MIRCEA ELIADE

"In archaic and traditional societies, the surrounding world is conceived as a microcosms. At the limits of this closed world begins the domain of the unknown, of the formless. On this side there is ordered - because of inhabited and organized - space; on the other, outside this familiar space, there is the unknown and dangerous region of the demons, the ghosts, and the dead and foreigners - in a world, chaos or death or night. This image of an inhabited microcosm, surrounded by desert regions as a chaos or a kingdom of the dead, has survived even in highly evolved civilizations such as those of China, Mesopotamia and Egypt." (from Images and Symbols, 1952)

"The man of archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all premodern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being...(R)eligious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power...(T)he completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit...(D)esacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies."

Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest in 1907. Despite a childhood interest in entomology, chemistry and botany (which doubtless first attracted his attention to Goethe, a lifelong role model and inspiration), he developed an interest in world literature and was led from there to philology, philosophy, and comparative religion. As a youth he read extensively in Romanian, French, and German, and around 1924-25 he learned Italian and English to read Raffaele Pettazzoni and James George Frazer in the original. In 1925 Eliade enrolled at the University of Bucharest where he studied in the department of philosophy. The influence of Nae Ionescu (b.1890), then an assistant professor of logic and metaphysics and an active journalist, was keenly felt by the young Eliade. A fierce Nationalist, defender of the Romanian culture, Ionescu had become until the late 1920s one of the most renowned Romanian philosophers, journalists and politicians. Nae Ionescu, a charismatic figure, became one of the intellectual leaders of the Iron Guard, a strongly anti-Semitic and fascist Romanian organization with sympathies for the German National Socialst Regime. Eliade wrote articles endorsing Romania's Fascists, the "Legionary Movement" or "Iron Guard". Many years later, in 1967, Mircea Eliade included Nae Ionescu in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and wrote this about his mentor: "God, for Nae Ionescu, is present in history through the Incarnation ... man's mode of being is completely fulfilled only through death, death is above all transcendent." A shadow fell on the older scholar because of his involvement with the extreme right in inter-war Romania and darkened Eliade's reputation in the eyes of the western intellectual establishment.

While collecting material in Italy for his study on Renaissance philosophers Eliade read Surendranath Dasgupta's work A History of Indian Philosophy (Motilal Banarsidass 1922-55), which impressed him deeply. Eliade's Master's thesis examined Italian Renaissance Philosophers from Marcilio Ficino to Giordano Bruno, and Renaissance Humanism was one of his major influences when he turned to India in order to "universalize" the "provincial" philosophy he had inherited from his European education. Finding that the Maharaja of Kassimbazar sponsored European scholars to study in India Eliade applied and was granted an allowance for four years. He went to India to study Sanskrit and philosophy at the University of Calcutta, under Surendranath Dasgupta. He fell in love with Dasgupta's daughter, which did not make his teacher happy. During this period he also wrote the erotic novel ISABEL SI APELE DIAVOLULUI (1930). Eliade lived for six months in the ashram (hermitage) of Rishikesh, Himalaya. It was in this time that his view began to evolve concerning the meaning of language, symbolism and systems employed by various religious traditions. These experiences he depicted in the novel MAITREYI (1933), which became a success.

He returned to Bucharest in 1932 and after military service he successfully submitted his analysis of Yoga as his doctoral thesis at the Philosophy department in 1933. Published in French as Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique Indienne this was extensively revised and republished as Yoga, Immortality, and Freedom. As Ionescu's assistant Eliade lectured on, among other things, Aristotle's Metaphysics and Nicholas of Cusa's Docta Ignorantia. From 1933 to 1939 he was active with the Criterion group who gave public seminars on wide-ranging topics. They were strongly influenced by the philosophy of "trairism," the search for the "authentic" in and through lived experience (Romanian, traire) seen as the only source of "authenticity."

In 1933 Eliade was appointed associate professor in the faculty of letters at Bucharest University. In 1934 he married Nina Mares, who died of cancer in 1944. After publishing DOMNISOARA CHRISTINA (1936) Eliade was accused of pornography and he was dismissed from his office for a short time. The protagonist in the novel, based on Rumanian folk stories, was a strigoi, a ghost or vampire. The story dealt with the meaning of erotic life and death in human life.

In the 1930s and 1940s he published several works of fiction, where the sacred and the mythical often manifested themselves in everyday life as ordinary people are initiated into religious experience. The unifying element of Eliade's early fiction is a strong, immediately recognizable autobiographical bent. Isabel si apele diavolui was a thinly disguised story of a love affair between a European man and an Indian girl. In INTOARCEREA DIN RAI (1934) and HULIGANII (1935) the author went beyond his personal self, and depicted the 20th-century reincarnations of the older 'nihilists'. The 'hooligan' in the title referred to a person, who is guided by his inner visions and youthful energy, and who doesn't approve of the rules or beliefs of the outside world. LUMINA CE SE STINGE (1934) was an experimental novel using a Joycean stream-of-consciousness technique. Eliade's growing interest in the supernatural was seen in Domnisoara Christina, SARPELE (1937) and SECRETUL DOCTORULUI HONIGBERGER (1940, Two Tales of the Occult). His major theoretical and scholarly works from the 1940s include TRAITE D'HISTOIRE DES RELIGIONS (1949, Patterns of Comparative Religion), Le mythe de l'éternel retrour, MYTHS, DREAMS AND MYSTERIES (1957), SHAMANISM (1968) and A HISTORY OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS (3 vols. 1976-1983).

In 1938 Nae Ionescu, professor at the faculty of philosophy, was arrested and Eliade was dismissed as his assistent. Ionescu was accused of being member of the Iron Guard. Soon also Eliade was arrested and he spent a short time in a concentration camp. From 1940 Eliade worked as a Romanian cultural attaché in London and in Lisbon (1941-44).

After the Second World War, during which he served with the Romanian Legation in the UK and Portugal, Eliade was unable to return to the newly communist Romania because of his connection with the right-wing Ionescu. In 1945 he moved to Paris where his acquaintance with George Dumézil, an important scholar of comparative mythology, secured a part-time post for him at the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne teaching comparative religion. From this time on almost all of Eliade's scholarly works were written in French. He held posts at various European universities. He lectured at the Sorbonne and taught for a while at the École des Hautes Ètudes and elsewhere. In 1950 he married Christinel Cotrescu. The Forbidden Forest, which Eliade considered his major novel, appeared in 1954.

At the prompting of Joachim Wach, Eliade's predecessor at the University of Chicago, a comparativist and hermeneuticist, Eliade was invited to give the 1956 Haskell Lectures on "Patterns of Initiation" at the University of Chicago. These were later published as Birth and Rebirth. In 1958 he was invited to assume the chair of the History of Religions department in Chicago. There he stayed until his death on April 23, 1986, publishing extensively and writing largely unpublished fiction. He also launched the journals History of Religions and The Journal of Religion and acted as editor-in-chief for Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Religion.

In 1991 the Divinity School of the University of Chicago became, dramatically, the scene of Ioan Culianu's death. Culianu - the professor of the history of religion, Eliade's professional heir - was slain execution-style in the restroom. The murder stunned the school, terrified the students, and mystified the FBI. The case remains unsolved. In Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu, Ted Anton pieces together the evidence and shows that the murder is in fact what Culianu's friends suspected all along: the first political assassination of a professor on American soil. Anton shows how Culianu - an expert on magic and the occult whose predications were often remarkabley accurate - began toying with a new far-right coalition in Romania, taunting them from the presumed safety of his American base with the content and tone of his articles, goading them into believing him dangerous. Ted Anton suggests strongly that radicals from Culianu's native Romania did the deed. Recently published materials throw some new light on Eliade's involvement with the Iron Guard. It now appears that Eliade's enthusiasm may have been much more political, rather than merely cultural, and even anti-Semitic, than his own later collections give us to understand.

Thought

Eliade was an intensely prolific author of fiction and non-fiction alike, publishing over 1,300 pieces over 60 years. He earned international fame with LE MYTHE DE L'ÉTERNAL RETOUR (1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return), an interpretation of religious symbols and imagery. The influence of his thought, through his works and through thirty years as director of History of Religions department at the University of Chicago, is considerable.

In the ample recent literature on the intellectual biography of Eliade, one of the areas that has received the newest and most original contributions is the discovery and then the assessment of Eliade's relationship to scholars linked to so-called "traditional thought," particularly René Guénon, Julius Evola, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Eliade used many traditional thoughts in his works. He corresponded with Evola throughout his life and knew the works of Guenon. Eliade had read Evola’s early philosophical works during the 1920s and “admired his intelligence and, even more, the density and clarity of his prose.” An intellectual friendship developed between the young Romanian scholar and the Italian philosopher, who was nine years Eliade’s senior. Evola and Eliade’s first meeting was in Romania, in conjunction with a luncheon hosted by the philosopher Nae Ionescu. Eliade recalled the admiration that Evola expressed for Corneliu Codreanu (1899-1938), the founder of the Romanian nationalist and Christian movement known as the “Iron Guard.” The examination of the works of his Romanian period shows that some central and characteristic concepts of Eliade's thought derive directly from his use of the traditionalists' works, namely: the notions of anthropocosmic correspondence, sacred center, the cyclical quality of traditional time, human construction as a repetition of the cosmogony, sacrifice as reintegration, androgyny, and archetype.

Eliade's analysis of religion assumes the existence of "the sacred" as the object of worship of religious humanity. It appears as the source of power, significance, and value. Humanity apprehends "hierophanies"--physical manifestations or revelations of the sacred--often, but not only, in the form of symbols, myths, and ritual. Any phenomenal entity is a potential hierophany and can give access to non-historical time: what Eliade calls illud tempus (Latin for 'that time'). The apprehension of this sacred time is a constitutive feature of the religious aspect of humanity.

A central theme in Eliade's works was that the archaic religions made sacred the world in a fashion no longer available, but through the understanding of the relationship between the sacred and the profane it is possible to begin to understand the world of archaic people. Eliade was a Christian and Jungian - he met Carl Gustav Jung for the first time in 1950 - and his works, such as Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, and MYTH AND REALITY (1964), stress the relevance of ancient religions for contemporary man. However, Jung insisted that the images of archaic man are much closer to the European and American psyche than Eliade admitted.

According to Eliade, shamanism is "one of the archaic techniques of ecstasy - at once mysticism, magic, and 'religion' in the broadest sense of the term". He wanted to restrict the term 'shaman' to those who went into trances and who would address the tribe through a spirit or would visit the spirit world and return. James Frazer described bluntly the evidence of superhuman powers in The Golden Bough (1890) as spurious, but Eliade himself was convinced that shamanism had a paranormal component. In Shamanism (1968) he argued that epics of ancient poets and certain kinds of fairy tales derive from ecstatic journeys and mystical flights. Throughout his life Eliade believed that there are things in life that cannot be explained.

In his novels Eliade used the conventional repertory of fantasy: vampires, serpents, ghosts, time warp, searches for immortality. Most of Eliade's fiction dealt in the postwar years with the hidden world behind everyday reality. Among his masterpieces is FORÊT INTERDITE (1955, The Forbidden Forest), which appeared in English in 1978. THE OLD MAN AND THE BUREAUCRATS (1979) is an allusive and symbolic novella in which a schoolteacher detained for questioning by Communist authorities beguiles his captors with stories, as in A Thousand and One Nights.

Despite his focus on the history of religions, Eliade never relinquished his philosophical agenda. That said, he never fully clarified his philosophy. There has been radical disagreement over his thought, some seeing it as a crucial contribution to the study of religion, and some seeing him as an obscurantist whose normative assumptions are unacceptable.

In Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954), a book which he was tempted to subtitle Introduction to a Philosophy of History, Eliade distinguishes between religious and non-religious humanity on the basis of the perception of time as heterogenous and homogenous respectively. This distinction will be immediately familiar to students of Henri Bergson as an element of that philosopher's analysis of time and space. Eliade contends that the perception of time as an homogenous, linear, and unrepeatable medium is a peculiarity of modern and non-religious humanity. Archaic or religious humanity (homo religiosus), in comparison, perceives time as heterogenous; that is, as divided between profane time (linear), and sacred time (cyclical and reactualizable). By means of myths and rituals which give access to this sacred time religious humanity protects itself against the 'terror of history', a condition of helplessness before the absolute data of historical time, a form of existential anxiety. In the very process of establishing this distinction, however, Eliade undermines it, insisting that non-religious humanity in any pure sense is a very rare phenomenon. Myth and illud tempus are still operative, albeit concealed, in the world of modern humanity and Eliade clearly regards the attempt to restrict real time to linear historical time as finally self-contradictory. He squarely sets himself against the historicism of Hegel.

Eliade started to write The Myth of the Eternal Return in 1945, in the aftermath of World War II, when Europe was in ruins, and Communism was conquering Eastern European countries. According to Eliade, in modern times people have lost their contact with natural cycles, known in traditional societies. Eliade saw that for human beings their inner, unhistorical world and its meanings were crucial. Behind historical processes are archaic symbols. Belief in a linear progress of history is typical for the Christian world view, which counters the tyranny of history with the idea of God, but in the archaic world of archetypes and repetition the tyranny of history is accepted. Stoics created from the concept of the eternal cycle a theory which embraced the whole universe. Eliade contrasts the Western linear view of time with the Eastern cyclical world view. In the 19th century Nietzsche's criticism of Christian dogmas brought back the idea of the eternal cycle to Western discussion.

"The sacred" has also been the subject of considerable contention. Some have seen Eliade's "sacred" as simply corresponding to a conventional concept of deity, or to Rudolf Otto's ganz andere (the "wholly other"), whereas others have seen a closer resemblance to Emile Durkheim's socially influenced sacred. Eliade himself repeatedly identifies the sacred as the real, yet he states clearly that "the sacred is a structure of human consciousness" (1969 i; 1978, xiii). This would argue more for the latter interpretation: a social construction of both the sacred and of reality. Yet the sacred is identified as the source of significance, meaning, power and being, and its manifestations as hierophanies, cratophanies, or ontophanies accordingly (appearances of the holy, of power, or of being). Corresponding to the suggested ambiguity of the sacred itself is the ambiguity of its manifestations.

Eliade does state that believers for whom the hierophany is a revelation of the sacred must be prepared by their experience, including their traditional religious background, before they can apprehend it. To others the sacred tree, for example, remains simply a tree. It is an indispensable element of Eliade's analysis that any phenomenal entity could be apprehended as an hierophany with the appropriate preparation. The conclusion must be that all beings reveal, and at the same time conceal, the nature of Being. A reprise of Nicholas of Cusa's Coincidentia Oppositorum is evident here, as is a possible explanation of the systematic ambiguity of Eliade's writings.

Finally religion, systematically understood as the apprehension of relative worth conferred through non-historical realities (including all abstract and imaginary entities) but revealed and confirmed through historical phenomena is seen as a unifying human universal. It is characteristic of Eliade's style of writing, both in his fictional and in his academic work, that this conclusion is nowhere clearly stated. Leading assertions are scattered throughout his publications on the history of religions, alchemy, symbolism, initiation, myth, etc. inviting his readers either to make an immediate interpretation or to pursue the question further into the thicket of his oeuvre.

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