Editing Mircea Eliade (section)

====Religious survivals in the secular world====
Eliade says that secular man cannot escape his bondage to religious thought. By its very nature, secularism depends on religion for its sense of identity: by resisting sacred models, by insisting that man make history on his own, secular man identifies himself only through opposition to religious thought: "He [secular man] recognizes himself in proportion as he 'frees' and 'purifies' himself from the '[[superstition]]s' of his ancestors."<ref>Eliade, ''The Sacred and the Profane'', p. 204</ref> Furthermore, modern man "still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals".<ref>Eliade, ''The Sacred and the Profane'', p. 205</ref> For example, modern social events still have similarities to traditional initiation rituals, and modern novels feature mythical motifs and themes.<ref>Eliade, ''The Sacred and the Profane'', p. 205; ''Myth and Reality'', p. 191</ref> Finally, secular man still participates in something like the eternal return: by reading modern literature, "modern man succeeds in obtaining an 'escape from time' comparable to the 'emergence from time' effected by myths".<ref>Eliade, ''The Sacred and the Profane'', p. 205; see also Eliade, ''Myth and Reality'', p. 192</ref>

Eliade sees traces of religious thought even in secular academia. He thinks modern scientists are motivated by the religious desire to return to the sacred time of origins:
<blockquote>One could say that the anxious search for the origins of Life and Mind; the fascination in the 'mysteries of Nature'; the urge to penetrate and decipher the inner structure of Matter—all these longings and drives denote a sort of nostalgia for the primordial, for the original universal ''matrix''. Matter, Substance, represents the ''absolute origin'', the beginning of all things.<ref>Eliade, "The Quest for the 'Origins' of Religion", p. 158</ref></blockquote>
Eliade believes the rise of materialism in the 19th century forced the religious nostalgia for "origins" to express itself in science. He mentions his own field of History of Religions as one of the fields that was obsessed with origins during the 19th century:
<blockquote>The new discipline of History of Religions developed rapidly in this cultural context. And, of course, it followed a like pattern: the [[Positivism|positivistic]] approach to the facts and the search for origins, for the very beginning of religion.</blockquote>
<blockquote>All Western historiography was during that time obsessed with the quest of ''origins''. [...] This search for the origins of human institutions and cultural creations prolongs and completes the naturalist's quest for the origin of species, the biologist's dream of grasping the origin of life, the geologist's and the astronomer's endeavor to understand the origin of the Earth and the Universe. From a psychological point of view, one can decipher here the same nostalgia for the 'primordial' and the 'original'.<ref>Eliade, "The Quest for the 'Origins' of Religion", p. 160</ref></blockquote>

In some of his writings, Eliade describes modern political ideologies as secularized mythology. According to Eliade, [[Marxism]] "takes up and carries on one of the great [[eschatological]] myths of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean world, namely: the redemptive part to be played by the Just (the 'elect', the 'anointed', the 'innocent', the 'missioners', in our own days the [[proletariat]]), whose sufferings are invoked to change the ontological status of the world."<ref>Eliade, ''Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries'' 1960, pp. 25–26, in Ellwood, pp. 91–92</ref> Eliade sees the widespread myth of the [[Golden Age]], "which, according to a number of traditions, lies at the beginning and the end of History", as the "precedent" for [[Karl Marx]]'s vision of a [[classless society]].<ref name="Myths2526, Ell92">Eliade, ''Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries'' 1960, pp. 25–26, in Ellwood, p. 92</ref> Finally, he sees Marx's belief in the final triumph of the good (the proletariat) over the evil (the [[bourgeoisie]]) as "a truly messianic Judaeo-Christian ideology".<ref name="Myths2526, Ell92"/> Despite Marx's hostility toward religion, Eliade implies, his ideology works within a conceptual framework inherited from religious mythology.

Likewise, Eliade notes that Nazism involved a [[Nazi occultism|pseudo-pagan mysticism]] based on [[Germanic paganism|ancient Germanic religion]]. He suggests that the differences between the Nazis' pseudo-Germanic mythology and Marx's pseudo-Judaeo-Christian mythology explain their differing success:
<blockquote>In comparison with the vigorous optimism of the communist myth, the mythology propagated by the national socialists seems particularly inept; and this is not only because of the limitations of the racial myth (how could one imagine that the rest of Europe would voluntarily accept submission to the master-race?), but above all because of the fundamental pessimism of the Germanic mythology. [...] For the eschaton prophesied and expected by the ancient Germans was the [[ragnarok]]—that is, a catastrophic end of the world.<ref name="Myths2526, Ell92"/></blockquote>