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The exegesis of Mircea Eliade's work highlights the fact that the author integrated concepts that belong to several sciences into his hermeneutical analysis of religion. Thus, our study analyses both Eliade's view of discourse and the tight connection with the idea of myth, which is a fundamental religious concept for his work. We are focusing on the concept of myth as fundamental, archaic story, which establishes the connection between human and transcendental by resorting to symbol as a key concept for semiotics. Eliade takes the theories of symbol further into Jungian psychoanalysis, while highlighting its connections with the imaginary and the human subconsciousness, thus getting to a fundamental anthropological concept, that of the archetype. The circle discourse-myth-symbol-archetype that we aim to analyze is thus closed, as it shows the continuity of "divine manifestation". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study analyzes the relationship between the imaginary / imagination and scientific rationalism while mirroring seemingly contrasting aspects. Just as the imaginary has its own reasoning (structures, archetypes, the capacity to produce meaning - analyzed by Gilbert Durand, Gaston Bachelard and Northrop Frye), rationalism is subject to its own logic (cause-effect, arguments, deduction/induction, etc.) which may surface in the realm of the imaginary. We further analyze the cognitive function of the imaginary, which is at the core of analogy-based knowledge and manifests itself through the metaphorical side of language. Thus a subtle, yet rigorous game emerges between clarity (characteristic to science) and ambiguity (a feature of the imaginary), between visible and invisible, further leading towards an understanding of reality beyond abstract rationalism which, in its turn, may lead to fiction while exploring possible worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the manifestations of the sacred and the profane in Mircea Eliade's work. More precisely it analyses the ways in which space is depicted, focusing on various spatial variants, such as the concepts of house, center, limits, etc., in light of the sacred / profane duality that is specific to Eliade's work. Mimetism, camouflage and disguise are some features of Eliade's fantastic literature, as well as the subtle game of simultaneously showing and hiding something. At the level of discourse, these aspects are translated by coding the information so that later it can be decoded partly by the author, partly by the reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]