Blurb:

[T]he history of religions is destined to play an important role
in contemporary cultural life. This is not only because an understanding
of exotic and archaic religions will significantly assist
in a cultural dialogue with the representatives of such religions.
It is more especially because, by attempting to understand the
existential situations expressed by the documents he is studying,
the historian of religions will inevitably attain to a deeper
knowledge of man. It is on the basis of such a knowledge that a
new humanism, on a world-wide scale, could develop. We may
even ask if the History of Religions cannot make a contribution
of prime importance to its formation. For, on the one hand, the
historical and comparative study of religions embraces all the
cultural forms so far known, both the ethnological cultures and
those that have played a major role in history; on the other hand,
by studying the religious expressions of a culture, the scholar
approaches it from within, and not merely in its sociological,
economic, and political contexts. In the last analysis, the historian
of religions is destined to elucidate a large number of
situations unfamiliar to the man of the West. It is through an
understanding of such unfamiliar, “exotic” situations that cultural
provincialism is transcended. (Eliade 1961: 2–3)