These days, celebrating a festival may resemble more a theatrical spectacle rather than an event where something really happens. Mircea Eliade proposed a theory that allows us to understand both the meaning of a religious ritual and a certain universal tendency of the human mind.

Eliade was the best known and perhaps greatest historian of religion in the 20th century. Not only did he author pioneering and still relevant monographs dedicated to phenomena such as shamanism and yoga; he also left behind countless ideas that make it possible to interpret various religious and cultural phenomena. A particular place in the research of the Romanian scholar is occupied by the idea of “crisis and renewal,” related to his concept of the religious festival.

To understand it, Eliade’s theory of myth must first be summarized. Today, “myth” is a popular word to describe a stereotype or fairy tale, often in relation to Greek and Roman stories. Treating a myth as fabrication or fiction is the long legacy of ancient philosophy. The Milesians subjected the Homeric tales to criticism, providing the beginning of philosophical speculation (contrary to the ethnocentric imagination that’s still so popular today, this contribution did not come exclusively from the Greeks; philosophy emerged in a similar way in China, India, and Mesoamerica). But that doesn’t mean these first philosophers didn’t think with the help of myths themselves; more fantasies emerged in place of traditional ideas. According to Eliade, mythical thinking is typical for all of humanity. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said the same thing, though from a slightly different perspective. For example, he believed the theory of the Big Bang or Schrödinger’s cat were new variations on mythical structures known to ethnologists and historians—the Big Bang is fundamentally very reminiscent of the Biblical myth of creation ex nihilo.

But ethnology and religious studies don’t use the concept of myth as a synonym for “fabrication.” From a religious person’s