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).