|
Review Summary: Lost Worlds of the Sacred |
Date: 2008-10-24 |
|
| |
Details: The world contains two kinds of people: those who have read Mircea Eliade, and the deprived. In one reader's insignificant opinion he is worth 3 of Lévi-Strauss and 6 of Carl Jung.
Growing up immersed in Romanian folkways and Orthodox ritual, he was living in the archaic world of myth and symbol, so it's no surprise that he writes about it so convincingly.
He went to India to study Yoga when few Europeans had even heard the word; and while there (to fill the long lonely evenings,) he learnt Sanskrit, Pali and who-knows-what-else. His scholarship has you reaching for the oxygen-mask: he seemed to have read everything worth reading in at least 15 languages.
All but canonised in his native Romania, elsewhere he has fallen between two stools: too opinionated and subjective for the scholars, too scholarly for the public. But this hasn't stopped the pervasive spread of dummed-down versions of his ideas.
Eliade was one of those scholars (artists, poets) who keep returning to a stock of obsessions or key ideas, interpreting all and everything in their light. One such is the subject of this book: that distinction between the Sacred and the Profane, or holy things and ordinary things, so crucial for most ancient and religious cultures.
This is one of the best books to begin on (the other is "The Myth of the Eternal Return".) Nothing that I have ever read helps more in understanding the fabulous lost worlds of pre-modern thought, so often disparaged and misconstrued. |
| |
|
Review Summary: Sacred and the Profane |
Date: 2008-04-22 |
|
|
| |
Details: Years ago, I was assigned this book in one of my university classes. I number it in my most memorable and personally influential works that I have ever read. At the time, I had just begun to study archaeology and had very little understanding of the concept of ethnocentricism. My personal way of thinking was very black and white. The only real experience that I had with the dichotomies of the sacred versus the profane at that point was my own experiences.
The Sacred and the Profane gave me an entirely different perspective. I began seeing how others saw religion, spirituality, ritual, and symbolism in slightly different ways. How certain experiences could be interpreted in a variety of ways to become personal and cultural beliefs. I also noticed how these beliefs permeated into everyday life. So began my interests in spirituality, symbolic dichotomies, and the varied beliefs of others. |
| |
|
Review Summary: Whew. |
Date: 2008-01-18 |
|
|
| |
Details: Yes, the sacred and the profane is discussed here. And guess what? They make sense. It's no secret, just sociology. Good sociology, too, none of your Discovery-Channel, sixth-tier, make every middle class viewer look down on those that are different from a Durkheim-style-deviance-arrogance and pray that they can forget just how screwed up they are kind of stuff. The good stuff. The meat, the bone and the marrow. Unapologetic, yet refined and in no way obscene. Great read. Well written, and, I can only assume, well-translated.
Be warned: The cover image on Amazon is not the one that comes on the book!!! The book you get from Amazon is a new-age style cover photograph of some half-photographed "natives" playing with a circle of candles. The nifty little negative portrait of the Triune God should have stayed. It was much more appropriate to the content. |
| |
|
Review Summary: A marvelous work |
Date: 2007-10-19 |
|
|
| |
|
Details: I read this book with a great excitement. It tells people about essence of our religion. In my opinion, this book is quite good companion for religious comparison study. |
| |
|
Review Summary: A brilliant introduction to the study of religion |
Date: 2007-09-30 |
|
|
| |
Details: I decided to read this book for a religion-course I'm taking, and I must say I'm happy I did! Mircea Eliade was a Rumanian historian of religions, philosopher and author, in addition to being a vaguely religious man himself. This book was written to serve as an introduction to the study of religion for new students and the interested layman, and it does so excellently. Eliade was interestingly enough a member of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, back home in Rumania, the organization of Corneliu Codreanu. In addition to this wonderful fact, he was also acquainted with Baron Julius Evola, so this is certainly one of "our own boys".
The book itself is, as the title implies, an attempt to show the difference between the archaic mans sacred conception of the cosmos, and the profane view of the world of today's "modern man". The first part of the book details the sacred space and the sacralisation of the world. What he means by this is the fact that so-to-speak all religions and the various races have traditions of themselves living near the centre of the world, axis mundi. This world pillar, known as Irminsûl to my own Germanic ancestors, was the place (mountain, tree, building, pillar etc.) where the world traditionally was highest and hence the underworld, the human world and the higher realm of heaven was connected the closest. The various races and peoples then thought that this was where Creation had begun, where the cosmos has flowed out from, and hence the most sacred space on Earth. Eliade then delves into some depth about this subject.
The second chapter is about holy time and myths. He shows how the archaic peoples thought of time as always recurring, going in cycles. The first break with this line of thought was with Judaism and later Christianity, who thought of history as a unique happening, centred on Christ and his coming. The archaic peoples did their rites and their religious cultism so that they could transform themselves back into the sacred eternal present time when the Gods performed the actions the myths mirror today.
The third chapter is about the holiness of nature and the comical view of ancient religion. He shows how ancient man conceived of their own role in the cosmos, and how their actions were supposed to mirror the actions of the creation of the cosmos. It's a very wide chapter that is difficult to summarize, but as everywhere else in the book he fills it up with example upon example from all over the world.
The final chapter is about the existence of humans and the holiness of life. He tells us how many traditions thought of the human body as its own cosmos. The opening at the top of the scull was the place where the soul would leap from at death, and hence some Indians have the tradition of crushing the scull of a recently deceased priest to ensure his soul's easy transcendence. He also mentions männerbunde and various initiations that served to give birth to man anew, after the initiation was complete, and the new sacred man arose. This chapter is also very wide and difficult to summarize, but the richness of the examples is splendid.
All in all, a book that is hard to characterize, but I've read it twice in two weeks now, so I guess that says it all. An excellent book that nearly is enough to make the most profane person catch a glimpse of the holy. Highly recommended!
(I read a different edition) |
| |
|
out of 24 Reviews
