I “regimi immaginali” del sacro. Religione, spiritualità, trascendenza: un’analisi di sociologia della religione e dell’immaginario

Abstract

The Sacred and the “Regimes of the Imaginary”. Religion, Spirituality, Transcendence: an Analysis from the Perspective of the Sociology of Religion and Imagery.
The aim of this essay is to analyze the relationship between different “regimes of the imaginary” (Durand, 2013) and the sacred.
In the first section, I underline the features in common between the domain of the sacred and that of the imaginary; in the second, I identify the “axial” epoch as the genetic moment of the “diurnal regime” (Durand, 2013) highlighting the concurrence of the emergence of the transcendent sphere; in the third, I analyze the passage of the symbolic power of the “disjunction” from the sacred to the scientific imaginary; in the fourth, I discuss two typical forms of social relationship with the sacred in contemporary society, hypothesizing that religion, maintaining a relationship with the transcendent sphere, is still inscribed today in a “diurnal” imaginary while, spirituality, by having its relationship with the sacred only in the immanent dimension, it represents a contemporary form of “nocturnalization of experience”, paraphrasing an expression by Gilbert Durand.