Authors: Mircea Eliade, Rosemary Sheed (Translator), John C. Holt
ISBN-13: 9780803267336, ISBN-10: 0803267339
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Date Published: September 1996
Edition: Reprint
Mircea Eliade’s works include the multivolume History of Religious Ideas.
John C. Holt is a professor of religion at Bowdoin College and the author of The Religious World of Kirti Sri: Buddhism, Art, and Politics of Late Medieval Sri Lanka.
In this era of increased knowledge the essence of religious phenomena eludes the psychologists, sociologists, linguists, and other specialists because they do not study it as religious. According to Mircea Eliade, they miss the one irreducible element in religious phenomena—the element of the sacred. Eliade abundantly demonstrates universal religious experience and shows how humanity’s effort to live within a sacred sphere has manifested itself in myriad cultures from ancient to modern times; how certain beliefs, rituals, symbols, and myths have, with interesting variations, persisted.
List of Abbreviations | ||
Introduction | ||
Author's Foreword | ||
I | Approximations: The Structure and Morphology of the Sacred | 1 |
II | The Sky and Sky Gods | 38 |
III | The Sun and Sun-Worship | 124 |
IV | The Moon and Its Mystique | 154 |
V | The Waters and Water Symbolism | 188 |
VI | Sacred Stones: Epiphanies, Signs and Forms | 216 |
VII | The Earth, Woman and Fertility | 239 |
VIII | Vegetation: Rites and Symbols and Regeneration | 265 |
IX | Agriculture and Fertility Cults | 331 |
X | Sacred Places: Temple, Palace, "Centre of the World" | 367 |
XI | Sacred Time and the Myth of Eternal Renewal | 388 |
XII | The Morphology and Function of Myths | 410 |
XIII | The Structure of Symbols | 437 |
Conclusions | 459 | |
Name Index | 466 | |
Subject Index | 473 |