Editing Mircea Eliade (section)

====Sacred and profane====
[[File:Mosesshoesspeculum.jpeg|thumb|250px|[[Moses]] taking off his shoes in front of the [[burning bush]] (illustration from a 16th-century edition of the ''[[Speculum Humanae Salvationis]]'')]]
Eliade argues that "Yahweh is both kind and wrathful; the God of the Christian mystics and theologians is terrible and gentle at once."<ref name="Eliade Myths p.450">Eliade, ''Myths, Rites, Symbols'', p. 450</ref> He also thought that the Indian and Chinese mystic tried to attain "a state of perfect indifference and neutrality" that resulted in a coincidence of opposites in which "pleasure and pain, desire and repulsion, cold and heat [...] are expunged from his awareness."<ref name="Eliade Myths p.450"/>

Eliade's understanding of religion centers on his concept of [[hierophany]] (manifestation of the Sacred)—a concept that includes, but is not limited to, the older and more restrictive concept of [[theophany]] (manifestation of a god).<ref>Eliade, ''The Sacred and the Profane'', pp. 20–22; ''Shamanism'', p. xiii</ref> From the perspective of religious thought, Eliade argues, hierophanies give structure and orientation to the world, establishing a sacred order. The "profane" space of nonreligious experience can only be divided up geometrically: it has no "qualitative differentiation and, hence, no orientation [is] given by virtue of its inherent structure."<ref name="Eliade, p.22">Eliade, ''The Sacred and the Profane'', p. 22</ref> Thus, profane space gives man no pattern for his behavior. In contrast to profane space, the site of a hierophany has a sacred structure to which religious man conforms himself. A hierophany amounts to a "revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the non-reality of the vast surrounding expanse."<ref name="Eliade, p.21">Eliade, ''The Sacred and the Profane'', p. 21</ref> As an example of "[[hierotopy|sacred space]]" demanding a certain response from man, Eliade gives the story of [[Moses]] halting before [[Yahweh]]'s manifestation as a [[burning bush]] (''[[Book of Exodus|Exodus]]'' 3:5) and taking off his shoes.<ref>Eliade, ''The Sacred and the Profane'', p. 20</ref>