Profanum

Profanum is the Latin word for "profane". The distinction between the sacred and the profane was considered by Émile Durkheim to be central to the social reality of human religion.

Sacred/profane
The sacred–profane dichotomy is a concept posited by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who considered it to be the central characteristic of religion: "religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden." In Durkheim's theory, the sacred represents the interests of the group, especially unity, which were embodied in sacred group symbols, or totems. The profane, however, involves mundane individual concerns. Durkheim explicitly stated that the sacred–profane dichotomy is not equivalent to good-evil, as the sacred could be either good or evil, and the profane could be either as well.

Durkheim's claim of the universality of this dichotomy for all religions and cults has been criticized by scholars such as the British anthropologist Jack Goody. Goody also noted that "many societies have no words that translate as sacred or profane and that ultimately, just like the distinction between natural and supernatural, it was very much a product of European religious thought rather than a universally applicable criterion." As Tomoko Masuzawa explains in The Invention of World Religions (2005), this system of comparative religion privileged Christianity at the expense of non-Christian systems. Any cosmology without a sacred–profane binary was rendered invisible by the field of religious studies, because the binary was supposed to be "universal".

The profane world consists of all that we can know through our senses; it is the natural world of everyday life that we experience as either comprehensible or at least ultimately knowable — the Lebenswelt or lifeworld.

In contrast, the sacred, or sacrum in Latin, encompasses all that exists beyond the everyday, natural world that we experience with our senses. As such, the sacred or numinous can inspire feelings of awe, because it is regarded as ultimately unknowable and beyond limited human abilities to perceive and comprehend. Durkheim pointed out however that there are degrees of sacredness, so that an amulet for example may be sacred yet little respected.

Transitions
Rites of passage represent movements from one state — the profane – to the other, the sacred; or back again to the profanum.

Religion is organized primarily around the sacred elements of human life and provides a collective attempt to bridge the gap between the sacred and the profane.

Profane progress
Modernization and the Enlightenment project have led to a secularisation of culture over the past few centuries – an extension of the profanum at the (often explicit) expense of the sacred. The predominant 21st-century global world view is as a result empirical, sensate, contractual, this-worldly – in short profane.

Carl Jung expressed the same thought more subjectively when he wrote that “I know – and here I am expressing what countless other people know – that the present time is the time of God's disappearance and death”.

Counter reaction
The advance of the profane has led to several countermovements, attempting to limit the scope of the profanum. Modernism set out to bring myth and a sense of the sacred back into secular reality — Wallace Stevens speaking for much of the movement when he wrote that “if nothing was divine then all things were, the world itself”.

Fundamentalism – Christian, Muslim, or other – set its face against the profanum with a return to sacred writ.

Psychology too has set out to protect the boundaries of the individual self from profane intrusion, establishing ritual places for inward work in opposition to the postmodern loss of privacy.

Cultural examples
Seamus Heaney considered that “the desacralizing of space is something that my generation experienced in all kinds of ways”.