The sacred

In plain terms

What makes something sacred is not a property you could find by examining it. A stone, a day, a text and a stretch of ground can all be sacred, and they have nothing in common physically.

What they share is a boundary. Something has been set apart from ordinary use, and the rules governing it are different: it may not be sold, photographed, walked on, altered or spoken about casually, depending on the tradition.

Which means the sacred is constituted by a distinction rather than discovered as a quality. That does not make it arbitrary. The line is maintained by a community, breaking it is a serious matter, and someone who does not recognise it can walk across a place that is, for others, not the kind of place you walk across.

As a philosopher would put it

Durkheim's definition is structural: religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say things set apart and forbidden, and the sacred-profane division is the elementary form. On his account the sacred is society representing itself to itself, which makes it real and social rather than supernatural.

Otto's account is phenomenological. The numinous is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans - a response of awe, dread and attraction that is sui generis and cannot be derived from moral or rational categories.

Eliade builds on both, describing hierophany as the manifestation of the sacred in an object and treating sacred space and time as qualitatively different from homogeneous profane extension.

Agamben's recovery of homo sacer uses the Latin term's double sense - consecrated and set outside the law - to argue that the sacred marks an exclusion as much as an elevation, which returns the concept to politics.

What is actually disputed

Whether the sacred is a real category or a social one.

Durkheim's account makes it a social fact - real, powerful, and about the group rather than about anything transcendent. Otto's makes it a response to something genuinely encountered, irreducible to social or moral categories, and criticised for building the conclusion into the description.

Eliade's comparative approach has been attacked for assembling a single phenomenon from materials that do not fit together, in the way that all cross-cultural religious categories have been attacked.

The practical question is sharper and does not wait for the theoretical one. Where a community holds something sacred and others do not, someone has to decide whose rules apply to a place, an object or an image - and the answer cannot be derived from any account of what the sacred is. It is settled politically, and the Uluru case is one instance among a great many.