Mircea Eliade and the Right
The Architect of Reenchantment
I. The Silent Architect
In the twentieth century, few scholars examined the religious impulse with the structural depth of Mircea Eliade. Trained in philosophy and the history of religions, he built a vast comparative framework that spanned the mythologies of Asia, Europe, and the Americas. While his contemporary Julius Evola remains a recognizable name in right-wing intellectual circles, Eliade’s work often circulates in the quieter corners of academia. This silence is costly. His studies do not merely catalog myths; they identify the living grammar of the sacred and its patterns in human culture.
Eliade observed that premodern societies did not divide the world into sacred and profane spaces as modernity does. For the religious man, every act could be rooted in a primordial gesture, repeating the deeds of gods or ancestors. Life gained orientation from the reenactment of these models. In stripping life of these patterned reenactments, modernity severed its link to a higher order. The result is not a neutral world, but one flattened and spiritually impoverished.
The right, which speaks often of tradition, has in Eliade a rigorous guide to how tradition functions in practice. His writing shows where the arteries of sacred meaning once ran, and how they might be opened again. He is not a mystic retreating from the present but an analyst of structures that can be rebuilt. To recover his thought is to reclaim the architectural plans for a world that remembers its gods, and in remembering, lives among them once more.
II. Intellectual Genealogy
Eliade did not emerge in isolation. His formative years placed him in contact with the traditionalist current that sought to defend the sacred order against the flattening impulses of modernity. Julius Evola pursued this defense through an openly polemical style, writing with the intention of confronting the modern world head-on. Eliade took a different path. His was a scholar’s lens, drawing on fieldwork, linguistic study, and comparative mythology to reveal the universality of certain religious patterns. Yet beneath this academic discipline lay a shared conviction with Evola: that humanity without the sacred is humanity in decline.
Both men recognized that the erosion of religious consciousness is not merely a loss of faith but a loss of structure. In Eliade’s view, myths, rituals, and sacred spaces are not peripheral cultural ornaments; they are the very skeleton of a civilization. When these supports collapse, the result is not liberation, but a drift into formlessness. Evola gave this decay a political vocabulary, while Eliade charted it through historical case studies and symbolic analysis.
To see Eliade alongside Evola is to see two approaches to the same summit. One carves a steep and combative ascent; the other maps the ancient trails that have always led there. The right, if it is serious about recovering the sacred, cannot afford to ignore either. Eliade’s contribution offers the intellectual precision that turns instinct into a plan, giving form to the impulse toward a world where the sacred is once again the central axis of life.
III. The Religious Man’s World
At the center of Eliade’s work is the figure he called homo religiosus, the religious man whose life is ordered around the presence of the sacred. For this kind of man, time is not uniform and space is not neutral. Certain places are sacred because something once happened there. Certain times are sacred because they return the beginning to the present. The cosmos itself is not a backdrop for life but a structure that carries meaning, renewed through ritual and myth.
Eliade taught that the sacred is not an abstraction. It breaks into ordinary life and marks it. He called such an event a hierophany, a moment when the sacred becomes visible through matter. It might reveal itself through a stone, a star, a flame, or a human act. Once it does, that place or action becomes a center, a fixed point around which the rest of life turns.
The religious man is not enchanted because he lacks reason. He is enchanted because he remembers. He remembers that meaning does not begin with man but with something older and higher. To participate in that meaning is to repeat the gestures that bring it near again. This is why myth is not entertainment and ritual is not theater. They are repetitions of a truth that must be enacted to remain real.
Eliade traced these patterns across cultures and eras. They form a blueprint, not a relic. They can be restored wherever men remember what the world once was, and decide to build again.
IV. Sacralization as Countermeasures
Eliade’s work does not only describe what has been lost. It points toward what must be done. If the sacred once revealed itself through myth, ritual, and space, then the reintroduction of these elements offers a path forward. The task is not to recreate the ancient world in its totality. The task is to reestablish points of contact, fixed places where the sacred can return and reshape the present.
This begins with public life. Our cities have been stripped of orientation. Nearly all architecture today is designed for speed, scale, and profit. It communicates no meaning. It offers no ascent. But sacred architecture once told stories. Temples and churches were not built for convenience. They were built to draw the eye upward and the heart inward. Sacred space must return.
The same is true of time. Secular societies treat time as a flat surface, without direction or division. In sacred cultures, time is marked and renewed. Holy days, fasts, festivals are instruments of memory. They bind the human calendar to a cosmic rhythm. Reintroducing them reintroduces the idea that some moments must be set apart.
Even gestures matter. A repeated action, a shared posture, a deliberate word. These do not become sacred by chance. They become sacred through repetition, reverence, and shared use.
Eliade does not offer vague ideals. He offers practical structures. Sacralization begins wherever we decide to replace noise with form and absence with attention.
V. Underdiscussion and Underappreciation
In intellectual circles aligned with tradition, Evola is quoted often. Eliade is not. The silence around him is strange, given the scale of his work. He produced more than sixty volumes across several languages, covering myths from the Amazon to the Himalayas. He taught at the University of Chicago and shaped an entire generation of scholars in religious studies. Yet his name rarely appears in the places where his insights are most needed.
Part of this neglect comes from the academic tone of his writing. Eliade did not write like a provocateur. He avoided polemics and positioned himself as a scholar, not a critic. This made him easier to absorb into university curricula, but harder to recognize as a figure of resistance. His work was respected but disarmed.
Another reason lies in the political timidity of the right itself. The contemporary right tends to be reactive. It criticizes liberal institutions but often fails to develop its own intellectual foundations. Eliade offers one. Yet he is passed over because he does not fit neatly into political categories. He does not talk about policy or strategy. He talks about sacred time, ritual space, mythic repetition. And so, he is shelved.
But this is a mistake. Eliade offers a model for rebuilding order at the deepest level. Those who care about tradition, meaning, and form have every reason to read him. His absence is not neutral. It reflects the very crisis he spent his life diagnosing.
VI. Unlocking a Healthier Order
Eliade’s work is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is a manual for repair. His descriptions of myth and ritual offer a grammar for restoring order, especially in the domains where modern life has grown most fragile. The family, the community, the calendar, the built environment. Each can become a vessel for the sacred again. But they must be shaped, not drifted into.
When communities lose a sense of sacred time, they fall into either exhaustion or chaos. Without rhythm, life collapses into endless productivity or endless distraction. Eliade shows how sacred calendars gave traditional societies a shared structure. Fasts and feasts came not from superstition, but from the need to bind human time to something greater than appetite. To restore this pattern is to restore energy with direction.
The family also suffers when it becomes disenchanted. Once, it was more than a contract or a tax unit. It was a mirror of divine order, shaped through rites of passage, domestic altars, and seasonal rituals. Eliade provides examples from cultures across the world where the home served as the first temple. That model has not disappeared. It has only been forgotten.
Even in civic life, sacred structures once directed the flow of the crowd. Processions, shared acts of mourning, rituals of greeting and farewell—these were not ornamental. They were essential.
Eliade helps the right remember what a culture looks like when it carries the sacred not in theory but in daily form. His work shows that a healthier order is not invented. It is remembered and restored.
VII. The Right’s Sacral Turn
Much of the political right speaks of tradition but fails to grasp what tradition requires. It is not preserved through rhetoric or nostalgia. It is preserved through form. The sacred must be enacted, not referenced. A politics that forgets this becomes shallow. It may win votes, but it loses meaning. Eliade offers a way out of this condition.
His vision helps distinguish between two competing impulses on the right. One seeks control over decaying institutions. The other seeks to build new forms grounded in older truths. The first is reactive. The second is creative. Eliade belongs to the second. His work reminds us that order begins where the sacred is honored. Without that, all strategy collapses into drift.
This does not mean retreating into private belief. It means building public structures that reflect sacred reality. Architecture, holidays, rituals, and stories must all be treated as essential elements of political life. Without them, laws become temporary and leaders become replaceable. The sacred does not decorate a regime. It sustains it.
A right that draws on Eliade will not limit itself to economics or procedural reform. It will see culture as a battleground, and it will act accordingly. It will elevate myth, protect the calendar, and shape space with care.
The goal is not merely to resist decline. The goal is to build a civilization that orients people toward what is permanent. Eliade does not tell us what to believe. He shows us what belief requires. That is the beginning of power.
VIII. A Sacred Horizon
The modern world is not lacking in politics. It is lacking in vision. Eliade’s legacy gives the right a way to restore that vision without fantasy or escapism. He does not speak of utopias. He speaks of memory, form, and return. These are not acts of retreat. They are the preconditions for renewal.
To sacralize the world is not to cover it in symbols. It is to recognize where the sacred already presses up through the cracks. Eliade taught that sacred time still touches ours, and that sacred space still calls out from the margins. We ignore these things at our peril. But we can also restore them. Not through theory, and not through law alone. Through action. Through form. Through reorientation.
The right must stop waiting for permission to begin building. It must stop treating culture as something downstream from power. In Eliade’s world, culture is not downstream. It is the source. Political forms collapse when they no longer reflect the sacred order. The renewal of those forms must begin where Eliade begins—with the restoration of meaning in time, space, and story.
There is no going back. The sacred cannot be resurrected by sentiment. But it can be reawakened through deliberate structure.
Mircea Eliade has drawn the map. Others must now take up the work of construction. To speak his name is not an academic exercise. It is a declaration of intent. A sacred horizon still exists. The question is whether we will walk toward it.