This is an authoritative introductory survey to the field of history and phenomenology of religion as a whole, with sincere methodological discussions, informative and at the same time concise introduction to the literature. It might also be the best of Mircea Eliade's oeuvre except for his monumental A History of Religious Ideas and perhaps Patterns in Comparative Religion. His shorter monographs, such as The Myth of the Eternal Return, are written in a rather sloppy manner, leading the readers to doubt that Eliade is not really a thinker with a clear mind, which is thoroughly disproven in the writing of this book.

While the book is factually a survey, even an introductory survey, it is still extremely relevant for those who have more-or-less gotten into the field. Even those who have already read all the major works of Eliade, Frazer, Levy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, Durkheim, Freud, Jung, Malinkowski, Dumezil, etc. will find the book helpful in organizing the amorphous thoughts that are still to be given a definite form. I myself was surprised to find out that Eliade himself was also seriously concerned with the impact of the studies of religions on philosophical anthropology. It is evident that Eliade's thoughts on the discipline, expounded as far as I know only in this book, is not at all old-fashioned even half a century has passed, and is unequalled in its broadness of perspective. What I'd like to add to his perspective, after half a century has passed, are, first, that of human evolution and hominization, that religion is older, primordial and 'close to the essence' than the human seen as a specie, which was at best only hinted by Eliade, and second, that of Cosmogony, that the phenomenological world and hence also material world are generated by observers that are in turn generated by the sacred, the center of religion.

Students of the disciplines of phenomenology/history/psychology of religion are commonly not aware of the implications these disciplines can have on the human spirit in general. They often relapse into collecting facts about fancy rituals and mythologies without trying to decipher and understand or even try to feel their meanings, turning disciplines of unfathomable depths into chit-chats. To understand religions is to pursue sciences of human, of the phenomenon of man, to manufacture essential components for the construction of a road to self-knowledge. For the students and enthusiasts that want to get into the field but cannot find a proper way, gazing into the mysterious landscape painted with precious gems adumbrated by the words like 'religion' and 'myth' and 'ritual', this little book of Eliade's would serve as a guide to the most magnificent universe of human spirit and religion.