The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade
Published 1957 · 44,911 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Non-Fiction, Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy
How hard is The Sacred and the Profane to read?
The Sacred and the Profane scores 54 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 63 out of 100
- Technical phenomenological vocabulary combined with accessible comparative religious description.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- High-level phenomenological categories applied across vast comparative religious material.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- Compressed synthesis of enormous comparative ethnographic and historical material.
- Narrative indirection: 16 out of 100
- Illustrative examples from world religions support theoretical argument.
- Symbolic density: 22 out of 100
- Axis mundi, hierophany, and cosmic symbolism are both subject and analytical tool.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Treats secular modernity with quiet regret rather than irony.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- Ends by posing the question of the sacred's fate in modernity without resolving it.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Four chapters on space, time, nature, and human existence organized around the sacred-profane axis.
How The Sacred and the Profane is regarded
The Sacred and the Profane holds a literary regard score of 81 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.