and sedentary man, do not faze Eliade. That Eliade chooses to 
call the oral man “religious” is, of course, as fanciful and 
arbitrary as calling blondes bestial. But it is not in the least 
confusing to those who understand that the “religious” for 
Eliade is, as he insists from the start, the irrational. He is in 
that very large company of literacy victims who have 
acquiesced in supposing that the “rational” is the explicitly 
lineal, sequential, visual. That is, he prefers to appear as an 
eighteenth-century mind in rebellion against the dominant 
visual mode which then was new. Such was Blake and a host of 
others. Today Blake would be violently anti-Blake, because the 
Blake reaction against the abstract visual is now the dominant 
cliché and claque of the big battalions, as they move in 
regimented grooves of sensibility.

      “For religious man, space is not homogeneous; he