Mircea Eliade A Critical Reader

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 have an authentic application in the struggle for freedom from the human condition.