Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts is an edited collection of essays by Mircea Eliade, selected and introduced by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. It is a gathering of Eliade’s writings rather than a continuous monograph; the individual pieces are Eliade’s, while Apostolos-Cappadona supplies the editorial framing. The volume includes an editor’s introduction, illustrations, a bibliography, and an index.
The collection is unified by Eliade’s history-of-religions approach to symbolic imagination. Its essays examine how religious symbolism operates in myth, ritual, archaic cultures, and the arts, and how “the sacred” is mediated through images, objects, spaces, and artistic making. The book does not construct a chronological survey of art history or advance a single systematic aesthetic theory. Instead, it brings together essays whose coherence lies in recurrent concerns: the nature of symbols, the persistence of myth, the dialectic of sacred and profane, and the ways artistic forms can carry or disguise religious meaning.
Among the explicitly identified essays are “The Symbolism of Shadows in Archaic Religion,” which examines the religious valence of shadow in archaic cultures; “Cultural Fashions and the History of Religions,” which turns the historian-of-religions eye on intellectual and cultural fashions and their symbolic or mythic dimensions; and “Survivals and Camouflages of Myths,” which considers how myths persist in modern secular culture under changed or disguised forms. These pieces indicate the volume’s range: it moves from archaic religious symbolism to the modern reception and transformation of mythic structures.
Other essays in the collection extend these concerns to sacred space, architecture, and the visual arts, and to the situation of the modern artist in relation to the sacred. Throughout, the essays treat symbols not as mere decorative signs but as forms through which religious meaning is experienced and communicated. The arts are approached as carriers of mythic structures and as places where the sacred may be camouflaged, recovered, or contested in modern life. The volume is thus an edited selection of Eliade’s essays on religious symbolism and artistic creation, rather than a biography or a single-author monograph.
Read together, the essays reveal a consistent interpretive discipline rather than a unified aesthetic doctrine: Eliade treats symbolic forms as structured ways of relating human experience to the sacred, and he compares particular images or motifs across religious traditions in order to bring out their capacity for multiple, sometimes contradictory, meanings. The result is not a survey of art objects but a set of demonstrations in the history of religions, showing how visual and spatial forms can be read as symbolic systems. The volume’s significance lies in making that method available to discussions of art and religion while respecting the specificity of the materials: it asks what a symbol does within a religious economy, how it can be reinterpreted or camouflaged in modern culture, and why artistic making remains a privileged site for such questions.
The modern essays sharpen this point by refusing a simple narrative of secularization; they show Eliade testing whether mythic structures survive in modern cultural fashions and artistic practices, and they leave the relation between modern art and the sacred as an open, historically variable problem rather than a settled thesis.
