Sacred and Profane

New Year’s celebrations bring to mind for me the benefits bestowed by our humble status as a planet circling the sun in an imperfect circle, an ellipse, and at a tilt yet, thus giving us distinct seasons. To avoid the horrors of the Void (see last post), we have the blessings of a place—a certain orbit of the solar system—and the equal boon of a recurring time. The universe appears eternal and limitless, nobody has seen its edge, but we’re all right. We’ve got the minimum orientation we need to maintain our sanity.

To live in eternity, it is nice to have clear markers of the here and now. If we wander away from Here, it is good to know that we can return. And if we can pin a name to the Now we can also return to it. It’s Christmas time again. It’s New Year’s day. These arrangements defeat the horror of eternity; there are some for whom the mere conscious contemplation of it produces a kind of mental nausea. With our markers nicely in place, eternity ends at right regular intervals and we get a brand new beginning. Here it is. A brand new year.

This need to orient, to place, to mark the time—and to renew it—appears to be innately present in us. Emmanuel Kant wisely concluded that space and time are innate intuitive characteristics of our minds—created, as it were, to make sense of the experienced flux but not objectively real. Well, fine. They’re objectively real if we are. But then it occurs to me that dividing space into the here and time into the now—and regularly annihilating eternity by restarting it again—are also innate tendencies. And the oldest and most traditional views of humanity also project what we experience ordinarily into the transcendental realm. A good exposition of this subject is presented in Mircea Eliade’s work, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. This view asserts that as below, so above. It echoes the views of the oldest versions of Zoroastrian philosophy (and Zoroastrianism is most likely the oldest higher religion we know of) that all things here have their counterparts in the transcendental dimension. Thus earthly or profane space and time have their counterpart in sacred space and time. And the rounds of duration and renewal taking place there take place here because they take place there. Interesting view—long predating Plato’s notions of eternal forms. But, as we say, what goes around comes around.

Happy New Year!