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A review by akemi_666
The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion by Willard R. Trask, Mircea Eliade
1.0
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.
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.