Pages: 510-518

The article analyses some ideas in a book by Mircea Eliade, one of the greatest researchers of archaic mythology “Traitat …”. Though the author does not pretend to provide an overall analysis of the mentioned work, he tries to bring a modern perspective in drawing conclusions outgoing from Eliade’s main arguments. First of all, the doctrine of the Romanian researcher about the sacred as actual (in Hegel’s meaning of the word), as a truer and fuller existence needs precisions and corrections. The author believes that world of the sacred created by the archaic consciousness is a virtual world to serve first of all as a guidance in real life, and it can be hardly considered a truer way of existence a-priori. Ambivalence of the sacred, as Eliade says, can be explained by the fact that everything beyond daily experience happens to be in this sphere – everything from the divinised to ridiculous and shameful. Finally, the paper tells about features of Eliade’s concept, rather obsolete nowadays, as an outcome of the limitations of structural method.