ABSTRACT
Nick Cave is not a theologian. Nor does he claim to be one. What Cave’s lyrics address, in multiple ways, however, is sacredness. While early twentieth-century anthropologists and historians of religion such as Mircea Eliade tended to theorise ‘the sacred’ as ‘the opposite of the profane’, 1 Cave’s sacred is deeply enmeshed in the human dimensions of flesh, erotics and violence. The sacred – the holy, divine, hierophanic, epiphanic – and the profane do not stand apart in his work, but are in dynamic and conflicting conjunction, creating a sprawling, unsystematic and confrontational dialogue with divine forces which may or may not be ‘there’. Institutional religion does not fare well in his lyrics, but nor is it ignored. What we find stamped across his songs, over and over, is the dark, lonely figure of a man caught up in desire for a divine source or balm.
