Sacred Time
August 11th, 2006
Updated April 2006
The concept of sacred space is prevalent throughout most religious practices. The world is dotted with holy temples, shrines, and cathedrals, all which mark the presence of the divine. These sacred places remind us of the holy, even when the holy is wholly transcendent and unobtainable. Sacred space is, in all religions, a place to step outside of the humdrum world and commune with the sublime.
In Wiccan practice, sacred space is often not confined to a building or physical place, but rather is created through the casting the magic circle-a world between worlds in which to worship, to celebrate, to convene, to work magic. Within the magic circle, the mundane world falls away and the inner eye is opened fully, receptive to the ethereal presence.
Of course, Deity is always with us. All that is truly required to tap into the divine source is a sense of the sacred, and what turns on that sense may vary from person to person. For the pantheist and the panentheist, God is not only present but immanent, suffusing the very world around us with its presence. For that reason, for the nature-worshiper and many a neo-pagan, the world around is already sacred. Not the woodland and unmolested nature alone, but skyscrapers, city streets, human dwellings and creations. I need not elaborate on this notion here, as I have dedicated another essay to the concept of sacred space. But it bears mentioning briefly here.
The real problem with a reliance on sacred space, however, is that it is alienating. One of the reasons that most tribal religions (the Abrahamic faiths notwithstanding) do not travel far from the places of their birth is that the mythology and sacred history of the religions is usually tied to physical markers of the region. In ancient Mesopotamia, for example, deities were tribal-they were tied to the people who worshipped them in a specific area, and were usually linked to a particular temple or shrine. (1) If a traveler left his homeland and entered a land where homage was paid to a different deity, that traveler too paid homage to that deity. The idea that all gods were omnipresent didn’t evolve until the formation of early Judaism. (2)
As a result of this kind of tribal god, the histories and stories associated with that god were tied to the land as well. Perhaps a story would center on a local river, or mountain, or temple, detailing some action or event centered around the god in question. The story of Isis and Osiris, for example, turns the Nile River into a holy landmark. The local people had only to look around them to be reminded of their own sacred histories.
Yet this is not the reality of the world that most of us live in. For many of us, the only sacred pagan sites that we know of are Stonehenge, Brigid’s Well, the pyramids, and other equally hard-to-get-to and exotic locales (at least for us Americans). And so we read the mythologies of far away cultures, engrossed in the messages they portray, and perhaps we find ourselves wishing that we could bathe in the same holy waters, or lay with our backs against the same holy ground.
But if we allow ourselves to incorporate into our practice another form of sensing the sacred, we will find that the sacred is truly always with us. Time is always with us.
Sacred time is definitely not a new concept. In fact, the concept of sacred time is central to the Jewish faith. But I would like to take a moment to explore the implications of sacred time for panentheists, and discover a way to further deepen the link between us and the other-holy.
In Abraham Heschel’s short but profound work The Sabbath, he writes, “[The Bible] is more concerned with history than with geography. To understand the teachings of the Bible, one must accept its premise that time has a meaning for life which is at least equal to that of space, that time has a significance and sovereignty of its own.” (3)
You may be wondering why I bother mentioning ht Bible in an essay dealing with non-Abrahamic faith. But consider the longevity of the Bible, and the success of Bible-based religions in spreading out from the motherland. It is not merely coincidence that the Bible relies on time imagery and has successfully borne international religions. There is something inherently meaningful in the inclusion of time into the Bible’s fundamental myths (such as the cosmology presented in Genesis).
Joseph Campbell provides us with an important insight as to why this detachment from mere physical space is important. He writes, “For when the inner eye is awakened and a revelation arises from inner space to meet impressions brought by the senses from outer space to the mind, the significance of the conjunction is lost unless the outward image opens to receive and embody the elementary idea” (4) In other words, in order for a tribal myth or a local story to have transcendent meaning, it must speak to the core of many people; it must spark something that is true or relevant for everyone, no matter where they are.
Time provides this vehicle for us very nicely. When we are able to move away from the concept of space as the sole seat of the sacred (how about a little alliteration?) and embrace time as an embodiment of the ethereal, it is easy to breach cultural and ethnic barriers. Time moves in cycles, each cycle mimicking the one previous, and yet unique in its own way. Each cycle, each season, each hour carries with it a sacred story, its lesson, and we have but to attune ourselves to the cycling of time to be privy to the lessons nature and the gods grant. As Emerson writes, “Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.” (5)
We can turn to time to remember progression and initiation in our own lives. Every individual is faced with a series of initiations in life, whether they are social or religious, familial or personal, whether marked by ceremony or ritual or not. All of us experience the end of a chapter and the beginnings of something new. More than the oft-quoted “maiden, mother, crone” system of cycle and initiation, our lives are filled with many stages and progressions, much like time and nature’s expression of it. Moreover, as the seasons parallel our inner journeys, they parallel the inner journeys of others as well, and we begin to see and feel the complex tapestry of our communal lives.
Learning to find the other-holy, the sacred that supercedes that which we are able to envision in ourselves and our world, becomes substantially easier when we link time with sacredness. Drawing God out of the ethereal, out of the past, out of exotic cultures, we may feel the divine in any present moment, and enrich our lives with our own mythologies and sense of wonder, rather than merely relying on the histories and experiences of others.
(1) Armstrong, Karen. A History of God, Ballantine Books.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Heschel, Abraham. The Sabbath, HarperCollins, New York, 1951. pp. 6-7
(4) Campbell, Joseph. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Haper & Row, New York, 1986. p. 34
(5)Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature.