Rating: 
Summary: Wise, Insightful
Review: Before Huston Smith, Mircea Eliade was probably THE writer on religion. His writings are deep and beautiful, exploring what is profane and what is sacred particularly through the evolution of myth and early religion."The point to be emphasized is that, from the beginning, religious man sets the model he is to attain on the transhuman plane, the plane revealed by his myths. One becomes truly a man only by conforming to the teaching of the myths, that is, by imitating the gods." What has stuck with me is how he's described the way that primitive man would seek out and find the sacred. For example, finding and creating sacred space and the threshold between the sacred and profane space. If you like this, also consider Joseph Campbell's writings, as well as John Huston's.
Rating:
Summary: This is IT!
Review: Eliade was among the first to realize that our world is in danger. Because our science advances the world but in the same time demolishes it.And the only way to come back, the only way to get back into sacred time is to understand that it is needed a rigorous study of world religions. Of course that this doesn't mean that we have to be fanatics, but rather to read carefully and to understand the message. And by this we will come back into sacred time. I think this is the point of Mircea Eliade's book....
Rating:
Summary: Critical text to understanding religious history.
Review: Eliade's book picks up the thread from Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy and attempts to explain the nature of the Sacred by pairing it with its opposite-- the profane. This little book is a deceptively easy and quick read, but take the time to think it through carefully. He uses the oppositional pair sacred/profane to examine the notion of space, time, nature and human existence and it's worth spending the time to go back after each chapter and reconsider the chapter before it. Bound with a chronological survey on the history of religion and a selected bibliography, a must have before trying to do further reading in religious thought.
Rating: 
Summary: What Twentieth Century can understand from religion
Review: I first discovered this book in college and it has become one of the most influential pieces of writing in my life. Eliade's extensive studies in comparative religion penetrates to the core of the human condition, our existence and constant search for meaning. This is a great book to open dialogue about the nature of religion, it's development, and evolution. If you are open to thinking outside of convention, Eliade will blow your mind. He makes the underlying connections between "what we do" and "why do we do it" obvious. For anyone who wants explore the ultimate "why" questions of life, this book is a great place to start. Eliade's ideas have constantly change the way I viewed religion and the world. Plus, the book is really short with big font. For anyone else looking for more on Eliade, his academic work covers volumes, literally.
Rating:
Summary: Read it...short book, big font - plus the "meaning of life."
Review: I first discovered this book in college and it has become one of the most influential pieces of writing in my life. Eliade's extensive studies in comparative religion penetrates to the core of the human condition, our existence and constant search for meaning. This is a great book to open dialogue about the nature of religion, it's development, and evolution. If you are open to thinking outside of convention, Eliade will blow your mind. He makes the underlying connections between "what we do" and "why do we do it" obvious. For anyone who wants explore the ultimate "why" questions of life, this book is a great place to start. Eliade's ideas have constantly change the way I viewed religion and the world. Plus, the book is really short with big font. For anyone else looking for more on Eliade, his academic work covers volumes, literally.
Rating:
Summary: What Twentieth Century can understand from religion
Review: If you are interested in modern religious studies this book might be a must. But if you have a sincere, non-scholarly interest in religion, you might better try something like Tolstoy.
Rating:
Summary: The Traditional and the Modern
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Characterizing the Numinous
Review: That the phenomenon of religious experience brooks no debate whatsoever. Eliade examines characteristics of this phenomenology, contrasting what humankind has experienced for tens of thousands of years with modern, stripped-down, rationalized religion. If nothing else, this book demonstrates what "modern" religions lack. The price they have paid in order to become modern deprives them of the underlying phenomena which have always empowered spiritual experience as a meaningful force in the past. The chief point of the book is "to show in what ways religious man attempts to remain as long as possible in a sacred universe, and hence what his total experience of life proves to be in comparison with the experience of the man without religious feeling, of the man who lives, or wishes to live, in a desacralized world." Eliade begins with hierophany, the event of the sacred manifesting itself to us, the experience of a different order of reality entering human experience. He presents the idea of sacred space, describing how the only "real" space is sacred, surrounded by a formless expanse. Sacred space becomes the point of reference for all other spaces. He finds that people inhabit a midland, between the outer chaos and the inner sacred, which is renewed by sacred ritual and practice. By consecrating a place in the profane world, cosmogony is recapitulated and the sacred made accessible. This becomes the center of the primitive world. Ritual takes place in this sacred space, and becomes a way of participating in the sacred cosmos while reinvigorating the profane world. Next, Eliade considers sacred time and mythology. While "profane time" is linear, sacred time returns to the beginning, when things were more "real" than they are now. Again, ritual plays an important part. Time is regenerated by being created anew as rituals tie participants back to the sacred origins of the cosmos. Thus, the cycle of the year becomes a paradigm for community renewal and for replentishing the world from the sacred genesis. He goes on to examine how a number of the elements of nature typically play into sacred experience. He considers water, the sacred tree, the home and the body. He notes that "No modern man, however irreligious, is entirely insensible to the charms of nature." Cosmic symbolism adds a new value to an object or action without removing the inherent values. Religious man finds within himself the same sanctity which he finds in the cosmos. "Openness to the world enables religious man to know himself in knowing the world--and this knowledge is precious to him because it is religious, because it pertains to being." He concludes the book by considering the contrast between homo religiosus and profane man. Non-religious man finds that all things have been desacralized. This can be liberating, in that oppressive meanings have been removed--but also impoverishing as all actions and items have been deprived of spiritual significance. He speaks to the great loss of Christianity: "The religious sense of the urban population is gravely impoverished. The cosmic liturgy, the mystery of nature's participation in the Christological drama, have become inaccessible to Christians living in a modern city. Their religious experience is no longer open to the cosmos. In the last analysis, it is a strictly private experience; salvation is a problem that concerns man and his god [sic]; at most, man recognizes that he is responsible not only to God but also to history. But in these man-God-history relationships there is no place for the cosmos. From this it would appear that, even for a genuine Christian, the world is no longer felt as the work of God. This is a powerful book. It presents basic elements of religious experience, and allows the reader to notice where their lack can be felt in modern society and his own life. Eliade suggests no solutions to the problems which this consideration may raise. If one is inclined towards the Christian tradition, Matthew Fox's writings, particularly ORIGINAL BLESSING, may offer hope. For others, more exploration is required.
Rating:
Summary: Sacred?Profane?
Review: This a very interresting book for anyone interrested in religion and the structure that sustaines time .I don't want to talk the perception of time and space from a profane point of view because this already known-->just take a look around!Instead,I want to talk about the time and space seen from a religious point of view where everything is different.The primitive man or the "homo religioso" sees time from an angle that makes you think very seriously about our modern world..I am talking about the circular time..the eternal recurrence(see the myth of the eternal return).Now, if Darwin was right and man evoluates (which by the way didn't happen' since the cave-man..yes genetically we are still cave-men)means that on a certain level his theory was right, at least from my point of view!!No matter what buy this book and read it(although you may have to do it a couple of times) because Eliade along with Jung,Campbell,Otto,Steiner,Watts,Culiano,Eco..etc is one of the greatest scholars on religion of our century!(pls excuse my english but on my small island this is the only computer and the english language is a foreign thing for us)
Rating:
Summary: Read this book!
Review: This book represents a milestone in the academic study of religion. Read it! It is a classic. Eliade displayes rare genius in his analysis of the phenomona of religion
| 
