Human nature is open to perceiving hierophany through a cosmic orientation that unfolds spatially in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, united by the symbolism of the Center. Equally crucial to the human perception of the sacred is the awareness of Time as an eternal Divine Manifestation—multilayered, interconnected, and total within the Unity of the Chaos–Cosmos dichotomy. It is hierophany that determines the essence of society and all social phenomena.
According to Mircea Eliade, society is the result of the cosmologization of human experience rather than a contract (as in J.-J. Rousseau or T. Hobbes). The legitimacy of authority, the stability of the calendar, social order, stratification, territory, and so forth are sanctified through their very being as manifestations of a sacred archetype. Thus, every member of society sacralizes their ontological position through a reunion with the sacred prototype.
Human activity within the Cosmos is a ritual that reveals and actualizes myth—the traditional meaning-generating mechanism—realizing the human being as a participant in the Sacred Acts of the First Ancestors. Hence the interpretation of every revolutionary movement or coup as a means of returning to the mythological primordial state through an eschatological process which, in a secular (=degenerated) society, takes on distorted and openly perverted forms (e.g., the Bolshevik or French revolutions, the 16th-century peasant wars in the German principalities, etc.).
Eliade views the ideologies of modernity as “secularized mythological systems” that unconsciously seek to restore the sacred within a desacralized society, thereby generating a range of deviant and terrorist phenomena. For example, communism, through its utopia, offers a new “paradisiacal” time for its followers—a time that is to come after an eschatological world revolution, which constitutes a distortion of the traditional understanding of Time.
The desacralization of contemporary society has led to the loss of the Sacred Center, of its axiological system, and of the sacred meaning of life itself. As a result of abandoning their sacred nature, human beings have begun searching for surrogates of the sacred, and the extreme form of this degradation is the consumer society, where, for instance, the body and sexuality—sacred within paganism—become profaned by the modern consumer and perceived solely as a resource or commodity.
