Abstract

Eliade proposed to ‘undertake to analyze the religious creativity of modern societies’ in his History of Religious Ideas but never did so. In this paper I have attempted to suggest the general direction that his analysis would have taken – the identification of the real with the actual is a religious valorization of contemporary humanity. This is not a generic shift from religion to non-religion but a belief of a religious nature which constitutes a novel departure from the traditional operations of the religious mind. It is accompanied by a refusal to countenance our creative involvement in the construction of reality. This Eliade labels ‘modern’ and ‘historical’.