Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism

by Mircea Eliade

Book Overview

Mircea Eliade--one of the most renowned expositors of the psychology of religion, mythology, and magic--shows that myth and symbol constitute a mode of thought that not only came before that of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B000JZ4G88
• Release Date: January 1969
• Publisher: Sheed and Ward
• Length: 189 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Towards a new humanism

This insightful book features a central element of Eliade's work as a whole: a humanistic impulse which envisions the study of symbols as the best possible way to overcome close-mindedness and provincialism, and which holds that a liberation from the traps of historicism is necessary in order to reach the archetypes that somehow inform the multiple 'symbolic incarnations' throughout the ages and peoples. Eliade here considers symbols of centre, time, binding (relying a lot on Dumezil on that topic), waters and shells. The relationship between symbol and history is constantly examined in the book: Eliade suggests that each new meaning ascribed by history to a symbol does not alter the latter's fundamental structure, since the symbol can properly be considered 'transhistorical'. This is as good a work as any to start reading Eliade; many quintessential Eliadian themes are treated here.