It's perfect for non initiated people since it's an introductory book to the symbols of religion that still have influnce in our lives despite our actual "atheism". Maybe you'll have to look up some words at first, but it really gets better and you get the ideas across when reading so I'd recommend it to anyone interested in this topic. It reminded me a bit of Jung's work with less psychological analysis and complexity indeed. But I could pretty much say that the conclusion is the same even if Eliade's intention is not to prove the existence of the unconscious collective imagination like Jung does, but it clearly defines a common pattern besides religious symbols that explain the nature of myth compared to some asian religions and the Judeo-Christian tradition and reveals it in a completely non pretentious accesible way.

Definitely a worthwhile read. Perhaps I should give it 5 stars, but the book seemed to fall just shy of. . .I can't quite say what. There's just this feeling on incompleteness when all is said and done.

Very nice, short intro to the science of religion up to 1957.

I think I would want to read more of this author's works before making a final call on his general thesis. Overall the ideas presented are interesting and I think really enlightening as to what religion IS. His answer to this question allows readers almost without being told to understand that man is inherently religious. I was also very interested in his descriptions of what he calls "the profane", ie nonreligious rational approaches to existence. The biggest issue I had is something that all books of this era do, which is use anthropological studies of modern people and examples from all of the world rather haphazardly to try and "prove" a universal quality of human behavior now and in the past. It's not intellectually sound the way it's presented, and I question the accuracy of some of the examples (such as mentioning the gatherings of witches in early modern Europe as if that's a real thing that happened and not a myth spun up by the malleus maleficarum).

C

You wanna understand fascist nostalgia? Read this book from an actual fascist.

There is absolutely no materialist analysis of the religious societies Eliade considers. He doesn't connect their symbols to their environment nor their social organisation. He explains what, without delving into why or how. Why are these particular symbols used? How have they become sedimented into our collective conscious? For example, he talks about the sacred as being connected to cyclicality and the sky. He doesn't make the obvious connection that the sacred, as that which gave birth to life, is connected to cyclicality and the sky due to the seasons: due to the material power of the sun, rain, wind, and so forth.

Furthermore, Eliade reproduces the modernist desire for a universal and total theory of religion, cherry picking certain features and rites of various peoples to reproduce a reactionary understanding of human nature. Namely, that humans turn back to revitalise the present. That order is restored through a reenactment of its cosmogony. He doesn't or perhaps cannot see the vitalising power of disorder (see Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger, for a much more nuanced take on disorder. She separates the sacred and the profane from the orderly and the disorderly, to show how the sacred can be found in disorder, and how order is not always sacred.)

Consequently, Eliade is deeply and unapologetically conservative. He naturalises his fascist worldview, implicitly damning progressive change. For him, there is no need to explain how this or that cosmogony comes about in the first place, nor what ideological effects it has on its people. There is no need to examine how religion rites reproduce power. There is only a need to return to our previous form, a form where order is restored and so too our 'real' connection with God, a God of purity and order.

Fuck all that shit, I'd rather be an feral bitch.