Patterns in Comparative Religion
by Mircea Eliade

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Book Reviews of Patterns in Comparative Religion

Book Review: Brilliant, if rather dated
Summary: 5 Stars

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.

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