Mircea Eliade

Romanian historian of religions who developed the concept of the sacred/profane distinction and the myth of the eternal return — arguing that religious experience is qualitatively distinct from ordinary experience and that archaic societies lived in a sacred time outside ordinary history.

The Sacred and the Profane: religious experience creates a qualitatively different space and time — the sacred interrupts profane space-time. Myth of the Eternal Return: archaic societies periodically re-enacted the creation to renew the world, refusing linear historical time. Shamanism: the foundational academic study of shamanic traditions.