THE SACRED

Without comprehending the sacred, faith can only be a destructible illusion. For this reason, we need to question and comprehend the meaning of our Sacred.

What is sacred? In its general meaning, scriptures describe it as anything that is beyond human’s reach, anything that is divine, holy, celestial and unearthly. When we examine the myths all over the world, we observe that the sacred concepts include terms such as unattainable, dedication, authority, ruler, owner and beloved.

Sacred means something connected with the divine Creator, something from God, or anything related to God.

When we look at human history, we see that everything related to grace, fertility, and the transcendent is sacralized. Humans have always sanctified everything that is beyond their comprehension, everything that they fear and/or love. Each belief of Sacred has created its respective myths and rituals unique to the geography and cultural background it stems from, in all parts of the world.

In ancient societies, the sacred myths were the only truth. Mythology, therefore, is sacred because it narrates the creative actions of divine and God-like figures and how they occurred in the beginning of time. Various disciplines acknowledged that myths are universal, and that the same myth was expressed in different legacies and with different heroes in different cultures. Are the myths universal?

These stories carried meaningful messages for humanity as they expressed patterns of the one truth. By handing down the same narrative to new generations through its unique rituals, they provided an explanation of the birth of the cosmos cosmogony, the social order and humans’ position within this order, along with the death of the cosmos, eschatology.

Myths offer useful life practices while protecting morality and social order with codes. Phenomena such as birth, death, drought and fertility were accepted as the reflections of the gods’ grace in the metaphysical realm on the earth. The myths emphasized the sacred.

Considered as the oldest revelation in many parts of the world, myths inscribed the search for meaning into human consciousness and preached the humanistic values, judgments and moral values. The purpose of all myths was to recreate that divine incident of the very first moment of creation and awaken the original supreme power within the human soul.

Mircea Eliade, a faithful researcher of myths and thus the sacred, tells us of a reverse evolution from Homo Religious to Homo Economicus. Accordingly, most psychiatrists agree that fairy tales are the dreams of the whole of humanity and contain solutions to humanity’s problems. They raise the curtain of the soul’s drama because the same characters, archetypes are present in everyone’s psyche.

It is useful to consider the compilation of interesting creatures, monsters and creatures found in mythology, in terms of seeing their unified integrity.

According to Carl G. Jung, we are the ones who can get connected to the collective unconscious of humanity, pull these symbols, and bring them to our reality. Some of these may be a symbol of virtue, while others may be a symbol of evil. They also contain adjectives and features that complete the One God. The story of humanity, which begins with the creation of myths, continued its existence in countless stories, legends, and tales in different parts of the world, which then proceeded to become myths and cultures. Ultimately, all myths, beliefs, and rituals arise from human beings’ desire and passion for joining the Creator’s perfect cycle, the unity. Each myth, legends, fairy tale or even superstition, contains the sacred without exception. Fairy tales might seem as if they are not real, but still possess inner symbolic meanings. Thus, we can say that myths and fairy tales are the doors that open to the Holy, the Absolute Truth, which lead us through by catering us with relief and hope.

Every belief system produces its own myths. In religions with a revelation, the influence of myths diminishes as the orthodoxy created by centralization increases. Myths continue to live in their own mediums when they are pushed out of religion by the dominant orthodoxy. Myths have the opportunity to enter the sacred texts between the emergence of religion and the time until it turns into a solid institution. In non-institutionalized beliefs such as Indian beliefs, myths enter the belief randomly. In monotheistic but falsified religions, the plot revolves around a single universal being. Myths are attached to this pattern. After a long time, a structure emerges in which myths overshadow even the creed of religion. This is true even in the religion of Islam, which is a non-falsified religion. While Muslims were integrating with the peoples of the regions they conquered, the myths in the regions established a relationship with the sacred and settled in the shadow of the sacred. Every belief that is tried to be purified from myths and every work that distinguishes between sacred and myth causes contradictions in itself.

Assuming the creation myths in the Old Testament are taken from the Sumerian Nineveh tablets leads to the delusion that God is a product of human thought. However, we can see the perfect harmony when we take a careful look at the history of gods and the creation myths in terms of the sacred. In case that you do not have the patience for this integrative and complementary research; you may reach a surreal conclusion that the information you find on a Sumerian tablet are also found in revelation books, and therefore, you may assume that the holy books are copied from profane sources. But if you have the patience to look deeper into mythology you can see that it disabuses us from this illusion and that the texts of tribes, who lived in independent places, unaware of each other, are incredibly connected with the same divine knowledge.

You can witness that they all originate from a single truth. It is possible to find traces of Adam and Eve’s or Noah’s (as) story under different names and figures in aboriginal cultures and even in African tribes. From the most primitive societies to our modern age, the rituals of the creation myths have always been alive, and they have manifested in humans’ life to recreate and ready to share their secrets.

Every act in shamanic beliefs and worship in monotheistic religions is full of rituals. From primitive life to today, life has been full of sacred myths and rituals which support faith. Myth requires rite, and rite requires myth. As the author Robert A. Johnson points out in ‘Ecstasy’: “The point of ritual is not to make magic, or to dominate someone or something and make it bend to our will, but to make a divine connection, to experience a momentary unity of the two worlds.”

Places also are made sacred through manifestations of the divine. The occurrence of a hierophany, sacred object or subject, or rituals can transform a place into an Axis Mundi, the center of the world. Axis mundi is a sacred place that connects heaven and earth and is believed to be the center of the world, the cosmos in other words. Mircea Eliade notes that such places are made sacred. through rituals which “result in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different.

The purpose of the rituals is to bring order to the elements which have a tendency to lose their axis in the chaotic world. For a religious person, space is not homogeneous; s/he experiences interruptions in the space, and s/he sees the breaks in it and realizes that some parts of space are qualitatively different from others. “Draw not nigh hither,” says the Lord to Moses (as): “...put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” (Bible, Exodus, 3, 5).

Then, there must be a unique space of sacred and all the other spaces must be not sacred but profane where space is neutral; hence, no orientation is given by a myth or meaning with sacred to non-religious human who rejects the sacrality of the world and only accepts a profane existence which is divested of all religious presuppositions.

It must be clearly pointed out that such a profane existence is never found in the pure state. Regardless of the extent to which the human may have desacralized the world, s/he who has made his choice in favor of a profane life never succeeds in completely getting away with religious behavior. Our daily lives are full of rites connected to myths that we perform unwittingly and instinctually. Knocking on wood when we hear something negative is a perfect example of the rituals in our modern life that we continue to perform unconsciously. On the other hand, it seems that the humans who live within the Sacred wish to take a part in objective reality by not letting themselves be paralyzed by the instincts and motives from the collective unconscious, and they aim to live in a real and effective world, instead of an illusive one!

The myths and rites, which are more vivid in the Collective Unconscious, always lead our lives whether you believe in them or not. All spiritual teachings have rituals. For example, Christians still decorate Christmas trees for prosperity, which is in fact a Pagan symbol of immortality and the sacred, because pine trees do not shed. Myths of tree of life or sacred tree differ in every belief system, but one thing is common: cutting the sacred tree is forbidden. According to these beliefs, natural spirits will forever curse the man who cut down one of the sacred trees.

Human races had various beliefs in the Divinity expressed as Gods. Jung claims that this “archetype” exists in our collective pool and needs to be manifested in our reality. Even if one removes the God archetype from their conscious mind, they unconsciously start to worship their spouse, lover or child, or a religious leader.

Because the archetype will manifest in a different form.

Therefore, an atheist who denies the existence of a Supreme Power, should consider the following claim while searching for the truth:

“Your ancestors passed down records about the ‘God’ concept to your subconscious. It may be possible for your conscious mind to deny this information on a conscious level; however, it is not possible for you to erase the records hidden in your subconscious because it is the same mechanism that controls your impulses as well as thoughts, without your control.”

Our ancestors believed in various myths full of mythical creatures, gods, and goddesses. Mythology is not limited to the ancient Greeks. “The Mother Goddess” concept is recorded into our genes, therefore; the belief in a god, either mythological or apocalyptical, has always existed in all cultures around the world.

What does the collective unconscious add to our lives? We think that we control our choices; however, most of our decisions, perspectives, emotions and actions are controlled by the collective unconscious.

Let us go back to the subject of the sacred sacrifice rituals. For instance, animal sacrifice rite, qurban is essential in Islam. Allah tells us in the Qur’an that the sacrificed animal’s blood will not reach Him and that this ritual only serves the humans.

“Neither their meat nor blood reaches Allah. Rather, it is your piety4 that reaches Him. This is how He has subjected them to you so that you may proclaim the greatness of Allah for what He has guided you to and give good news to the good doers.”

(Qur’an, Surah Al-Hajj, verse 37)

Some Islamic scholars of the modern age try to explain this Qur’anic order by addressing our intellectual side, claiming that the purpose of the order is to distribute meat to poor people and feed them. However,this is a very narrow and incomplete explanation. When it is possible to provide vegan/vegetarian food such as plants. The word “piety” here refers to our consciousness of God. If it iş for the poor as a substitute to meat, then why do we talk about slaughtering? Even Hinduism praises animal sacrificing rituals. Brahmanas, (the explanation of Vedas) also describe sacrifice. Why?

Think about how our ancestors sacrificed many valuable things for centuries, from their innocent youngsters to the others in their tribe beside animals, to increase fertility, to appease the gods, or pay for the sins. They sacrificed living beings or objects. We know that they sacrificed their most valuable things, including animals, and even humans in some cultures. What happens if we remove this well-established sacrifice ritual?

We have stated that the purpose of all sacred is to enhance the meaning in our lives. Jung also considers belief as an ontological phenomenon. This phenomenon symbolically participates in people’s world of meaning. When we say that a person is believing, we mean that s/he is awakening the dormant symbols, in other words, possibilities of ideas. The fact that one does not believe means that those symbols lose their vitality for that person and gaps in meanings occur in the mind of the contemporary human.

The existence found in modern lives, which is “pregnant to meanings”, has been cut off from the divine source, by its one- sided and dissociated consciousness through cutting its contact with the soul.

In mythical life, religions and also in psychological doctrine, the aim is to bring the individual into contact with the divinity to the extent of his/her ability by animating symbols that shall prepare him/her for death. A religion or a specific route that is followed to know the meaning and the truth is a set of possibilities offered to people so that they sense the last purpose of life. Ensuring the integrity of personality is a life-long task.

Human’s duty is “to prepare himself for death (eschatology) and in the deepest sense for the afterlife.” Thus the primary purpose of all religions is to make existence meaningful in terms of the creation purpose of humankind. The meaning that we find in myths and religions is God’s gift to humans. Although meaning is the most fundamental value for humans, they do not receive it at birth in a ready-to-use manner. Humans are created with a tendency to search for the meaning, and it is precisely in their nature.

In Islamic Sufism, a human’s tendency to place meanings to phenomena is called Istidad. Istidad is the raw material in each human that is waiting to be processed!