THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE: THE NATURE OF RELIGION- MIRCEA ELIADE

Picked this thing up at a book swap here in Tokyo, it’s quite famous but I managed to make it out of college without reading it and now seemed like a good time to dive in. Before we get too into it, it’s important to note, as always, that Eliade was a fascist and supporter of the genocidal Iron Guard movement in his native Romania. Like so many in the field of mythology, especially popular mythologists, Campbell, Evola, Peterson, etc. Elidade is far-right, and/or anti semitic and certainly fascistic. Something about the field is attracting these sorts. But either way, this book was fairly interesting, if not a bit out of time. The whole idea of a “science of religion” is very stupid, which isn’t to say that you can’t engage in comparative studies amongst the religions and/or point out where they overlap, harmonize, disagree or contradict, but rather that this isn’t a science. It’s speculative, by nature incomplete, and much closer to poetry than chemistry. Eliade has some smart things to say about how religions work. I like his ideas around “sacred time” as eternal and thus when one undertakes a religious ceremony and enters into this time-space, one is not commemorating a hierophany, but rather engaging in it oneself. There is some interesting structuralist stuff about how a religious man’s house represents his theory of the universe. There is some good stuff about eternal return and the like. There is a common mid-century failing of anthropology and social sciences generally. Namely, this idea that some societies are at an earlier stage of development, and that they have a “primitive” understanding of religion. The idea that we can understand our past by looking at these people, typical bullshit that is slowly going out of fashion, though folks like Pinker are doing their best to keep around. They will lose. Likewise, you get the common thing where he talks about “african religion” or “American Indian religion” in a way that makes it clear he read one ethnography by some (usually French) asshole who spent 6 weeks with one group and has decided that he’s an expert, then using this “insight” to both make generalizations about the people’s of whole continents and, through that, religion as a whole. Lots of this seemed pretty obvious/religion101 but I suppose that isn’t Eliade’s fault that his work has been absorbed into the realm of “common sense,” I’d recommend this to a high school student.