Quotes from Mircea Eliade

Berne A remarkable discovery today in the window of a toyshop. Not only lead soldiers of all sizes and poses—but also a large number of tanks. Some of them are quite realistic, with machine guns in the turret and wheels encircled with tracks. Locomotives are no longer in fashion today, in children's toys—not even in Switzerland.

Since 1960 it has been known that villages preceded the discovery of agriculture.

Hay épocas en las que sólo puedes avanzar yendo en la dirección opuesta

Nu poÅ£i r?mâne niciodat? cu o singur? prezen??, nu te poÅ£i d?rui niciodat? unui singur lucru. Firea asta omeneasc? este atât de fundamental tragic? încât te cheam? necontenit în cel puÅ£in dou? direcÅ£ii, paralele dac? nu opuse.

It has often been said that one of the characteristics of the modern world is the disappearance of any meaningful rites of initiation.

For the historian of religions, every manifestation of the sacred is important: every rite, every myth, every belief or divine figure reflects the experience of the sacred and hence implies the notions of being, of meaning, and of truth ... In short, the sacred is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness.

The 'terror of history,' for me, is the feeling experienced by a man who is no longer religious, who therefore has no hope of finding any ultimate meaning in the drama of history, and who must undergo the crimes of history without grasping the meaning of them.

En resumen, la mayoría de los hombres -sin religión- comparten aún pseudo religiones y mitologías degradadas. Cosa que en nada nos asombra, desde el momento en que el hombre profano es el descendiente del homo religiosus y no puede anular su propia historia, es decir, los comportamientos de sus antepasados religiosos, que lo han constituido tal como es hoy día.

Así como la -naturaleza- es el producto de una secularización progresiva del cosmos obra de Dios, el hombre profano es el resultado de una desacralización de la existencia humana.

Ancak simyac?lar çal???rlarken Tanr?'n?n yard?m?n? ald?klar?na inan?yorlard? ve bu yüzden onlara göre yapt?klar? iÅŸ Tanr?'n?n teÅŸvik ettiÄŸi deÄŸil ama izin verdiÄŸi bir doÄŸay? kusursuzlaÅŸt?rma etkinliÄŸiydi. Sy.187

el iniciado, el que ha conocido los misterios, es el que sabe.

Consciousness of a real and meaningful world is intimately linked with the discovery of the sacred.

Experience of the sacred is inherent in man's mode of being in the world.

The sacred does not necessarily imply belief in God or gods or spirits … it is the experience of a reality and the source of an awareness of existing in the world.

It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit…for the nonreligious men of the modern age, the cosmos has become opaque, inert, mute; it transmits no message, it holds no cipher.

The domestication of fire—that is, the possibility of producing, preserving, and transporting it—marks, we might say, the definitive separation of the Paleanthropians from their zoological predecessors. The most ancient "document" for the use of fire dates from Choukoutien (about 600,000 B.C.), but its domestication probably took place much earlier and in several places.

Hacerse hombre significa ser religioso

By accelerating the process of the growth of metals, the metallurgist was precipitating temporal growth: geological tempo was by him changed to living tempo. This bold conception, whereby man defends his full responsibility vis-a-vis Nature, already gives us a glimpse of something of the work of the alchemist.

Un gând izvorât ÅŸi organizat în singur?tate e întodeauna un gând neterminat.Nu pentru c? cel care îl gândeÅŸte nu are curajul sau puterea s?-l duc? mai departe.Ci pur ÅŸi simplul pentru c?,dup? o anumit? margine,nu-l mai interseaz?.

For me, the sacred is always the revelation of the real, an encounter with that which saves us by giving meaning to our existence.

It is, above all, mastery over distance, gained by the projectile weapon, which gave rise to countless beliefs, myths, and legends.

Modern nonreligious man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes 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.

It is probable that the Phoenician version of the myth of divine sovereignty derives from, or was strongly influenced by, the Hurrian myth. We may presume that Hesiod made use of the same tradition, known in Greece either through the Phoenicians or directly from the Hittites.

Primitive hunters5 regard animals as similar to men but endowed with supernatural powers; they believe that a man can change into an animal and vice versa; that the souls of the dead can enter animals; finally, that mysterious relations exist between a certain person and a certain animal (this used to be termed "nagualism").