ABSTRACT
One cannot read Mircea Eliade's writings on myth, in particular, and religion, in general, without soon encountering his concern, often bordering on an obsession, with the evils of modem forms of "reductionism." It is such reductionism, as evidenced in modem scholarly approaches and in much of contemporary life, that prevents us from appreciating, or even recognizing, the nature, function, significance, and meaning of myth and religion. Eliade sees much of his task, as defined by the proper and urgently needed "creative hermeneutics" of the history of religions, as reclaiming the mythic and renewing modem scholarship and contemporary life by an "antireductionist" orientation toward the "irreducibility of the sacred," including the irreducibly sacred world of myth.
