Read more Mircea Eliade

Yes. If what you liked about Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane is the combination of big comparative ideas, mythology, symbolism, ritual, sacred space/time, and a very readable attempt to see what different religions have in common, there are several successors—but none is an exact replacement.

Eliade’s approach has actually become somewhat controversial in academic religious studies. Later scholars often criticized him for imposing universal patterns too readily.  But there is a very good line of books that preserves what is most attractive about him.

My first choice for you: Ninian Smart —

Dimensions of the Sacred

Ninian Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs is probably the closest thing to what you’re asking for.

Smart was trying to do something Eliade-like but more systematically: instead of asking simply What is religion?, he examines religion through recurring dimensions—ritual, experience, myth, doctrine, ethics, social organization, material symbols, etc.

It is explicitly listed among major works in comparative religion alongside Eliade, and contemporary discussions of comparative religion continue to treat Smart’s work as important.

Why I think you’d like it:

• readable rather than narrowly academic

• compares Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and other traditions

• interested in religious experience, not merely institutional religion

• takes symbols and myths seriously

• tries to understand religion from the inside

• gives you a framework for seeing relationships among religions

I’d put this #1 for you.

#2: Huston Smith —

The World’s Religions

If what you really want is the experience of reading Eliade and then continuing into the world’s religions, I’d actually consider Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions even more enjoyable.

Smith was not primarily trying to construct a theory of religion like Eliade. Instead, he tries to explain the inner meaning of the major traditions.

It’s particularly good for asking:

What does the world look like if I temporarily enter the worldview of a Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Taoist, etc.?

That’s very much in the spirit of Eliade’s attempt to understand homo religiosus.

Smith also wrote Why Religion Matters, which is more explicitly about what happens to the sacred in the modern secular world. The book is regularly grouped with Eliade and Smart in comparative-religion bibliographies.

For pure readability, I might actually put Smith ahead of Smart.

#3: William E. Paden —

Interpreting the Sacred

This is an especially interesting choice because Paden is consciously working on the problem that Eliade left behind.

His Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion asks how we can compare religions without simply assuming that every religion is expressing the same underlying thing.

Paden is part of the modern development of comparative religion, and his later New Patterns for Comparative Religion explicitly revisits Eliade, Durkheim and Jonathan Z. Smith.

So:

Eliade → Smart/Smith → Paden

is a good intellectual progression.

#4: Jonathan Z. Smith —

Drudgery Divine

This is the opposite direction, but fascinating if you want to understand what happened to Eliade’s method.

Jonathan Z. Smith became one of the most important critics of Eliade. Rather than looking for universal religious structures, Smith emphasizes comparison, historical difference and the particular circumstances in which religions develop. His Drudgery Divine is specifically a major statement on comparative religious methodology.

He’s less immediately pleasurable than Eliade, though.

I’d not start here if your objective is simply to find another wonderful book to read.

And there’s another author I think may particularly interest you

Karen Armstrong —

A History of God

Armstrong isn’t really an Eliade successor academically. But in terms of the reading experience you’re describing, she may be exactly right.

A History of God moves through Judaism → Christianity → Islam, following how human conceptions of God developed.

And she repeatedly asks essentially an Eliadean question:

What does the religious symbol mean to the people who inhabit it?

She is much more historical than Eliade, and therefore provides an excellent corrective to him without abandoning the fascination with religious imagination.

One more possibility: Mircea Eliade himself

There is an amusing answer to your question: the best successor to The Sacred and the Profane may be another Eliade book.

If you haven’t read it, I would put:

1. The Sacred and the Profane

2. Images and Symbols

3. Myths, Dreams and Mysteries

4. Patterns in Comparative Religion

5. The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion

very high on your list.

Images and Symbols in particular gets closer to the experience you seem to be looking for: the center, tree, labyrinth, initiation, symbolism, religious imagination, etc. Eliade’s subsequent works continued developing those themes.

My suggested reading path for you

Given the things you’ve been asking me about recently—Rumi, the Qur’an and Christianity, Hindu texts, sacred space, sunrise rituals, Coomaraswamy, and the idea of the sacred in ordinary life—I’d go:

Eliade → Huston Smith → Ninian Smart → Karen Armstrong → Coomaraswamy → Paden

And if you want to see where the modern academic study of religion went after Eliade, then add:

Jonathan Z. Smith

The really interesting intellectual transition is:

Eliade: What recurring sacred structures appear across humanity?

Smith: Are we sure those structures aren’t being created by the scholar doing the comparison?

Smart/Paden: Can we preserve meaningful comparison while avoiding that problem?

That is probably the closest thing to a “next generation of Eliade” story.

If you want just one book to buy/read next, I’d choose Ninian Smart’s Dimensions of the Sacred. If you want the most enjoyable and spiritually expansive read, choose Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions.