Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to present a brief description and evaluation of Mircea Eliade's interpretation of religious symbols with an eye to certain methodological difficulties. Professor Eliade characterises the procedure of the historian of religions as being uniquely preoccupied with religious symbols, that is, with those symbols which are involved in both the experience of homo religiosus and in his conception of the cosmos. As an historian of religions Eliade's own approach has consistently been to study religious symbols from a position that is not reductionist. Although admitting the influence of cultural and environmental factors upon the formulation of religious symbols, he has been primarily concerned to discern the typical structures or types of religious experience and expression by a consideration of religious phenomena. In his own words, he has attempted to study ‘the conceptions of being and reality that can be read from the behaviour of man of the premodern societies’