Mircea Eliade

The vocabulary is the part of the work everyone uses, whether or not they accept the theory it came from. A hierophany is any showing of the sacred in something ordinary, a stone, a tree, a person, and the term is deliberately wider than theophany because it does not require a god. Sacred space is not homogeneous: it has a centre, an axis mundi where the levels of the cosmos meet, and orientation from that centre is what makes a world habitable. Sacred time is not the time of the calendar but the time of the founding events, re-entered through festival, so that the year begins again rather than merely continues.

Out of these he built a large claim about history. Archaic societies, he argued, understood events as repetitions of exemplary models and could therefore bear what happened to them. The modern refusal of that structure leaves people exposed to what he called the terror of history, a linear time with no renewal in it. The Myth of the Eternal Return is the compact statement, The Sacred and the Profane the introduction, and Shamanism the fullest application to a single body of material.

The method is morphological. It sorts phenomena from everywhere by structure rather than by descent, which is why he can put a Siberian pole beside an Indian pillar beside a Christian cross, and it is also why historians of particular traditions have always found him difficult to use.

He came to Chicago in 1956 and held the chair in the history of religions from 1957 until his death. What grew around him is usually called the Chicago school: a comparative, phenomenological approach that treated the sacred as a category not reducible to sociology or psychology, and that trained a generation of American scholars of religion. He founded the journal History of Religions and served as editor in chief of the sixteen-volume Encyclopedia of Religion, which appeared in 1987, the year after he died.

Criticism came from two directions. Historians objected that the morphological method removes phenomena from the societies that produced them and that the sources are used unevenly. Scholars of particular traditions objected that the generalisations do not survive contact with the specialist literature on any one of them.

The other criticism is biographical and it is not settled. In the 1930s Eliade was publicly sympathetic to the Legion of the Archangel Michael, the Romanian fascist movement, and wrote in its press; he served in the wartime Romanian diplomatic service; and after the war he did not discuss any of it. Documentation of the interwar articles has accumulated since the 1970s. What is argued about is not whether they exist but what they mean for the work, and positions range from treating the two as separable to reading the anti-historical strand of the theory as continuous with the politics. Anyone using his categories should know the argument is live.