So a lot of heathen, and neo-pagan, recon especially, theology is based off of the works of some prolific anthropologists and historians, so keep in mind that a lot of this is a lot less “ancient” than we often talk like it is. A lot of it is based off of these works.
So that said, a little bit on ritual. It is typically defined as “the established form for a ceremony” but for our purposes, I’d like to also add “an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner” or “a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence” So using these second definitions, ritual is defined by doing, or more precisely preforming. This will be important later.
According to Mircea Eliade (other ritual theorists make use of this distinction but do not go into nearly as much depth in how to designate sacred vs profane space), the space of the universe, of our world at least, is delineated into the sacred and the profane (the opposite of sacred, this is not a moralized word) two opposite states of being with clear distinctions. Eliade describes the sacred as “[manifesting itself] as a reality of a wholly different order from ‘natural’ realities” and “man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane” therefore it is helpful to understand that, for Eliade, the profane is our natural, mundane, world and we distinguish the sacred by its difference from the profane.
So when it comes to sacred space, that’s usually pretty easy. A church, a tree, an altar, a crossroads, a hǫrgr, etc. These are places in which the divine presence can be not only felt but observed. Whether it is the sanctity of the space that allows the divine to enter or the presence of the divine that creates the sacred is open for interpretation typically, but one does not exist without the other. And you’ll often hear about people purifying themselves before entering a sacred space, so as to not make it profane.
However temporal sacred-ness is a little more difficult to nail down. Using Eliade again, sacred time is “a primordial mythic time made present” meaning, when we are in a sacred time, we are in the ‘before times’ in which myth occurred. and it “represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past” so essentially, sacred time is then repeating itself in a cycle, every time we enter into it, we are entering the same sacred time as before.
For Catherine Bell, time is an important factor in ritualization and the construction of tradition. She discusses tradition as being a paradox between an “atemporal order and the profane world of temporal change” and how “each is differentiated from but dependent upon the other.” This really doesn’t mean a whole lot on its own but in the context of myth and ritual, it is a way to set something up as ‘how it was always done’ or a sense of continuity in the context of the creation, and subsequent recreation, of ritual. This recreation of meaning, and therefore ritual is best explained by Ronald L Grimes “ritual meaning consists just as surely of the random thoughts and gestures that occur during a ritual” and so the ritual meaning is different from when they were first constructed just by virtue of the continual doing.
Ronald L Grimes discusses the different types of ritual time. “a time between the times” or transitional times or seasons, lifecycles, or a change in social status, is a displacement of the usual sense of chronologically ordered time. He mentions kairos or ‘a pulse of opening and closing’ described when we experience things we cannot anticipate, they catch us by surprise. As well as ‘anticipated time’ or cyclical time, which is like what Eliade describes, though maybe not quite the same, since we can anticipate the return of that time though many do not consider it a repetition. This latter kind of time, the return is what categorizes most traditional liturgical rites.
So what does that have to do with heathenry? many heathens consider only Eliade’s conception of ritual time, wherein ritual as we preform it is a recreation of the moment of the creation. However this is not a particularly practical way to look at ritual in the heathen context. There is indeed very little to be found of a real creation of any sense, beyond the recreation of ritual as Grimes explains it. I would posit that the sacred time in which heathen ritual typically exists is more along the lines of ritualization and construction of tradition. What heathens are creating when preforming ritual is the ritual itself.
When talking about Judaism and the Jewish way of viewing sacred time, the cyclical time of return seems to be the most accurate way to understand it. For them, the Shabbat has been happening since the creation of the world itself, it has been the way they have delineated time for themselves and is thus both tradition in the sense of Bell and cyclical in the sense of Grimes, while also invoking the idea of the mythic time as set up by Eliade. This traditional ritual time is sacred itself because God made it so. It was declared scared ‘in the beginning’ and has been at every time it has reoccurred since then. This is the definition and practical use of sacred time I was referring to in the op. The application of it is meaningful as both a religiously symbolic time as well as a regularly occurring time that is designated as separate from our profane time of the rest of the week, thus as per Eliade making it sacred.
Sources
The Sacred and the Profane
Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice
Beginnings in Ritual Studies
