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Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) |
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Romanian-born historian of religion, fiction writer, and one of the pre-eminent interpreters of world religion in this century. Mircea Eliade was a 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'eternel retour: archétypes et répétition (1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return), an interpretation of religious symbols and imagery. Eliade was much interested in the world of the unconscious. The central theme in his novels was erotic love. "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 regarded as a chaos or a kingdom of the dead, has survived even in highly evolved civilizations such as those of China, Mesopotamia and Egypt." (Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism by Mircea Eliade, translated by Philip Mairet, London: Harvill Press, 1961, pp. 37-38 ;originally published in France by Gallimard under the title Images et symboles, 1952) Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest, Romania, the son of Georghe (Ieremia) Eliade, an army officer. He had changed, according to Eliade, his name from Ieremia to Eliade due to his admiration for the writer Eliade-Radulescu. The family moved from Bucharest to Rimnicu-Sarat and later to Cernavoda. "In my memory," Eliade recalled, "that time spent there between the Danube and the brick-colored calcinated hills, where wild roses and tiny flowers with pale dry petals grew, is always lighted with sunshine." (Autobiography: Volume I: 1907-1937: Journey East, Journey West by Mircea Eliade, translated from the Romanian by Mac Linscott Ricketts, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981, p. 7) At school he was interested in biology and chemistry, and he had his own small laboratory. He read much, and increased this time reading books by sleeping only five-six hours. While collecting material in Italy for his study on Renaissance philosophers, Eliade read Surendranath Dasgupta's work A History of Indian Philosophy, which impressed him deeply. After graduating in philosophy at Bucharest in 1928, he studied in India under Dasgupta at the University of Calcutta. Eliade was a talented student, but his relationship with Dasgupta became strained when he fell in love with Dasgupta's daughter Maitreya. During this period he wrote the erotic novel Isabel si apele diavolului (1930). His experiences in the Himalayas, at Swami Shivananda's ashram, where he went to meditate, Eliade depicted in the novel Maitreyi (1933), which became a success. Eliade considered his tantric experiments in the Himalayas with the South African Jenny a proof that he had not understood India. "My vocation was culture, not sainthood." After military service Eliade took his doctorate in 1933 – his thesis dealt with the history of yogic techniques. In the same year Eliade was appointed associate professor in the faculty of letters at Bucharest University. In 1934 he married Nina Mares; she died of cancer in 1944. After publishing Domnisoara Christina (1936) Eliade was accused of pornography and 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 Eliade published several works of fiction. The unifying element of the early fiction is a strong, autobiographical bent. Isabel si apele diavolui was a thinly disguised story of a love affair between a European man and an Indian girl. In Întoarcerea 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. The character bears resemlances to Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov and Kirilov. 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), which included the tales 'Nopti la Serampore' and 'Secretul doctorului Honigberger'. The title of the book referred to Dr. J.M. Honigberger, writer of the book Thirty-five Years in the East (1952). Following the arrest of Nae Ionescu, professor at the faculty of philosophy, Eliade was dismissed as his assistent. Ionescu was accused of being member of the Legion of the Archangel Michael (the "Iron Guard"), an extreme-right-wing Romanian organization, anti-Semitic, with Nazi sympathies. Eliade 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 WW II he did not return to his home country, but held posts at various European universities. He lectured at the Sorbonne and taught for a while at the École des Hautes Ètudes and elsewhere. While in Briançon he met a female occultist, the high priestess of an African secret society, who claimed that she could remember many of her previous incarnations. She lived in an elegant apartment and had forty or so disciples, each paying about ten thousand francs for an initiation course. "All this in the Paris of A.D. 1950 is not only possible but also very profitable," Eliade wrote in his Journal. Durig this period Eliade adddd to his
friends Eugène Ionesco, Georges Dumèzil,
and Georges Bataille. In 1950 he married Christinel Cottescu, a
Romanian exile, whose sister was a professor of Latin. There is only a
few refrences to her in Eliade's Journal I: 1945-1955, but in his Autobiography
he devoted to her a whole chapter. "In contrast to her sister,
Christinel was blond and blue-eyed, but like Sibylle she left her hair
fall to her shoulders. That first image has never been erased from my
mind: she laughed like a child, yet with a troubling feminity, showig
her teeth, inclining her head slightly." (Autobiography: Volume II: 1937-1960: Exile's Odyssey, translated from the Romanian by Mac Linscott Ricketts, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 128-129) 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. The essay dealt with mankind's experience of history and time, especially the conceptions of being and reality. 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. These ideas were further developed by Oswald Spengler in his study The Decline of the West (1918-1922). Eliade's other major theoretical and scholarly works in the 1940s and 1950s include Traitè d'histoire des religions (1949, Patterns of Comparative Religion), Le mythe de l'éternel retrour, and Mythes, rêves et mystères (1957, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries). The Forbidden Forest, which Eliade considered his major novel, came out in 1954 . In 1957 Eliade assumed the chair of the History of Religions Department of the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught until 1983, retiring at the age of seventy-six. His office in Meadville-Lombard School of Religion caught fire in 1985. Most of his precious books were damaged by smoke and water, but his notebooks of his Journal survived relatively untouched. The fire had started on the desk, perhaps from pipe ashes in the ashtray. Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses (3 vols. 1976-1983, A History of Religious Ideas) has been called the synthesis of Eliade's work as a scholar. "The breadth and depth of Eliade's learning," wrote Roger Corless, "which astonished all who met him, his reverence toward the tradition he studied, and his intense, infectious enthusiasm, were an assurance that, if anyone could find what was religious about religion(s), he could. I believe the record shows that he could not. As a result, we now know a great deal more about religion(s) and we can ask totally new questions about it/them." ('Building on Eliade's Magnificent Failure, in Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade, ed. by Bryan S. Rennie, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000) Since 1960 Eliade suffered from the rheumatoid arthritis in his
hands, which made writing extremely arduous for him. Eliade never
returned to Romania, where he had been denounced as a
"mystic" and "Fascist" by the Communist regime. However, during
Ceausescu's era several of his books were published in Romanian
translations. Eliade read in 1961 Romain Rolland's Indian journal to
understand why the pacifist Nobel laureate ended up embracing
communism. Mircea Eliade remained in the United States until his death on April 23, 1986. His body was cremated on the day following his death. Five years later 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 murdered execution-style on campus. He suspected that – allegedly – Eliade had been associated with the Iron Guard. After Eliade's death he started to develop his own theory of history. "In Culianu's case, some fellow exiles conjectured, the Iron Guard would have feared Culianu because he had been named executor of Eliade's unpublished scholarly papers. They might have feared he would use his position to undermine his mentor's reputation by publishing the wrong documents. . . . Corcerning the whispered rumors, Paria dissident Monica Lovinescu put it best: "Whatever they say it's the Iron Guard," she observed, "you can be sure it's Securitate."" (Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu by Ted Anton, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997, p. 263) A central theme in Eliade's works was that the archaic religions
made sacred the world in a fashion no longer available. Through the
understanding of the relationship between the sacred and the profane it
is possible to begin to understand the world of the past. Eliade's
creative hermeneutics has received considerable criticism, and it has
been said that his "main position is shrouded in ambiguities".
Claude-Henri Rocquet has suggested the reader of Eliade is involved in
"a hermeneutics without end, since even as we read Eliade, we are
interpreting him, just as he is interpreting some Iranian symbol". (Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet: With an Essay on Brancusi and Mythology by Mircea Eliade, translated by Derek Coltman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 130) (Eliade's reply was: "That may be so.") Eliade was a Christian and Jungian – he met Carl Jung
for the first time in 1950, and two years later he interviewed Jung at
the Eranos Conference. They had a dinner together in an Ascona
restaurant. "He is a captivating old gentleman," Eliade wrote in his
journal in August 1950, "utterly without conceit, who is happy to talk
as he is to listen. What could I write down here first of this long
conversation? Perhaps his bitter reproches of 'official science'? In
university circles he is not taken seriously." (Jung: A Biography by Gerhard Wehr, translated from the German by David M. Weeks, Boston & London: Shambhala, 2001, pp. 273-274) Like Jung, Eliade maintained that modern man must rediscover a deeper
source of his own spiritual life. Also Eliade's works, such as Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, and Aspects du mythe (1963, Myth and Reality), stressed 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. Eliade later stopped using the term "archetype," which is familiar from Jung's works, in order to avoid Jungian and other misinterpretations. In Le Sacré et le Profane (1959, The Sacred and the Profane) Eliade argued that for religious man, there are sacred and non sacred places. The manifestation of the sacred is wholly different from the profane. "It is not a matter of theological speculation, but of a primary religious experience that preceedes all reflection on the world." (The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, translated from the French by Willard R. Trask, Orlando: Harcourt, 1987, p. 20) The traditional man, "homo religiosus," had a strong will to live within the sacred or near the sacred objects. A sacred place possesses an unique existential value for religious man, but for nonreligious man, space is neutral. Although modern man seems to experience the world completely as profane, ancient myths, taboos, and rituals still nourish life in the West, but in a corrupted form. 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." (Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, translated from the French by Willard R. Trask, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964, p. xix)
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. "This small mystical elite not only
directs the community's religious life but, as it were, guards its
"soul." The shaman is the great specialist in the human soul; he alone
"sees" it, for he knows its "form" and its destiny." (Ibid., p. 8) 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. 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 in destiny, "in the sense that I think there is
something that cannot be explained—I can't call it Providence—but certainly there is something that cannot be explained. . . ." ('Chicago Interview: Mircea Eliade' by Delia O'Hara, Chicago, June 1986, quoted in Autobiography: Volume II: 1937-1960: Exiles Odyssey, p.
xx) In his novels Eliade used the conventional repertory of fantasy: vampires, serpents, ghosts, time warp, searches for immortality. Most of Eliade's postwar fiction dealt with the hidden world behind everyday reality. Among his masterpieces is La Forêt interdite (The Forbidden Forest), which appeared in English in 1978. Pe strada Mântuleasa (1968, The Old Man and the Bureaucrats) is an allusive and symbolic novella in which a schoolteacher detained for questioning by Communist authorities beguiles his captors with stories, as the enslaved Sheherazade in The Arabian Nights. For further reading: Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred by Thomas J. J. Altizer (1963); Myths & Symbols: Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade, ed. by Joseph M. Kitagawa and Charles H. Long (1969); The Role of Myth in Religion: a Study of Mircea Eliade's Phenomenology of Religion by George R. Slater (1973); Structure and Creativity in Religion: Hermeneutics in Mircea Eliade's Phenomenology and New Directions by Douglas Allen (1977); L'herméneutique de Mircea Eliade by Adrian Marino (1981); Imagination and Meaning, ed. by Norman J. Girardot and Mac Linscott Ricketts (1982); Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907-1945 by Mac Linscott Ricketts (1988); Waiting for the Dawn, ed. by David Carrasco and Jane Marie Law (1991); Reading and Responding to Mircea Eliade's History of Religious Ideas by John R. Mason (1993); Mircea Eliade's Vision for a New Humanism by David Cave, John David Cave (1995); Reconstructing Eliade by Bryan S. Rennie (1996); Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade by Douglas Allen (1998); The Politics of Myth by Robert S. Ellwood (1999); Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade, ed. by Bryan S. Rennie (2000); Waiting for the Dawn: Mircea Eliade in Perspective by David Carrasco and Jane M. Law (2009); Mircea Eliade: From Magic To Myth by Moshe Idel (2014); Paradigms of D.D. Kosambi and Mircea Eliade: An Exposition on Religion and Myths bySanjukta Bhattacharyya (2015); F.F. Coppola & Mircea Eliade: Youth without Youth: A View from Romania by Cristina Scarlat; translated by Mihaela Mititelu (2018); De la Neagoe Basarab la Mircea Eliade: Studii de istorie a filosofie romanesti by Gheorghe Bobana (2021) Selected works:
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