Hierophany and The Everyday Sacred
Every now and again, I discover a word that I haven’t previously encountered. This week while reading Katherine May’s beautiful and insightful new book, Enchantment, I was definitely enchanted by her third chapter, Hierophany (pronounced, Hi-roff-a-knee). It’s a delicious word. I like the way it rolls off the tongue. However, it’s the meaning of the word that I savor.
The historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, coined the term, hierophany, to describe the way that the Divine reveals itself to us, transforming the objects through which it works. When we make a tree, or a stone, or a wafer of bread into the subject of our worshipful attention, we transform it into a hierophany, an object of the sacred. Enchantment by Katherine May
I look around this little room that serves as my workspace, prayer room, atelier, and library and I see hierophany in many forms.
A ceramic bowl, crafted by my grand-daughter, a sacred container for my threads for stitching
A small silver bell, a gift from my daughter, to be rung whenever I receive a blessing
A vintage camera lens, a gift from my son, to remind me to stay focused
A Roman glass vessel, a souvenir from my pilgrimage to Jerusalem
A bone folder I use for book-making
My mother’s embroidery scissors
A hand-crafted felt pouch and little Henriette doll, hand-crafted Belle Cœur petits cadeaux, gifted from two spiritual sisters
These precious objects that I’ve named have definitely received my “worshipful attention.” Each one is sacred to me, by virtue of the associated memory of its provenance, and the meaning I’ve ascribed to it. I feel the presence of the Divine, the Sacred, within these things. I could fill this page with my unending list of personal Hierophony.
There are also places, I believe, that by virtue of worshipful attention are transformed into hierophony. My husband and I now live in the same town where we were born, raised, met in high school and were married. We recently returned here after being away for fifty-two years, while we lived life in other places.
I feel blessed to have another opportunity at this stage of life, to drive through the neighborhoods where my family lived when I was child, past the homes, parks, and winding tree-shaded streets that are potent with memories and the ghosts of family members, neighbors, and friends. Many persons and places of long ago that informed who I would become are now gone.
However…
Last week, Don and I went to a restaurant that occupies what used to be a corner drugstore, across the street from my great-grandmother’s home. As a girl, aged six, I used to go to Spencer’s Drugstore on hot summer afternoons for a butter brickle ice cream cone. My special treat was made by Mr. Spencer, himself, at his soda fountain while the ceiling fan whirred above my head, and the bell above the door rang with every customer’s coming and going.
In 1953, I didn’t have language to express what the tin-ceilinged, glass shelved, old-fashioned drugstore, meant to me. But revisiting its ghost last week, for the first time in nearly seventy years, in it’s current reincarnation as a seafood restaurant, I realize it is a place of hierophony for me. The spirit of my memory remains, the smell of fresh limes being squeezed for limeade, the coolness of the tiled floor on bare feet, the sound of my mother’s laughter at Mr. Spencer’s joke of the day. The old drugstore will always remain a sacred place, frozen in time, in my memory, a hierophony of my girlhood.
I invite you to take a look around you. Behold what you see, the objects and places, that are your hierophony. Enchantment is alive within you and surrounding you. Sometimes it just takes a word to bring it all to life, so it (the thing or the place) can become “the subject of our worshipful attention…to be transformed into a hierophany, an object of the sacred.”