Mircea Eliade

Heaven
Heaven is a place
Where nothing
Nothing ever happens

Romanian historian of religions. Before and during WWII, he was an active and vocal fascist intellectual in Bucharest. After the war, he lied flagrantly about his past and became a highly respected academic in the west, eventually and for many years professor at the University of Chicago. Of course, many prominent mythologists of the 20th century had similar political leanings --- Jung was definitely a Nazi fellow-traveler (though not an active party member, like Eliade), and Joseph Campbell extremely reactionary (and may, also, have been a supporter of fascism). The cause of this connection isn't entirely clear, but it seems to have something to do with the way that fascism originated (on both the right and the left) in a rejection of rationalism and materialism --- and what better way, for a scholar, to act out such a rejection than to study and indeed celebrate the stories that rationalism dismisses as superstition?

Be that as it may, Eliade was also, in some odd way, a Christian, and has been accused of trying to make it seem as those some kind of simple monotheism and/or redemption myth is the original, universal religion of humanity by highly selective quotation and other forms of manipulation of evidence. I'm not competent to judge that, but frankly I wouldn't be much surprised. That part of his thought doesn't interest me very much, to be honest. What I'm intrigued by are his ideas about commonalities in different cultures' myths, particularly mythical ideas connected to the early history of technology. Of course, if he misrepresented the facts to support his pet beliefs in one area...

Probably the central notion in Eliade's work is that of the ``eternal return.'' The idea is that the pattern of the world was set (as he always put it) in illo tempore, in Those times, the magical ones towards the beginning of the world. Those times are magically, ritually re-created when it is necessary to re-affirm or draw on the ``power and prestiege of origins'' --- at the new year, during initiations (one of his big themes), when attempting alchemy.

His gloss on alchemy is that the alchemists attempted to ``recreate the initial conditions'' --- as we say in the trade, that by turning lead (or whatever) into the prima materia they not only made it formless but capable of being perfected by human art. The alchemists were trying to perfect creation by going back to the problem at the beginning. (Particle physicists have similar strategies but few would admit in public to trying to repair the universe.) There's a lot to be said for this notion, I think, but Eliade definitely pushes it very hard, to the point where he sometimes seems to lose sight of the fact that the alchemists were experimenters, getting their hands dirty in the lab and wanting to have real gold, or at least real shiny stuff, and real elixirs, or at least real medicines, to show for their efforts.

Shamanism. Metallurgy. (I'll try to write précis of his views on these subjects soon.)

ME
- Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
- The Forge and the Crucible
- Rites and Symbols of Initiation
- Myths, Rites and Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader
Peter Gay, "Witness to Fascism", New York Review of Books 4 October 2001 [Review of the journals of Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian writer of Jewish descent who was a personal friend of Eliade's, showing just how deep into fascism and anti-Semitism Eliade was, and how much he lied about it afterwards]
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century [Contains a very good discussion of the intellectual context which produced Eliade, and how many fascist intellectuals similarly white-washed themselves once it became clear that they'd lost. I recall Eliade being mentioned by name but can't now find the passage.]
Ian Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Levi-Strauss and Malinowski

ME
- Cosmos and History, a.k.a. The Myth of the Eternal Return. [The title seems to oscillate once every 15-20 years. The current edition has a Mandelbrot set on the cover, which is staggeringly appropriate, but probably not why it was chosen... I need to sit down and just finish the book.]
- Yoga: Immortality and Freedom
- From Primitives to Zen
- The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion
Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell
Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s

Notebooks

Mircea Eliade