Frases de Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade, Diario 1945-1969, Ed. Kairos, Barcelona, 2001.

Mircea Eliade, La prueba del laberinto, Ed. Cristianidad, Madrid, 1980.

Mircea Eliade, Diario 1945-1969, Ed. Kairos, Barcelona, 2001.

Mircea Eliade, La prueba del laberinto, Ed. Cristianidad, Madrid, 1980.

Mircea Eliade, Diario 1945-1969, Ed. Kairos, Barcelona, 2001.

Mircea Eliade, Diario 1945-1969, Ed. Kairos, Barcelona, 2001.

Mircea Eliade, Diario 1945-1969, Ed. Kairos, Barcelona, 2001.

Mircea Eliade, La prueba del laberinto, Ed. Cristianidad, Madrid, 1980.

Mircea Eliade, Diario 1945-1969, Ed. Kairos, Barcelona, 2001.

Mircea Eliade, El mito del eterno retorno, Emece, Buenos Aires, 2001.

Mircea Eliade, La prueba del laberinto, Ed. Cristianidad, Madrid, 1980.

Mircea Eliade, La prueba del laberinto, Ed. Cristianidad, Madrid, 1980.

Mircea Eliade, Lo sagrado y lo profano, Ed. LABOR, colección Punto Omega, Buenos Aires, 1985.

Mircea Eliade, La nostalgia del paraíso en las tradiciones primitivas, en Irving Louis Horowitz (compilador y director), Historia y Elementos de la Sociología del Conocimiento, EUDEBA, Bs. As., 1974.

As quoted in The Structure of Religious Knowing : Encountering the Sacred in Eliade and Lonergan (2004) by John Daniel Dadosky, p. 89.
Contexto: When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also a revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expanse. The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homogenous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.

As quoted in Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade (2002) by Douglas Allen, p. 216.

The Sacred and the Profane : The Nature of Religion: The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual within Life and Culture (1961), translated from the French by William R. Trask, [first published in German as Das Heilige und das Profane (1957)]
Contexto: Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane. To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophany. It is a fitting term, because it does not imply anything further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i. e., that something sacred shows itself to us. It could be said that the history of religions — from the most primitive to the most highly developed — is constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities. From the most elementary hierophany — e. g. manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree — to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act — the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world.

As quoted in Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade (2002) by Douglas Allen, p. 90.
Contexto: It is above all the valorizing of the present that requires emphasizing. The simple fact of existing, of living in time, can comprise a religious dimension. This dimension is not always obvious, since sacrality is in a sense camouflaged in the immediate, in the "natural" and the everyday. The joy of life discovered by the Greeks is not a profane type of enjoyment: it reveals the bliss of existing, of sharing — even fugitively — in the spontaneity of life and the majesty of the world. Like so many others before and after them, the Greeks learned that the surest way to escape from time is to exploit the wealth, at first sight impossible to suspect, of the lived instant.

Myth and Reality (1963)
Contexto: Myth is an extremely complex cultural reality, which can be approached and interpreted from various and complementary viewpoints.
Speaking for myself, the definition that seems least inadequate because most embracing is this: Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled time of the "beginnings." In other words myth tells how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality — an island, a species of plant, a particular kind of human behavior, an institution. Myth, then, is always an account of a "creation"; it relates how something was produced, began to be. Myth tells only of that which really happened, which manifested itself completely. The actors in myths are Supernatural Beings. They are known primarily by what they did in the transcendent times of the "beginnings." hence myths disclose their creative activity and reveal the sacredness (or simply the "supernaturalness") of their works. In short, myths describe the various and sometimes dramatic breakthroughs of the sacred (or the "supernatural") into the World. It is this sudden breakthrough of the sacred that really establishes the World and makes it what it is today. Furthermore, it is as a result of the intervention of Supernatural Beings that man himself is what he is today, a mortal, sexed, and cultural being.