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The Sacred Tree, The Sacred Stone Are Not Adored As Stone Or Tree; They Are Worshipped Precisely Because They Are Hierophanies, Because They Show Something That Is No Longer Stone Or Tree But Sacred, The Ganz Andere Or 'wholly Other.'

-Mircea Eliade

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The Sacred Tree, The

Mircea Eliade

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The Sacred Tree, The Sacred Stone Are Not Adored As Stone Or Tree; They Are Worshipped Precisely Because They Are Hierophanies, Because They Show Something That Is No Longer Stone Or Tree But Sacred, The Ganz Andere Or 'wholly Other.'

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Whether Religion Is Man-made Is A Question For Philosophers Or Theologians. But The Forms Are Man-made. They Are A Human Response To Something. As A Historian Of Religions, I Am Interested In Those Expressions.

Do What He Will, He [the Profane Man] Is An Inheritor. He Cannot Utterly Abolish His Past, Since He Himself Is A Product Of His Past. He Forms Himself By A Series Of Denials And Refusals, But He Continues To Be Haunted By The Realities That He Has Refused And Denied. To Acquire A World Of His Own, He Has Desacralized The World In Which His Ancestors Lived; But To Do So He Has Been Obliged To Adopt An Earlier Type Of Behavior, And That Behavior Is Still Emotionally Present In Him, In One Form Or Another, Ready To Be Reactualized In His Deepest Being.

In Imitating The Exemplary Acts Of A God Or Of A Mythic Hero, Or Simply By Recounting Their Adventures, The Man Of An Archaic Society Detaches Himself From Profane Time And Magically Re-enters The Great Time, The Sacred Time.

The Way Towards 'wisdom' Or Towards 'freedom' Is The Way Towards Your Inner Being. This Is The Simplest Definition Of Metaphysics.

Water Symbolizes The Whole Of Potentiality - The Source Of All Possible Existence.

The Crude Product Of Nature, The Object Fashioned By The Industry Of Man, Acquire Their Reality, Their Identity, Only To The Extent Of Their Participation In A Transcendent Reality.

To Believe That I Could, At Twenty-three, Sacrifice History And Culture For The Absolute Was Further Proof That I Had Not Understood India. My Vocation Was Culture, Not Sainthood.

The Great Cosmic Illusion Is A Hierophany.... One Is Devoured By Time, Not Because One Lives In Time, But Because One Believes In Its Reality, And Therefore Forgets Or Despises Eternity.

Man Makes Himself, And He Only Makes Himself Completely In Proportion As He Desacrilizes Himself And The World. The Sacred Is The Prime Obstacle To His Freedom. He Will Become Himself Only When He Is Totally Demysticized. He Will Not Be Truly Free Until He Has Killed The Last God.

Psychoanalysis Justifies Its Importance By Asserting That It Forces You To Look To And Accept Reality. But What Sort Of Reality? A Reality Conditioned By The Materialistic And Scientific Ideology Of Psychoanalysis, That Is, A Historical Product.

When The Sacred Manifests Itself In Any Hierophany, There Is Not Only A Break In The Homogeneity Of Space; There Is Also A Revelation Of An Absolute Reality, Opposed To The Nonreality Of The Vast Surrounding Expanse. The Manifestation Of The Sacred Ontologically Founds The World. In The Homogenous And Infinite Expanse, In Which No Point Of Reference Is Possible And Hence No Orientation Can Be Established, The Hierophany Reveals An Absolute Fixed Point, A Center.

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The Sacred Tree, The Sacred Stone Are Not Adored As Stone Or Tree; They Are Worshipped Precisely Because They Are Hierophanies, Because They Show Something That Is No Longer Stone Or Tree But Sacred, The Ganz Andere Or 'wholly Other.'

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If We Pay No Attention To It, Time Does Not Exist.

It Would Be Frightening To Think That In All The Cosmos, Which Is So Harmonious, So Complete And Equal To Itself, That Only Human Life Is Happening Randomly, That Only One's Destiny Lacks Meaning.

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