Definition
- I first ran into the concept of Hierophany from an article on Haitian Vodou written by none other than the greats, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith & Claudine Michel.
- Hierophany is the act of being aware of something sacred manifesting itself through various things in the physical world. “Hiero” is Greek for sacred/holy; “phany” means appearance or manifestation.
- It’s the act of seeing the divine in the ordinary, the abstract in the concrete, seeing the software in the hardware–to use today’s tech-obsessed parlance.
- Hierophany was coined by the philosopher Mircea Eliade in his work “Treatise on the History of Religions.”
- When you manifest the sacred, ordinary objects become something else without losing themselves in the transmutation process. A sacred book is still a book sitting next to other ordinary books.
- This is the case where addition (or change) is not a zero/sum game, where adding doesn’t come at the expense of something else. So while 1 + 1 = 3, the ones are still contained within the 3–they weren’t obliterated in the process of transmutation.