Customer Reviews

History of Religious Ideas, Volume 2: From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity

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Mircea Eliade has spent a lifetime exploring the origins, meaning and mysteries of mankind's spiritual inner being. He is the Joseph Campbell of religion - not myth. This first volume was ably translated (from the French) into clear and direct English - a hallmark of his writing. It is difficult to speak knowingly of neolithic religion because the evidence is largely circumstantial and evolutionary. That is, we divine from our own religious present what must have existed prior to the forming of current ideas.

One of his main points is that peoples around the world, for whatever reason, seemed to be instinctually drawn toward the worship of something - an object, animal, human or unseen god or goddess. In this first volume he explores various cultures and their beliefs - the Mayas, Greeks, Iranians, neolithic man, Egypt, other Middle East groups...a dazzling array of cultures and societies. As the imagination grew, so did belief in an unseen world.

Of particular interest is the section on ancient Israeli beliefs and the origins of Yahweh. The chapters on religion in Greece were notable for their abundant detail. Even in the most isolated areas, the same rites and beliefs emerged - the idea of sacrifice, the belief in another life, the battle of good vs evil, the idea of holy representatives and eventually the thought of eternal life.

This book reminds me of Joseph Campbell's Masks of God series in the way it is presented. Lots of facts and theories, but very readable. Eliade hasn't assumed that you are reading this book because you are a theologian or going for your Master's degree but for the common person with a beginning interest in Religious History.

This is a superb series on the history of religion, and incidentally serves as a fine introduction to comparative religion. The only real weakness is in this first volume: I've never like the treatment of paleolithic religion here, which seems abrupt. But this caveat is far too minor to dissuade anyone from reading these wonderful books.

An excellent source of information about early development of religion. It shows the evolution of human thought with respect to metaphysical matters.

Volumes 1 -3 were recommended to me by John Pamperin who studied theology at University of Chicago. John's one of brightest individuals that I know. This is a great treatment on religion and it is a bit of effort to read through volumes 1-3 but well worth the journey! Much more deep and thorough than Joseph Cambell's works! Thanks John!

Mircea Eliade was a genius, a polymath, and his three-volume history of religious ideas deserves to go on your bookshelf right next to Copleston's history of philosophy.

I want this review to be brief, so I'll just point out that Page One is really worth the price of the entire book. On that page, Eliade simply reprints his earlier thoughts on religion in general, which strike me as absolutely true: around the world and throughout recorded time, we human beings have been religious.

And this is something which really deserves serious thought and examination. I myself am about as religious as a pea, but I cannot help noticing that I am in a distinct minority. Then I look at Page One again, and think again about Eliade's statement that religion is a constant of human consciousness, NOT an historical stage which we have passed through.

Well, the man who most fervently believed that religion was "only a phase" was Mr. Karl Marx, who nowadays looks to have been proven wrong about almost everything.

As Eliade says, "it is difficult to imagine how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly *real* in the world; and it is impossible to imagine how consciousness could appear without conferring a *meaning* on man's impulses and experiences. Consciousness of a real and meaningful world is intimately connected with the discovery of the sacred.....Living, considered as being human, is in itself a *religious act*, for food-getting, sexual life, and work have a sacramental value. In other words, to be --- or, rather, to become --- *a man* signifies being 'religious.' "

This might well be compared with Larkin's poem, "Church Going."

Perhaps the question for us non-believers is not so much to "convert" others, as to try to define a religion that works for everyone. Just as an example, I cannot see any reason why a religious life should involve a conflict with science, or an easily-falsifiable belief that the Earth was created in 4,000 BC.

In any case, Volume I begins with the Paleolithic -- the earliest hunter-gatherers. It continues through "the longest revolution" --- agriculture -- the Mesolithic and the Neolithic. The next stop is Mesopotamia and Sumer / Babylon, followed by the religious ideas of the Pharoahs. There is a "detour" into the mystery of the megaliths (Stonehenge etc.). There follows a discussion of the Hittites and the Canaanites, early Israel, and then a sudden shift to the Europeans and the Indian Vedic gods. The rest of the volume deals with the phases of Greek religion, Indian religion before Buddha, and Zarathustra.

That's just Volume I of an extremely detailed and thorough history of our religious ideas.

Eliade isn't for everyone. That said, in my opinion, this trilogy is the most thorough, informative, complete work on the subject of religiosity that has ever been done. Quite simply, the tabula rosa on the subject. Must buy all 3 volumes. I found ex-libris copies (like new) through Amazon for a fraction of the price of one new hardcover volume. Indispensable resource for the advanced student of history, philosophy, religion, and sociology. Can't say enough about Eliade. He rocked my understanding of culture, religion and society.

I like to say that Eliade's work is the first--but not the last--word in comparative religion. The best introduction to his thought is "Patterns in Comparative Religion."

The greatness of this history is that Eliade actually writes about almost everything, ever. So these three volumes are a solid introduction to the totality of religion. Since all of us lack familiarity with something, we can all fill in some significant gaps in our knowledge with these books.

But unfortunately, it's not the best introduction to any specific thing that it covers. If you already know about some subject, then Eliade's coverage of it proves completely useless and superficial. It seems that Eliade's purpose was to show how every important religious phenomenon in history relates to his pet theories. In his defense, perhaps this is simply inevitable when one person tries to write about all of religion in 1000 pages. Certainly, there is nothing else like this out there because the task is enormous. If nothing else, the fact that Eliade researched and wrote this is amazing.

The product arrived on time as stipulated. Mircea Eliade is a must for students of mythology who want to go beyond a myth's story and come to understand how and why it was written, and why it remains eternal.