Eliade Quotes

#1. According to Eliade, the shamanic ladder is the earliest version of the idea of an axis of the world, which connects the different levels of the cosmos, and is found in numerous creation myths in the form of a tree.

Jeremy Narby

#2. I was excited to discover, in this tale by Eliade, the key themes that I most hope to understand better time, consciousness and the dreamlike basis of reality.

Francis Ford Coppola

#3. Harner has impeccable credentials, both as an academic and as a practicing shaman. Without doubt (since the recent death of Mircea Eliade) the world's leading authority on shamanism.

Nevill Drury

#4. It would be frightening to think that in all the cosmos, which is so harmonious, so complete and equal to itself, that only human life is happening randomly, that only one's destiny lacks meaning.

Mircea Eliade

#5. The great cosmic illusion is a hierophany ... One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity.

Mircea Eliade

#6. To whatever degree he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favor of a profane life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior.

Mircea Eliade

#7. I don't want to be mediocre, this is the fear of my soul and my body.

Mircea Eliade

#8. Psychoanalysis justifies its importance by asserting that it forces you to look to and accept reality. But what sort of reality? A reality conditioned by the materialistic and scientific ideology of psychoanalysis, that is, a historical product ...

Mircea Eliade

#9. To believe that I could, at twenty-three, sacrifice history and culture for the Absolute was further proof that I had not understood India. My vocation was culture, not sainthood.

Mircea Eliade

#10. And since a more convincing argument could not be found - aside from a fatal accident or suicide - this way was chosen: a process of galloping senescence.

Mircea Eliade

#11. I wanted to study them all; obviously, not as a specialist, but still rigorously, working directly from texts, because I have a horror of improvisation and hearsay learning.

Mircea Eliade

#12. A religious symbol conveys its message even if it is no longer consciously understood in every part. For a symbol speaks to the whole human being and not only to the intelligence.

Mircea Eliade

#13. The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but sacred, the ganz andere or 'wholly other.

Mircea Eliade

#14. And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is.

Mircea Eliade

#15. If we pay no attention to it, time does not exist.

Mircea Eliade

#16. Hesse's Journey to the East (1951) in the fifties anticipated the occult revival of the late sixties. But who will interpret for us the amazing success of Rosemary's Baby and 2001? I am merely asking the question.

Mircea Eliade

#17. Whether religion is man-made is a question for philosophers or theologians. But the forms are man-made. They are a human response to something. As a historian of religions, I am interested in those expressions.

Mircea Eliade

#18. To have solely one thought, but it to be capable to destroy the universe.

Mircea Eliade

#19. It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected.

Mircea Eliade

#20. Light does not come from light, but from darkness.

Mircea Eliade

#21. Water symbolizes the whole of potentiality - the source of all possible existence.

Mircea Eliade

#22. Through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an "escape from time" comparable to the "emegence from time" effected by myths. ( ... ) Reading projects him out if his personal duration and incorporates him into other rythms, makes him live in another "history".

Mircea Eliade

#23. The primitive magician, the medicine man or shaman is not only a sick man, he is above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself.

Mircea Eliade

#24. The way towards 'wisdom' or towards 'freedom' is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics.

Mircea Eliade

#25. The joy of life is not a profane type of enjoyment: it reveals the bliss of existing, of sharing in the spontaneity of life and the majesty of the world.

Mircea Eliade

#26. In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

Mircea Eliade

#27. As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth.

Mircea Eliade

#28. The Experience of Sacred Space makes possible the founding of the world: where the sacred Manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence.

Mircea Eliade

#29. The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality.

Mircea Eliade

#30. Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacrilizes 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.

Mircea Eliade

#31. The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.

Mircea Eliade

#32. For those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality.

Mircea Eliade

#33. When one approaches an exotic spirituality, one understands principally what one is predestined to understand by one's own vocation, by one's own cultural orientation and that of the historical moment to which one belongs.

Mircea Eliade

#34. Every religion implies that it treats the problem of being and nonbeing, life and death. Their languages are different, but they speak about the same things.

Mircea Eliade