Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Mircea Eliade

Romanian Historian of Religion, Fiction Writer, Philosopher and Professor at the University of Chicago

"Architecture simply took over and developed the cosmological symbolism already present in the structure of primitive habitations."

"As "copy of the cosmos", the Byzantine church incarnates and at the same time sanctifies the world."

"And if, through the repetition of paradigmatic gestures and by means of periodic ceremonies, archaic man succeeded, as we have seen, in annulling time, he none the less lived in harmony with the cosmic rhythms; we could even say he entered into these rhythms."

"And in our day, when historical pressure no longer allows any escape, how can man tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history ? from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings ? if beyond the he can glimpse no sign, no trans-historical meaning; if they are only the blind play of economic, social, or political forces, or, even worse, only the result of the ?liberties? that a minority takes and exercises directly on the stage of universal history?"

"Cosmic symbolism is found in the very structure of the habitation. The house is an "imago mundi"."

"De-sacralization pervades the entire experience of nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies. ... The man of the traditional societies is admittedly a homo religious, but his behavior forms part of the general behavior of mankind and hence is of concern to philosophical anthropology, to phenomonology, to psychology."

"Even the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of a religious valorization of the world."

"Every New Year is a resumption of time from the beginning, that is, a repetition of the cosmogony. ?at the end of the year and in expectation of the New Year there is a repetition of the mythical moment of the passage from chaos to cosmos."

"Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different."

"Every religion implies that it treats the problem of being and nonbeing, life and death. Their languages are different, but they speak about the same things."

"For profane experience, space is homogenous and neutral; no break qualitatively differentiates the various parts of its mass."

"For archaic man, reality is a function of the imitation of a celestial archetype."

"For religious man every world is a sacred world."

"For religious man, space is not homogenous ... there is, then, a sacred space ... there are other spaces that are not sacred ... nonhomogeneity of space ... [is] homologizable to a founding of the world. ... the break effected in space allows the world to be constituted, because it reveals the fixed point, the central axis for future orientation. When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also revelation of an absolute reality ... In the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center."

"Habitations are not lightly changed, for it is not easy to abandon one's world. The house is not an object, a 'machine to live in'; it is the universe that man constructs for himself by imitating the paradigmatic creation of the gods, the cosmogony. Every construction and every inauguration of a new dwelling are in some measure equivalent to a new beginning, a new life."

"Her beauty is not conventional, it does not meet the classic dictates. Her face is rebelliously expressive. She enchants in the magical sense of the world."

"I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is."

"I cannot consider exclusively what that man tells me when he consciously says, ?I don?t believe in God; I believe in history,? and so on. For example, I do not think that Jean-Paul Sartre gives all of himself in his philosophy, because I know that Sartre sleeps and dreams and likes music and goes to the theater. And in the theater he gets into a temporal dimension in which he no longer lives his ?moment historique.? There he lives in quite another dimension. We live in another dimension when we listen to Bach. Another experience of time is given in drama. We spend two hours at a play, and yet the time represented in the play occupies years and years. We also dream. This is the complete man. I cannot cut this complete man off and believe someone immediately when he consciously says that he is not a religious man. I think that unconsciously, this man still behaves as the ?homo religiosus,? has some source of value and meaning, some images, is nourished by his unconscious, by the imaginary universe of the poems he reads, of the plays he sees; he still lives in different universes. I cannot limit his universe to that purely self-conscious, rationalistic universe which he pretends to inhabit, since that universe is not human."

"If a "construction" is to endure (be it house, temple, tool, etc.), it must be animated, that is, it must receive life and a soul. The transfer of the soul is possible only through a blood sacrifice."

"Here, then, we have a sequence of religious conceptions and cosmological images that are inseparably connected and form a system that may be called the 'system of the world' prevalent in traditional societies: (a) a sacred place constitutes a break in the homogeneity of space; (b) this break is symbolized by an opening by which passage from one cosmic region to another is made possible (from heaven to earth & vice versa; from earth to the underworld); (c) communication with heaven is expressed by one or another of certain images, all of which refer to the axis mundi: pillar (cf. the universalis columna), ladder (cf. Jacob's ladder), mountain, tree, vine, etc.; (d) around this cosmic axis lies the world (=our world), hence the axis is located 'in the middle,' at the 'navel of the earth'; it is the Center of the World."

"If Samkhya-Yoga philosophy does not explain the reason and origin of the strange partnership between the spirit and experience, at least tries to explain the nature of their association, to define the character of their mutual relations. These are not real relationships, in the true sense of the word, such as exist for example between external objects and perceptions. The true relations imply, in effect, change and plurality, however, here we have some rules essentially opposed to the nature of spirit."

"If the moon in fact serves to ?measure? time, if the moon?s phases ? long before the solar year and far more concretely ? reveal a unit of time (the month), the moon at the same time reveals the ?eternal return?. The phases of the moon ? appearance, increase, wane, disappearance, followed by reappearance after three nights of darkness ? have played an immense part in the elaboration of cyclical concepts. This means that the lunar rhythm not only reveals short intervals (week, month) but also serves as the archetype for extended durations; in fact, the ?birth? of a humanity, its growth, decrepitude (?wear?), and disappearance are assimilated to the lunar cycle."

"If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded - and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of the profane space."

"If we pay no attention to it, time does not exist; furthermore, where it becomes perceptible ? because of man?s ?sins, i.e., when man departs from the archetype and falls into duration ? time can be annulled.? Basically, if viewed in its proper perspective, the life of archaic man? although it takes place in time, does not bear the burden of time, does not record time?s irreversibility; in other words, completely ignores what is especially characteristic and decisive in a consciousness of time. Like the mystic, like the religious man in general, the primitive lives in a continual present."

"In general, one can say that any myth tells how something came into being, the world, or man, or an animal species, or a social institution, and so on. But by the very fact that the creation of the world precedes everything else, the cosmogony enjoys a special prestige. In fact, as I have tried to show elsewhere [Eliade footnotes The Myth of the Eternal Return and Myth and Reality], the cosmogonic myth furnishes the model for all myths of origin."

"In his rejection of concepts of periodicity and hence, in the last analysis, of the archaic concepts of archetypes and repetition, we are, we believe, justified in seeing modern man?s resistance to nature, the will of ?historical man to affirm his autonomy."

"In imitating the exemplary acts of a God or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time."

"In most primitive societies, the New Year is equivalent to the raising of the taboo on the new harvest, which is thus declared edible and innoxious for the whole community. Where several species of grains or fruits are cultivated, ripening successively at different seasons, we sometimes find several New Year festivals. This means the divisions of time are determined by the rituals that govern the renewal of alimentary reserves; that is, the rituals that guarantee the continuity of life of the community in its entirety."

"In order to obtain a better grasp of the poetic phenomenon, we should have recourse to a mass of heterogenous examples, and side by side with Homer and Dante, quote Hindu, Chinese, and Mexican poems; that is, should take into consideration not only poetics possessing a historical common denominator (Homer, Vergil, Dante) but also creations that are dependent upon other esthetics. From the point of view of literary history, such juxtapositions are to be viewed with suspicion; but they are valid if our object is to describe the poetic phenomenon as such, if we propose to show the essential difference between poetic language and the utilitarian language of everyday life."

"In the primitive conception, a new year begins not only with every new reign, but also with the consummation of every marriage, the birth of every child, and so on For the cosmos and the man are regenerated ceaselessly and by all kinds of means, the past is destroyed, evils and sins are eliminated, etc. Differing in their formulas, all these instruments of regeneration tend toward the same end: to annul past time, to abolish history by a continuous return in illo tempore by the repetition of the cosmogonic act."

"It is by virtue of the temple that the world is re-sanctified in every part."

"It is highly probable that the fortifications of inhabited places and cities began by being magical defenses; for fortifications -- trenches, labyrinths, ramparts, etc. -- were designed rather to repel invasion by demons and the souls of the dead then attacks by human beings."

"In the ?lunar perspective,? the death of the individual and the periodic death of humanity are necessary, even as three days of darkness preceding the ?rebirth? of the moon are necessary. The death of the individual and the death of humanity are alike necessary for their regeneration Any form whatever, by the mere fact that it exists as such and endures, necessarily loses vigor and becomes worn; to recover vigor, it must be reabsorbed into the formless, if only for an instant; it must be restored to the primordial unity from which it issued; it must return to ?chaos,? to ?orgy,? to ?darkness,? to ?water.?"

"It is preferable to love a genius than to love the masterpieces of a mediocre soul."

"Life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent; in other words human beings cannot live in chaos."

"Man only repeats the act of the Creation; his religious calendar commemorates, in the space of a year, all the cosmogonic phases which took place ab origine. In fact, the sacred year ceaselessly repeats the Creation; man is contemporary with the cosmogony and with the anthropogony because ritual projects him into the mythical epoch of the beginning."

"Myth always related to a "creation," it tells how something came into existence, or how a pattern of behavior, an institution, a manner of working were established; this is why myths constitute the paradigms for all significant human acts."

"Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacrilizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god."

"Man constructs according to an archetype."

"Men are not free to choose a sacred site, they only seek for it and find it by the help of mysterious signs."

"Myth means a "true story" and, beyond that, a story that is a most precious possession because it is sacred, exemplary, significant."

"Often there is no need for a theophany or a hierophany properly speaking; some sign suffices to indicate the sacredness of a place. "According to the legend, the marabout who founded El-Hamel at the end of the sixteenth century stopped to spend the night near a spring and planted his stick in the ground. The next morning, when he went for it to resume his journey, he found that it had taken root and that buds had sprouted on it. He considered this a sign of God's will and settled in that place." In such cases the sign, fraught with religious meaning, introduces an absolute element and puts an end to relativity and confusion... When no sign manifests itself, it is provoke ... For example, a wild animal is hunted, and the sanctuary is built at the place where it is killed. Or a domestic animal -- such as a bull -- is turned loose; some days later it is searched for and sacrificed at the place where it is found. Later the altar is raised there and the village will be built around the altar... In each case the hierophany has annulled the homogeneity of space and revealed a fixed point."

"Our primary concern is to present the specific dimensions of religious experience, to bring out the differences between it and profane experience of the world."

"One of the outstanding characteristics of traditional societies is the opposition that they assume between their inhabited territory and the unknown and indeterminate space that surrounds it... An unknown, foreign and unoccupied territory (which often means, "unoccupied by our people") still shares in the fluid and larval modality of chaos... By occupying it and, above all, by settling in it, man symbolically transforms it into a cosmos through a ritual repetition of the cosmogony. What is to become "our world" must first be "created," and every creation has a paradigmatic model -- the creation of the universe by the gods."

"Orientations that tend to re-confer value upon the myth of cyclical periodicity disregard not only historicism but even history as such. We believe we are justified in seeing in them, rather than a resistance to history, a revolt against historical time? it is not inadmissible to think of an epoch, and an epoch not too far distant, when humanity to ensure its survival, will find itself reduced to desisting from any further ?making? of history in the sense in which it began to make it from the creation of the first empires, will confine itself to repeating prescribed archetypal gestures, and will strive to forget, as meaningless and dangerous, any spontaneous gesture which might entail ?historical? consequences."

"Our world is a universe within which the sacred has already manifested itself."

"Profane experience still includes values that to some extent recall the non-homogeneity peculiar to the religious experience of space. There are, for example, privileged spaces, qualitatively different from all others -- a man's birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the "holy places" of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life. This example of crypto-religious behavior on profane man's part is worth noting."

"Religious man always sought to fix his abode at the "center of the world." If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded -- and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relatively of profane space. ... For profane experience, on the contrary, space is homogeneous and neutral; no break qualitatively differentiates the various parts of its mass. ... We need only remember how a classical geometrician defines space."

"Religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnated with the sacred."

"Settling in a territory is equivalent to founding a world."