The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

Record summary

Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, published in English in 1957, discussed recurring religious structures including cosmogony, catastrophe, renewal and sacred time. It offers a major mid-century framework for comparing deluge and world-renewal traditions across cultures. The book matters as a history-of-religions lead, not as evidence that myths encode one literal catastrophe. Eliade’s broad typological method and use of secondary sources have attracted substantial criticism, especially regarding cultural difference, selective comparison and the tendency to treat diverse traditions as structurally equivalent.