The Arts and the Knowledge of Religion

Abstract

The seriousness and sheer quantity of attention given by the Encyclopedia of Religion to the arts, music, literature, and aesthetics of all the world's religious and cultural areas is testimony that the arts are not merely marginal places in the study of religion. Or, as is the fashion now, we might say that they are indeed among the most marginal, if religion is understood to entail limit and liminality. The Encyclopedia treats the various literary, plastic, and performing arts as primary sources of religious knowledge and modes of religious experience-along with histories of communities, mythic traditions and ritual practices, sacred writings and doctrinal thought. Likewise, varieties of art and literary criticism are not ancillary but primary methods for the study of religious knowledge, beside the human, social, and natural sciences and other hermeneutical disciplines intrinsic to religious traditions themselves. All this, of course, is to be expected of a work nurtured by the imagination of Mircea Eliade, whose own researches required as much of the disciplines of fiction and mythmaking as of historical method. This extraordinary tool gives the reader access to a vast body of authoritative description, comparison, theory, and bibliography. Ease of crossreferencing is enhanced by the synoptic outline of contents (in vol. 16), which effectively transforms the Encyclopedia into a circuitous gyre of religions and religious ideas-a meander as rich as might be imagined in stories of encyclopedias, libraries, and labyrinths by Jorge Borges or by Eliade himself. I sampled articles on architecture, plastic arts (premodern and modern), drama and performance, dance, music, cinema, poetry and novel, biography and autobiography, and calligraphy and on the interrelation of art and religion discussed in entries on language, aesthetics, hermeneutics, imagination, performance and ritual, iconography, sacred