A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

In short, the “sacred” is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness. On the most archaic levels of culture, living, considered as being human, is in itself a religious act, for food-getting, sexual life, and work have a sacramental value.

Sometimes the importance of a religious creation is revealed by its later valorizations.

Very little is known about the Eleusinian Mysteries and the earliest manifestations of Orphism; yet the fascination that they have exercised over the best minds of Europe for more than twenty centuries constitutes a religious fact that is highly significant and whose consequences have not yet been properly understood. Certainly, the Eleusinian initiation and the secret Orphic rites, extolled by certain late authors, reflect mythologizing Gnosticism and Greco-Oriental syncretism. But it is precisely this conception of the Mysteries and of Orphism that influenced medieval Hermeticism, the Italian Renaissance, the “occultist” traditions of the eighteenth century, and Romanticism; and the Mysteries and the Orpheus that inspired modern European poetry, from Rilke to T. S. Eliot and Pierre Emmanuel, are still the Mysteries and the Orpheus of the scholars and mystics and theologians of Alexandria.

India, where the tension and despair brought on by the religious devalorization of the Brahmanic sacrifice produced a series of outstanding creations (the Upanishads, the codification of Yogic techniques, the message of Gautama Buddha, mystical devotion, etc.), each one of them constituting a different and daring resolution of the same crisis

This is not a matter of a vain and, in the end, sterile pseudo-encyclopedism. It is simply a matter of not losing sight of the profound and indivisible unity of the history of the human mind. Consciousness of this unity of the spiritual history of humanity is a recent discovery, which has not yet been sufficiently assimilated.

the crises brought on by the masters of reductionism—from Marx and Nietzsche to Freud—and of the contributions made by anthropology, the history of religions, phenomenology, and the new hermeneutics, that the reader will be able to judge the sole, but important, religious creation of the modern Western world.

the ultimate stage of desacralization.

it illustrates the complete camouflage of the “sacred”—more precisely, its identific...

Paleanthropians

Uprightness cannot be maintained except in a state of wakefulness. It is because of man’s vertical posture that space is organized in a structure inaccessible to the prehominians: in four horizontal directions radiating from an “up”-“down” central axis.

It is true that certain monkeys use objects as if they were tools, and are even known to make them in certain cases. But the Paleanthropians also produce tools to make tools. In addition, their use of tools is much more complex; they keep them accessible, ready for use in the future. In short, their use of tools is not confined to a particular situation or a specific moment, as is the case with monkeys.

important to note that tools do not serve as extensions of the human body, for the earliest-known worked stones were shaped to perform a function not prefigured in the body’s structure, namely, the function of cutting (an action completely different from tearing with the teeth or scratching with the nails).

We know that the extraordinary upsurge in technology during the past two centuries has not found expression in a comparable development of Western man’s intelligence.

The most ancient “document” for the use of fire dates from Choukoutien (about 600,000 B.C.), but its domestication probably took place much earlier and in several places.

For man is the final product of a decision made “at the beginnings of Time”: the decision to kill in order to live. In short, the hominians succeeded in outstripping their ancestors by becoming flesh-eaters.

there remain a certain number of testimonial “documents” for the life of the Paleanthropians, and it is hoped that their religious meaning will one day be deciphered.

just as, thanks to the genius of Freud, the creations of the unconscious, which until his time were regarded as absurd or meaningless—dreams, waking dreams, phantasms, and so on—have revealed the existence of a language that is extremely precious for a knowledge of man.

It is only from the late Paleolithic that we have rock paintings and engravings, painted pebbles, and bone and stone statuettes.

the majority of the documents from before the Aurignacian (30,000 B.C.)—that is, tools—reveal nothing beyond their utilitarian value.

It is enough to examine the role of tools in the religious life and mythology of the primitives who still remain at the hunting and fishing stage.

To leave an immense part of the history of the human mind a blank runs the risk of encouraging the idea that during all those millennia the activity of the mind was confined to the preservation and transmission of technology.

The earliest and most numerous “documents” are, obviously, bones.

the Mousterian (70,000–50,000 B.C.

preserving the skulls of dead relatives and carrying them along when the tribe travels.

The same facts have also been interpreted as proof of cannibalism,

The custom of dusting corpses with ocher is universally disseminated in both time and space, from Choukoutien to the western shores of Europe, in Africa as far as the Cape of Good Hope, in Australia, in Tasmania, in America as far as Tierra del Fuego.

woman’s skull at Mas-d’Azil, fitted with artificial eyes and placed on the lower jaw and antler of a reindeer.

circumvallation

solely on the archeological level, this symbolism is as inaccessible to us as that of a Paleolithic interment.