Reconstructing Eliade is a concept-by-concept analysis of the thought of Mircea Eliade and a re-evaluation of his analysis of religion. It illustrates how a thorough familiarity with Eliade's work can produce an interpretation of his thought as systematic, coherent, and fully rational. Part One provides an analysis of the terms of Eliade's understanding of religion--hierophany, the sacred and the dialectic of the sacred and profane, homo religiosus, myths and symbols--and thus of the meaning of religion implied throughout his work. Part Two inspects various problems which arise in light of...

This anthology is a collection of key essays by and about the Romanian-American Historian of Religions, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). It introduces the beginning student to the terms and categories of Eliade's understanding of religious behaviour as a universal phenomenon: apprehension of the sacred by homo religiosus, humanity's religious mode, through hierophanies, revelatory events and objects. The analysis of religious behaviour as the restoration of illud tempus, an alternative continuum of sacred time, through myth, ritual, and symbol is a central feature of that understanding, assumed to...