Sacred & Profane
August 1'st, 2025
This is a portrayal of our inner Nature embodied as the divine feminine in the liminal space between what is sacred and what is profane, with a right wing that is natural, soft, and nurturing and a left wing that is armored, sharp, and piercing. In a pose reminiscent of the High Priestess, at its core this depicts the desire to find balance between the intuitive mystical nature of Soul and the dissective rational nature of the mind. This resonates all the more these days in the face of what some refer to as the polycrisis, and I can’t help but wonder if ecocide, war, disease, famine, inequality, and so on, would all but cease to exist if we were genuinely more in tune with our true Nature, instead of being petrified by fear with hands helplessly tied behind our backs.
The idea for this artwork initially came to me back in 2010 while doing some loose pencil sketches, but it would be another 9 years until I briefly revisited it in 2019, before putting it away again for another 6 years, until finally picking it back up in 2025 as part of an album cover design.
Named after the dichotomy that Mircea Eliade himself explored in his own homonymous book, this artwork was featured on the front cover of the music album AIN by Corbu, available on all music streaming platforms.
This illustration © 2025 by Radu Luchian is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
