Sacred time and sacred space

Sacred time and sacred space are the categories by which religious traditions mark off portions of the temporal and spatial continuum as qualitatively different from the ordinary. The pairing was made central by Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane (1957), and much subsequent work has been a refinement of, or a reaction against, his account.

Eliade's argument is that for religious people space is not homogeneous. There are breaks in it, points where the sacred has manifested itself, which he called hierophanies, and these become centres around which a world is organised. Such a place is a fixed point in an otherwise undifferentiated expanse, is frequently identified with the centre of the world, and is where communication between the cosmic levels becomes possible. Time is likewise heterogeneous: festivals on his account are not commemorations but re-actualisations, entries into the primordial time of the events concerned, so that the sacred calendar periodically abolishes ordinary duration and renews the world.

The phenomena are real whatever one makes of the theory. Sacred spaces include temples, shrines, groves, mountains, rivers, tombs and thresholds, and they are characteristically marked by boundaries, entry requirements, purification, the removal of shoes, and rules about who may pass how far, the graded courts of the Jerusalem Temple and the enclosures of a Hindu temple being explicit spatial statements about who stands where. Sacred times include sabbaths, festivals, fasts, new years and the daily hours of prayer, and are typically marked by the suspension of ordinary work and by a different code of conduct.

Eliade's framework has been criticised extensively: for treating "archaic man" as a single type, for a normative preference for the religious over the secular that runs through work presented as descriptive, for inattention to history, and for presenting as universal a scheme assembled selectively. The most influential alternative is Jonathan Z. Smith's, in To Take Place (1987), which argues that sacredness is not a quality a place possesses but a position within a system of ritual attention, a place is sacred because of what is done there and how it is bounded, rather than being the site of a manifestation to which ritual afterwards responds. Smith's account has the advantage of explaining why sacred places can be made, moved and unmade, and why disputes over them prove so intractable: what is contested is the ordering of a system, not a property of the ground.

Contested sacred sites, Jerusalem's Temple Mount and Haram al-Sharif, Ayodhya, and many others, are where these theoretical questions acquire practical consequences, since incompatible ritual orderings of the same ground cannot both be enacted at once.

Article one treats sacred time chiefly as Eliade's theory of festivals re-entering a founding moment. How a tradition actually fixes its calendar is a separate and more concrete story, and the three Abrahamic traditions made three different, doctrinally loaded choices.

Christianity settled the date of its central festival at a council rather than leaving it to local custom. Disagreement over when to keep Easter was serious enough that the Council of Nicaea in 325 addressed it, moving toward a computation independent of the Jewish calendar and tied to the spring equinox and the following full moon; the method was refined for centuries afterward, and the Julian and Gregorian calendars still yield different dates for most Christian bodies today.

Judaism moved the opposite way, from an empirically observed calendar toward a fixed mathematical one. The new month was originally declared on eyewitness testimony of the new moon to a rabbinical court in Jerusalem; the fixed arithmetical calendar now used, traditionally associated with the fourth-century patriarch Hillel II though the precise date of its adoption is debated, removed that dependence once a central court in the land of Israel could no longer reliably convene.

Islam took a third path deliberately. The Quran (9:36-37) rejects the intercalation pre-Islamic Arabs used to keep a lunar calendar aligned with the seasons, fixing a purely lunar year that drifts through the solar year across a roughly thirty-three-year cycle, so Ramadan and the Hajj fall in every season in turn. The drift is not an oversight; it is the doctrinal point, a deliberate rejection of the solar adjustment the other two traditions each made in their own way.