Images and Symbols

An interesting study of selected threads running through myths and civilizations, sufficient to illustrate fragments of the world's ceremony in a snippet. Some notions fished out from various works to make it interesting. For an amateurish read, it does its duty. Eliade didn't mean it for a professional, critical reader, methinks. It fails in its purpose if it wants to be anything other than a Western-oriented lecture that tries to weave various threads into some sort of magnificent plot. At the very end, a flawed crescendo in christological contagion, as if the author wants to throw everything else away. It's a problem when people who study religious studies, theologies, deities, comparative religions have a personal kink in their own show more direction. It's like masturbating to your own image and trying to avoid discovery by someone else while pretending you can empathize with the secret voyeur. show less

Some excellent material on the symbol and its tracing (mostly transcendentally) in the history of religion, as well as on symbols themselves. Between these 2 sections (commencing and ending the book) lies a data-supported recap of Eliade's main ideas(Symbolism of the Centre, of Creation Waters, etc), which are also presented in one way or another in most of his books, which may lead to a weakening of the (familiar-with-the-author) reader's attention.

Mircea Eliade--one of the most renowned expositors of the psychology of religion, mythology, and magic--shows that myth and symbol constitute a mode of thought that not only came before that of discursive and logical reasoning but is still an essential function of human consciousness. He describes and analyzes some of the most powerful and ubiquitous symbols that have ruled the mythological thinking of East and West in many times and at many levels of cultural development. Source: Princeton University Press, 1991 edition

> Chirat Henri. Mircea Eliade, Images et symboles. Essais sur le symbolisme magico-religieux, 1952.
In: Revue des Sciences Religieuses, tome 30, fascicule 2, 1956. pp. 197-199. … ; (en ligne),
URL : https://www.persee.fr/doc/rscir_0035-2217_1956_num_30_2_2118_t1_0197_0000_1