Je parle des pierres plus âgées que la vie et qui demeurent après elle sur les planètes refroidies, quand elle eut la fortune d’y éclore. Je parle des pierres qui n’ont même pas à attendre la mort et qui n’ont rien à faire que laisser glisser sur leur surface le sable, l’averse ou le ressac, la tempête, le temps.

— Roger Caillois, Œuvres, Gallimard, Paris 2008, p. 1038

Introduction

In our attempt to understand the essence of imagination, we often resort to the concept of fantasy. This conscious activity animates reality by drawing upon the internal reservoir of creativity. Through it, the world is seen anew, reimagined with fresh symbolic forms. Yet in this paper, we assign imagination a more profound and more existential task. We aim to explore its intimate relationship with the sacred, hoping to awaken in the reader a renewed sense of mystery, possibility, and philosophical openness.

As Josef Hrdlička has noted in his comparative reading of Caillois and Bachelard, Caillois resists any strict separation between rationality and reverie, instead proposing a continuum in which critical caution and imagination are co-constitutive of a unique mode of perception that escapes both poetry and science. This chimes with our attempt to restore imagination to its sacred function.¹

This inquiry arises from a striking tension in the postmodern condition: while contemporary society is prosperous in imaginative expressions — through art, literature, and technology — it often appears disconnected from the ultimate meanings that once anchored human experience in the metaphysical. Particularly in its cultural dimensions, postmodernity tends to secularise imagination, detaching it from any reference to transcendence beyond the human or within the human. Nonetheless, in the privacy of individual consciousness, an undercurrent persists — an intuitive link to totality, a lingering spiritual impulse that resists historical reduction.

We propose that this subterranean impulse can be illuminated by turning to a neglected dimension in the work of Roger Caillois (Reims, 1913 — Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, 1978). Known primarily as a sociologist of religion and a cultural theorist, Caillois’s intellectual path also reveals a lesser-known but deeply suggestive mystical vision, especially in his later writings. Caillois later shifts toward a natural mysticism, particularly in Pierres (1966) and L’écriture des pierres (1970), where his focus on the mineral world becomes a spiritual and philosophical meditation on the cosmos.

Caillois defies strict categorisation: philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, and art theorist alone suffice. This paper focuses on a neglected aspect of his legacy: that of a mystic who, without subscribing to formal religious beliefs, retrieves a luminous path to the sacred from nature. His work may serve as a valuable resource today, in an age that calls for new models of desecularisation –² not through dogma, but through encounters with wonder, imagination, and the symbolic depths of the natural world. In an era marked by ecological crisis and moral disorientation, rediscovering a sense of sacred presence within nature can catalyse both spiritual and ethical renewal.

Can the sacred still be imagined? Is this an act of fantasy or a more profound intuition — a visionary capacity capable of revealing the hidden structure of life and rekindling meaning?

To trace this reorientation of imagination toward the sacred, the present paper follows a three-part trajectory: first, it examines Caillois’s early sociological account of the sacred about the cultural background of his early stages; second, it explores the metaphysical implications of his turn to natural form, especially in his writings on stones; and finally, it proposes that this shift anticipates a non-confessional, ecological mysticism rooted in the very materiality of the world. Through this arc, we aim to rethink imagination not as fantasy, but as a mode of vision that reopens the world to symbolic and spiritual resonance.

Horizontal Transcendence in the Early Caillois

The sacred gives life and takes it away; it is the source from which it flows and the estuary in which it is lost. But the sacred is also something one would not know how to possess simultaneously with life. Life is wear and tear and waste. It vainly strives to persevere and refuse every expenditure to be preserved. Death lies in wait for it.³

To understand Caillois’s intellectual transformation, we must begin with his early engagement with the sociology of religion, particularly in dialogue with the work of Durkheim and Mauss. The historian of religions Julien Ries places Caillois among those who inherited the Durkheimian conception of the sacred as a social construct.⁴ This cultural mechanism sustains group cohesion through rites, symbols, and myths. Within this view, the holy emerges not as a transcendent entity but as a collective experience rooted in the horizontal dynamics of human society.

This framework has enduring value, yet it reduces the sacred to an anthropological constant, stripping it of metaphysical weight. Ries contrasts this with the perspective of Mircea Eliade, who argues that the holy is a structural element of human consciousness — an ontological reality manifested in hierophanies that reveal a dimension beyond the physical, economic, or historical. For Eliade, the homo religiosus seeks communion with the origins of being, regardless of the historical or cultural form it takes.

Caillois’s early writings, particularly L’homme et le sacré (1950), indeed reflect Durkheimian premises and were shaped by his participation in the Collège de Sociologie alongside Georges Bataille. In that context, the sacred was dissociated from formal religion and explored as a subversive, transgressive force, pointing toward a new, elite spiritual order — an esoteric Sacred Conspiracy. Yet the outbreak of World War II brought an abrupt end to these dreams.⁵ Caillois later recalled: “Our confused reveries, our illusions, had been nothing but the human equivalent of those tremors that agitate animals at the approach of earthquakes”.⁶

In Man and the Sacred, Caillois attempts to give shape to a phenomenon that resists easy definition. He does not approach the sacred from the standpoint of theology or metaphysics, but rather from within a sociological and anthropological matrix that owes much to Durkheim. Yet, even as he borrows from that tradition, one senses a certain unease — an effort to push the framework further, or at least to expose its inner tensions. The sacred, for Caillois, is not simply a symbolic category imposed by a collective consciousness, but something more volatile, more dangerous. It threatens to spill out of its social containers.

At the core of the book lies a fundamental distinction: the sacred is never singular, never stable — it is defined by internal contradiction. It both attracts and repels, elevates and defiles, commands reverence and triggers fear. This ambivalence is not a side effect; it is constitutive of the experience. The sacred is always double. Caillois develops this polarity in the contrast between the sacred of respect (associated with prohibition, order, and reverence) and the sacred of transgression (which erupts in the form of sacrifice, festival, and the undoing of norms). The balance between these two modes is fragile, and societies construct elaborate rituals to manage the oscillation — sometimes to channel it, sometimes to suppress it.

His analysis moves across diverse domains: mourning rites, incest taboos, and myths of impurity. And yet, beneath this wealth of material, there remains a methodological hesitation. Is Caillois describing something universal, a structure of symbolic oppositions found in all cultures? Or is he tracking a more elusive force — something that precedes or exceeds the social codes that try to capture it?

The answer is not entirely clear, and perhaps it is not meant to be. What becomes apparent is that, in this phase, Caillois still treats the sacred as something fundamentally relational and constructed. Sacredness does not inhere in things; it arises from how things are marked, separated, or forbidden. A person, a gesture, a piece of land becomes sacred when set apart — when withdrawn from ordinary use and made untouchable. The status is not ontological but symbolic. In this sense, the sacred is less a substance than a function: it organises social space by introducing thresholds and boundaries.

It will be Caillois himself, in the preface to the French third edition of 1963, who will retrace his steps concerning these conclusions: “Je regrette de plus en plus la coupable rapidité de la conclusion. Ces pages trop adventureuses […] tranche lègérment les problems le plus grave”.⁷

There is no trace yet of the idea (so central to his later work) that sacredness might reside in matter itself, in the intrinsic form of things, in their silent endurance. At this stage, Caillois’s thought remains aligned with a kind of horizontal transcendence: the sacred is powerful, yes, even overwhelming, but it moves laterally, through human relations, myths, taboos, and festivals. It binds and breaks, but it does not yet shine from within the world.

And yet, there are hints — small moments where one feels the anthropological framework beginning to strain. Specific descriptions, particularly those involving ritual purity, sacrifice, or ecstatic celebration, seem to suggest something more than a social function. They gesture toward a dimension that cannot be fully explained by symbolic economy alone.

It is precisely from the mid-1960s that the need for his essays shifts to cover various areas of culture, with a markedly increased emphasis on the importance of imagination as an inner faculty capable of recognising the analogies of a syntax of the universe.

Il convient de désigner par le mot imagination employé sans qualificative la faculté unique de vision s’exerçant, sous different modalités, de la percepetion au rêve, en passant par la représentation et l’hallucination ; cadre a priori de la sensibilité ; capacité de mis en images, c’est-à-dire d’aperception spatiale.⁸

It is here, perhaps, in these minor ruptures, that one can already sense the future Caillois: the one who will turn to stones, to forms, to mineral time — not to escape the sacred, but to reimagine it entirely.

Despite its conceptual limitations, L’homme et le sacré offers important distinctions — such as the contrast between the sacred of transgression and that of respect, and between the pure and impure — that would influence later anthropology. Yet the conclusion of the book, as Caillois himself admitted in the 1963 preface, suffered from culpable haste and a superficial treatment of the deeper problem. His reflection marks a turning point, the beginning of a shift toward a more vertical, contemplative vision of the sacred.

In the mid-1960s, this transformation became evident. Caillois begins to explore imagination not as mere fantasy, but as a faculty of perception and insight:

It is appropriate to designate by the unqualified term imagination the unique faculty of vision that operates through perception, representation, and hallucination; it is the a priori framework of sensibility, the capacity to form images — that is, to perceive space.

This definition echoes a metaphysical orientation: imagination becomes a tool for decoding the world’s hidden syntax, a perceptual bridge to the sacred embedded in matter. Caillois begins to sound not like a sociologist, nor an antiquarian of religions, but a phenomenologist of mystery. As Pierfrancesco Stagi says:

It is not a matter in Caillois of the traditionalist desire for a return to ancient, primitive societies founded on the sacred, but of the recognition, as Durkheim had done, that at the heart of modern societies are hidden drives and tensions similar to those that had animated ancient societies. […] The religious man is not so much the man of the past, of an immemorial past, as the man of the future who tends to go beyond technocratic society towards a world in which personal creativity can freely express itself based on what lies deepest in man.⁹

The Mysticism of Stones

In this paper, the term mysticism is employed in a broad and nuanced sense that extends beyond traditional theological frameworks. Rather than understanding mysticism solely as a religious experience of union with a transcendent deity, I adopt a conception that encompasses profound engagements with the world which do not presuppose classical theism or transcendence.

Specifically, the notion of non-theological mysticism here refers to experiences and reflections characterised by an encounter with the ineffable or the sacred that do not presuppose a theistic ontology. This form of mysticism is not grounded in doctrines or divine revelation. Still, it emerges from a direct, often pre-conceptual, confrontation with aspects of reality that resist full articulation or reduction to ordinary categories of understanding.

Building on this, the mysticism of matter or material mysticism is a further specification that focuses on how physical, non-living entities — such as stones — manifest a form of sacred presence or ontological exceptionality. This mysticism arises not from spiritualising or symbolising matter, but from recognising matter’s inherent mystery, its indifference to human meaning-making, and its capacity to reveal an immanent dimension that challenges anthropocentric interpretations.¹⁰

This inner evolution in Caillois’s later writings on stones is a perfect example of this. His mineralogical explorations, far from being a collector’s eccentricity, become a spiritual path — an anabasis, a return journey toward a forgotten centre. Marguerite Yourcenar described this shift beautifully:

En présence de cette humanité sentie plus que jamais come précaire, en presence même de ce monde animal et vegetal dont nous accélérons la perte, il semble che l’émotions et la dévotion de Caillois se refusent ; il cherche une substance plus durable, un object plus pur. Il le trouve dans le peuple des pierres.¹¹

Before entering the core of Caillois’s mineral reflections, it is worth considering the profound allure that stones have always exerted upon the human imagination — not merely as decorative curiosities or tools of exchange, but as bearers of a latent, silent mystery. This mystery does not arise from external religious frameworks, nor mythic narratives artificially projected onto them. Instead, it emerges from the stones themselves, from their sheer presence as objects that seem both deeply familiar and radically alien. Their stillness, their permanence, and their refusal to signify anything beyond what they are — all these traits lend them a kind of pre-symbolic sacredness, one that precedes codified belief systems and gestures instead toward a more primordial register of awe.¹²

The Writing of Stones is not merely a collection of poetic impressions, but a phenomenological taxonomy of the mineral realm, constructed with the meticulous attention of a theorist and the reverence of a mystic. His fascination with the mineral world is not based solely on abstraction or symbolic projection, but on a meticulous and sensual engagement with the stones themselves. The book is structured as a meditative taxonomy, where each type of stone — jasper, agate, septaria, ruin marble — is not simply named but encountered. These are not inert objects of geological curiosity; they are, instead, thresholds of perception. Caillois writes of the stones he has handled, looked at, and caressed, insisting on the necessity of physical familiarity. His project is thus both ontological and tactile.

The mineral forms he describes exhibit a bewildering variety of configurations: some suggest ruined cities, burning landscapes, towers collapsing into dendritic moss; others evoke wooded ravines, embryonic birds, cosmic webs, or labyrinthine calligraphies without referent. Crucially, Caillois does not claim that these resemblances are allegorical. They are not metaphors, nor projections of a mythic unconscious. They are, in his words, spontaneous beauty — forms that exist independently of invention or function. Their allure lies precisely in their indifference to meaning: they do not communicate, and yet they provoke interpretation and reverie. As Hrdlička notes, these spontaneous analogies produce not just interpretive reverie but also alter the very status of the perceiving subject. The dreaming self is not stable; it is displaced by the mineral form, infused with being, and reshaped by its enigmatic resistance.¹³

The act of observing a stone, in Caillois’s writing, becomes a philosophical gesture. It is not a matter of aesthetic appreciation in the conventional sense, nor of scientific analysis. It is closer to a form of contemplative hermeneutics — a practice of sustained attention in which the material form, through its opacity and resistance, begins to suggest a deeper, non-anthropocentric order. In the agate, the jasper, or the septarium, Caillois perceives a kind of writing that precedes the alphabet, a mineral script inscribed not by intention but by geological forces. These inscriptions are anonymous, but not without structure; they are chaotic yet internally coherent. They possess, he writes, a plastic equilibrium as unique as a work of art, and yet they are the product of chance, pressure, and time.

What emerges is not merely an aesthetics of stone, but an epistemology: a way of knowing grounded in humility before a world that is already articulate without us. The sacred, in this vision, is not a transcendental realm accessed through myth or doctrine, but something immanent, embedded in matter itself. It is in the stone’s endurance, its silence, its improbable perfection, that Caillois discovers a spiritual grammar — a logic of form that escapes utility, defies economic rationality, and renders our symbolic systems partial, belated, and sometimes superfluous. In Caillois’s stones, it is the hint of a sign that unites the essential, redeeming from an apparent chaos a reality that points to its unitary syntactic origin.¹⁴

To read The Writing of Stones attentively is to witness a profound inversion of modern epistemological assumptions. The stone is not a primitive object awaiting interpretation; it is a presence that interrupts the act of interpretation. It asks not to be explained but endured. The images it contains — some shockingly figurative, others dizzyingly abstract — do not signify so much as insist. They insist on a reality that exceeds concept, a world where creation precedes intention and where beauty emerges without a gaze to summon it.

In this sense, the descriptive passages in The Writing of Stones are not auxiliary to the philosophical insight; they are its ground. The spiritual dimension of Caillois’s thought does not float above the material — it is crystallised in it. Each septarium, with its radiating fissures; each ruin marble, with its spectral architectures; each agate, with its trembling inner landscapes — these are not just objects of wonder. They are fragments of a deeper order that calls for attention rather than comprehension, presence rather than possession. They invite the reader, like the collector and the mystic, to step beyond the human horizon and encounter a form of silent astonishment that belongs to the Earth itself.

What draws us to stones is not simply their beauty in the conventional aesthetic sense, but something more unsettling and ancient: an uncompromising perfection untainted by human effort or interpretation. Their patterns, colours, and forms often resemble things we know — a shell, a flame, a wound — but always with a dissonance that resists domestication. This tension between resemblance and strangeness gives rise to a cognitive tremor, a vertigo of recognition that points toward a wholly immanent transcendence. In this way, Caillois’s mineral reflections resonate with a form of naturalistic mysticism. Let’s understand it by his words:

Ils m’ont lentement obligé à l’anabase qui en tout cas à celle de ses extrémités qui est la plus étrangèere à ma propre espèce. Elle est le contraire de nos émotions éphémeres, comme de nos choix sans cesse à reconduire ou à reprendre. Et de notre condition d’un jour. C’est comme si cette sorte d’objets que j’ai retenus, cette sorte de pierres totales où m’ont conduit à retrouver mon chemin perdu.¹⁵

Stones suggest a world in which creation happens without intention, where form arises without teleology, and where perfection is not the result of labour, but the consequence of an enigmatic deeper law — one that remains illegible primarily to human reason. This kind of perfection, which we might call lapidary, contrasts with the fragility of human works. Art, invention, and industry are belated gestures compared to the mute articulation of beauty found in quartz veins or agate cross-sections. In this sense, stones are not only objects of contemplation; they are also epistemological provocations. They remind us that the human impulse to create, symbolise, and adorn may be merely one among many responses to a universe already teeming with aesthetic logic.

Here, the sacred does not manifest in its theological form but in its elemental one: as the sensation that a beauty exists before us, resists us, and ultimately makes our own symbolic frameworks partial at best. Stones are not windows to another realm; they are fragments of this realm that refuse to be fully understood or consumed. Their resistance to narrative, their refusal to signify beyond themselves, is precisely what makes them numinous. One might say that they radiate presence in a way that escapes both utility and metaphor.

Stones — and not only they but also roots, shells, wings, and every other cypher and construction in nature — give us an idea of the proportions and laws of that general beauty about which we can only conjecture and in comparison with which human beauty must be merely one recipe among others, just as Euclid’s theorems are but one set out of the many possible in a total geometry.¹⁶

This sense of presence — immobile, absolute, yet intricately detailed — is what makes the mineral realm so crucial for any attempt to rethink the sacred outside of traditional religious frameworks. In Caillois’s thought, we find the germ of a non-confessional mysticism, one that does not rely on revelation or dogma, but instead anchors itself in the wonder of material forms that carry within them a logic beyond comprehension. In specific rare stones, Caillois identifies a paradoxical value — one that escapes all conventional frameworks of economics or utility. These minerals do not derive their worth from labour, scarcity, or exchangeability, but from a kind of improbable exceptionality. Their appeal lies in the sheer unlikelihood of their existence: they appear to condense cosmic chance into a single, inexplicable form. It is as though they were the outcome of a metaphysical lottery — at once irrational, excessive, and irrefutable. Precisely because of this, they acquire a status that borders on the miraculous. For Caillois, these stones become not just objects of beauty or curiosity, but catalysts of wonder, sometimes even seen as talismans — fragments of matter that suggest an obscure intervention of fate.

This ontological exceptionality often leads to their being regarded as charged objects, capable of concentrating symbolic, emotional, even mystical significance. In Eastern traditions, Caillois notes, the contemplation of strangely shaped stones or gnarled roots becomes a method of meditation — a spiritual exercise aimed at dissolving the boundaries between subject and object. These materials are not just viewed but entered, imagined as gateways into altered states of consciousness or sacred dimensions. The sage does not merely look at the stone — he traverses it. This extraordinary valuation of stones, independent from conventional economic metrics, invites a reflection on contemporary ethical and economic paradigms. In a world driven by commodification and mass production, where worth is often reduced to exchange value or utility, Caillois’s stones challenge us to reconsider what it means to value something genuinely unique and irreplaceable. Their pointless and priceless nature exposes the limits of market logic and gestures toward a more profound ethic — one grounded not in possession or profit but in wonder, reverence, and humility before the ineffable complexity of the natural world. This ethical dimension resonates with current ecological concerns, where recognising intrinsic value beyond instrumental use becomes crucial for sustainable coexistence.¹⁷

This paradox — a mute object that evokes infinite resonance — places the stone at the heart of a possible post-secular sacred. It calls for a reconsideration of mysticism not as a retreat from the world but as an intensification of the encounter with matter, particularly that matter which seems most lifeless, most resistant, most remote and — as we just said — priceless. In this perspective, the stone becomes a figure of radical alterity, but also of ontological depth: a being that discloses nothing, and in doing so, discloses everything.

Thus, what Caillois ultimately invites us to consider is not just an aesthetics of the mineral, but a metaphysics of astonishment — a renewed sense of awe rooted in the simplest yet most opaque elements of the cosmos. To engage with stones is to court a form of knowledge that is no longer analytic but contemplative, no longer possessive but reverential — a latent mysticism of the natural that may ground a renewed sense of our place in the world. A stone does not preach, nor does it console. It simply endures — and in that endurance, it offers an invitation to reimagine the sacred as something silent, dense, and indestructible. As Hrdlička poignantly suggests, the mineral form does not merely precede human imagination — it provokes it, traps it, and ultimately reflects it. The writing of stones becomes an occasion for melancholy not because it reveals nothing, but because it reveals too much — a cosmic order that makes our symbolic systems appear belated, even arbitrary. The silence of the stone, in this view, is a wound that cannot be closed, only contemplated.¹⁸

This people of stones expresses not only poetic affection but a philosophical commitment: stones become signs of an enduring order, fragments of a cosmic language. In Le Fleuve Alphée (1978), Caillois reflects autobiographically on this late vocation. Stones from Tuscany, Uruguay, or anonymous fields are not merely aesthetic curiosities; they are epiphanies of a mysterious, anterior beauty.

Their patterns suggest a pre-human geometry, a natural writing that recalls sacred iconography. Without invoking theology, Caillois discovers a sacredness that does not require belief — only attention. This attentiveness reveals a kind of silent revelation, a non-confessional mysticism that speaks powerfully to our current need for a spirituality rooted in ecological humility and symbolic imagination. In conclusion, I find the following observation by Donna Roberts particularly apt:

There is also, however, a kind of evolutionary mythopoesis in Caillois’ reverie on stones, which, paradoxically, despite their otherworldly and inhuman nature, flows from the mythical imaginings of stones as generative and related to human birth and ancestry. Through an ultra-monistic sense of evolution, Caillois sees stone as an original substance within which humans are prefigured; the willo-the-wisps of their forms appearing like hallucinatory and uncanny premonitions within some impersonal and cosmic imagination millions of years before the advent of the species and the development of its compulsive demon of analogy.¹⁹

This passage situates Caillois among those rare 20th-century thinkers who reframed mysticism in terms of natural order, imagination, and epistemological humility. His vision resists nihilism without reverting to dogma. It suggests that the sacred is not a domain outside the world, but rather the globe seen differently, with wonder, attention, and symbolic insight.

This is not a return to ancient religion, but a gesture toward a future spirituality — one compatible with science, ecology, and philosophical scepticism. As such, Caillois speaks powerfully to our age: his mysticism of stones suggests a non-theological sensus sacralis grounded in the geometry of the Earth itself.

Recent work by Xiaofan Amy Li adds a crucial comparative dimension to Caillois’s mineral aesthetics by foregrounding the role of chance in the genesis of form. Drawing on both Caillois and Chinese traditions of scholar’s rocks, Li argues that stones exemplify a natural order that emerges unpredictably from chaos — what she calls the shape of chance. While the mineral configurations are not designed, they reveal morphological regularities that invite aesthetic contemplation and interpretive engagement. According to Li, Caillois does not celebrate pure randomness, but instead posits a universe in which necessity and accident co-exist, producing objects that are neither symbolic constructions nor entirely mute matter. This view reframes Caillois’s lapidary practice as a negotiation between the opaque alterity of geological form and the cognitive reverie it elicits, thereby enriching the philosophical stakes of his non-anthropocentric imagination.²⁰

In a related but distinct register, Caillois himself suggests that the markings within stones — especially septaria — form a kind of proto-writing: spontaneous, authorless, and yet structured. These fissures and radiating cracks do not communicate in a human sense. Still, they record, he writes, events from millions of years ago and evoke an unconscious alphabet that precedes all human invention. Such forms are not only beautiful but epistemologically charged: they defy symbolic interpretation while simultaneously demanding attention. In this way, Caillois positions stone as both archive and enigma — a geological script that reminds us that meaning may be older than language, and that the sacred might emerge not from speech but from structure. This prepares the ground for a final reflection on imagination, not as fantasy but as perception tuned to the latent grammar of the world.

Conclusion

This study aims not to exhaust Roger Caillois’s vast oeuvre, but to foreground a pivotal and often overlooked transformation in his intellectual journey: from sociological reduction to metaphysical intuition. His imaginative engagement with nature, particularly with stones, offers a model for a renewed philosophy of religion, one attuned to the spiritual needs of a post-secular age.

At a time when ecological destruction and moral disillusionment dominate public discourse, Caillois demonstrates that the sacred can be recovered not through institutional belief but through aesthetic receptivity and symbolic sensitivity. The imagination, in this sense, becomes a spiritual faculty, one that reveals the hidden kinship between human consciousness and the structures of the cosmos.

By observing nature’s silent grammar, Caillois unveils a path beyond disenchantment. His perspective reminds us that sacredness does not necessarily stem from doctrine but can arise from lived experiences of wonder. As he writes, even the smallest natural form can become a hieroglyph of meaning.

Every space is filled, every interstice occupied. Even metal has insinuated itself into the cells and channels from which life has long since disappeared. Compact and insensible matter has replaced the other kind in its last refuge, taking over its exact shapes, running in its finest channels, so that the first image is set down forever in the great album of the ages.²¹

Ultimately, this paper has shown that Caillois offers more than a theory — he provides a practice of perception. A perfection of an immortal autograph, as Caillois beautifully said here. His mysticism of stones calls us to reawaken a sacred imagination capable of responding ethically and spiritually to the ecological and cultural crises of our time.

In his poetic meditation on the moon, Caillois leaves us with a final image of humility and awe — qualities we must recover if we are to re-enchant our relationship with the world:

Le pas des hommes et le progrès de la technique n’affectent pas le disque nocturne, la lune changeante et permanente, la lune du banal clair de lune, visible è l’oeil nu et merveillusement inaccessible, hors de la portée de la main et qu’un enfant ne se laisse pourtant pas d’essayer de saisir, en allongeant ses bras gourds, un cercle à peine brillant, une simple tache, mais juste de la grandeur qu’il faut dans le ténèbres anonymes.²²

In this light, Caillois’s turn to the mineral world does not merely enrich his literary or aesthetic legacy; it also invites a reconsideration of his intellectual position beyond the sociological frame. While his early work remains anchored in the analysis of ritual, taboo, and collective cohesion, the later writings gesture toward a more elusive domain — one where imagination, form, and the sacred intersect without recourse to institutional religion.

As Josef Hrdlička insightfully observes in the passages we diffusely quoted, Caillois’s mineral meditations evoke a melancholic sacred: a form of reverie in which the human self, destabilised by the opacity of matter, is momentarily reconfigured by its contact with the inhuman.

We should stress, however, that our reading does not presuppose a fully non-theistic interpretation of the sacred. Precisely because of its enigmatic silence, the sacred disclosed by the mineral realm remains theologically indeterminate. It cannot be conclusively aligned with either doctrinal belief or secular immanence. What Caillois offers is a space of suspended meaning; a sacred that invites speculation but refuses resolution. Anyway, we would prefer describing the connection with this form of sacredness as an intuition, more than a simple reverie.²³ In our opinion, the fixity of stone may produce a fragile but compelling moment of wisdom that resists both religious fundamentalism and nihilism.

This shift does not represent a rupture, nor does it amount to a new doctrine. Ambiguity here signals not confusion but richness: it allows thought to hover, to oscillate, to hesitate before naming. Rather than forcing Caillois into a clear-cut disciplinary identity, we might see in this tension the very mark of philosophical purity.

This, in turn, offers a lesson for the historian of philosophy: before seeking to classify a thinker within schools or traditions, one must first listen to their silences, their digressions, their disciplinary heterodoxies — not as deviations to be corrected, but as signs of autonomous movement. There are moments in Caillois where the voice feels uncoupled from its time, as if echoing ancient modes of wonder and ontological curiosity. The opacity of his later work, far from disqualifying it from philosophical inquiry, demands that we expand our criteria for what counts as philosophy in the first place.

Without ever naming it as such, Caillois evokes a sacred that remains unresolved yet pressing — a sacred encountered not in doctrine, but in form, resistance, and silence. This is not a conclusion, but a modest hypothesis: that in the ambiguous gleam of a stone, the philosophy of religion might find both a question and a path of spiritual renewal for our time.