Mircea Eliade - Exploring How Religion Transforms Objects into Sacred

1. Mircea Eliade - Exploring How
Religion Transforms Objects into
Sacred
By: Matt Kafker

2. Mircea Eliade - Exploring How Religion Transforms
Objects into Sacred
With a focus on physics and mathematics, university student Mathew “Matt” Kafker has also
completed coursework in psychology and computer science. An avid reader, Matt Kafker is
currently working his way through Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of
Religion and The Myth of the Eternal Return.

3. Mircea Eliade - Exploring How Religion Transforms
Objects into Sacred
One of the most influential religious historians of the 20th century, Eliade was originally from
Romania and made his mark as a professor at The University of Chicago. His primary focus was
on identifying and explaining the underlying perspectives with which people within traditional
religions view the world and their place within the cosmos. Working through the myriad and often
striking differences between belief systems, he sought out commonalities in mindset between
various adherents.

4. Mircea Eliade - Exploring How Religion Transforms
Objects into Sacred
As Eliade saw it, religion provides a way of experiencing the sacred and enables physical things
such as trees and stones to be transmuted into “conduits of the divine.” To the religious person,
physical objects acquire value through the way in which they take part in a “reality that transcends
them.” This world of sacred, transcendent objects is in its totality the cosmos, with manifestations
of the sacred establishing a way of ordering the world and fixing limits on behavior and thought.