Sacred, Eclipse of the

The thesis of the eclipse of the sacred, which is built on psychological experience of the sacred and measures of its decline, moves in a different space from many other theories of secularization that – according to the scholars who defend the eclipse – give less importance to the problem of the level of experience and therefore to the presence of the sacred and instead concentrate on cultural and structural analysis. The theory of the eclipse proceeds from the definition of the sacred as experience (which nearly all individuals have). Sacred experience exists when an aspect of the real is recognized as “radically other” compared to natural reality. In different cultures and societies there are different hierophanies of sacred experience. This experience, lived as individual psychological reality and as the central nucleus of religiousness and religion, is considered the center around which religiously significant social acts and facts orbit

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Astronomy · Eclipse · Epistemology · Geography · Religious experience · Secularization · Sociology · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies