Faith & RitualGreek → English
Hierophany
/ˌhaɪəˈrɒfəni/noun
A manifestation of the sacred in an ordinary object, place or event.
The Greek roots
ἱερός
hierós
sacred, holy
φαίνειν
phaínein
to show, reveal
Literally: “showing of the sacred”
The story of the word
Mircea Eliade built the word in the middle of the twentieth century to name the moment the sacred shows itself through something plain. His insistence was that the stone does not stop being a stone: it goes on being granite while also being, for whoever kneels there, a manifestation. Both halves are ancient, ἱερός as in hieroglyph and φαίνειν as in epiphany, but the compound belongs entirely to comparative religion.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scholarly coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1950s
Same family
epiphanytheophanyhierarchyhieroglyphphenomenon
In a sentence
For Eliade a spring, a tree or a shard of rock can all be a hierophany.
The chapter treats the burning bush as the model hierophany and works outwards from it.