I love this quote by Merce Eliade:

For all history is in some measure a fall of the sacred, a limitation and diminution.  But the sacred does not cease to manifest itself, and with each new manifestation it resumes its original tendency to reveal itself wholly. It is true, of course, that the countless new manifestations of the sacred in the religions consciousness of one or another society repeats the countless manifestations of the sacred that these societies knew in the course of the past, of their “history.”[i]