A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 2, by Mircea Eliade: A Review
Macro/Microcosms, Rejecting Material Reality, and My Unconscious Yells at Me — Tackling Jordan Peterson’s Reading List
My aim is not to outline every religious idea Eliade presents. Each volume is way too dense to do that and that’s why the book exists. You can just read it. I’ll highlight some thoughts I had particular to a couple of the religious ideas and some ideas I had that were inspired by this intellectual trip.
Ancient Chinese Religion
Volume two starts out with the religious ideas of ancient China. One thing unique about it was their expansion of the idea of macrocosm-microcosm into a larger description of our universe.
The macrocosm-microcosm line of thought is common throughout all religious traditions and is important to understand in order to see the framework for how ancient people thought and how modern religions are still framed. It’s most easily understood as a system of analogies. The most common analogy is that of man to the universe and to God. Everything we describe is in some means related to our beliefs about ourselves.
The easiest way to see this is with our descriptions of gods, which are almost always human personalities. The famous Greek gods are all thought of as people with different types of concerns, biases and emotions which govern our world.
One of the most fundamental frameworks for this analogy between humanity and the universe is the relationship between the horizontal and vertical axis: man is the only primate that stands upright and all religious thought puts the heavens up above and the profane down below. All that is known and familiar to us is the center of the world, and the unknown is away from us on a horizontal axis.
The analogy is between how we are shaped and how the universe is shaped. We project ourselves into the description of the world, which is why you may often hear phrases like “the world of humanity”. How we understand the world is specific to a framing centered on humanity.
This is why Jacob’s spiraling ladder goes up and down instead of being a pathway on a horizontal plane. It’s why Jack’s beanstalk goes up into the heavens to find gold. It’s why Muslims remove their shoes and connect with the ground (prayer rug) during ritual prayers. The rug and ground becomes a horizontal center to connect with what is above. It’s why the dead in Greek religions are “down below” in the land of the dead while Mount Olympus is up above. The gods descend in order to interact with the world of humanity. It’s why the first European settlers in what would become the United States first established a church when they landed. The church is a point of reference on a horizontal axis where the familiar is centered, the unknown is away from that center on a horizontal axis, and what is divine is up above and best connected with that center.
Richard Dawkins pointed this out a bit differently when he remarked that aliens could understand a lot about the earth if they examined a creature from earth. Our anatomy and physiology would be a reflection of the environment from which we evolved. An organism that requires oxygen and water would come from a place that has oxygen and water. In the same vein, our description of the world and the world which we create is a reflection of our humanity (microcosm) into the world (macrocosm).
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