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

by Mircea Eliade

Consciousness of a real and meaningful world is intimately connected with the discovery of the sacred.

In short, the “sacred” is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness.

“every innovation brought with it the danger of collective death” (André Varagnac).

Their technical immobility insured the survival of the Paleanthropians.

The domestication of fire—that is, the possibility of producing, preserving, and transporting it—marks, we might say, the definitive separation of the Paleant...

Choukoutien (about 600,...

For some two million years, the Paleanthropians lived by hunting; fruits, roots, mollusks, and so on, gathered by the women and children, did not suffice to insure the survival of the species.

Hunting determined the division of labor in accordance with sex, thus reinforcing “hominization”; for among the carnivora, and in the entire animal world, no such difference exists.

To kill the hunted beast or, later, the domestic animal is equivalent to a “sacrifice” in which the victims are interchangeable.

the experience of the sacred constitutes an element in the structure of consciousness.

It is, above all, mastery over distance, gained by the projectile weapon, which gave rise to countless beliefs, myths, and legends.

Belief in a survival after death seems to be demonstrated, from the earliest times, by the use of red ocher as a ritual substitute for blood, hence as a symbol of life.

To sum up, we may conclude that the burials confirm the belief in survival (already indicated by the use of red ocher) and furnish some additional details: burials oriented toward the East, showing an intention to connect the fate of the soul with the course of the sun, hence the hope of a rebirth, that is, of a postexistence in another world; belief in the continuation of a specific activity; certain funeral rites, indicated by offerings of objects of personal adornment and by the remains of meals.

We may regard the Paleolithic representations as a code that signifies the symbolic (hence magico-religious) value of the images and at the same time their function in the ceremonies connected with various “stories.”

But localizing the “soul” or “spirit” in the brain had marked consequences;15 on the one hand, it was believed that the victim’s spiritual element could be assimilated by eating his brain; on the other hand, the brain, the source of power, became the object of a cult.

The military initiations of the Indo-Europeans involved a ritual transformation into a wolf: the paradigmatic warrior appropriated the behavior of a carnivore.

the bestowal of cereals on human beings is sometimes connected with a hierogamy between the god of the sky (or of the atmosphere) and Mother Earth or with a mythical drama involving sexual union, death, and resurrection.

The agrarian cultures develop what may be called a cosmic religion, since religious activity is concentrated around the central mystery: the periodical renewal of the world.

The mystery of cosmic sacrality is symbolized in the World Tree.

The Cosmic Tree is held to be at the center of the world, and it unites the three cosmic regions, for it sends its roots down into the underworld, and its top touches the sky.

(7000 B.C.)

The principal divinity is the goddess, presented under three aspects: young woman, mother giving birth to a child (or to a bull), and old crone (sometimes accompanied by a bird of prey).

the old dream of the alchemists)—the struggle to take the place of time that characterizes the man of the modern technological societies, had already begun in the Iron Age.

and of love. The gods of the Moon and the Sun will have their apogee during the Babylonian period. As for Inanna, homologized with the Akkadian Ishtar and later with Ashtarte, she will enjoy an “actuality” in both cult and mythology never approached by any other goddess of the Near East. At her apogee, Inanna-Ishtar was the goddess at once of love and of war, that is, she governed life and death; to indicate the fullness of her powers, she was called hermaphroditic (Ishtar barbata). Her personality was already fully outlined in the Sumerian period, and her central myth constitutes one of the most significant creations of the ancient world.

The myth begins with a love story: Inanna, the tutelary goddess of Erech, marries the shepherd Dumuzi,18 who thus becomes sovereign of the city.

Yet she has a presentiment of the tragic fate that awaits her husband:

This “evil fate” was decided on the day when the ambitious Inanna determined to go down into the underworld to supplant her “elder sister,” Ereshkigal.

Sovereign of the Great Above, Inanna aspires also to reign over the World Below. She manages to enter Ereshkigal’s palace, but, as she successively passes through the Seven Gates, the gatekeepers strip her of her clothes and ornaments.

Ereshkigal fixes the “look of death” on her, and “her body became inert.”

her devoted friend Ninshubur, obeying the instructions that Inanna had given her before setting out, informs the gods En-lil and Nanna-Sin. But they decline to intervene, because Inanna, they say, by entering a domain—the Land of the Dead—which is governed by inviolable decrees, “sought to meddle with forbidden things.”

he creates two messengers and sends them to the underworld carrying “the food of life” and “the water of life.” By a trick, t...

the Seven Judges of the Underworld (the Anunaki) held her back, saying: “Who, having descended into the underworld, has ever ascended from the underworld again unharmed? If Inanna wishes to ascend ...

In surprise and indignation, Inanna discovers that, instead of lamenting, Dumuzi was sitting on his throne, richly clad—satisfied, it almost seemed, to be sole sovereign of the city.

‘This one (she said to the demons), carry him away.’”

Dumuzi implores his brother-in-law, the sun god Utu, to change him into a snake, and flees to the house of his sister,

“In all probability, it is Ereshkigal who, softened by Dumuzi’s tears, lightens his sad fate by deciding that he should spend only half the year in the netherworld and that his sister, Geshtinanna, should replace him during the other half”

During this time the people sought for Marduk, supposed to be “shut up in the mountain” (a formula indicating the “death” of a divinity).

As we saw in the case of Inanna-Ishtar, this “death” was not final; yet she had to be redeemed from the lower world.

The texts proclaim that the king had lived in fellowship with the gods in the fabulous garden that contains the Tree of Life and the Water of Life.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is certainly the best known and most popular of Babylonian creations.

Gilgamesh was two-thirds a divine being, son of the goddess Ninsun and a mortal.

we are presented with a tyrant who violates women and girls and wears men out in forced labor.

Babylon was a Bab-il-ani, a “Gate of the Gods,”

The most elaborate method was extispicy, that is, examining the entrails of a victim;

lecanomancy, consisted in pouring a little oil on water, or vice versa, and interpreting the signs that could be read in the shapes produced by the two liquids.

Astrology, developed later than the other techniques, was principally practiced...

But it is religion, and especially the dogma of the pharaoh’s divinity, which, from the beginning, contributed to shaping the structure of Egyptian civilization.

unification of the country and the founding of the state were the work of the first sovereign, known by the name of Menes.

Later, and for more than three thousand years, the pharaohs were crowned at Memphis; in all probability, the culminating ceremony represented the one inaugurated by Menes. It was not a commemoration of Menes’ exploits but the renewal of the creative source present in the original event.2

To begin, we mention that the most complete version of the Osiris myth is the one transmitted by Plutarch (second century A.D.) in his treatise De Iside et Osiride.