I first ran into the concept of Hierophany from an article on Haitian Vodou written by none other than the greats, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith & Claudine Michel.
Hierophany is the act of being aware of something sacred manifesting itself through various things in the physical world. “Hiero” is Greek for sacred/holy; “phany” means appearance or manifestation.
It’s the act of seeing the divine in the ordinary, the abstract in the concrete, seeing the software in the hardware–to use today’s tech-obsessed parlance.
Hierophany was coined by the philosopher Mircea Eliade in his work “Treatise on the History of Religions.”
When you manifest the sacred, ordinary objects become something else without losing themselves in the transmutation process. A sacred book is still a book sitting next to other ordinary books.
This is the case where addition (or change) is not a zero/sum game, where adding doesn’t come at the expense of something else. So while 1 + 1 = 3, the ones are still contained within the 3–they weren’t obliterated in the process of transmutation.
