MIRCEA ELIADE (1947-74)

Historian of religions and man of letters distinguished for his researched in the symbolic language used by various religious traditions and his attempt to reduce their meaning to underlying primordial myths that provide the basis for mystical phenomena.

Eliade took an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Bucharest in 1928. Through a graduate fellowship he studied Sanskrit and Indian philosophy at the University of Calcutta from 1928 to 1931, then lived for six months in the ashram (hermitage) of Rishikesh, Himalaya.

Returning to Romania he earned his Ph.D. in 1933 with the dissertation Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne (Yoga: Essay on the Origins of the Indian Mystic) and was named assistant professor at Bucharest where he taught the history of religions and Indian philosophy.

During World War II he served as cultural attaché to the Romanian legation in London and Lisbon. In 1945 he went to Paris as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études of the Sorbonne.

He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1957 as professor of the history of religions and in 1961 founded the international journal History of Religions.

Eliade´s essential interpretation of traditional religious cultures and his analysis of the forms of mystical experience characterize his major works : Traité d´histoire des religions (1949); Le Mythe de l´éternel retour (1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return) and Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l´extase (1951). He also expressed these basic themes through the literary form of novels, notably Forêt interdite (1955, Forbidden Forest).

Fundamentally Eliade considers religious experience in traditional and contemporary societies as credible phenomena that he terms hierophanies; i.e., manifestations of the sacred in the world. His researches trace the forms these hierophanies have taken across the earth and through time. The result is a type of history of divine revelation, viz., a systematizing of the major classes of religious phenomena that he judges to be authentic appearances of the sacred and a tracing of the rise, dominance, decline and disappearance of these classes within the changing contexts of human life. This analytic-descriptive method has led to the uncovering of suggestive clusterings of certain religious patterns within particular historical conditions; e.g. the recurring nature of theophanies (appearance of a deity), the yearning for paradise, elitist doctrines and arcane worship. Such a morphological (structural) investigation of religious phenomena resembles a type of cultural paleontology the sole aim of which is the reconstruction from scattered fragments of ancient man´s consciousness of the universe.

In his search for the primordial consciousness Eliade interprets primitive man´s experience of the mysteries of creation, birth, initiation and death as connoting a unity of man and nature, the natural and the supernatural, the secular and the sacred. Early man thus experienced the immanent working of the deity and understood it in the form of a myth, viz., the story of a primordial event that constitutes and inaugurates a reality and hence determines man´s situation in the cosmos as a sacred or unified world. At any moment in time, Eliade maintains, man can relate to these primordial and constitative events by means of ritual communication. The basic meaning of religious ritual in this thesis is the attempt to reach the pure, pristine act of the deity that signified his relation with man and the world and so to speak, to return to that moment when time did not exist in order to be reborn by realizing the presence of the numen (divine spirit). This "myth of the eternal return" and its correlative cyclical time is distinguished from other interpretations of history; e.g. the Judeo-Christian linear concept or history as purposeful plan.

The myth or axis mundi (axis of the world) indicates the centre of reality and the enduring present of the sacred, communicating to man through inscrutable mysteries that serve as vehicles for meanings it chooses to reveal. Thus, the meaning of mythical phenomena and religious experience according to Eliade cannot be grasped by the various methods of the psychological and social sciences because of the irreducible element of the sacred. It is this sacred character that distinguishes myth form related literary types: saga, legend and fairy tale.