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

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.