archytypical existence (163). In contrast to a pre-agricultural society, devoted to hunting ethos and a profane cult of preagricultural mother earth religion, a sacrilized cosmos of mysterious, yet Homo Religious signs is established (164).

In attempts of locating a “center of the world”, even the most nonreligious man extensively identifies a unique, ‘holy’, and private universe as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary life. Eliade refers to a theophany or hierophany of religious man which is homogenius. An example of a holy location is evident within holy writ, ‘Draw not nigh hither” says the Lord to Moses; ‘put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’ (Exodus 3, 5); according to Islamic tradition, the highest location on earth is the ‘ka’aba’ because “the pole star bears witness that it faces the center of Heaven, while Christians recognize Golgotha (167). All these beliefs express the same feeling, which is profoundly religious: “our world” is holy ground (168). The symbolism of the center reflects other series of cosmological images and religious beliefs. Among these, the most important are: holy sites and sanctuaries believed to be situated at the center of the world. (169)

Within the discipline of psychology, a quantitative approach was associated with psychology, behavior, cognitive psychology, whereas a qualitative approach was connected with psychodynamic schools of psychology like the psychoanalysis of language of the world (Freud:361). With such terms as id meaning ‘it’, and ego meaning, ‘I’, a super-ego represents an exaggerated self (361). Similarly, within each stage of ego a development of a psychosocial crisis that represented ego is summarized in the following way: trust/ basic mistrust (infancy); autonomy/shame and doubt (early childhood); initiative/guilty (play age); industry/inferiority (school age); identity/confusion (adolescence), intimacy/isolation (young adult); generativity/stagnation (adulthood), and integrity/despair and disgust (old age). (361)

Also, an accompaniment and an association of an almighty and all-just God, no divine world-order and no future life, will feel exempt from all obligation to obey the precepts of civilization (362). Everyone will, without inhibition or fear, follow his asocial, egoistic instincts and seek to exercise his power; Chaos, which we have banished through thousands of years of the work of civilization, will come again (362). This is because so many instinctual demands which will later be unserviceable cannot be suppressed by the rational operation of the child’s intellect but have to be tame by acts of repression, behind which, as a rule, lies the motive of anxiety of these infantile neuroses are overcome spontaneously in the course of growing up, and this is especially true of the obsessive neurosis of childhood (363).

Religion would be the universal obsessive neurosis of humanity; like the obsessive neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex (363). In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and his is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of a similar neurosis. (363)

In conclusion, in Eliade’s and Freud’s essays, Religion is recognizably within, without, and obviously, no illusion. No, an illusion it would be to suppose that religion is non-existent, or unrecognizable. Thus, such an alienuminous existence of an axis of religion is evident within Eliades and Freuds essays.

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