Homo Religiosus's intention is that the profane world be made sacred. But how is this accomplished? Mircea Eliade's answer in his The Sacred and the Profane was that she marks it as different. For Eliade what is homogeneous is profane and what is heterogeneous is holy. Eliade's prime example was drawing a circle amid a homogenous landscape, which marks that space as different from the rest. But this is also the primary move in phenomenology as well. Maurice Merleau-Ponty noted that the most basic perception foregrounds an object against a background. Perception is the marking of difference. For example, one doesn't perceive temperature until it changes or becomes different. This way of thinking about the sacred aligns Homo Religiosus with humanity's most definitive trait of symbolization. To make holy is to make perceivable through symbolization, and then speakable through a symbolic language. Martin Heidegger called language the "house of being" because our access to being is through the symbolic differences of language, which is the connection between Eliade's Homo Religiosus and Heidegger's "Shepard of Being."

Trying Too Hard