Names what archaic religion considers as both beneficent and terrible, being the name for what both protects the community from without and threatens it from within.
![Reverently Propitiate](https://mimetictheory.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/9-1.jpg)
The sacred is good to respect at a distance, and to ritually and reverently propitiate in quest of its protection; it is terrible in its proximity, being imagined as the unearthly cause of natural calamities: plague, drought, famine.
![Sacred](https://mimetictheory.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/45-2.jpg)
Ritual propitiation does not allay these scourges, but scrupulous attention, variation and refinement of ritual techniques may advance technologies, affording possibilities of pre-scientific induction in metallurgy, agriculture, and animal husbandry.