Product Description

This founding work of the history of religions, first published in English in 1954, secured the North American reputation of the Romanian emigre-scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). Making reference to an astonishing number of cultures and drawing on scholarship published in no less than half a dozen European languages, Eliade's "The Myth of the Eternal Return makes both intelligible and compelling the religious expressions and activities of a wide variety of archaic and "primitive" religious cultures. While acknowledging that a return to the "archaic" is no longer possible, Eliade passionately insists on the value of understanding this view in order to enrich our contemporary imagination of what it is to be human. Jonathan Z. Smith's new introduction provides the contextual background to the book and presents a critical outline of Eliade's argument in a way that encourages readers to engage in an informed conversation with this classic text.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #304136 in Books
• Published on: 1992-09-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 195 pages

About the Author
Eliade was educated as a philosopher. He published extensively in the history of religions and acted as editor-in-chief of Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Religion. The influence of his thought, through these works and through thirty years as director of History of Religions department at the University of Chicago, is considerable. Eliade's analysis of religion assumes the existence of "the sacred" as the object of worship of religious humanity. It appears as the source of power, significance, and value. Humanity apprehends "hierophanies"--physical manifestations or revelations of the sacred--often, but not only, in the form of symbols, myths, and ritual. Any phenomenal entity is a potential hierophany and can give access to non-historical time: what Eliade calls illud tempus (Latin for 'that time,' I tend to think of it as 'yon time'). The apprehension of this sacred time is a constitutive feature of the religious aspect of humanity.

Customer Reviews

Elegant, profound and peerless
I had this on my bookshelf for nearly a year before I was in the right frame of mind to approach this innovative work, and that was after I read "The sacred and the profane". This earlier and broader work sets out many of the same themes, but everything is worth reading several times over. The writing style is a somewhat archaic, but I found it accessible with a little effort - and what rewards await the patient reader! Eliade's erudition is breathtaking but never overbearing. His explanation of the "burden of history", and the "premodern" and modern responses to it, is truly elegant and helped me to understand in a new way the fundamental differences between Western (monotheistic) and Eastern religions - and why Westerners practising Buddhism or Daoism (for example) have difficulty experiencing the "eternal present". The implication, as I see it, is that the pressure of history gradually obliterates the premodern way of experiencing sacredness. I suspect this is a subtle form of historicism, which Eliade rejects, and I'm not sure I agree with his conclusion that "Christianity is the religion of modern man and historical man". Fifty years after Eliade wrote this book, Christianity is looking rather feeble in the face of dominant materialism and vaguely psychologically-based "new age" philosophies. Independent spiritual practitioners reading this book, however, might be inspired to question the dominant myth of progress and live a more immanent spirituality. This book certainly deserves a wide audience and a lively debate.

An important, profound and timeless book
This little book has managed to influence all discussions about Time not only in religion, but also in psychology (see Norman O. Brown's "Life against Death"), the natural sciences(see Gould's "Time's Arrow"), literary criticism (see Camille Paglia) etc. Eliade's insights into Time are now so pervasive that it becomes de rigueur for this book to be read and relished not just by the scholars of religion, but also by those aspiring to a broader education. Do not be deceived, however, by the book's apparent simplicity; it is only a measure of Eliade's genius that profound insights are offered with the elegance of a true artist.

Religion as meringue
An English translation of a Romanian author's rather vacuous French speculations about "primordial archetypes." The unsurpassed opacity of the prose could, perhaps, pass for profundity, but it is, in fact, a superbly silly book.