· C.-H. Rocquet · For you, not only does the history of religions transform the person who devotes himself to it in an inner, spiritual way, it can also give new life to the sacred in our present-day world. Among the most illuminating entries in your Journal I should like to quote this, dated 5 December 1959: “If it is true that Marx has analysed and ‘unmasked’ the social unconscious, and that Freud has done the same for the personal unconscious, if, therefore, it is true that psychoanalysis and Marxism teach us to how to penetrate the ‘superstructures’ in order to reach the true causes and motives beneath, then the history if religions, as I personally understand it, has the same goal: to identify the presence of the transcendent in human experience, to isolate, within the vast mass if ‘the unconscious,’ that which is transconscious … ‘to unmask’ the presence of the transcendent and the suprahistoric in everyday life.” Elsewhere you write that “the cardinal phenomenon of the twentieth century” is not “the revolution if the proletariat but the discovery of non-European man and his spiritual universe.” And you add that the unconscious, just like the “non-Western world,” will let itself be “deciphered by the hermeneutics of the history of religions.” So are we to take it that the great intellectual “revolution,” the revolution that may possibly be capable of changing the course of history, is neither Marxism nor Freudianism, neither historical materialism nor the analysis of the unconscious, but rather the history of religions?
· M. Eliade · That is indeed what I think, and the reason is simple: it is that the history of religions reaches down ans makes contact with which is essentially human: the relation of man to the sacred. […]
– Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet (1984), p. 148