this is very, very interesting. i think the opening few chapters which outline his concepts of sacred time and sacred space are the most useful of the book. the way myth is discussed (as the kind of origin story of a given religion) and then spun out into repeated gestures and re-performances was also quite cool. the recognition of Christianity as an embedding of the sacred into a specific historical moment (the birth of christ) rather than a repeatable mythological gesture was also really really cool to think about.

obviously, lot of fucked up colonial stuff going on in here, specifically the whole discussion of what is "primitive" and not. i did feel he was cherry-picking a bit, jumping around between so many disparate (usually non-western) religious practices in order to prove his points. i know he mentioned multiple times that this isn't supposed to be a historical discussion of religion in context but a sweeping discussion of religion and non-religion at large. that said, I do think the difference between Spanish Christianity, for example, and indigenous Ojibwe spirituality is a bit too big for these things to be directly comparable. how is religion being defined here? and how do settler religions and the "religious men" they create differ from indigenous practices in all these various places? 

i feel that would rly complicate this simple argument. but. this book is old. so.

The Sacred and the Profane is a timeless work. Eliade does an exceptional job at showing the similarities among (nearly all, if not all) religions in their practices, beliefs, and vestiges. What’s more, he shows the similarities between the religious and non-religious man. The non religious man, he argues, attempts to do away with the sacred but fails because man is a historical creature and therefore inherits the religious tradition of his past. Religion thus continues to be made manifest through ideology (his example is Marxism) and is deeply engrained in the subconscious (his example is psychoanalysis).