literate man; even “a peasant of Christian Europe” retains some 
of the old auditory resonance and aura of sacral man, as the 
Romantics insisted more than two hundred years ago. So long 
as a culture is nonliterate, it has for Eliade the indispensable 
sacral ingredients (p. 17):

     It is obvious, for example, that the symbolisms and cults 
     of Mother Earth, of human and agricultural fertility, of the 
     sacrality of woman, and the like, could not develop and 
     constitute a complex religious system except through the 
     discovery of agriculture; it is equally obvious that a 
     preagricultural society, devoted to hunting, could not feel 
     the sacrality of Mother Earth in the same way or with the 
     same intensity. Hence there are differences in religious 
     experience explained by differences in economy, culture, 
     and social organization—in short, by history.