Sacred Space

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Recommended: The role of sacred space in religion

Sacred space is one of the types of spatial condition being analyzed by Mircea Eliade’s religious journal. It is related to purification and can only be apprehended by a religious person. According to Eliade, “For a religious man, a space is not homogeneous as he experiences interruption, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others” (20). He also believes that a person in a sacred space will ultimately reach a threshold that personify the frontier which distinguishes and opposes the two worlds. In this essay, I will compare and contrast the concept of sacred space in the biography of Maryam Binti Imran and Alice Kingsleigh. Maryam holds an independently exalted place as a religious hero in Islam, because her name …show more content…

She withdraws herself from her family to avoid any embarrassment and dejection. It is at a secret place in the East Jerusalem, where Maryam took refuge and she witnesses a hierophany. It is an irruption of the sacred that results in the detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic surrounding and making it qualitatively different. Allah sends Gabriel (the angel) to meet in her there. This occurrence is critical in Maryam’s life because it allows Maryam to communicate and express her sadness and perplexity to God. At the same time, Maryam is informed that she will give birth to a child named Isa (Jesus) who will be among those that will be blessed by God. She then undergoes the pain of childbirth alone and returns home without conversing to anyone. Dissimilarly, Alice’s experience of the sacred space reaches the threshold twice in her life. After she crosses the boundary from real world to the rabbit hole for her very first time, she is able to distinguish the sheer differences between the two worlds. Just like the concept of threshold highlighted by Eliade, “The spatial non-homogeneity finds expression in the experience of an opposition between space that is sacred- the only real and real-ly existing space- and all other space, the formless expanse surrounding it” (20). Later on, she also succeeded in killing the Jabberwocky dragon which then boils down to, herself reaching the threshold of the sacred space for the second time. The blood of the Jabberwocky dragon becomes the key to her wish of returning to the real world. This important phase marks her departure from the sacred space and transmission to the profane

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