A review by virtualmima
The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade, Willard R. Trask

2.5

Roland Barthes does a much better job at deconstructing the mythologies of the secular world. Eliade is too reductionistic, essentialist, and ethnocentric. Also repetitive. He's right to say that even most atheists are still usually stuck in a religious mentality, but it comes from the wrong place. It's residue from millennia of religion, and it will take some time for the notions of sacred and profane to disappear.