ABSTRACT
According to Eliade, the symbol arises as a "creation of the psyche," is constituted "as the result of existential tensions," and must be regarded as an "autonomous mode of cognition." "The phenomena of nature are freely transformed by the psyche in 'an autonomous act of creation' into symbols of the power and holiness they reveal to the beholder."' Eliade's primary concern in interpreting the meaning of myths and other reHgious phenomena is with determining how religious symbols function and what they reveal. In this regard he makes the following crucial assertions: that symbolic, and hence mythic, thought is an autonomous mode of cognition that has its own structure; that symbols have their own "logic" and fit together to make up coherent structural systems; that every coherent symbolism is universal; that the symbolic system, and the myths that incorporate such symbolism, will preserve its structure regardless of whether it is understood by the person who uses it.^
CHARACTERISTICS AND FUNCTIONS OF SYMBOLISM In commenting on "the imagination of matter" from Gaston Bachelard's Water and Dreams, Eliade summarizes several of his major claims about religious symbolism:
[T]he imagination constitutes an instrument of cognition, because it reveals to us, in an intelligent and coherent form, the modes of the real.... Once constituted, the symbol is invested with a double func-
tion: "existential" and "cognitive." On the one hand, a symbol unifies various sectors of reality (aquatic symbolism, for example, reveals structural solidarity among Water, Moon, becoming, vegetation, femininity, germs, birth, death, rebirth, etc.). On the other hand, the symbol is always open, in the sense that it is capable of revealing "transcendent" meanings which are not "given" (not evident) in immediate experience. For example, the rites of baptism reveal a plane of the real other than the biocosmic (birth-death-rebirth): they reveal the "spiritual birth," rebirth to a transcendent mode of being ("salvation," etc.). The aquatic symbol is . . . a means of intuiting the real in its totality, because it reveals the fundamental unity of the Cosmos. A symbol becomes autonomous at the moment when it is constituted as such, and its polyvalence helps us to discover homologies among different modes of our being-homologies which the simple "imagination of matter" could not make possible.'
