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Title: Patterns in Comparative Religion by Mircea Eliade, Rosemary Sheed, John C. Holt ISBN: 0-8032-6733-9 Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr Pub. Date: November, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Brilliant, if rather dated
Comment: Mircea Eliade's contribution to the study of religion cannot be overestimated; his works quite simply revolutionized the discipline. Unfortunately, he had a tendency, especially in later life, to crank out volumes on every conceivable theme and concept, and many of these later works simply do not work. But he wrote a small number of great books, works without which you simply cannot claim to have read the "classics." Patterns is one of these great books.
The translation is dubious, to the say the least, but even so Eliade comes through. He always does. In Patterns, he walks through a kaleidoscope of images and concepts, demonstrating at once his brilliance and his disturbingly broad reading. He never uses one example where ten will serve, and this becomes part of the whole argumentative structure of the book.
The point, you see, is that these "patterns" he pulls out-out of history, out of context, whatever-appear again and again. The opening chapter, on "Sky Gods," for example, is a little manifesto, a demonstration of everything Eliade is all about. If you really master this chapter, come to understand every bit of how it works, you will truly understand Eliade.
For those who have been introduced to Eliade through The Sacred and the Profane, for example, and are looking for an accessible book, Patterns does have the difficulty of moving rather rapidly through its arguments. Some discussions simply move too fast for the general reader; Eliade is trying to talk primarily to scholars, and as such he assumes that his readers have some familiarity with his examples. But unless you plan to challenge his thought deeply, you simply do not need to read all of the background material.
One failing of Patterns is simply its publication date: this book is from the fifties. And a lot has changed since then, particularly our knowledge of lots of other religions. So sometimes his examples seem simplistic, or downright dubious-and they are! But you just can't begin to make sense of Eliade without Patterns.
If you liked Joseph Campbell, it's time to step up to the plate. Read Patterns, maybe reading Cosmos and History and The Sacred and the Profane first, and you'll see the real thing at work. It's true, he doesn't really address his audience magnetically as Campbell sometimes does, but then his project is primarily to suggest to that reading and studying other people's religions is the only way for moderns. You see, desacralization has made modern humanity incapable of seeing the truly powerful worldview of homo religiosus (religious humanity). But unlike Campbell, Eliade doesn't think that we can solve this by getting in touch with our bliss and our myths; he thinks that only reading books can approximate this world.
Admittedly, from a scholarly perspective Eliade is a crypto-theologian with a huge axe to grind. Sure, some of his examples are extremely problematic-a point that Jonathan Z. Smith has made on more than one occasion. But like Smith, I'd argue that we need to go through, not around: without Eliade, we can never really make sense of how we look at religion now, how everyone looks at it.
The point about Patterns is that it's really a great book. It's wrong-about just about everything, when you get down to it!-but it's one that needs to be read. These days, lots of folks in and out of the Ivory Tower seem to want to get in touch with spirituality. But Eliade was talking about this fifty years ago, and his points still have considerable weight. Why reinvent the wheel? Go to the source, read Eliade at his best, and feel a revolution overtaking you.
Rating: 5
Summary: Eliade's best book, and the best introduction to his work.
Comment: Eliade's place among scholars of religion is unequaled; even his detractors admit this. "Comparative Religion" exists as a scholarly discipline because of Eliade.
Essentially, this is a book about religious symbolism, covering an incredibly wide range of religious traditions. I think if you read this, agree or disagree, you will never look at religions the same way again.
Further, this is Eliade's most accessible and complete book.
I graduated with a religious studies degree from Yale University, and read this book in the first year after I graduated. I learned nearly as much from this book alone as I did from my undergraduate education. That is a strong statement, but I mean it.
Rating: 5
Summary: Dive In!
Comment: Amidst the chaotic profusion of symbols, myths, rituals and mystical perspectives of the world's religious traditions, Eliade weaves a mandela-like portrait of humankind's incredibly vital relationship with the divine, spanning several thousand years. Not for the faint of heart, this monumental work provides important insight into the often confusing psychology of the primitive religious experience; an experience characterized by perspectives charged with meaning across broad fields of associative and interdependent symbolic realms.
Eliade bases his discoveries of common patterns in the global-religious-traditions upon a thematic theoretical framework. In this manner, he avoids the pitfalls latent in more common conceptions of religious experience that are defined by psychologically artificial categories created within perspectives that tend to be too narrow. Such commonly expressed and narrowly defined perspectives often stop short of understanding the limits of psychologically artificial, chronological, geographic and even ethnic categories; categories which humanity's important religious archetypes of divine experience have traditionally and absolutely transcended.
In this vein, Eliade's "Patterns in Comparative Religion" also provides important material for the interpretation of dreams. I think it is no mere coincidence that both primitive religious experience and the native realm of the unconscious both display a disturbing and important tendency to buck the rules of normality that our modern conscious minds so often wish to impose upon experience. It is from the creative associative milieu of dream symbolism that humanity's religious traditions have incessantly sprung and to which one must arguably return for the most fertile understanding of the 'primitive' divine experience.
Mircea Eliade's "Patterns in Comparative Religion" surely presented me with a formidable challenge, however, as with any important challenge to understanding that I have experienced, the rewards have far outweighed the difficulties encountered along the way.
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Title: The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade, Willard Trask ISBN: 015679201X Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: October, 1968 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History by Mircea Eliade, Willard Trask ISBN: 0691017778 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 November, 1971 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Images and Symbols by Mircea Eliade, Philip Mairet ISBN: 069102068X Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 05 June, 1991 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: A History of Religious Ideas: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries by Mircea Eliade, Willard R. Trask ISBN: 0226204014 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: March, 1981 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Myth and Reality (Religious Traditions of the World) by Mircea Eliade ISBN: 1577660099 Publisher: Waveland Press Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.50 |
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