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The disclosures made by Leon Volovici and other researchers about Mircea Eliade's (and other generation colleagues of his) during his youth led to the discovery of important elements regarding the adherence to the extreme right of the time. Moshe Idel performs an analysis of what remained after these compromising discoveries, trying to outline a portrait of Mircea Eliade, analyzing his entire career and setting the limits of the errors of his youth, investigating with finesse the accusations of anti-Semitism, legionary beliefs and fascism. The purpose of this study is to reanalyze the facts in the context of the epoch, to determine what led to the mass expansion of the concept of Romanianism and of the elitist concept of Romanian exceptionalism. These are the foundation for a study that tries to see to what extent the ideology of the extreme right is found today in Romanian and European politics, where sovereignist and nationalist conceptions are increasingly present.

In 1966, two thinkers--Mircea Eliade and Leszek Kolakowski--independently of each other carried out a comprehensive analysis of the mythological sphere of human life. Each became an important researcher in the philosophy of culture and religion not only in his own country but also in the world. In their view, myth serves the human being to explain the existence of the world, of which we remain a constituent element, or it serves as a defence against the destructive influence of the Enlightenment heritage. Rationalistic anthropological concepts abolish boundaries that make it impossible for human beings to orient themselves axiologically, while myth sets strict boundaries between what is good and bad in human conduct. Myth is a response to transience, fear, uncertainty and human despair in the choice between individual freedom and autonomy and acceptance of and submission to the sacral order. Both Eliade and Kolakowski consider myth in relation to the tension between sacrum and profanum. They refer to the same concepts in their research to explain what myth is. The aim of this paper is to answer whether they interpret in the same way what myth is and what its significance for human existence is. Key words: Myth, Leszek Kolakowski, Mircea Eliade, sacrum, profanum, religion, human being, sacral order.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1923–1975) fashioned poetry, prose, cinema, and theatrical works, and how he conceived of the sacred is more thoroughly understood in relation to his working biography. Two films, The Gospel According to St Matthew and La Ricotta, together with his tragedies, overwritten on the Greek plays The Eumenides and Medea are here in focus, indicating why Pasolini drew on Mircea Eliade’s method of integrating historical, phenomenological, and hermeneutical approaches. Declaring himself a Marxist, Pasolini did not accept Eliade’s theory in full, while the two concepts that most link him to Eliade are the latter’s ‘eternal return’ and ‘hierophanies’. Pasolini had grown up immersed in the natural world of Friuli, Northern Italy, and he considered hierophanies as an immanent manifestation of the sacred in nature. In doing this, he discovered both the immensity of the archaic peasant world and the cosmogonic matrix of his religion. Pasolini’s ontological vision of being led him to define the eternal return as the cyclical time of nature, the movement of life in respect of the inscrutable laws of the cosmos and the transcendent supernatural. Cyclical time meant death and resurrection and thus the possibility of regeneration, like a seed that dies to become a plant.

Discussions on Mircea Eliade's contributions to the study of religion are often focus on his controversial notion of the sacred, mainly deployed in his work The sacred and the Profane (1959). However, it is often disregarded that Eliade understands the sacred as closely related with another key notion: the homo religiosus. Because this notion has been overlooked and understudied, the purpose of this writing is to reconsider the value of the 'homo religiosus' and advocate for its legitimacy through a two-step argumentation. Firstly, departing from Eliade's understanding of the homo religiosus, its meaning and implications will be briefly exposed. Secondly, a justification of the validity of this expression will be attempted through a subject-object approach and the application of the philosophical principle of operari sequitur esse. While the former means that the homo religiosus (subject) is always understood as operating in relation with something else (object), the latter allows to account for the implications of this expression through its effects, as this principle states that every being operates according to its ontological constitution. This paper proposes six ways in which the validity of the homo religiosus can be justified through this reasoning: while three of them are alternative approaches from different disciplines, the other three are paradoxically based on the anti-religious argumentations of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. Key words: Mircea Eliade--Homo Religiosus--Religion--The Sacred--operari sequitur esse

Starting from the premise that contemporary advertising is defined by a \"literary turn\", the paper proposes an investigation of the advertising stories from the perspective of Mircea Eliade's theory of the sacred and the profane. In the first part of the paper, I focus on the concept of storytelling, emphasizing also the major impact of new media on the manner in which we understand the advertising stories. Next, I discuss the most important aspects of Eliade's conception on the essential relationship between the narrative and the sacred, emphasizing the idea that the omnipresence of storytelling in the postmodern society is, in fact, stirred by this longing for meaning and for access to what is perceived as \"truly real\". Furthermore, the narrative core of advertising, understood in the terms provided by the theory the sacred of Mircea Eliade, contributes in a decisive manner at defining what Sheffieldd labels \"the religious dimension of advertising\".

Meditation has become a common instrument used by Western man in personal and professional contexts, or in the ones in which relationships with alterity are reconstructed. To understand the importance of meditation techniques I started off from Mircea Eliade's fascination with the Indian culture and his attempt to explain the need to abandon a Eurocentrist perspective of values and spiritual practices hierarchy. On the grounds of the mystical imaginary that came to the West from Oriental spirituality, I showcased a few meditation techniques for personal development purposes. Focusing on the four existential dimensions (physical, social, personal and spiritual), I have highlighted the fact that for each of these, meditation techniques may be used to build up balance and authenticity. Corporeality, love, interiority and contemplative vocation are engaged in the meditation process aimed to recover man's fundamental unity in the digital society. The dialectic of the sacred and the profane perspective, as captured in Eliade's writings, was put to work to reveal the metamorphosis of significance and traditional symbolic practice when assumed as initiation by contemporary man. Meditation techniques become important because they are instrumental in the process of bettering the daily life.

At the heart of the analyzes proposed by Moshe Idel is the change of perspective that we find in the work of Ioan P. Coulianu in the last stage of his creation. Coulianu leaves the field of historical-philological approach of religious phenomena to explain the development of religions from a fractal perspective, as an actualization of potentials found from the very beginning, which, combined in different ways, produce different results, Idel finds that the sharp methodological shift that Coulianu has been carrying out since 1986, a stage that also coincides with the one after the death of Mircea Eliade, has been interpreted by two of the most important Romanian intellectuals. Moshe Idel considers that their explanations do not address the specificity of the new approach as formulated by Couliano himself. They appear, on the one hand, as an overly simplistic explanation of a vision of great complexity reduced to a form of psychological complex, and on the other hand, the reduction to a theological perspective that appeals to the intervention of a transcendental power, Idel gives a nuanced explanation of this methodological turn, while suggesting that in order to better understand what is happening in the last stage work, it would be better to talk about the \"American Couliano\" instead of the \"last Couliano\".

We have entered the digital era without a clear understanding of the metamorphoses of spiritual experiences lived by those who inhabit the digital world. To understand what exactly is happening in the registry of these expectations, I have used a few of Mircea Eliade's ideas. To reveal the way in which the digital era human keeps a series of behavioral and thinking mode patterns of homo religiosus, I wished to posit beyond religious representations and practices typical of a certain cultural space or of a single religious option. It is the reason for which I called on an ontology of the sacred like the one present in Mircea Eliade's analyses. Such a philosophy of the sacred can help us understand the way in which the sacred functions like an organizing element of the entire existence, beyond its particulars depending on stage division of cultural development or on content evolution brought about by the human imaginary. Such an option enabled noticing the need for meaning, significance and authenticity of the digital era human, seeing the way the symbolism of the centre functions as an essential symbolic structure in the understanding of contemporary man's situating in the network. It also permitted revealing the archetypal premises based on which is the tendency to give an axiological significance to virtual space and technologies determining a rapid dynamic of digital world development, as well as deciphering the significance of the ever growing importance of storytelling in today's communication and motivational discourse.