"In archaic and traditional societies, the surrounding world is conceived as a microcosm. At the limits of this closed world begins the domain of the unknown, of the formless. On this side there is ordered — because of inhabited and organized — space; on the other, outside this familiar space, there is the unknown and dangerous region of the demons, the ghosts, and the dead and foreigners — in a world, chaos or death or night. This image of an inhabited microcosm, surrounded by desert regions as a chaos or a kingdom of the dead, has survived even in highly evolved civilizations such as those of China, Mesopotamia and Egypt."
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Essayists from RomaniaUniversity of Chicago facultyPeople from BucharestHistorians from RomaniaPhilosophers from Romania
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Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade (13 March 1907 {O.S. 28 February} – 22 April 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. His most enduring and influential contribution to religious studies was possibly his theory of Eternal Return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply record or imitate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them.
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