"Surrounded by a world full of wonder and vigour, whose laws man will never understand (though he may sense their existence and long to know them), a world which reaches him in a few interrupted chords that leave his soul unsatisfied, man conjures into being the perfection that he lacks, and, creating a miniature world where the cosmic laws, though restricted, may appear complete in themselves, he gratifies the cosmogonic instinct within him." (Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonishen Künsten.)
"During the Middle Ages, spatial relations tended to be organized as symbols and values. The highest object in the city was the church spire, which pointed toward heaven and dominated all the lesser buildings, as the church dominated their hopes and fears." (Mumford, "the Monastery and the Clock"
Mircea Eliade locates the primary spatializing impulse of architecture the demarcation of sacred from profane. He studies sacred space and the ritual building of human habitation as parts of the modality of sacred experience. For Eliade, the sacred and the profane are two modalities of experience, each with its own world. The former experience takes place in a sacralized cosmos, while the latter desacralizes the world in order to assume a profane existence. An echo of this distinction is to be found in the relationship between philosophy and poetry. (see truth )
In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga, linking play to ritual, also emphasizes spatial separation from everyday life. (In a structuralist perspective, play and ritual are inverses of each other. eg. see time)
Eliade refers to Rudolf Otto's study Das Heilige , published in 1917, as the first study of religious experience rather than of religious concepts or beliefs. While Otto's study focusses more on the frightening and irrational aspects of the religious experience, Eliade concentrates on its difference from the profane and takes up the theme of the otherness, the ganz Andere of the sacred, as it is communicated through hierophanies , the occasions on which the sacred shows itself to us.
According to Eliade, every hierophany represents a paradox, in that any thing including the cosmos can both remain itself and yet reveal the sacred. For the religious man, the sacred is both power and reality, and he desires to be and to participate in reality by living as close to it as possible.
According to Vincent Scully, the Greek temple enacts a reciprocal relationship between the form of the sanctuary and the sacred site. It is a localization, an image in the landscape of the the qualities of the god whose image it housed. (Scully) The place itself is holy and, before the temple was built upon it, embodied the whole of the deity as a recognized natural force ... not as a picture, but as a true force.
Despite differences between nomadic hunters and sedentary cultivators, for example (see smooth and striated) both live in a sacralized cosmos.
In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas criticizes the notion of the sacred as separate and in need of of constant reenforcement through prohibitions and rituals of separation. For her, the concern of anthropologists to underscore the otherness of the sacred derives in part from their own interest in distinguishing magic from religion, the primitive from the modern. Thus they characterize primitive religions as not distinguishing magic from religion, cleanliness from the holy. She also points to the link between the sacred and the contagious.
Eliade's hierophanies are analogues to the erotic multiplicities described by Hans Bellmer (ref. eroticism)
For Alain Badiou, philosophy can only begin by desacralazation.