Date: February 7, 2025
If you look into the history of the sacred vs profane you notice that there are actually two aspects to the sacred. The word sacer in Latin could be used both for sacred things in the modern sense and for forbidden things; this is the same in Arabic and Hebrew. In Arabic, haram means forbidden, but Masjid al-Haram translates to “the sacred mosque”. So, the concept of the sacred has a positive aspect and a negative aspect; positive corresponding to right-hand path spirituality and negative corresponding to left-hand path spirituality.
In the right-hand path, you transition from the profane to the sacred through holy rituals: prayer, communion, fasting, etc. In the left-hand path, you transition from the profane to the sacred through forbidden actions: human sacrifice, cannibalism, etc. This is actually Durkheim’s original theory of religion if I recall correctly. Religion as a sociological phenomenon is really just a society’s determination of what constitutes as sacred and what constitutes as profane.