Very Good Condition. Signature of Previous Owner on Flyleaf " Reverend Richard R. Over, Easter School, Baguio, Philippines, 4/13/1967" Organizing data from cultures the world over, Mircea Eliade, one of the preeminent interpreters of world religion in the twentieth century, lays out the basic patterns of initiation: group puberty rites, entrance into secret cults, shamanic instruction, individual visions, and heroic rites of passage. The vast information assembled here transcends usual scholarship. Eliade always affirms the greater experience in all initiation the indissoluble tie between humans and the cosmos of gods, spirits, animals, ancestors, and nature. As Michael Meade writes in his foreword, Eliade fervently worked at keeping the doors of perception open to the world of sacred symbols and creative ritual. Through his insistence that we are each the necessary inheritors of a vast sacred heritage, he has acted as a spiritual elder and distant mentor to me and many students of myth and ritual. Like an archeologist of symbols, he has unearthed, preserved, and found new meanings in the rites of our ancestors. Eliade (1907-1986) was a Romanian philosopher, historian of religion and Professor of Chicago University. Mircea Eliade fervantly worked at keeping the doors of perception open to the world of sacred symbols and creative ritual.There may be no time more suited to the study of rites of passage than the threshold between the end of modernity and the uncertain future of humanity. As an old proverb reminds us: We can only see as far forward as we remember back." The future is contained in the past; and the past is carried within us like seeds of memory waiting for the waters of attention."
+
