This is a fundamental text for religious scholarship and for living an examined life.

Eliade wastes no time trying to explain or define the experience of the sacred in terms of other disciplines (for instance, the sacred as psychological experience (Campbell) or the sacred as sociological phenomenon (Burkert)). Instead, he examines the sacred as sacred.

Eliade shows how sacred space and sacred time are supremely REAL space and time, permanent and eternal in opposition to the fluid space and time of the profane world. Homo religiosus re-enacts the primordial deeds of the gods in his rites and, indeed (unlike modern man), in all his acts, because only those primordial acts are truly real. Likewise, irruptions of sacred phenomena into profane space create sacred space, space which is created, which is eternal, which is real.

Read this book before undertaking any serious study of comparative religion. Read this book along with other classics about thought. Read this book and consider your own experience of the sacred. But whatever you do, read this book.

In the "Sacred and the Profane", Mircea Eliade describes two fundamentally different modes of experience: the traditional and the modern. Traditional man or "homo religious" is open to experiencing the world as sacred. Modern man however, is closed to these kinds of experiences. For him the world is experienced only as profane. It is the burden of the book to show in what these fundamentally opposed experiences consist. Traditional man often expresses this opposition as real vs. unreal or pseudoreal and he seeks as much as possible to live his life within the sacred, to saturate himself in reality.According to Eliade the sacred becomes known to man because it manifests itself as different from the profane world. This manifestation of the sacred Eliade calls "hierophany". For Eliade this is a fundamental concept in the study of the sacred and his book returns to it again and again.

The "Sacred and the Profane" is divided into four chapters dealing with space, time, nature, and man. To these is appended a "Chronological Survey Of the History of Religions as a Branch of Knowledge."

In CHAPTER ONE Eliade explores the "variety of religious experiences of space". Modern man tends to experience all space as the same. He has mathematsized space, homogenizing it by reducing every space to the equivalent of so many units of measurement. What differences there are between places are usually due only to experiences an individual associates with a place not the place itself, e.g. my birthplace, the place I fell in love, etc.

But religious man does not experience space in this way. For him some space is qualitatively different. It is sacred, therefore strong and meaningful. Other space is profane, chaotic, and meaningless. Traditional man is unable to live in a profane world, because he cannot orientate himself. In order to gain orientation he must first have a center. The center is not arrived at by speculation or arbitrary decision but is given. A revelation of the sacred, a hierophany establishes a center and the center establishes a world because all other space derives its' meaning from the center.

CHAPTER TWO deals with sacred time. Here Eliade treats briefly material he covers at greater length in "The Myth of the Eternal Return". As with his experience of space, religious man experiences time as both sacred and profane. Sacred time, the time of the festival, is a return to the mythic time at the beginning of things, what Eliade calls "in illo tempore" (Latin: "at that time"). Religious man wishes to always live in this strong time. This is a wish to "return to the presence of the gods, to recover the strong, fresh, pure world that existed "in illo tempore". According to Eliade sacred or festive time is not accessible to modern man, because he sees profane time as constituting the whole of his life and when he dies his life is annihilated.

CHAPTER THREE is entitled "The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion." Here Eliade explains that for religious man nature was never merely "natural" but always expresses something beyond itself. For him the world is symbolic or transparent; the world of the gods shines through his world. The universe is seen as an ordered whole which manifests different modalities of being and the sacred.

Eliade goes on to explores certain key symbols of the sacred: sky, waters, earth, vegetation, and the moon. Within these categories Eliade gives special attention to Christian baptism and the Tree of Life. Needless to say, modernity is characterized by a desacralization of nature.

The FOURTH and final CHAPTER covers the sanctification of human life. Sanctification allows religious man to live an "open existence." This means traditional man lives his life on two planes. He lives his everyday life, but he also shares in a life beyond the everyday, the life of the cosmos or the gods. This "twofold plane" of human and cosmic life is aptly expressed in traditional man's experience of himself and his dwelling as a microcosm or little universe.

Much of this chapter deals with the triplet "body-house-cosmos" and with the meaning of initiations. Initiation is the way traditional man sanctifies his life. It contains a uniquely religious view of the world, because he considers himself unfinished or imperfect. Thus his natural birth must be completed by a series of second or spiritual births. This is accomplished by "rites of passage" which are initiations An initiation is a kind of birth, but it is always accompanied by death to the state left behind.

The excellence of "The Sacred and the Profane" lies in its' combination of brevity and startling depth of insight. Eliade writes with simplicity and clarity about matters of profound import to human life. This is scholarship at its' best: one pauses often, not caught in a tangle of verbiage but lost in wonder.

This eminently readable introduction to cross-cultural religious studies is one of the gems of my personal library. Eliade does not believe that "primitive" means "simple-minded" or "outmoded", hence, his discussions of "primitive" religious ideas are sympathetic and penetrating. The final section of the book skewers "modern" humanity's pretensions to having transcended the sacred. The appendix contains a succinct and iluminating chronology of the development of "history of religions" studies. If you always thought (along with most of the rest of the world) that "myth" simply meant "old superstition" or "false story"' this book has a few surprises in store for you. Just read it!

I read this book when I was about sixteen, and it moved me profoundly.BENGAL NIGHTS, which is known in original version as Maitrey recounts the story of two lovers by the name of Alain and Maitrey. Of course that the story has something true, indeed, Eliade fell in love with Dasgupta's daughter Maitrey.Just imagine that the love story narrated in the novel, happened in reality. Also, must be remembered that Eliade was very much influenced by the "balkan supreme sacrifice" when he wrote Bengal Nights. And if you read more of his work, you will see that the same kind of sacrifice is found in "From Primitives to.." or in "The myth of the eternal return". I am talking, of course, the tracico-dacico mythology, where the death is seen not as the ultimate step of existence but as a gate to another world. For example, the dacians were proud to die, and only the most worthy of them was put to death. Now, in the novel you can see the same thing , but the supreme sacrifice is dedicated to love. And here comes the contribution of the indian mythology, where love and sexuality play a very important role. Whereas in the european mythology, the love is concealed by the Christian Church. Well, this is the substratum of the story anyway. And is just an opinion of mine. Nevertheless, add this book to the shopping cart now, and you will experience something that a very few books could make you feel!

This book is a dream, a message, a powerful explosion of signs, a bloody and mangled corpse left by the passage of some hurricane. In the year of the great success of "Monsoon Wedding" this book more than ever deserves to be read and wept about.

Is this the confession of a repentant Adam, come to weep at the gates of Eden where he so briefly knew bliss? Is it the war story of a proud and Faustian soul who learns European reason after tasting the blood of innocents? Is it the testimony of an emasculated Abelard, who can remember but can no longer experience the passion of his wretched Eloise?

All of these, all of these and much that cannot be justly set forth besides. The style is awkward, at times clumsy, but the life of this book is so vivid, so true, so radiant and bewildering, it reminds me of what many religious teachers have said: that if a man tried to look at God directly, though he would be filled with inexpressible joy, he would also certainly die. In that sense this book is a near-death experience.

It gets off to a shaky start, a bit like a model-T Ford being wound up on a dusty road, but soon you are captured into a whirlwind of passion and ideas, a kind of psychedelia, with levels and reversals of meaning radiating off into space in every direction: as the other reviewers have said -- colonialism, Hinduism and Christianity (and what is Christianity but prophetic Judaism captured and set to music by exiled Indian temple priests), romance, pride, purity, childhood, selfishness, devotion, promise, punishment, renunciation...

Like all Romanian poets, Eliade's motto should be "Lord, grant me only this vision!" His vision burns with the intensity of an acetylene arc. May the reader shield his eyes and turn it to good use.

When this book first appeared they said that, same as every century has its love story novel, the XXth century has "Bengal Nights" (original title: "Maitrey") for its own love story novel. I used to believe that a scientist such as Eliade couldn't write fine literature. After reading "Bengal Nights" I found out I was mistaking. It is an excellent written book that tells an wonderfull story.

I like to say that Eliade's work is the first--but not the last--word in comparative religion. The best introduction to his thought is "Patterns in Comparative Religion."

The greatness of this history is that Eliade actually writes about almost everything, ever. So these three volumes are a solid introduction to the totality of religion. Since all of us lack familiarity with something, we can all fill in some significant gaps in our knowledge with these books.

But unfortunately, it's not the best introduction to any specific thing that it covers. If you already know about some subject, then Eliade's coverage of it proves completely useless and superficial. It seems that Eliade's purpose was to show how every important religious phenomenon in history relates to his pet theories. In his defense, perhaps this is simply inevitable when one person tries to write about all of religion in 1000 pages. Certainly, there is nothing else like this out there because the task is enormous. If nothing else, the fact that Eliade researched and wrote this is amazing.

This is a superb series on the history of religion, and incidentally serves as a fine introduction to comparative religion. The only real weakness is in this first volume: I've never like the treatment of paleolithic religion here, which seems abrupt. But this caveat is far too minor to dissuade anyone from reading these wonderful books.

Volumes 1 -3 were recommended to me by John Pamperin who studied theology at University of Chicago. John's one of brightest individuals that I know. This is a great treatment on religion and it is a bit of effort to read through volumes 1-3 but well worth the journey! Much more deep and thorough than Joseph Cambell's works! Thanks John!

Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton, 1951)

I didn't keep count of how many times during this survey Eliade says he's just touching on the very surface of the scholarship of a given topic, or that in the limited space provided, he can only manage the barest mention of something. Eliade's "few comments" (p. 511) and fifty plus pages of bibliography, if he is to be believed, are a quick overview on shamanism as it has been practiced for the past two and a half millenia, covering six of the seven continents and thousands of years.

Shamanism is a survey, not a new work; Eliade, here, only attempts to distill what he and others have written in the past, to give the prospective student or researcher an idea of where to begin on a specific topic. As such, the book may not be meant to be read all the way through. Taken as a whole, however, it's an interesting and thought-provoking document about not only shamaism, but many deeper issues; the migration of man over two and a half thousand years, cultural "degeneration" (Eliade's word), the Judeo-Christian tradition and its heavy borrowing from religions that pre-dated it, etc. While Eliade's writing is often thick, it's certainly understandable by the layman, as always (one of the things which made Eliade a consistently popular and well-read anthropologist). It requires a leisurely pace and a good deal of reflection, but is ultimately worth the time (in my case, five and a half months) it takes to finish.

Eliade's work, which I first read at university, achieves something quite unique - it's completely scholarly, and yet never loses its deep sense of respect for, or awareness of, its core topic - the search for the divine in earlier cultures, from the Australian aborigines to Eskimos.

Indeed, Eliade's survey reveals the remarkable world-wide commonality of the major Shamanic traditions - death/resurrection within 3 days of initiation, mastery of fire, descent into the underworld and magical flight (shades of Jesus?).

In its humanity and understanding, it matches Geza Vermes' "Jesus the Jew", which explores the multiplicity of revelatory traditions in the biblical Holy Land. Both books enhance the majesty and importance of their central subjects by emphasising that nothing profound or sacred springs from a vacuum.

In short, "Shamanism" is a treasure that one can re-open on any page at any time, and find new wonders.

Eliade's book is widely acknowledged to be the definitive work of scholarship on shamanism. It deserves its reputation.

Shamanism is mostly comparative anthropology, describing shamanistic systems from all over the world and relating them to what Eliade considers to be the paradigmatic type, namely, Siberian shamanism.

The shamanic universals are of considerable interest in themselves, not just as evidence of some ancient pan-cultural Ur-religion (although as such they also make interesting thought-fodder). They include initiation experiences (almost always involving the oneiric dismemberment of the shaman by demons), a history of self-healing (frequently the young shaman must and does cure himself of epilepsy or some other such condition), equipment and regalia used, beliefs about the nature and structure of the spirit world, and the claim by twentieth-century practitioners that a few generations back some catastrophe caused a degeneration in the powers shamans are able to command.

The portrait Eliade evokes of the practicing shaman is fascinating, but I have to admit that I read this book as much for insight into the interaction between the human brain and mind as for anthropology. Admittedly dry at times, Shamanism more than repays the effort required to take it in.

This was one of the books used in an Introduction to Mythology class I took. It's very scholarly, so have a good dictionary handy.

This is a good book for myth, though Eliade's style is a little difficult to get used to. Read it if you're interested in myth and comparative religion.

Another brilliant look at the archaic religious experience by Eliade. See also Eliade, "Myths Dreams and Mysteries." These are companion books.

Eliade presents an impressive collection of data from the religions and mythologies of an incredible number of different cultures, organized according to recurring themes: sky gods, agricultural goddesses, cycles of death and rebirth, and so on. It is an interesting resource for the student of comparative religion, but seems to lack a coherent interpretive framework. I'm left with unsatisfied curiosity to know what Eliade believed is to be learned from this collection of parallels. Perhaps his other writings provide more interpretation, but this book (although it contains many interesting "gems") seems incomplete as a stand-alone volume.

Eliade's place among scholars of religion is unequaled; even his detractors admit this. "Comparative Religion" exists as a scholarly discipline because of Eliade.

Essentially, this is a book about religious symbolism, covering an incredibly wide range of religious traditions. I think if you read this, agree or disagree, you will never look at religions the same way again.

Further, this is Eliade's most accessible and complete book.

I graduated with a religious studies degree from Yale University, and read this book in the first year after I graduated. I learned nearly as much from this book alone as I did from my undergraduate education. That is a strong statement, but I mean it.

Amidst the chaotic profusion of symbols, myths, rituals and mystical perspectives of the world's religious traditions, Eliade weaves a mandela-like portrait of humankind's incredibly vital relationship with the divine, spanning several thousand years. Not for the faint of heart, this monumental work provides important insight into the often confusing psychology of the primitive religious experience; an experience characterized by perspectives charged with meaning across broad fields of associative and interdependent symbolic realms.

Eliade bases his discoveries of common patterns in the global-religious-traditions upon a thematic theoretical framework. In this manner, he avoids the pitfalls latent in more common conceptions of religious experience that are defined by psychologically artificial categories created within perspectives that tend to be too narrow. Such commonly expressed and narrowly defined perspectives often stop short of understanding the limits of psychologically artificial, chronological, geographic and even ethnic categories; categories which humanity's important religious archetypes of divine experience have traditionally and absolutely transcended.

In this vein, Eliade's "Patterns in Comparative Religion" also provides important material for the interpretation of dreams. I think it is no mere coincidence that both primitive religious experience and the native realm of the unconscious both display a disturbing and important tendency to buck the rules of normality that our modern conscious minds so often wish to impose upon experience. It is from the creative associative milieu of dream symbolism that humanity's religious traditions have incessantly sprung and to which one must arguably return for the most fertile understanding of the 'primitive' divine experience.

Mircea Eliade's "Patterns in Comparative Religion" surely presented me with a formidable challenge, however, as with any important challenge to understanding that I have experienced, the rewards have far outweighed the difficulties encountered along the way.

I cannot add to any of the other excellent synopses of the contents of this seminal work. The ideas are fascinating and the perspective unique. The concepts under discussion are sophisticated, but elegant, and the work is certainly written for thinking persons who are given to pondering unanswerables.

Here is where I diverge from the other readers' sparkling reviews: this is the most laborious, bombastic, convoluted text, more given to flamboyant language structure--and leaving content to languish under the suffocation of verbiage--than any book I have ever read.

Be prepared for the most archaic of words, the least succinct of summations, and the most roundabout explanations of what are already intricate interrelationships in a complex system. Although I have never seen, nor could read, the original text, the translators do no favors for the reader, and, I fear, a great disservice to Mr. Eliade's intent in the interest of being faithful to the original.

I hope that one day a more accessible translation will be available.

Eliade attempts to show that "archaic man" lives in a world that perpetually recreates the building and maintenance of a cosmos. Using many examples from anthropological work and his own textual work in Indian religion and philosophy, he tries to show that all societies practice religion in a way such that each action gains meaning only be identifying with a cultural archetype. Thus, objects have no "meaning" in and of themselves, but only insofar as they participate in a mythic role. While some might argue against drawing likenesses between "archaic" religions and "modern" ones, Eliade does just that, arguing that the three modern monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, retain, at the least, vestiges of this ongoing mythic repetition.

The most important issue for Eliade is "history." It is so important, that he states that the central problem of "man" is to attempt to abolish history. The word "abolish" is very important. It helps signify that this process is for Eliade, an attempt to banish the withering, terrorizing effect of passing through the "meaninglessness" of ordinary or profane time. Eliade states that for "primitive" societies, time is not allowed to become history. Other, "modern" societies have felt the need to record temporal occurrences, thus making them irreversible. Instead of abolishing this need to return to a mythic beginning, this has made the need grow deeper. Thus the role for religion in the modern world is to enable "man" to become a "primitive" again. Not in a sense of rationally dysfunctional, but in the sense of living eternally in the present, removed from the relentless onslaught of "history."

Perhaps Eliade is simply describing a dualism, where he could chide "archaic" man for not living up to the "truth" of reality. But this is actually far from Eliade's project. In describing a situation where a folklorist had the attempted to correct a mythical account with a historically factual one, Eliade sides with those who refuse to accept the historical account-he argues "...was not the myth truer by the fact that it made the real story yield a deeper and richer meaning, reaching a tragic destiny."

Thus we see that Eliade is willing to let truth become divorced from factuality. In his account of evil among archaic man, Eliade argues that evil is tolerable because it is at least never absurd, or meaningless. That is, evil is never without the ability to be fitted into a cosmic scheme that retains cultural purpose. Occurrences, good or bad, reveal a purpose to the world. Even Marxism, says Eliade, posits a meaning to history, expressing it in terms of class struggle and dialectical materialism.

While this schema of "history" does possess considerable explanatory power, the reduction of all religion to the irruption of the sacred through the individual and culture masks the very real human elements that enforce and maintain religion and religious prescriptions as part of culture. The positing of a "meaning" by a culture (or subculture) also carries with it the possibility (and often the power) to enforce a specific mode of political, economic, and social discourse.

If we only look at the lens of myth in this manner, we miss being able to see how myth contributes to political, gender, racial and economic oppression. "Religion" then becomes a legitimating factor in the commitment of atrocities we might otherwise criticize or punish. For example, are the recent tragedies in the USA any more legitimate because they were committed by fanatics in the name of "Islam" ? Of course not.

For a similar, yet quite different perspective, read Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."

Stated most simply, this is a study of two understandings of what it means to exist in time: the archaic or traditional and the modern. According to Eliade man has traditionally sought to conform his actions in time to primordial or mythic actions performed by gods or heroes in the beginning of time. By conforming his actions to those performed in the beginning or as Eliade puts it "in illo tempore", traditional man gives significance to those actions. He saves his life in time from the terrors of meaninglessness. Modern man on the other hand, has lost or rejected the archetypical world, the world of eternity. He sees nothing beyond the world of time. Modern man, according to Eliade is "historical man." Rather than seeking to transcend history, he "consciously and voluntarily creates history." He is "the man who is in so far as he makes himself, within history."

This neat division is complicated however, by the Judaic prophets and Christianity. The God of the Jewish people is a personal God who intervenes in history and reveals his will through events. "Historical facts thus become 'situations' of man in respect to God, and as such they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able confer on them." The relationship with Yahweh brings into play a new element according to Eliade--faith. Christianity takes up the Jewish understanding and amplifies it. For Christianity the meaning of history "is unique because the Incarnation is a unique fact." Yet the archaic understanding of returning to the archetype is not altogether rejected by Christianity, but woven into its' new understanding of the uniqueness of historical events.

This essay spans 162 pages that are divided into four large chapters with subheadings. The first chapter introduces the notions of the archetype, the return to the archetype, and their relation to sacred and profane time and place. The second chapter deals in depth with sacred time as a return to eternity. The third chapter examines suffering and the return to the archetype. The forth chapter looks at the modern understanding of history as it relates to the archaic. The book includes and extensive bibliography and an index.

No summary can do justice to the depth, range, and brilliance of Eliade's essay. His knowledge of religions is damn near encyclopedic. He opens up so many interesting avenues for further thought that reading him is like having your brain fertilized. This book is must reading for anyone interested in religion, myth, philosophy of history, personalism, liturgy, or the idea of progress. If you are interested in traditionalist thinkers such as Rene Guenon or Ananda Coomaraswamy you will also want to check out Eliade.

Mircea's first love in India (Amrita/Amruta, penname "maitrayi devi"--who died on January 4, 1990) had published her own memoir in Bengali (her mothertongue and one of the principal language of India). The title of her book is "Na Hanyate" which means "It does not die". It is a fairly intense memoir showing her impression and the spiritual implication. I am not sure if the book is translated in English or not. I was impressed by her candor and honesty. In 1976, her book received an award from the "sahitya academy" (academy for litrature) in India. I have tried to supply some information that was missing from Mircea'a autobiography. I hope the readers will find this information useful.

Mircea Eliade is a maniac: He read about a book each night. He trained himself to sleep less and less, so that he could learn in the night. That paid well in terms of producing a knowledge which has seldomly been reached by a historian of religion. He especially knew about similar things in very different religions, so that he saw parallels, where nobody thought about it before. He wrote novels as well as religios history books, including the well known "Yoga, Immortality and Freedom".

This autobiography covers the most interesting part of his life, but does not make it to the end, which has the effect, that no one knows, what happend, when the woman, he loved in India visited him later in life in Chicago. That's quite a story, because of who the woman was and because of the shaking novel about the affair. The biography covers his Romanian time and the time in India. He writes very openly not hiding unpleasant things. He tried both, to understand indian religions and to live it. The science he did, but trying to live it with Dasgupta and within the Shivananda ashram, both ended in stories with women. With Dasgupta he was to study, but also he wanted to live like a hindu and in the ashram he wanted to practice yoga. Later he became a professor of history of religion at the university of Chicago. It's now some time, since I read this biography and my comments are not propperly weighted, but I can still say, that Eliade was a fascinating person and did good writing and he knew nearly everything. (Just to say: English is a foreign language to me, so please forgive mistakes)

First of all, this book makes a lot more sense if you also read Mircea Eliade's "Maitreyi"...

"It does not die" reveals not only a Bengali woman's views on love, marriage and life, but also the relationship between a writer and its subject. For the sensual, tragic Maitreyi from Eliade's novel reveals herself as a woman with her feet down to earth and a lot of common sense. I was charmed by her serenity and tenacity.

We don't get to hear "the other side of a story" too often. This is one of the rare instances where we can meet both the literary heroine (from Eliade's novel) and the real woman, with her personality so different from what we might have expected. I could go on talking about inspiration and influences, about social norms and the ideas of "exotic beauty", but I will let you enjoy the book :)

As a Bengali reader of the novel "Na Hanyate" (It Does Not Die) by Maitreyi Devi, I've got charmed with the true essence of not the story only, but the language it was written in also. To tell about the literary value, I have to tell the fluency and the story-telling style of the novel. As was associated with the family of Rabindranath Tagore, 'Ru', as the writer called herself in the novel knew how to write such a story in a descent and controlled way. The story about the love of Mircea Eliade & Maitreyi had flourished secretly quite unknowingly to her parents, who were very conservative and respected persons in the early-20th century Bengali soceity. If anybody knows the true history of that society, he can easily understand how much 'unlawful' it was to make love and then to marry in those days, even if they were Bramha in religion (which was well-known as the religion of those educated in Western culture & believed to be beyond all kinds of conservativeness). So unfortunately the affair had been public & Mircea, who was in their house as a helper to her father's work and stayed with so-called good will had been thrown away. Now starts the tragedy. Maitreyi got consolation from Tagore and then got married to another goody guy. She was happily living in her marital life. But after publishing of 'Bengal Nights', by Mircea, Ru went to him and chraged him for exploting their relation. Ru then felt that their love would not die. All the stars of night are in the depth of sunshine.

I think as a chracter Ru has not correctly portrayed Mircea. What disturbed her later, was a madly work of Mircea, according to Ru. But the feelings of them are really touching to one's heart. Sometimes Ru seems to be selfish and cruel, the reader can get an easy sympathy for Mircea. But still a very good readable book indeed. Quite unforgettable affair with tragic end, one of so many in today's world even.

A reference book on religions that is readable and even compelling. The detail on backgrounds and structural formats of 33 religious traditions helps the reader to begin developing a comprehensive view of world religions. The utter complexity of the subject needs a resource such as this book once a person begins to get elementary details in mind. To see religions "in the light of day" enables a person to makes ones own decision in an informed manner.