The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (723 page)

Elephanta
(Gharapuri)
.

An island off the coast of Bombay, containing a famous representation of the
tr
murti
iva
in a cave temple. The date is uncertain, but
c.
5th–7th cent. CE.

 
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Elephantiné
.

City situated on an island in the Nile river. Elephantiné was the site of the discovery of a collection of papyri written in
Aramaic
dating back to the 5th cent. BCE. They include legal documents, fragments of the
Book of Ahikar
and letters. Two goddesses seem to have been worshipped there as well as the Hebrew God.

 
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Elevation
.

The lifting up of the
elements
of the
eucharist
by the celebrant. The purpose is both to symbolize their offering to God and to focus the devotion of the congregation.

 
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(1907–86).
Advocate of what is called ‘history of religions’, which in his case is better seen as an attempt to discern elemental, timeless, patterns of religious life. Religion is taken to be the manifestation of ‘Being’. Symbolic forms, redolent of the sacred, are influenced by historical circumstances but are not themselves the product of history. The task is to use the comparative method to arrive at what is constant; to arrive at what goes beyond the contingencies of time.
Working with a model of the human as
homo religiosus
, of the human as motivated by an irreducible religious intentionality, Eliade drew most of his material from archaic cultures. Supposedly providing the most powerful evidence of the ‘morphology of the sacred’, these cultures are held to signal the contemporary need for greater
ontological
rootage. See also SHAMANISM.

 
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(end of 1st cent. CE).
Jewish
tanna
. Eliezer was described by
Johanan b. Zakkai
as outweighing all the sages of
Israel
(
Avot
2. 8). Both literally and metaphorically, he regarded the transmission of the Jewish inheritance as imperative. After his discussion with the
Sanhedrin
on ritual purity, his view was rejected and he was excommunicated (
erem
). Only after his death was he reinstated as one of the foremost halakhists of his time.
Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer
(Sayings of Rabbi Eliezer) are ascribed to him.

 
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