Eliade Summary p.144-151

WOMAN, EARTH, AND FECUNDITY

Religious experiences that are connected to fecundity and birth have a cosmic structure.  Womanhood and the ability to give birth are sacred. Symbolically, woman is equated with the earth and childbearing is equated with the fertility of the earth. He gives examples of how women are perceived in different cultures and how the perception is linked to the religious mythology of the past in those areas. For example, in some places, Mother Earth is apparently capable of conceiving without anyone’s help (no sex). In those cultures, we can see a societal structure favoring matriarchy  In other cases, people believe that cosmic creation came to be by the hierogamy between the Sky-God and Mother Earth.  Based on that perception, “human marriage is regarded as an imitation of the cosmic hierogamy,” (p. 145).  Therefore, marriage and conjugal rituals have cosmic structures too.  This link between Mother Earth being sacred and conjugal rituals being sacred is the reason there are orgies for crop production especially at New Year celebrations. Each new year means there will be new creation.   “Here too the orgy is a return to the cosmic night, the preformal, the waters, in order to ensure complete regeneration of life and hence the fertility of the earth and an abundance of crops” (p. 147).

SYMBOLISM OF THE COSMIC TREE AND OF VEGETATION CULTS

Cosmos is a living organism which renews itself periodically.  Thus, the cosmos was imagined in the form of a tree to symbolically express the endless regeneration of the cosmos. He gives many examples of trees as symbols in other cultures and religions as well.  A tree is not the only symbol used to portray religious ideas, but other kinds of vegetation are used to explain other religious ideas too, such as immortality, omniscience, and limitless power.  Eliade talks about fruit being a symbol of power and having the ability to change men to gods when they eat it.  He also points out that only the religious vision of life makes it possible to think of vegetation as symbolic - however, the non-religious still see some significance in the sacredness of nature which is why we have vegetation cults that still celebrate the coming of spring as the “prophetic sign of the cosmic mystery” (p. 151).