In archaic and traditional societies, the surrounding world is conceived as a microcosm. At the limits of this closed world begins the domain of the … - Mircea Eliade

The fact is that in most cases an author does not understand all the meaning of his work. Archaic symbolisms re-appear spontaneously...

cum ar fi fost viaţa noastră? Nu mă gândesc deloc la trupul ei; e destul de uşor să cunoşti şi să uiţi un trup. Dar mă gândesc mai ales la prezenţa ei, la magia ei ascunsă. O zi, o sută de zile, zece ani cu fiinţa aceasta frumoasă sau mai puţin frumoasă, blondă, înaltă, cum o fi, sub acelaşi acoperământ, alături de tine, zi după zi, zi şi noapte! Cum ar fi lucrat magia ei asupră-mi? Cum m-ar fi turmentat prezenţa ei?... Orice femeie pe care o iubesc mă apasă, mă sugrumă şi, fără voia ei, mă destramă şi mă topeşte, până la descompunerea finală.

"Yet the contents and structures of the unconscious are the result of immemorial existential situations, especially of critical situations, and this is why the unconscious has a religious aura. For every existential crisis once again puts in question both the reality of the world and man's presence in the world. This means that the existential crisis is, finally, "religious," since on the archaic levels of culture *being* and *the sacred* are one. As we saw, it is the experience of the sacred that founds the world, and even the most elementary religion is, above all, an ontology. In other words, in so far as the unconscious is the result of countless existential experiences, it cannot but resemble the various religious universes. For religion is the paradigmatic solution for every existential crisis. It is the paradigmatic solution notb only because it can be indefinately repeated, but also because it is believed to have a transcendental origin and hence is valorised as a revelation received from an *other*, transhuman world. The religious solution not only resolves the crisis but at the same time makes existence "open" to values that are no longer contingent or particular, thus enabling man to transcend personal situations and, finally, gain access to the world of spirit.
This is not the place to develop all the consequences of this close relation between the content and structures of the unconscious on the one hand and the values of religion on the other. We were led to refer to it in order to show in what sense even the most avowedly nonreligious man still, in his deeper being, shares a religiously oriented behavior. But modern man's "private mythologies" -his dreams, reveries, fantasies, and so on- never rise to the ontological status of myths, precisely because they are not experienced by the *whole man* and therefore do not transform a particular situation into a situation that is paradigmatic. In the same way, modern man's anxieties, his experiences in dream