Juxtaposes the traditional human with the modern human, the former being ahistorical and finding meaning in things insofar as they participate in the cyclical re-enactment of a cosmic archetype, while the latter feels themselves solely in History and is ultimately trapped by it in such a way that they fail to find meaning at all.

Nothing new happens in the world, for everything is but the repetition of the same primordial archetypes [...]

I mainly read this book as an extension to Marco Maurizi's Beyond Nature, specifically for the part where Eliade discusses how the re-evaluation of cosmic archetypes can be interpreted as the desire for a return to animality and the innocence that comes along with it.

Eliade's notion that traditional humans' ahistoricity is a function of a purely ideological process was unconvincing. And while we absolutely should look back on traditional humans' way on interpreting the world in order to inform our own, what comes from that must not be a regression, but instead something that builds on top of what we have.