Profane

The profane is the process or dynamic by which things held sacred tend to fall out of favour. The gravity of the profane has been in our world for a very long time. With the fall of any old ideal or regime, there has almost always been a destructive impulse that leads to the clearing away of the old symbols and works that suggested the old belief system.

Everything is either sacred or profane. Those who orient toward the sacred are seekers of hope. Those who have the wisdom of profanity cannot generally resist the urge to bring an image of the sacred down to earth. With the realization of your own nature, you also come to see your imago, or fetch. For whatever you are you will encounter the spiritual opposite of that, even to the point of evoking it in your own self.

“Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.” Theodor W. Adorno (German philosopher, 1903-1969)

“Nowadays the rage for possession has got to such a pitch that there is nothing in the realm of nature, whether sacred or profane, out of which profit cannot be squeezed” Desiderius Erasmus (Dutch Priest, Humanist and Editor of the New Testament, 1469-1536)