By Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade--one of the main well known expositors of the psychology of faith, mythology, and magic--shows that fantasy and image represent a style of suggestion that not just got here prior to that of discursive and logical reasoning, yet remains to be a vital functionality of human recognition. He describes and analyzes essentially the most robust and ubiquitous symbols that experience governed the mythological taking into consideration East and West in lots of instances and at many degrees of cultural improvement.
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Extra info for Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism
Sample text
For although there are numerous ways of practising history-from the history of technics to that of human thought-there is only one way of aplJroaching religion-namely, to deal with the religious facts. Before making the history of any thing, one must have a proper understanding of what it is, in and for itsel£ In that connection, I would draw attention to the work of Professor Van der Leeuw, who has done so much for the phenomenology of religion, and whose many and brilliant publications have aroused the educated public to a renewal of interest in the history of religions in general.
Still with the aid of the history of religions, man might recover the symbolism of his body, which is an anthropocosmos. What the various techniques of the imagination, and especially the poetic techniques, have realised in this direction is ahnost nothing beside what the history of religions might promise. All these things still exist even in modern man ; it is only necessary to reactivate them and bring them to the level of consciousness. By regaining awareness of his own anthropocosmic symbolism- which is only one variety of the archaic symbolism-modern man will obtain a new existential dimension, totally w1known to present-day existentialism and historicism : this is an authentic and major mode of being, which defends man from nihilism and historical relativism without thereby taking him out of history.
This desire, so deeply rooted in man, to find himself at the very heart of the real-at the Centre of the World, the place of communication with Heaven-explains the ubiqui tous use of "Centres of the World". We have seen above how the habitation of man was assirnilated to the Universe, the hearth or the smoke-hole being homologised with the Centre of the World; so that all houses-like all temples, palaces and cities-are situated at one and the same point, the Centre of the Universe. But is there not a certain contradiction here ?