Coomaraswamy

Yes. Coomaraswamy is probably an excellent next author for you if you are enjoying Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane. There is a real intellectual overlap: both are trying to recover the meaning of myth, symbol, sacred space, cosmic order, and traditional religion. But they approach it differently.

Eliade is primarily a historian/comparative phenomenologist of religion; Coomaraswamy is more of a metaphysician of traditional cultures who happens to write extensively about art. His writings range across comparative religion, symbolism, mythology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and civilization.

The Coomaraswamy books I would put at the top of your list

1. The Door in the Sky: Coomaraswamy on Myth and Meaning — probably start here.

This is a later selection of his writings specifically organized around myth and symbolism. It contains essays dealing with things such as the symbolism of the dome, the “door of heaven,” self-sacrifice, Vedic mythology, and the meaning behind traditional symbols.

This is probably the closest thing to what you are getting from Eliade: why an apparently simple physical object or mythological image represents an entire cosmology.

2. Time and Eternity — especially good for you.

I would put this very high given your recent interest in Eliade’s distinction between sacred and profane time.

Coomaraswamy examines how ancient civilizations understood Time, Eternity, cosmology, metaphysics, theology, philosophy, religion, and art. The Indian material is especially important, but he continually makes comparisons between Eastern and Western traditions.

There is a fascinating complementarity:

Eliade: Sacred time breaks into ordinary historical time.

Coomaraswamy: Eternity is not simply “a very long time”; it is a different order of reality altogether.

I think you would find this particularly rewarding after The Sacred and the Profane.

3. Hinduism and Buddhism

This is much shorter and more concentrated than Eliade’s large historical works. Coomaraswamy is trying to get underneath the surface differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and explain their shared metaphysical vocabulary.

It is one of his explicitly metaphysical works, alongside Time and Eternity and A New Approach to the Vedas.

Given your questions about Rumi, Sant Mat, the inner sky, the sun, sacred light and the correspondence between cosmos and inner experience, I suspect this could be particularly interesting.

4.

The Dance of Śiva

This is the more accessible, earlier Coomaraswamy.

It is a collection of essays on Indian art and culture, but the important thing is that he isn’t treating art as merely aesthetic. He is asking:

What did the Indian artist believe reality itself was?

Śiva’s dance, for example, becomes a way of thinking about creation, destruction, rhythm, time, consciousness and cosmic order.

That is very much the kind of question Eliade asks about religious symbols.

5.

Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought

This is where Coomaraswamy becomes more demanding but also more profound.

His central argument is essentially that traditional art is not primarily “art for art’s sake.” A traditional image is a form of knowledge. Its symbolism expresses metaphysical truths.

That is a very important bridge between Coomaraswamy and Eliade.

Coomaraswamy’s own title asks whether a traditional symbol is merely a figure of speech or actually a figure of thought.

And one I think you would particularly enjoy:

A New Approach to the Vedas

This gets much closer to the territory you’ve been exploring with Dyaus, light, the sun, Vedic cosmology, Rumi’s “midnight sun,” and the inner/outer sky.

It isn’t an easy introductory book. Coomaraswamy is doing philological and metaphysical interpretation of Vedic texts. But his fundamental concern is fascinating:

What did these ancient words and images actually mean within the Vedic conception of reality?

It is an essay in “translation and exegesis,” and it is one of his major metaphysical works.

If I were designing your reading sequence

Since you’re currently reading Eliade, I wouldn’t start with Coomaraswamy’s most technical art scholarship.

I’d do:

Eliade — The Sacred and the Profane

↓

Coomaraswamy — The Door in the Sky

↓

Coomaraswamy — Time and Eternity

↓

Coomaraswamy — Hinduism and Buddhism

↓

Coomaraswamy — A New Approach to the Vedas

↓

Coomaraswamy — Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought

That progression moves from myth → sacred space → sacred time → metaphysics → Vedic symbolism → the meaning of traditional symbols.

And there is something particularly interesting going on here: Coomaraswamy and Eliade are almost looking at the same mountain from different sides.

Eliade asks:

How does homo religiosus experience the sacred?

Coomaraswamy asks:

What metaphysical reality makes that experience and its symbols intelligible?

That second question is why I think Coomaraswamy could become very important to your reading of Rumi and the other traditions you’ve been exploring.

There is an enormous body of Coomaraswamy—one bibliography alone documents 95 books and pamphlets and hundreds of other writings—so it is worth being selective rather than simply picking up whatever title happens to be available.

If you want, I can also make you a  “Coomaraswamy for an Eliade reader” list of about 10 essays, ranked from most accessible to most profound, including the specific essays that connect most directly to Eliade’s sacred/profane, inner sky, sun/light, cosmic center, myth, and sacred time.