Mercia Eliade devoted his life to the historical study of religions and was a pivotal figure in the establishment of religious studies in academia from the 1960’s to 1980’s. His book, Patterns in Comparative Religion explored what role symbolism played in religion while Myth of the Eternal Return explored the concepts of religious history and well as the dichotomy of archaic religion and modern thought. Unlike many before him who thought of religion as fake, false, or representative of a mental illness, Mercia Eliade thought of religion as a completely natural and normal human quality. Interestingly enough as Pals points out, “Eliade tends in all of his writings to explore the same major ideas and patterns, but in no one of them does he offer …show more content…
However, he views the sacred as mostly dealing with the supernatural, not with the clan or society. Eliade explains that among archaic people, the sacred is “regarded as absolutely crucial to their existence, shaping every aspect of their lives.” According to Eliade, a person is connected to the sacred when their village is formed at a place where there has been a hierophany. He asserts that in quite a few if not all cultures the sacred is marked with some sort of vertical object in the ground that reaches up to the sky in order to join together heaven, earth, and the underworld. Eliade also sought to describe the realm of the sacred and to do so he found patterns in symbols and myths in these archaic cultures. To illustrate his findings he uses sky gods that appear in some form in many cultures, as well as fertility gods, rain gods, the sun, and the moon. Yet, Eliade has often been criticized for vagueness in defining his key concepts and like Frazer and Tylor he has also been accused of out-of-context comparisons of religious beliefs of very different societies and cultures. However, wether true or not, Eliade was a great mind and deserves at least some recognition for the work he has done and “for laying a strong claim to the independence of religious behavior over against the various forms of function