In a context dominated for decades by strongly historicist approaches to religion, which he, from a diametrically opposed standpoint, subjected to sustained and incisive criticism, Aldo Natale Terrin (1941-2024) represented, as an all-round phenomenologist of religion, a striking and highly productive exception within the Italian scholarly landscape: a heterodox figure. Among his main interlocutors, alongside Rudolf Otto, whom he knew in depth, and Gerardus van der Leeuw, Mircea Eliade occupies a central place. Terrin went so far as to describe him as the "totemic father of religious studies" and the "last great champion of belief in the sacred". Yet Terrin did not simply enshrine the Romanian scholar in his personal pantheon; rather, he reread and reinterpreted Eliade through the lens of the questions that most concerned him and, above all, within the theoretical architecture he developed over the course of a long and remarkably consistent scholarly career. For Terrin, although Eliade is closely aligned with Husserlian phenomenology and with that "anonymous phenomenologist" Rudolf Otto, his thought is to be understood above all in relation, on the one hand, to a Romantic humanism open to religious meaning and to mysticism, including esoteric currents, and, on the other, to the "Eastern soul", conceived as a philosophical bridge between history and metahistory, singularity and totality, the evanescence of the human condition and its transcendence. This paper aims to bring these significant connections into focus by drawing on Terrin's extensive writings on the subject.