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Mircea Eliade (; – April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. One of the most influential scholars of religion of the 20th century and interpreter of religious experience, he established in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that Hierophany form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential.Wendy Doniger, "Foreword to the 2004 Edition", Eliade, Shamanism, p. xiii One of his most instrumental contributions to religious studies was his theory of eternal return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but (at least in the minds of the religious) actually participate in them.
Eliade's literary works belong to the Fantastique and autobiographical genres. The best known are the novels Maitreyi ('La Nuit Bengali' or 'Bengal Nights', 1933), Noaptea de Sânziene ('The Forbidden Forest', 1955), Isabel și apele diavolului ('Isabel and the Devil's Waters'), and Romanul Adolescentului Miop ('Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent', 1989); the novellas Domnișoara Christina ('Miss Christina', 1936) and Tinerețe fără tinerețe ('Youth Without Youth', 1976); and the short stories Secretul doctorului Honigberger ('The Secret of Dr. Honigberger', 1940) and La Țigănci ('With the Gypsy Girls', 1963).
Early in his life, Eliade was a journalist and essayist, a disciple of Romanian philosopher and journalist Nae Ionescu, and a member of the literary society Criterion. In the 1940s, he served as cultural attaché of the Kingdom of Romania to the United Kingdom and Portugal. Several times during the late 1930s, Eliade publicly expressed his support for the Iron Guard, a Romanian Christian fascist organization. His involvement with fascism at the time, as well as his other far-right connections, came under frequent criticism after World War II.
Noted for his vast erudition, Eliade had fluent command of five languages (Romanian, French, German, Italian, and English) and a reading knowledge of three others (Hebrew language, Persian language, and Sanskrit). In 1990 he was elected a posthumous member of the Romanian Academy.
Eliade kept a particularly fond memory of his childhood and, later in life, wrote about the impact various unusual episodes and encounters had on his mind. In one instance during the World War I Romanian Campaign, when Eliade was about ten years of age, he witnessed the bombing of Bucharest by German Empire and the patriotic fervor in the occupied capital at news that Romania was able to stop the Central Powers' advance into Moldavia.Ion Hadârcă, "Mircea Eliade la începuturi" ("Mircea Eliade at His Beginnings") , in Revista Sud-Est, 1/2007; retrieved January 21, 2008
He described this stage in his life as marked by an unrepeatable epiphany.Ioan P. Culianu, "Mahaparanirvana", in El Hilo de Ariadna , Vol. IIEllwood, pp. 98–99 Recalling his entrance into a drawing room that an "eerie iridescent light" had turned into "a fairy-tale palace", he wrote,
I practiced for many years the exercise of recapturing that epiphanic moment, and I would always find again the same plenitude. I would slip into it as into a fragment of time devoid of duration—without beginning, middle, or end. During my last years of lycée, when I struggled with profound attacks of melancholy, I still succeeded at times in returning to the golden green light of that afternoon. ... But even though the beatitude was the same, it was now impossible to bear because it aggravated my sadness too much. By this time I knew the world to which the drawing room belonged ... was a world forever lost.Eliade, Autobiography, in Ellwood, pp. 98–99
Robert Ellwood, a professor of religion who did his graduate studies under Mircea Eliade,Ellwood, p. 5 saw this type of nostalgia as one of the most characteristic themes in Eliade's life and academic writings.
As a child, Eliade was fascinated with the natural world, which formed the setting of his very first literary attempts, as well as with Romanian folklore and the Christian faith as expressed by peasants. Growing up, he aimed to find and record what he believed was the common source of all religious traditions. The young Eliade's interest in physical exercise and adventure led him to pursue mountaineering and sailing, and he also joined the Romanian Boy Scouts.Maria Vlădescu, "100 de ani de cercetaşi" ("100 Years of Scouting"), in Evenimentul Zilei, August 2, 2007
With a group of friends, he designed and sailed a boat on the Danube, from Tulcea to the Black Sea.Constantin Roman, Continental Drift: Colliding Continents, Converging Cultures, CRC Press, Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol and Philadelphia, 2000, p. 60 In parallel, Eliade grew estranged from the educational environment, becoming disenchanted with the discipline required and obsessed with the idea that he was uglier and less virile than his colleagues. To cultivate his willpower, he would force himself to swallow insects and only slept four to five hours a night. At one point, Eliade was failing four subjects, among which was the study of the Romanian language.
Instead, he became interested in natural science and chemistry, as well as the occult, and wrote short pieces on Entomology subjects. Despite his father's concern that he was in danger of losing his already weak eyesight, Eliade read passionately. One of his favorite authors was Honoré de Balzac, whose work he studied carefully. Eliade also became acquainted with the Modernism short stories of Giovanni Papini and social anthropology studies by James George Frazer.
His interest in the two writers led him to learn Italian and English in private, and he also began studying Persian language and Hebrew language. At the time, Eliade became acquainted with Saadi's poems and the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. He was also interested in philosophy—studying, among others, Socrates, Vasile Conta, and the Stoicism Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and read works of history—the two Romanian historians who influenced him from early on were Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu and Nicolae Iorga. His first published work was the 1921 Inamicul viermelui de mătase ("The Silkworm's Enemy"), followed by Cum am găsit piatra filosofală ("How I Found the Philosophers' Stone"). Four years later, Eliade completed work on his debut volume, the autobiographical Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent.
It was during his student years that Eliade met Nae Ionescu, who lectured in Logic, becoming one of his disciples and friends.Călinescu, pp. 954, 955; Nastasă, p. 76 He was especially attracted to Ionescu's radical ideas and his interest in religion, which signified a break with the Rationalism tradition represented by senior academics such as Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, Dimitrie Gusti, and Tudor Vianu (all of whom owed inspiration to the defunct literary society Junimea, albeit in varying degrees).
Eliade's scholarly works began after a long period of study in British India, at the University of Calcutta. Finding that the Maharaja of Kassimbazar sponsored European scholars to study in India, Eliade applied and was granted an allowance for four years, which was later doubled by a Romanian scholarship.Nastasă, p. 237 In autumn 1928, he sailed for Calcutta to study Sanskrit and philosophy under Surendranath Dasgupta, a Cambridge alumnus and professor at Calcutta University, the author of a five volume History of Indian Philosophy. Before reaching the Indian subcontinent, Eliade also made a brief visit to Egypt. Once in India, he visited large areas of the region, and spent a short period at a ashram.McGuire, p. 150; Nastasă, p. 237
He studied the basics of Indian philosophy, and, in parallel, learned Sanskrit, Pali and Bengali language under Dasgupta's direction. At the time, he also became interested in the actions of Mahatma Gandhi and the Satyagraha as a phenomenon; later, Eliade adapted Gandhian ideas in his discourse on spirituality and Romania.
In 1930, while living with Dasgupta, Eliade fell in love with his host's daughter, Maitreyi Devi, later writing a barely disguised autobiographical novel Maitreyi (also known as "La Nuit Bengali" or "Bengal Nights"), in which he claimed that he carried on a physical relationship with her.Ginu Kamani, "A Terrible Hurt: The Untold Story behind the Publishing of Maitreyi Devi", at the University of Chicago Press website; retrieved July 16, 2007
Eliade received his PhD in 1933, with a thesis on Yoga practices. Biografie, in Handoca; Nastasă, p. 237Albert Ribas, "Mircea Eliade, historiador de las religiones" ("Mircea Eliade, Historian of Religions"), in El Ciervo. Revista de pensamiento y cultura, Año 49, Núm. 588 (Marzo 2000), pp. 35–38 The book, which was translated into French three years later, had significant impact in academia, both in Romania and abroad.
He later recalled that the book was an early step for understanding not just Indian religious practices, but also Romanian spirituality.Eliade, in Nastasă, p. 238 During the same period, Eliade began a correspondence with the Sri Lanka-born philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy.McGuire, p. 150 In 1936–1937, he functioned as honorary assistant for Ionescu's course, lecturing in Metaphysics.Nastasă, p. 442; Ornea, p. 452
In 1933, Mircea Eliade had a physical relationship with the actress Sorana Țopa, while falling in love with Nina Mareș, whom he ultimately married.Paul Cernat, "Jurnalul unui om mare" ("The Diary of A Big Man") , in Observator Cultural, Nr. 338, September 2006; retrieved January 23, 2008 The latter, introduced to him by his new friend Mihail Sebastian, already had a daughter, Giza, from a man who had divorced her. Eliade subsequently adopted Giza,Șora, in Handoca and the three of them moved to an apartment at 141 Dacia Boulevard. He left his residence in 1936, during a trip he made to the United Kingdom and Germany, when he first visited London, Oxford and Berlin.
As one of the figures in the Criterion literary society (1933–1934), Eliade's initial encounter with the traditional far right was polemical: the group's conferences were stormed by members of A. C. Cuza's National-Christian Defense League, who objected to what they viewed as pacifism and addressed Antisemitism insults to several speakers, including Sebastian;Ornea, pp. 150–151, 153 in 1933, he was among the signers of a manifesto opposing Nazi Germany's state-enforced racism.Ornea, pp. 174–175
In 1934, at a time when Sebastian was publicly insulted by Nae Ionescu, who prefaced his book ( De două mii de ani...) with thoughts on the "eternal damnation" of Jews, Mircea Eliade spoke out against this perspective, and commented that Ionescu's references to the verdict "Outside the Church there is no salvation" contradicted the notion of God's omnipotence.Eliade, 1934, in Ornea, p. 408; see also Ellwood, p. 85 However, he contended that Ionescu's text was not evidence of antisemitism.Eliade, 1934, in Ornea, pp. 408–409
In 1936, reflecting on the early history of the Romanian Kingdom and its Jewish community, he deplored the expulsion of Jewish scholars from Romania, making specific references to Moses Gaster, Heimann Hariton Tiktin and Lazăr Șăineanu.Eliade, 1936, in Ornea, p. 410 Eliade's views at the time focused on innovation—in the summer of 1933, he replied to an anti-Modernism critique written by George Călinescu:
All I wish for is a deep change, a complete transformation. But, for God's sake, in any direction other than spirituality.Eliade, 1933, in Ornea, p. 167
He and friends Emil Cioran and Constantin Noica were by then under the influence of Trăirism, a school of thought that was formed around the ideals expressed by Ionescu. A form of existentialism, Trăirism was also the synthesis of traditional and newer right-wing beliefs.Ornea, Chapter IV Early on, a public polemic was sparked between Eliade and Camil Petrescu: the two eventually reconciled and later became good friends.
Like Mihail Sebastian, who was himself becoming influenced by Ionescu, he maintained contacts with intellectuals from all sides of the political spectrum: their entourage included the right-wing Dan Botta and Mircea Vulcănescu, the non-political Petrescu and Ionel Jianu, and Belu Zilber, who was a member of the illegal Romanian Communist Party.Stelian Tănase, "Belu Zilber", Part II , in 22, Nr. 701, August 2003; retrieved October 4, 2007
The group also included Haig Acterian, Mihail Polihroniade, Petru Comarnescu, Marietta Sadova and Floria Capsali.Andrei Oişteanu, "Mihail Sebastian şi Mircea Eliade: cronica unei prietenii accidentate" ("Mihail Sebastian and Mircea Eliade: the Chronicle of an Abrupt Friendship)", in 22, Nr. 926, December 2007; retrieved January 18, 2008
He was also close to Marcel Avramescu, a former Surrealism writer whom he introduced to the works of René Guénon.Paul Cernat, "Eliade în cheie ezoterică" ("Eliade in Esoterical Key") , review of Marcel Tolcea, Eliade, ezotericul ("Eliade, the Esoteric"), in Observator Cultural, Nr. 175, July 2003; retrieved July 16, 2007 A doctor in the Kabbalah and future Romanian Orthodox cleric, Avramescu joined Eliade in editing the short-lived esoteric magazine Memra (the only one of its kind in Romania).Paul Cernat, "Recuperarea lui Ionathan X. Uranus" ("The Recuperation of Ionathan X. Uranus"), in Observator Cultural, Nr. 299, December 2005; retrieved November 22, 2007
Among the intellectuals who attended his lectures were Mihai Şora (whom he deemed his favorite student), Eugen Schileru and Miron Constantinescu—known later as, respectively, a philosopher, an art critic, and a sociologist and political figure of the communist regime. Mariana Klein, who became Șora's wife, was one of Eliade's female students, and later authored works on his scholarship.
Eliade later recounted that he had himself enlisted Zilber as a Cuvântul contributor, for him to provide a Marxism perspective on the issues discussed by the journal. Their relation soured in 1935, when the latter publicly accused Eliade of serving as an agent for the secret police, Siguranța Statului (Sebastian answered to the statement by alleging that Zilber was himself a secret agent, and the latter eventually retracted his claim).
They displayed his rejection of liberalism and the Modernization goals of the 1848 Wallachian revolution (perceived as "an abstract apology of Mankind"Eliade, 1933, in Ornea, p. 32. and "ape-like imitation of Western Europe"),Eliade, 1936, in Ornea, p. 32. as well as for democracy itself (accusing it of "managing to crush all attempts at national renaissance",Eliade, 1937, in Ornea, p. 53 and later praising Benito Mussolini's Italian fascism on the grounds that, according to Eliade, "in he who thinks for himself is promoted to the highest office in the shortest of times"). He approved of an ethnic nationalist state centered on the Orthodox Church (in 1927, despite his still-vivid interest in Theosophy, he recommended young intellectuals "the return to the Church"),Eliade, 1927, in Ornea, p. 147 which he opposed to, among others, the Secularism nationalism of Constantin Rădulescu-Motru;Eliade, 1935, in Ornea, p. 128. referring to this particular ideal as "Romanianism", Eliade was, in 1934, still viewing it as "neither fascism, nor chauvinism".Eliade, 1934, in Ornea, p. 136
Eliade was especially dissatisfied with the incidence of unemployment among intellectuals, whose careers in state-financed institutions had been rendered uncertain by the Great Depression.Eliade, 1933, in Ornea, pp. 178, 186.
In 1936, Eliade was the focus of a campaign in the far right press, being targeted for having authored "pornography" in his Miss Christina and Isabel și apele diavolului; similar accusations were aimed at other cultural figures, including Tudor Arghezi and Geo Bogza.Ornea, pp. 445–455. Assessments of Eliade's work were in sharp contrast to one another: also in 1936, Eliade accepted an award from the Romanian Writers' Society, of which he had been a member since 1934.Nastasă, pp. 525–526. In summer 1937, through an official decision which came as a result of the accusations, and despite student protests, he was stripped of his position at the university.Nastasă, p. 86; Ornea, pp. 452–453; Şora, in Handoca
Eliade decided to sue the Ministry of Education, asking for a symbolic compensation of 1 Romanian leu.Ornea, p. 453. He won the trial, and regained his position as Nae Ionescu's assistant.
Nevertheless, by 1937, he gave his intellectual support to the Iron Guard, in which he saw "a Christian revolution aimed at creating a new Romania",Eliade, 1937, in Ornea, p. 203 and a group able "to reconcile Romania with God". His articles of the time, published in Iron Guard-affiliated papers such as Sfarmă-Piatră and Buna Vestire, contain ample praises of the movement's leaders (Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Ion Moța, Vasile Marin, and Gheorghe Cantacuzino-Grănicerul).Ornea, pp. 202–206Ovidiu Şimonca, "Mircea Eliade şi 'căderea în lume'" ("Mircea Eliade and 'the Descent into the World'") , review of Florin Ţurcanu, Mircea Eliade. Le prisonnier de l'histoire ("Mircea Eliade. The Prisoner of History"), in Observator Cultural, Nr. 305, January–February 2006; retrieved July 16, 2007 The transition he went through was similar to that of his fellow generation members and close collaborators—among the notable exceptions to this rule were Petru Comarnescu, sociologist Henri H. Stahl and future dramatist Eugène Ionesco, as well as Sebastian.Ornea, p. 180
He eventually enrolled in the Totul pentru Țară ("Everything for the Fatherland" Party), the political expression of the Iron Guard,Ornea, p. 207 and contributed to its 1937 electoral campaign in Prahova County—as indicated by his inclusion on a list of party members with county-level responsibilities (published in Buna Vestire).
Eliade was kept for three weeks in a cell at the Siguranța Statului Headquarters, in an attempt to have him sign a "declaration of dissociation" with the Iron Guard, but he refused to do so.Ornea, p. 209 In the first week of August he was transferred to a makeshift camp at Miercurea-Ciuc. When Eliade began coughing blood in October 1938, he was taken to a clinic in Moroeni. Eliade was simply released on November 12, and subsequently spent his time writing his play Iphigenia (also known as Ifigenia). In April 1940, with the help of Alexandru Rosetti, he became Cultural Attaché to the United Kingdom, a posting cut short when Romanian-British foreign relations were broken.
After leaving London he was assigned the office of Counsel and Press secretary (later Cultural Attaché) to the Romanian Embassy in Portugal, Biografie, in Handoca; Nastasă, p. 442Cătălin Avramescu, "Citim una, înţelegem alta" ("We Read One Thing and Understand Another") , in Dilema Veche, Vol. III, August 2006; retrieved January 28, 2008 Michael Löwy, Review of Daniel Dubuisson, Impostures et pseudo-science. L'œuvre de Mircea Eliade, in Archives de Science Sociale et Religion, 132 (2005) ; retrieved January 22, 2008 where he was kept on as diplomat by the National Legionary State (the Iron Guard government) and, ultimately, by Ion Antonescu's regime. His office involved disseminating propaganda in favor of the Romanian state. In 1941, during his time in Portugal, Eliade stayed in Estoril, at the Hotel Palácio. He would later find a house in Cascais, at Rua da Saudade.Exiles Memorial Center.Pimentel, I. (2014) Cascais 650 anos:território, história, memória : 1364–2014, Câmara Municipal de Cascais.
In February 1941, weeks after the bloody Legionary Rebellion was crushed by Antonescu, Iphigenia was staged by the National Theater Bucharest—the play soon raised concerns that it owed inspiration to the Iron Guard's ideology, and even that its inclusion in the program was a Legionary attempt at subversion.
In 1942, Eliade authored a volume in praise of the Estado Novo, established in Portugal by António de Oliveira Salazar,Eliade, Salazar, in "Eliade despre Salazar" ("Eliade on Salazar"), Evenimentul Zilei, October 13, 2002Ellwood, p. 90 claiming that "The Salazarian state, a Christian and Totalitarianism one, is first and foremost based on love". On July 7 of the same year, he was received by Salazar himself, who assigned Eliade the task of warning Antonescu to withdraw the Romanian Army from the Eastern Front ("In, I would not be grinding it in Russia").Eliade, in Handoca Eliade also claimed that such contacts with the leader of a neutral country had made him the target for Gestapo surveillance, but that he had managed to communicate Salazar's advice to Mihai Antonescu, Romania's Foreign Minister.
In autumn 1943, he traveled to occupied France, where he rejoined Emil Cioran, also meeting with scholar Georges Dumézil and the Collaborationism writer Paul Morand. At the same time, he applied for a position of lecturer at the University of Bucharest, but withdrew from the race, leaving Constantin Noica and Ion Zamfirescu to dispute the position, in front of a panel of academics comprising Lucian Blaga and Dimitrie Gusti (Zamfirescu's eventual selection, going against Blaga's recommendation, was to be the topic of a controversy).Nastasă, pp. 442–443 In his private notes, Eliade wrote that he took no further interest in the office, because his visits abroad had convinced him that he had "something great to say", and that he could not function within the confines of "a minor culture". Also during the war, Eliade traveled to Berlin, where he met and conversed with controversial political theorist Carl Schmitt, and frequently visited Francoist Spain, where he notably attended the 1944 Lusitano-Spanish scientific congress in Córdoba.Joaquín Garrigós, "Pasiunea lui Mircea Eliade pentru Spania" ("Mircea Eliade's Passion for Spain") , in Dilema Veche, Vol. IV, October 2007; retrieved January 21, 2008 Andrei Oişteanu, "Mircea Eliade, de la opium la amfetamine" ("Mircea Eliade, from Opium to Amphetamines") , in 22, Nr. 896, May 2007; retrieved January 17, 2008 It was during his trips to Spain that Eliade met philosophers José Ortega y Gasset and Eugenio d'Ors. He maintained a friendship with d'Ors, and met him again on several occasions after the war.
Nina Eliade fell ill with uterine cancer and died during their stay in Lisbon, in late 1944. As the widower later wrote, the disease was probably caused by an abortion procedure she had undergone at an early stage of their relationship. He came to suffer from clinical depression, which increased as Romania and her Axis Powers allies suffered major defeats on the Eastern Front. Contemplating a return to Romania as a soldier or a monk, he was on a continuous search for effective , medicating himself with passion flower extract, and, eventually, with methamphetamine. This was probably not his first experience with drugs: vague mentions in his notebooks have been read as indication that Mircea Eliade was taking opium during his travels to Calcutta. Later, discussing the works of Aldous Huxley, Eliade wrote that the British author's use of mescaline as a source of inspiration had something in common with his own experience, indicating 1945 as a date of reference and adding that it was "needless to explain why that is".
Together with Emil Cioran and other Romanian expatriates, Eliade rallied with the former diplomat Alexandru Busuioceanu, helping him publicize Anti-communism opinion to the Western European public.Dan Gulea, "O perspectivă sintetică" ("A Syncretic Perspective"), in Observator Cultural, Nr. 242, October 2004; retrieved October 4, 2007 He was also briefly involved in publishing a Romanian-language magazine, titled Luceafărul ("The Morning Star"), and was again in contact with Mihai Șora, who had been granted a scholarship to study in France, and with Șora's wife Mariana. In 1947, he was facing material constraints, and Ananda Coomaraswamy found him a job as a French language teacher in the United States, at a school in Arizona; the arrangement ended upon Coomaraswamy's death in September.
Beginning in 1948, he wrote for the journal Critique, edited by French philosopher Georges Bataille. The following year, he went on a visit to Italy, where he wrote the first 300 pages of his novel Noaptea de Sânziene (he visited the country a third time in 1952). He collaborated with Carl Jung and the Eranos circle after Henry Corbin recommended him in 1949, and wrote for the Antaios magazine (edited by Ernst Jünger). In 1950, Eliade began attending Eranos conferences, meeting Jung, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, Gershom Scholem and Paul Radin.McGuire, pp. 150–151 He described Eranos as "one of the most creative cultural experiences of the modern Western world."McGuire, p. 151
In October 1956, he moved to the United States, settling in Chicago the following year. He had been invited by Joachim Wach to give a series of lectures at Wach's home institution, the University of Chicago. Eliade and Wach are generally admitted to be the founders of the "Chicago school" that basically defined the study of religions for the second half of the 20th century. Conference on Hermeneutics in History: Mircea Eliade, Joachim Wach, and the Science of Religions , at the University of Chicago Martin Marty Center. Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion ; retrieved July 29, 2007 Upon Wach's death before the lectures were delivered, Eliade was appointed as his successor, becoming, in 1964, the Sewell Avery Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions. Beginning in 1954, with the first edition of his volume on Eternal Return, Eliade also enjoyed commercial success: the book went through several editions under different titles, and sold over 100,000 copies.McGuire, pp. 151–152
In 1966, Mircea Eliade became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also worked as editor-in-chief of Macmillan Publishers' Encyclopedia of Religion, and, in 1968, lectured in religious history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Oişteanu, "Mircea Eliade şi mişcarea hippie" It was also during that period that Mircea Eliade completed his voluminous and influential History of Religious Ideas, which grouped together the overviews of his main original interpretations of religious history. He occasionally traveled out of the United States, attending the Congress for the History of Religions in Marburg (1960), and visiting Sweden and Norway in 1970.
He was slowly rehabilitated at home beginning in the early 1960s, under the rule of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.Frunză, pp. 448–449 In the 1970s, Eliade was approached by the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime in several ways, to have him return. The move was prompted by the officially sanctioned nationalism and Romania's claim to independence from the Eastern Bloc, as both phenomena came to see Eliade's prestige as an asset. An unprecedented event occurred with the interview that was granted by Mircea Eliade to poet Adrian Păunescu, during the latter's 1970 visit to Chicago; Eliade complimented both Păunescu's activism and his support for official tenets, expressing a belief that
the youth of Eastern Europe is clearly superior to that of Western Europe. ... I am convinced that, within ten years, the young revolutionary generation shan't be behaving as does today the noisy minority of New Left. ... Eastern youth have seen the abolition of traditional institutions, have accepted it ... and are not yet content with the structures enforced, but rather seek to improve them.Eliade, 1970, in Paul Cernat, "Îmblânzitorul României Socialiste. De la Bîrca la Chicago şi înapoi" ("The Tamer of Socialist Romania. From Bîrca to Chicago and Back"), part of Paul Cernat, Ion Manolescu, Angelo Mitchievici, Ioan Stanomir, Explorări în comunismul românesc ("Forays into Romanian Communism"), Polirom, Iaşi, 2004, p. 346
Păunescu's visit to Chicago was followed by those of the nationalist official writer Eugen Barbu and by Eliade's friend Constantin Noica (who had since been released from jail). At the time, Eliade contemplated returning to Romania, but was eventually persuaded by fellow Romanian intellectuals in exile (including Radio Free Europe's Virgil Ierunca and Monica Lovinescu) to reject Communist proposals. In 1977, he joined other exiled Romanian intellectuals in signing a telegram protesting the repressive measures newly enforced by the Ceaușescu regime. Writing in 2007, Romanian anthropologist Andrei Oișteanu recounted how, around 1984, the Securitate unsuccessfully attempted to become an agent of influence in Eliade's Chicago circle.Cristian Teodorescu, "Eliade şi Culianu prin ocheanul lui Oişteanu" ("Eliade and Culianu through Oişteanu's Lens"), in Cotidianul, June 14, 2007; retrieved November 7, 2007
During his later years, Eliade's past was progressively exposed publicly, the stress of which probably contributed to the decline of his health. By then, his writing career was hampered by severe arthritis. The last academic honors bestowed upon him were the French Academy's Bordin Prize (1977) and the title of Honorary degree, granted by George Washington University (1985).
Mircea Eliade died at the Bernard Mitchell Hospital in April 1986. Eight days previously, he suffered a stroke while reading Emil Cioran's Exercises of Admiration, and had subsequently lost his speech function. Four months before, a fire had destroyed part of his office at the Meadville Lombard Theological School (an event which he had interpreted as an omen). Eliade's Romanian disciple Ioan Petru Culianu, who recalled the scientific community's reaction to the news, described Eliade's death as "a Paranirvana", thus comparing it to the passing of Gautama Buddha. His body was Cremation in Chicago, and the funeral ceremony was held on University grounds, at the Rockefeller Chapel. It was attended by 1,200 people, and included a public reading of Eliade's text in which he recalled the epiphany of his childhood—the lecture was given by novelist Saul Bellow, Eliade's colleague at the university. His student and the bearer of his legacy, Charles H. Long, co-founder of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, gave the eulogy.Davíd Carrasco, "Codex Charles Long / The Scholar Who Traveled to Many Places to Understand Others," in With This Root About My Person: Charles H. Long and New Directions in the Study of Religion, ed. Jennifer Reid and Davíd Carrasco (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020), 306. His grave is located in Oak Woods Cemetery. "MAE: Repatrierea lui Cioran, Eliade și Brâncuși în România ar diminua semnificativ afluxul de turiști" ("Foreign Affairs Ministry: Repatriation to Romania of Cioran, Eliade and Brâncuși Would Significantly Diminish Tourist Arrivals"), in Adevărul, April 11, 2011; retrieved May 21, 2014
Eliade is known for his attempt to find broad, cross-cultural parallels and unities in religion, particularly in myths. Wendy Doniger, Eliade's colleague from 1978 until his death, has observed that "Eliade argued boldly for universals where he might more safely have argued for widely prevalent patterns."Doniger's foreword to Eliade's Shamanism (Princeton University Press edition, 1972, p. xii) His Treatise on the History of Religions was praised by French philologist Georges Dumézil for its coherence and ability to synthesize diverse and distinct mythologies.Dumézil, "Introducere", in Eliade, Tratat de istorie a religiilor: Introducere ("Religious History Treatise" – Patterns in Comparative Religion), Humanitas, Bucharest, 1992
Robert Ellwood describes Eliade's approach to religion as follows. Eliade approaches religion by imagining an ideally "religious" person, whom he calls homo religiosus in his writings. Eliade's theories basically describe how this homo religiosus would view the world.Ellwood, p. 99 This does not mean that all religious practitioners actually think and act like homo religiosus. Instead, it means that religious behavior "says through its own language" that the world is as homo religiosus would see it, whether or not the real-life participants in religious behavior are aware of it.Ellwood, p. 104 However, Ellwood writes that Eliade "tends to slide over that last qualification", implying that traditional societies actually thought like homo religiosus.
Eliade's understanding of religion centers on his concept of hierophany (manifestation of the Sacred)—a concept that includes, but is not limited to, the older and more restrictive concept of theophany (manifestation of a god).Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, pp. 20–22; Shamanism, p. xiii From the perspective of religious thought, Eliade argues, hierophanies give structure and orientation to the world, establishing a sacred order. The "profane" space of nonreligious experience can only be divided up geometrically: it has no "qualitative differentiation and, hence, no orientation is given by virtue of its inherent structure."Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 22 Thus, profane space gives man no pattern for his behavior. In contrast to profane space, the site of a hierophany has a sacred structure to which religious man conforms himself. A hierophany amounts to a "revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the non-reality of the vast surrounding expanse."Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 21 As an example of "hierotopy" demanding a certain response from man, Eliade gives the story of Moses halting before Yahweh's manifestation as a burning bush ( Exodus 3:5) and taking off his shoes.Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 20
Many traditional societies believe that the power of a thing lies in its origin.Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 15 If origin is equivalent to power, then "it is the first manifestation of a thing that is significant and valid"Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 34 (a thing's reality and value therefore lies only in its first appearance).
According to Eliade's theory, only the Sacred has value, only a thing's first appearance has value and, therefore, only the Sacred's first appearance has value. Myth describes the Sacred's first appearance; therefore, the mythical age is sacred time, the only time of value: "primitive man was interested only in the beginnings ... to him it mattered little what had happened to himself, or to others like him, in more or less distant times."Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, p. 44 Eliade postulated this as the reason for the "nostalgia for origins" that appears in many religions, the desire to return to a primordial Paradise.
Thus, argues Eliade, religious behavior does not only commemorate, but also participates in, sacred events:
In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythical hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.
Eliade called this concept the "eternal return" (distinguished from the Eternal return). Wendy Doniger noted that Eliade's theory of the eternal return "has become a truism in the study of religions."
Eliade attributes the well-known "cyclic" vision of time in ancient thought to belief in the eternal return. For instance, the New Year ceremonies among the , the Ancient Egypt, and other Near Eastern peoples re-enacted their Cosmogony myths. Therefore, by the logic of the eternal return, each New Year ceremony was the beginning of the world for these peoples. According to Eliade, these peoples felt a need to return to the Beginning at regular intervals, turning time into a circle.Eliade, Myth and Reality, pp. 47–49
Eliade argues that yearning to remain in the mythical age causes a "terror of history": traditional man desires to escape the linear succession of events (which, Eliade indicated, he viewed as empty of any inherent value or sacrality). Eliade suggests that the abandonment of mythical thought and the full acceptance of linear, historical time, with its "terror", is one of the reasons for modern man's anxieties.Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, Chapter 4; Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, pp. 231–245 Traditional societies escape this anxiety to an extent, as they refuse to completely acknowledge historical time. But the return to the sources involved an apocalyptic experience. Doina Ruști, analyzing the story The Old Man and The Bureaucrats ( Pe strada Mântuleasa), says The memories create the chaos, because "the myth makes irruption in a world in tormented birth, without memory, and transform all in a labyrinth".
they express on the one hand the diametrical opposition of two divine figures sprung from one and the same principle and destined, in many versions, to be reconciled at some illud tempus of eschatology, and on the other, the coincidentia oppositorum in the very nature of the divinity, which shows itself, by turns or even simultaneously, benevolent and terrible, creative and destructive, solar and serpentine, and so on (in other words, actual and potential).Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols, p. 449The reconciling opposites "involves imitating gestures or situations from before the establishment of history, by recovering the initial state, by regenerating time and the world, but also by mystical initiation."Doina Ruști, Dictionary of symbols from Eliade's work, Corint, 1997 Eliade argues that "Yahweh is both kind and wrathful; the God of the Christian mystics and theologians is terrible and gentle at once." He also thought that the Indian and Chinese mystic tried to attain "a state of perfect indifference and neutrality" that resulted in a coincidence of opposites in which "pleasure and pain, desire and repulsion, cold and heat ... are expunged from his awareness".
According to Eliade, the coincidentia oppositorums appeal lies in "man's deep dissatisfaction with his actual situation, with what is called the human condition". In many mythologies, the end of the mythical age involves a "fall", a fundamental "Ontology change in the structure of the World".Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols, p. 440 Because the coincidentia oppositorum is a contradiction, it represents a denial of the world's current logical structure, a reversal of the "fall".
Also, traditional man's dissatisfaction with the post-mythical age expresses itself as a feeling of being "torn and separate".Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols, p. 439 In many mythologies, the lost mythical age was a Paradise, "a paradoxical state in which the contraries exist side by side without conflict, and the multiplications form aspects of a mysterious Unity". The coincidentia oppositorum expresses a wish to recover the lost unity of the mythical Paradise, for it presents a reconciliation of opposites and the unification of diversity:
On the level of pre-systematic thought, the mystery of totality embodies man's endeavor to reach a perspective in which the contraries are abolished, the Spirit of Evil reveals itself as a stimulant of Good, and Demons appear as the night aspect of the Gods.
Because they contain rituals, Judaism and Christianity necessarily—Eliade argues—retain a sense of cyclic time:
by the very fact that it is a religion, Christianity had to keep at least one mythical aspect—Liturgy Time, that is, the periodic rediscovery of the illud tempus of the beginnings and an imitation of the Christ as exemplary pattern.Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 169
However, Judaism and Christianity do not see time as a circle endlessly turning on itself; nor do they see such a cycle as desirable, as a way to participate in the Sacred. Instead, these religions embrace the concept of linear history progressing toward the Messianic Age or the Last Judgment, thus initiating the idea of "progress" (humans are to work for a Paradise in the future).Eliade, Myth and Reality, pp. 64–65, 169 However, Eliade's understanding of Judaeo-Christian eschatology can also be understood as cyclical in that the "end of time" is a return to God: "The final catastrophe will put an end to history, hence will restore man to eternity and beatitude."Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 124
The pre- Persian Empire religion of Zoroastrianism, which made a notable "contribution to the religious formation of the West",Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 1, p. 302 also has a linear sense of time; although, according to Eliade, the Hebrews' linear sense of time predates their being influenced by Zoroastrianism. In fact, Eliade identifies the Hebrews, not the Zoroastrians, as the first culture to truly "valorize" historical time, the first to see all major historical events as episodes in a continuous divine revelation.Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 1, p. 356 However, Eliade argues, Judaism elaborated its mythology of linear time by adding elements borrowed from Zoroastrianism—including ethical dualism, a savior figure, the future resurrection of the body, and the idea of cosmic progress toward "the final triumph of Good."
The Indian religions of the East generally retain a cyclic view of time—for instance, the Hinduism doctrine of kalpas. According to Eliade, most religions that accept the cyclic view of time also embrace it: they see it as a way to return to the sacred time. However, in Buddhism, Jainism, and some forms of Hinduism, the Sacred lies outside the flux of the material world (called maya, or "illusion"), and one can only reach it by escaping from the cycles of time.Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 109 Because the Sacred lies outside cyclic time, which conditions humans, people can only reach the Sacred by escaping the human condition. According to Eliade, Yoga techniques aim at escaping the limitations of the body, allowing the soul ( atman) to rise above maya and reach the Sacred ( nirvana, moksha). Imagery of "freedom", and of death to one's old body and rebirth with a new body, occur frequently in Yogic texts, representing escape from the bondage of the temporal human condition.Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols, Volume 2, pp. 312–314 Eliade discusses these themes in detail in Yoga: Immortality and Freedom.
In the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation is established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.
Because profane space gives man no orientation for his life, the Sacred must manifest itself in a hierophany, thereby establishing a sacred site around which man can orient himself. The site of a hierophany establishes a "fixed point, a center". This Center abolishes the "homogeneity and relativity of profane space", for it becomes "the central axis for all future orientation".
A manifestation of the Sacred in profane space is, by definition, an example of something breaking through from one plane of existence to another. Therefore, the initial hierophany that establishes the Center must be a point at which there is contact between different planes—this, Eliade argues, explains the frequent mythical imagery of a World Tree or Pillar joining Heaven, Earth, and the underworld.Eliade, Shamanism, pp. 259–260
Eliade noted that, when traditional societies found a new territory, they often perform consecrating rituals that reenact the hierophany that established the center and founded the world.Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, pp. 32–36 In addition, the designs of traditional buildings, especially temples, usually imitate the mythical image of the axis mundi joining the different cosmic levels. For instance, the were built to resemble cosmic mountains passing through the heavenly spheres, and the rock of the Temple in Jerusalem was supposed to reach deep into the tehom, or primordial waters.Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, pp. 40, 42
According to the logic of the eternal return, the site of each such symbolic Center will actually be the Center of the World:
It may be said, in general, that the majority of the sacred and ritual trees that we meet with in the history of religions are only replicas, imperfect copies of this exemplary archetype, the Cosmic Tree. Thus, all these sacred trees are thought of as situated at the Centre of the World, and all the ritual trees or posts ... are, as it were, magically projected into the Centre of the World.Eliade, Images and Symbols, p. 44According to Eliade's interpretation, religious man apparently feels the need to live not only near, but at, the mythical Center as much as possible, given that the center is the point of communication with the Sacred.Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 43
Thus, Eliade argues, many traditional societies share common outlines in their mythical geographies. In the middle of the known world is the sacred Center, "a place that is sacred above all";Eliade, Images and Symbols, p. 39 this Center anchors the established order. Around the sacred Center lies the known world, the realm of established order; and beyond the known world is a chaotic and dangerous realm, "peopled by ghosts, demons, and 'foreigners' (who are identified demons and the souls of the dead)".Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 29 According to Eliade, traditional societies place their known world at the Center because (from their perspective) their known world is the realm that obeys a recognizable order, and it therefore must be the realm in which the Sacred manifests itself; the regions beyond the known world, which seem strange and foreign, must lie far from the center, outside the order established by the Sacred.Eliade, Images and Symbols, pp. 39–40; Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 30
However, Eliade disagrees with Wilhelm Schmidt, who thought the earliest form of religion was a strict monotheism. Eliade dismisses this theory of "primordial monotheism" ( Urmonotheismus) as "rigid" and unworkable.Eliade, "The Quest for the 'Origins' of Religion", p. 162; see also Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, pp. 54–58 "At most," he writes, "this schema Schmidt's renders an account of human religious evolution since the Paleolithic era".Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, p. 176 If an Urmonotheismus did exist, Eliade adds, it probably differed in many ways from the conceptions of God in many modern monotheistic faiths: for instance, the primordial High God could manifest himself as an animal without losing his status as a celestial Supreme Being.Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, pp. 176–177
According to Eliade, heavenly Supreme Beings are actually less common in more advanced cultures.Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, pp. 54–55 Eliade speculates that the discovery of agriculture brought a host of Fertility god into the forefront, causing the celestial Supreme Being to fade away and eventually vanish from many ancient religions.Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, p. 138 Even in primitive hunter-gatherer societies, the High God is a vague, distant figure, dwelling high above the world.See Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, pp. 54–56 Often he has no cult and receives prayer only as a last resort, when all else has failed.Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, pp. 134–136; The Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 97 Eliade calls the distant High God a deus otiosus ("idle god").Eliade, Myth and Reality, pp. 93–94
In belief systems that involve a deus otiosus, the distant High God is believed to have been closer to humans during the mythical age. After finishing his works of creation, the High God "forsook the earth and withdrew into the highest heaven".Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, p. 134 This is an example of the Sacred's distance from "profane" life, life lived after the mythical age: by escaping from the profane condition through religious behavior, figures such as the shaman return to the conditions of the mythical age, which include nearness to the High God ("by his flight or ascension, the shaman ... meets the God of Heaven face to face and speaks directly to him, as man sometimes did in illo tempore").Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, p. 66 The shamanistic behaviors surrounding the High God are a particularly clear example of the eternal return.
In Shamanism, Eliade argues for a restrictive use of the word shaman: it should not apply to just any magician or medicine man, as that would make the term redundant; at the same time, he argues against restricting the term to the practitioners of the sacred of Siberia and Central Asia (it is from one of the titles for this function, namely, šamán, considered by Eliade to be of Tungusic origin, that the term itself was introduced into Western languages).Eliade, Shamanism, pp. 3–4 Eliade defines a shaman as follows:
he is believed to cure, like all doctors, and to perform miracles of the fakir type, like all magicians ... But beyond this, he is a psychopomp, and he may also be a priest, Mysticism, and poet.Eliade, Shamanism, p. 4
If we define shamanism this way, Eliade claims, we find that the term covers a collection of phenomena that share a common and unique "structure" and "history." (When thus defined, shamanism tends to occur in its purest forms in Hunter-gatherer and Herding societies like those of Siberia and Central Asia, which revere a celestial High God "on the way to becoming a deus otiosus."Eliade, Shamanism, pp. 6, 8–9 Eliade takes the shamanism of those regions as his most representative example.)
In his examinations of shamanism, Eliade emphasizes the shaman's attribute of regaining man's condition before the "Fall" out of sacred time: "The most representative mystical experience of the archaic societies, that of shamanism, betrays the Nostalgia for Paradise, the desire to recover the state of freedom and beatitude before 'the Fall'." This concern—which, by itself, is the concern of almost all religious behavior, according to Eliade—manifests itself in specific ways in shamanism.
First, the shaman dies so that he can rise above human nature on a quite literal level. After he has been dismembered by the initiatory spirits, they often replace his old organs with new, magical ones (the shaman dies to his profane self so that he can rise again as a new, sanctified, being).Eliade, Shamanism, p. 43 Second, by being reduced to his bones, the shaman experiences rebirth on a more symbolic level: in many hunting and herding societies, the bone represents the source of life, so reduction to a skeleton "is equivalent to re-entering the womb of this primordial life, that is, to a complete renewal, a mystical rebirth".Eliade, Shamanism, p. 63 Eliade considers this return to the source of life essentially equivalent to the eternal return.Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, p. 84
Third, the shamanistic phenomenon of repeated death and resurrection also represents a transfiguration in other ways. The shaman dies not once but many times: having died during initiation and risen again with new powers, the shaman can send his spirit out of his body on errands; thus, his whole career consists of repeated deaths and resurrections. The shaman's new ability to die and return to life shows that he is no longer bound by the laws of profane time, particularly the law of death: "the ability to 'die' and come to life again ... denotes that the has surpassed the human condition."Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, p. 102
Having risen above the human condition, the shaman is not bound by the flow of history. Therefore, he enjoys the conditions of the mythical age. In many myths, humans can speak with animals; and, after their initiations, many shamans claim to be able to communicate with animals. According to Eliade, this is one manifestation of the shaman's return to "the illud tempus described to us by the paradisiac myths."Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, p. 63
The shaman can descend to the underworld or ascend to heaven, often by climbing the World Tree, the cosmic pillar, the sacred ladder, or some other form of the axis mundi.Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, p. 64 Often, the shaman will ascend to heaven to speak with the High God. Because the gods (particularly the High God, according to Eliade's deus otiosus concept) were closer to humans during the mythical age, the shaman's easy communication with the High God represents an abolition of history and a return to the mythical age.
Because of his ability to communicate with the gods and descend to the land of the dead, the shaman frequently functions as a psychopomp and a medicine man.
One of Eliade's noted contributions in this respect was the 1932 Soliloquii ('Soliloquies'), which explored Existentialism. George Călinescu who saw in it "an echo of Nae Ionescu's lectures",Călinescu, p. 954 traced a parallel with the essays of another of Ionescu's disciples, Emil Cioran, while noting that Cioran's were "of a more exulted tone and written in the Aphorism form of Kierkegaard."Călinescu, p. 955 Călinescu recorded Eliade's rejection of objectivity, citing the author's stated indifference towards any "naïveté" or "contradictions" that the reader could possibly reproach him, as well as his dismissive thoughts of "theoretical data" and mainstream philosophy in general (Eliade saw the latter as "inert, infertile and pathogenic"). Eliade thus argued, "a sincere brain is unassailable, for it denies itself to any relationship with outside truths."Eliade, in Călinescu, p. 954
The young writer was however careful to clarify that the existence he took into consideration was not the life of "instincts and personal Idiosyncrasy", which he believed determined the lives of many humans, but that of a distinct set comprising "personalities". He described "personalities" as characterized by both "purpose" and "a much more complicated and dangerous alchemy." This differentiation, George Călinescu believed, echoed Ionescu's metaphor of man, seen as "the only animal who can fail at living", and the duck, who "shall remain a duck no matter what it does".Ionescu, in Călinescu, pp. 953, 954 According to Eliade, the purpose of personalities is infinity: "consciously and gloriously bringing existence to waste, into as many skies as possible, continuously fulfilling and polishing oneself, seeking ascent and not circumference."
In Eliade's view, two roads await man in this process. One is glory, determined by either work or procreation, and the other the asceticism of religion or magic—both, Călinescu believed, were aimed at reaching the absolute, even in those cases where Eliade described the latter as an "abyssal experience" into which man may take the plunge. The critic pointed out that the addition of "a magical solution" to the options taken into consideration seemed to be Eliade's own original contributions to his mentor's philosophy, and proposed that it may have owed inspiration to Julius Evola and his disciples. He also recorded that Eliade applied this concept to human creation, and specifically to artistic creation, citing him describing the latter as "a magical joy, the victorious break of the iron circle" (a reflection of imitatio dei, having salvation for its ultimate goal).
In studying religion, Eliade rejects certain "Reductionism" approaches.Douglas Allen, Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade, Routledge, London, 2002, pp. 45–46; Adrian Marino, L'Herméneutique de Mircea Eliade, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1981, p. 60. Eliade thinks a religious phenomenon cannot be reduced to a product of culture and history. He insists that, although religion involves "the social man, the economic man, and so forth", nonetheless "all these conditioning factors together do not, of themselves, add up to the life of the spirit."Eliade, Images and Symbols, p. 32.
Using this anti-reductionist position, Eliade argues against those who accuse him of overgeneralizing, of looking for universals at the expense of . Eliade admits that every religious phenomenon is shaped by the particular culture and history that produced it:
When the Son of God incarnated and became the Christ, he had to speak Aramaic language; he could only conduct himself as a Hebrew of his times ... His religious message, however universal it might be, was conditioned by the past and present history of the Hebrew people. If the Son of God had been born in India, his spoken language would have had to conform itself to the structure of the Indian languages.
However, Eliade argues against those he calls "Historicism or Existentialism philosophers" who do not recognize "man in general" behind particular men produced by particular situations (Eliade cites Immanuel Kant as the likely forerunner of this kind of "historicism".) He adds that human consciousness transcends (is not reducible to) its historical and cultural conditioning,Eliade, Images and Symbols, p. 33. and even suggests the possibility of a "transconscious".Eliade, Images and Symbols, p. 17. By this, Eliade does not necessarily mean anything supernatural or mystical: within the "transconscious", he places religious motifs, symbols, images, and nostalgias that are supposedly universal and whose causes therefore cannot be reduced to historical and cultural conditioning.Eliade, Images and Symbols, pp. 16–17.
Eliade describes this view of reality as a fundamental part of "primitive ontology" (the study of "existence" or "reality"). Here he sees a similarity with the philosophy of Plato, who believed that physical phenomena are pale and transient imitations of eternal models or "Forms" ( see Theory of forms). He argued:
Plato could be regarded as the outstanding philosopher of 'primitive mentality,' that is, as the thinker who succeeded in giving philosophic currency and validity to the modes of life and behavior of archaic humanity.
Eliade thinks the Platonic realism theory of forms is "primitive ontology" persisting in Greek philosophy. He claims that Platonism is the "most fully elaborated" version of this primitive ontology.Eliade, in Dadosky, p. 105
In The Structure of Religious Knowing: Encountering the Sacred in Eliade and Lonergan, John Daniel Dadosky argues that, by making this statement, Eliade was acknowledging "indebtedness to Greek philosophy in general, and to Plato's theory of forms specifically, for his own theory of archetypes and repetition".Dadosky, p. 105 However, Dadosky also states that "one should be cautious when trying to assess Eliade's indebtedness to Plato".Dadosky, p. 106 Dadosky quotes Robert Segal, a professor of religion, who draws a distinction between Platonism and Eliade's "primitive ontology": for Eliade, the ideal models are patterns that a person or object may or may not imitate; for Plato, there is a Form for everything, and everything imitates a Form by the very fact that it exists.Segal, in Dadosky, pp. 105–106
From the standpoint of religious thought, the world has an objective purpose established by mythical events, to which man should conform himself: "Myth teaches religious the primordial 'stories' that have constituted him existentially."Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 12; see also Eliade, Myth and Reality, pp. 20, 145. From the standpoint of Secularism thought, any purpose must be invented and imposed on the world by man. Because of this new "existential situation", Eliade argues, the Sacred becomes the primary obstacle to nonreligious man's "freedom". In viewing himself as the proper maker of history, nonreligious man resists all notions of an externally (for instance, divinely) imposed order or model he must obey: modern man " makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world. ... He will not truly be free until he has killed the last god."
Eliade sees traces of religious thought even in secular academia. He thinks modern scientists are motivated by the religious desire to return to the sacred time of origins:
One could say that the anxious search for the origins of Life and Mind; the fascination in the 'mysteries of Nature'; the urge to penetrate and decipher the inner structure of Matter—all these longings and drives denote a sort of nostalgia for the primordial, for the original universal matrix. Matter, Substance, represents the absolute origin, the beginning of all things.Eliade, "The Quest for the 'Origins' of Religion", p. 158Eliade believes the rise of materialism in the 19th century forced the religious nostalgia for "origins" to express itself in science. He mentions his own field of History of Religions as one of the fields that was obsessed with origins during the 19th century:
The new discipline of History of Religions developed rapidly in this cultural context. And, of course, it followed a like pattern: the Positivism approach to the facts and the search for origins, for the very beginning of religion.
All Western historiography was during that time obsessed with the quest of origins. ... This search for the origins of human institutions and cultural creations prolongs and completes the naturalist's quest for the origin of species, the biologist's dream of grasping the origin of life, the geologist's and the astronomer's endeavor to understand the origin of the Earth and the Universe. From a psychological point of view, one can decipher here the same nostalgia for the 'primordial' and the 'original'.Eliade, "The Quest for the 'Origins' of Religion", p. 160
In some of his writings, Eliade describes modern political ideologies as secularized mythology. According to Eliade, Marxism "takes up and carries on one of the great eschatological myths of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean world, namely: the redemptive part to be played by the Just (the 'elect', the 'anointed', the 'innocent', the 'missioners', in our own days the proletariat), whose sufferings are invoked to change the ontological status of the world."Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries 1960, pp. 25–26, in Ellwood, pp. 91–92 Eliade sees the widespread myth of the Golden Age, "which, according to a number of traditions, lies at the beginning and the end of History", as the "precedent" for Karl Marx's vision of a classless society.Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries 1960, pp. 25–26, in Ellwood, p. 92 Finally, he sees Marx's belief in the final triumph of the good (the proletariat) over the evil (the bourgeoisie) as "a truly messianic Judaeo-Christian ideology". Despite Marx's hostility toward religion, Eliade implies, his ideology works within a conceptual framework inherited from religious mythology.
Likewise, Eliade notes that Nazism involved a Nazi occultism based on ancient Germanic religion. He suggests that the differences between the Nazis' pseudo-Germanic mythology and Marx's pseudo-Judaeo-Christian mythology explain their differing success:
In comparison with the vigorous optimism of the communist myth, the mythology propagated by the national socialists seems particularly inept; and this is not only because of the limitations of the racial myth (how could one imagine that the rest of Europe would voluntarily accept submission to the master-race?), but above all because of the fundamental pessimism of the Germanic mythology. ... For the eschaton prophesied and expected by the ancient Germans was the ragnarok—that is, a catastrophic end of the world.
This "terror of history" becomes especially acute when violent and threatening historical events confront modern man—the mere fact that a terrible event has happened, that it is part of history, is of little comfort to those who suffer from it. Eliade asks rhetorically how modern man can "tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history—from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings—if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning".Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 151 He indicates that, if repetitions of mythical events provided sacred value and meaning for history in the eyes of ancient man, modern man has denied the Sacred and must therefore invent value and purpose on his own. Without the Sacred to confer an absolute, objective value upon historical events, modern man is left with "a Relativism or Nihilism view of history" and a resulting "spiritual aridity".Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 152 In chapter 4 ("The Terror of History") of The Myth of the Eternal Return and chapter 9 ("Religious Symbolism and the Modern Man's Anxiety") of Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, Eliade argues at length that the rejection of religious thought is a primary cause of modern man's anxieties.
Eliade notes that a Western or Continental philosopher might feel suspicious toward this Hindu view of history:
One can easily guess what a European historical and Existentialism philosopher might reply ... You ask me, he would say, to 'die to History'; but man is not, and he cannot be anything else but History, for his very essence is temporality. You are asking me, then, to give up my authentic existence and to take refuge in an abstraction, in pure Being, in the atman: I am to sacrifice my dignity as a creator of History to live an a-historic, inauthentic existence, empty of all human content. Well, I prefer to put up with my anxiety: at least, it cannot deprive me of a certain heroic grandeur, that of becoming conscious of, and accepting, the human condition.Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, p. 241
However, Eliade argues that the Hindu approach to history does not necessarily lead to a rejection of history. On the contrary, in Hinduism historical human existence is not the "absurdity" that many Continental philosophers see it as. According to Hinduism, history is a divine creation, and one may live contentedly within it as long as one maintains a certain degree of detachment from it: "One is devoured by Time, by History, not because one lives in them, but because one thinks them real and, in consequence, one forgets or undervalues eternity."Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, p. 242 Furthermore, Eliade argues that Westerners can learn from non-Western cultures to see something besides absurdity in suffering and death. Traditional cultures see suffering and death as a rite of passage. In fact, their initiation rituals often involve a symbolic death and resurrection, or symbolic ordeals followed by relief. Thus, Eliade argues, modern man can learn to see his historical ordeals, even death, as necessary initiations into the next stage of one's existence.Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, p. 243
Eliade even suggests that traditional thought offers relief from the vague anxiety caused by "our obscure presentiment of the end of the world, or more exactly of the end of our world, our own civilization". Many traditional cultures have myths about the end of their world or civilization; however, these myths do not succeed "in paralysing either Life or Culture". These traditional cultures emphasize cyclic time and, therefore, the inevitable rise of a new world or civilization on the ruins of the old. Thus, they feel comforted even in contemplating the end times.Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, pp. 243–244
Eliade argues that a Western spiritual rebirth can happen within the framework of Western spiritual traditions.Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, p. 244 However, he says, to start this rebirth, Westerners may need to be stimulated by ideas from non-Western cultures. In his Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, Eliade claims that a "genuine encounter" between cultures "might well constitute the point of departure for a new humanism, upon a world scale".Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, p. 245
From Eliade's perspective, Christianity's "trans-historical message" may be the most important help that modern man could have in confronting the terror of history. In his book Mito ("Myth"), Italian researcher Furio Jesi argues that Eliade denies man the position of a true protagonist in history: for Eliade, true human experience lies not in intellectually "making history", but in man's experiences of joy and grief. Thus, from Eliade's perspective, the Christ story becomes the perfect myth for modern man.Jesi, pp. 66–67 In Christianity, God willingly entered historical time by being born as Christ, and accepted the suffering that followed. By identifying with Christ, modern man can learn to confront painful historical events. Ultimately, according to Jesi, Eliade sees Christianity as the only religion that can save man from the "Terror of history".Jesi, pp. 66–70
In Eliade's view, traditional man sees time as an endless repetition of mythical archetypes. In contrast, modern man has abandoned mythical archetypes and entered linear, historical time—in this context, unlike many other religions, Christianity attributes value to historical time. Thus, Eliade concludes, "Christianity incontestably proves to be the religion of 'fallen man, of modern man who has lost "the paradise of archetypes and repetition".Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 162
Whether in Augustus or modern Europe, democracy all too easily gave way to totalitarianism, technology was as readily used for battle as for comfort, and immense wealth lay alongside abysmal poverty. ... Gnostics past and present sought answers not in the course of outward human events, but in knowledge of the world's beginning, of what lies above and beyond the world, and of the secret places of the human soul. To all this the mythologists spoke, and they acquired large and loyal followings.Ellwood, p. 2
According to Ellwood, the mythologists believed in gnosticism's basic doctrines (even if in a secularized form). Ellwood also believes that Romanticism, which stimulated the modern study of mythology,Ellwood, p. 19 strongly influenced the mythologists. Because Romantics stress that emotion and imagination have the same dignity as reason, Ellwood argues, they tend to think political truth "is known less by rational considerations than by its capacity to fire the passions" and, therefore, that political truth is "very apt to be found ... in the distant past".
As modern gnostics, Ellwood argues, the three mythologists felt alienated from the surrounding modern world. As scholars, they knew of primordial societies that had operated differently from modern ones. And as people influenced by Romanticism, they saw myths as a saving gnosis that offered "avenues of eternal return to simpler primordial ages when the values that rule the world were forged".Ellwood, p. 1 In addition, Ellwood identifies Eliade's personal sense of nostalgia as a source for his interest in, or even his theories about, traditional societies.Ellwood, pp. 99, 117 He cites Eliade himself claiming to desire an "eternal return" like that by which traditional man returns to the mythical paradise: "My essential preoccupation is precisely the means of escaping History, of saving myself through symbol, myth, rite, archetypes".Eliade, quoted by Virgil Ierunca, The Literary Work of Mircea Eliade, in Ellwood, p. 117
In Ellwood's view, Eliade's nostalgia was only enhanced by his exile from Romania: "In later years Eliade felt about his own Romanian past as did primal folk about mythic time. He was drawn back to it, yet he knew he could not live there, and that all was not well with it."Ellwood, p. 101 He suggests that this nostalgia, along with Eliade's sense that "exile is among the profoundest metaphors for all human life",Ellwood, p. 97 influenced Eliade's theories. Ellwood sees evidence of this in Eliade's concept of the "Terror of history" from which modern man is no longer shielded.Ellwood, p. 102 In this concept, Ellwood sees an "element of nostalgia" for earlier times "when the sacred was strong and the terror of history had barely raised its head".Ellwood, p. 103
The classicist Geoffrey Kirk criticizes Eliade's insistence that Australian Aborigines and ancient had concepts of "being", "non-being", "real", and "becoming", although they lacked words for them. Kirk also believes that Eliade overextends his theories: for example, Eliade claims that the modern myth of the "noble savage" results from the religious tendency to idealize the primordial, mythical age.Kirk, Myth..., footnote, p. 255 According to Kirk, "such extravagances, together with a marked repetitiousness, have made Eliade unpopular with many anthropologists and sociologists". In Kirk's view, Eliade derived his theory of eternal return from the functions of Australian Aboriginal mythology and then proceeded to apply the theory to other mythologies to which it did not apply. For example, Kirk argues that the eternal return does not accurately describe the functions of Native American or Greek mythology.Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths, pp. 64–66 Kirk concludes, "Eliade's idea is a valuable perception about certain myths, not a guide to the proper understanding of all of them".Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths, p. 66
Even Wendy Doniger, Eliade's successor at the University of Chicago, claims (in an introduction to Eliade's own Shamanism) that the eternal return does not apply to all myths and rituals, although it may apply to many of them. However, although Doniger agrees that Eliade made overgeneralizations, she notes that his willingness to "argue boldly for universals" allowed him to see patterns "that spanned the entire globe and the whole of human history".Wendy Doniger, "Foreword to the 2004 Edition", Eliade, Shamanism, p. xii Whether they were true or not, she argues, Eliade's theories are still useful "as starting points for the comparative study of religion". She also argues that Eliade's theories have been able to accommodate "new data to which Eliade did not have access".
In contrast, Professor Kees W. Bolle of the University of California, Los Angeles argues that "Professor Eliade's approach, in all his works, is empirical":Kees W. Bolle, The Freedom of Man in Myth, Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, 1968, p. 14. Bolle sets Eliade apart for what he sees as Eliade's particularly close "attention to the various particular motifs" of different myths. French researcher Daniel Dubuisson places doubt on Eliade's scholarship and its scientific character, citing the Romanian academic's alleged refusal to accept the treatment of religions in their historical and cultural context, and proposing that Eliade's notion of hierophany refers to the actual existence of a supernatural level.
Ronald Inden, a historian of India and University of Chicago professor, criticized Mircea Eliade, alongside other intellectual figures (Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell among them), for encouraging a "romantic view" of Hinduism.Inden, in Morny Joy, "Irigaray's Eastern Expedition", Chapter 4 of Morny Joy, Kathleen O'Grady, Judith L. Poxon, Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives, Routledge, London, 2003, p. 63. He argued that their approach to the subject relied mainly on an Orientalism approach, and made Hinduism seem like "a private realm of the imagination and the religious which modern, Western man lacks but needs."
A piece authored in 1930 saw Eliade defining Julius Evola as a great thinker and offering praise to the controversial intellectuals Oswald Spengler, Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the Nazism ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. Evola, who continued to defend the core principles of mystical fascism, once protested to Eliade about the latter's failure to cite him and Guénon. Eliade replied that his works were written for a contemporary public, and not to initiates of esoteric circles.Eliade, Fragments d'un Journal 11, 1970–1978, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1981, p. 194 After the 1960s, he, together with Evola, Louis Rougier, and other intellectuals, offered support to Alain de Benoist's controversial Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne, part of the Nouvelle Droite intellectual trend.Griffin, p. 173; Douglas R. Holmes, Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000, p. 78
Notably, Eliade was also preoccupied with the cult of Thracian deity Zalmoxis and its supposed monotheism.Lucian Boia, Istorie şi mit în conştiinţa românească, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1997 (tr. History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness, Central European University Press, Budapest, 2001), p. 152Eliade, "Zalmoxis, The Vanishing God", in Slavic Review, Vol. 33, No. 4 (December 1974), pp. 807–809 This, like his conclusion that Romanization had been superficial inside Roman Dacia, was a view celebrated by contemporary partisans of Protochronism nationalism. According to historian Sorin Antohi, Eliade may have actually encouraged protochronists such as Edgar Papu to carry out research which resulted in the claim that medieval Romanians had anticipated the Renaissance.Antohi, preface to Liiceanu, p. xx
In his study of Eliade, Jung, and Campbell, Ellwood also discusses the connection between academic theories and controversial political involvements, noting that all three mythologists have been accused of reactionary political positions. Ellwood notes the obvious parallel between the conservatism of myth, which speaks of a primordial golden age, and the conservatism of far right politics.Ellwood, pp. xiii–xiv However, Ellwood argues that the explanation is more complex than that. Wherever their political sympathies may have sometimes been, he claims, the three mythologists were often "apolitical if not antipolitical, scorning any this-worldly salvation".Ellwood, p. 13 Moreover, the connection between mythology and politics differs for each of the mythologists in question: in Eliade's case, Ellwood believes, a strong sense of nostalgia ("for childhood, for historical times past, for cosmic religion, for paradise"), influenced not only the scholar's academic interests, but also his political views.
Because Eliade stayed out of politics during his later life, Ellwood tries to extract an implicit political philosophy from Eliade's scholarly works. Ellwood argues that the later Eliade's nostalgia for ancient traditions did not make him a political reactionary, even a quiet one. He concludes that the later Eliade was, in fact, a "radical Modernism".Ellwood, p. 119 According to Ellwood,
Those who see Eliade's fascination with the primordial as merely reactionary in the ordinary political or religious sense of the word do not understand the mature Eliade in a sufficiently radical way. ... Tradition was not for him exactly Edmund Burke 'prescription' or sacred trust to be kept alive generation after generation, for Eliade was fully aware that tradition, like men and nations, lives only by changing and even occultation. The tack is not to try fruitlessly to keep it unchanging, but to discover where it is hiding.
According to Eliade, religious elements survive in secular culture, but in new, "camouflaged" forms.Ellwood, p. 118 Thus, Ellwood believes that the later Eliade probably thought modern man should preserve elements of the past, but should not try to restore their original form through reactionary politics.Ellwood, pp. 119–120 He suspects that Eliade would have favored "a minimal rather than a maximalist state" that would allow personal spiritual transformation without enforcing it.Ellwood, p. 120
Many scholars have accused Eliade of "essentialism", a type of overgeneralization in which one incorrectly attributes a common "essence" to a whole group—in this case, all "religious" or "traditional" societies. Furthermore, some see a connection between Eliade's essentialism with regard to religion and fascist essentialism with regard to races and nations.Ellwood, p. 111 To Ellwood, this connection "seems rather tortured, in the end amounting to little more than an ad hominem argument which attempts to tar Eliade's entire scholarly work with the ill-repute all decent people feel for Sturmabteilung and the Iron Guard". However, Ellwood admits that common tendencies in "mythological thinking" may have caused Eliade, as well as Jung and Campbell, to view certain groups in an "essentialist" way, and that this may explain their purported antisemitism: "A tendency to think in generic terms of peoples, races, religions, or parties, which as we shall see is undoubtedly the profoundest flaw in mythological thinking, including that of such modern mythologists as our three, can connect with nascent anti-Semitism, or the connection can be the other way."Ellwood, p. x
Investigating the works' main characteristics, George Călinescu stressed that Eliade owed much of his style to the direct influence of French author André Gide, concluding that, alongside Camil Petrescu and a few others, Eliade was among Gide's leading disciples in Romanian literature. He commented that, like Gide, Eliade believed that the artist "does not take a stand, but experiences good and evil while setting himself free from both, maintaining an intact curiosity." A specific aspect of this focus on experience is sexual experimentation—Călinescu notes that Eliade's fiction works tend to depict a male figure "possessing all practicable women in a family".Călinescu, p. 959 He also considered that, as a rule, Eliade depicts woman as "a basic means for a sexual experience and repudiated with harsh egotism."
For Călinescu, such a perspective on life culminated in "banality", leaving authors gripped by the "cult of the self" and "a contempt for literature". Polemically, Călinescu proposed that Mircea Eliade's supposed focus on "aggressive youth" served to instill his Interwar period Romanian writers with the idea that they had a common destiny as a generation apart. He also commented that, when set in Romania, Mircea Eliade's stories lacked the "perception of immediate reality", and, analyzing the non-traditional names the writer tended to ascribe to his Romanian characters, that they did not depict "specificity".Călinescu, p. 958 Additionally, in Călinescu's view, Eliade's stories were often "Sensationalism compositions of the illustrated magazine kind."Călinescu, p. 960 Mircea Eliade's assessment of his own pre-1940 literary contributions oscillated between expressions of pride and the bitter verdict that they were written for "an audience of little ladies and high school students".
A secondary but unifying feature present in most of Eliade's stories is their setting, a magical and part-fictional Bucharest. In part, they also serve to illustrate or allude to Eliade's own research in the field of religion, as well as to the concepts he introduced. Thus, commentators such as Matei Călinescu and Carmen Mușat have also argued that a main characteristic of Eliade's fantasy prose is a substitution between the supernatural and the mundane: in this interpretation, Eliade turns the daily world into an incomprehensible place, while the intrusive supernatural aspect promises to offer the sense of life.Carmen Muşat, "Despre fantastica alcătuire a realului" ("On the Fantastic Shape of Reality") , in Observator Cultural, Nr. 131, August–September 2002; retrieved January 17, 2008 The notion was in turn linked to Eliade's own thoughts on transcendence, and in particular his idea that, once "camouflaged" in life or history, become "unrecognizable".
Allan himself stands alongside Eliade's male characters, whose focus is on action, sensation and experience—his chaste contacts with Maitreyi are encouraged by Sen, who hopes for a marriage which is nonetheless abhorred by his would-be European son-in-law. Instead, Allan is fascinated to discover Maitreyi's Oriental version of Platonic love, marked by spiritual attachment more than by physical contact.Călinescu, pp. 957–958 However, their affair soon after turns physical, and she decides to attach herself to Allan as one would to a husband, in what is an informal and intimate wedding ceremony (which sees her vowing her love and invoking an Chthonic as the seal of union). Upon discovering this, Narendra Sen becomes enraged, rejecting their guest and keeping Maitreyi in confinement. As a result, his daughter decides to have intercourse with a lowly stranger, becoming pregnant in the hope that her parents would consequently allow her to marry her lover. However, the story also casts doubt on her earlier actions, reflecting rumors that Maitreyi was not a virgin at the time she and Allan first met, which also seems to expose her father as a hypocrite.
George Călinescu objected to the narrative, arguing that both the physical affair and the father's rage seemed artificial, while commenting that Eliade placing doubt on his Indian characters' honesty had turned the plot into a piece of "Ethnology humor". Noting that the work developed on a classical theme of miscegenation, which recalled the prose of François-René de Chateaubriand and Pierre Loti, the critic proposed that its main merit was in introducing the Exoticism to local literature.
The other characters, standing for Eliade's generation, all seek knowledge through violence or retreat from the world—nonetheless, unlike Anicet, they ultimately fail at imposing rigors upon themselves. Pavel himself eventually abandons his belief in sex as a means for enlightenment, and commits suicide in hopes of reaching the level of primordial unity. The solution, George Călinescu noted, mirrored the strange murder in Gide's Lafcadio's Adventures. Eliade himself indicated that the book dealt with the "loss of the beatitude, illusions, and optimism that had dominated the first twenty years of 'Greater Romania'."Eliade, in Ellwood, p. 101 Robert Ellwood connected the work to Eliade's recurring sense of loss in respect to the "atmosphere of euphoria and faith" of his adolescence. Călinescu criticizes Întoarcerea din rai, describing its dialog sequences as "awkward", its narrative as "void", and its artistic interest as "non-existent", proposing that the reader could however find it relevant as the "document of a mentality".
Călinescu thought that the young male characters all owed inspiration to Fyodor Dostoevsky's Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov ( see Crime and Punishment). Anicet, who partly shares Pleșa's vision for a collective experiment, is also prone to sexual adventures, and seduces the women of the Lecca family (who have hired him as a piano teacher). Romanian-born novelist Norman Manea called Anicet's experiment: "the paraded defiance of bourgeois conventions, in which venereal disease and lubricity dwell together." In one episode of the book, Anicet convinces Anișoara Lecca to gratuitously steal from her parents—an outrage which leads his mother to moral decay and, eventually, to suicide. George Călinescu criticized the book for inconsistencies and "excesses in Dostoyevskianism", but noted that the Lecca family portrayal was "suggestive", and that the dramatic scenes were written with "a remarkable poetic calm".
Eliade's fantasy novel Domnișoara Christina, was, on its own, the topic of a scandal. The novel deals with the fate of an eccentric family, the Moscus, who are haunted by the ghost of a murdered young woman, known as Christina. The apparition shares characteristics with and with strigoi: she is believed to be drinking the blood of cattle and that of a young family member. The young man Egor becomes the object of Christina's desire, and is shown to have intercourse with her. Noting that the plot and setting reminded one of horror fiction works by the German author Hanns Heinz Ewers, and defending Domnişoara Christina in front of harsher criticism, Călinescu nonetheless argued that the "international environment" in which it took place was "upsetting". He also depicted the plot as focused on "major impurity", summarizing the story's references to necrophilia, menstruation sexual fetishism and ephebophilia.
In Curte la Dionis
In the relation between history and culture, „the memory acts from the event toward the creation, so that the cultural memory is the prisoner of history." When it will liberate itself, the human will escape the labyrinth, according to a character of the In Dionysus’ Court, of which ideal is the cultural memory; but, for him, the amnesia becomes a torment because, although he forgot details of his own existence, he kept the vague impression of a decisive meeting and with the obsession that he is not knowing his place in the universe: he had forgotten the message that he had to transmit to the world.
In addition to his fiction, the exiled Eliade authored several volumes of memoirs and diaries and travel writings. They were published sporadically, and covered various stages of his life. One of the earliest such pieces was India, grouping accounts of the travels he made through the Indian subcontinent. Writing for the Spanish journal La Vanguardia, commentator Sergio Vila-Sanjuán described the first volume of Eliade's Autobiography (covering the years 1907 to 1937) as "a great book", while noting that the other main volume was "more conventional and insincere." In Vila-Sanjuán's view, the texts reveal Mircea Eliade himself as "a Dostoyevskyian character", as well as "an accomplished person, a Goethian figure".
A work that drew particular interest was his Jurnal portughez ('Portuguese Diary'), completed during his stay in Lisbon and published only after its author's death. A portion of it dealing with his stay in Romania is believed to have been lost. The travels to Spain, partly recorded in Jurnal portughez, also led to a separate volume, Jurnal cordobez ('Cordoban Diary'), which Eliade compiled from various independent notebooks. Jurnal portughez shows Eliade coping with clinical depression and political crisis, and has been described by Andrei Oișteanu as "an overwhelming read, through the immense suffering it exhales." Literary historian Paul Cernat argued that part of the volume is "a masterpiece of its time", while concluding that some 700 pages were passable for the "among others" section of Eliade's bibliography. Noting that the book featured parts where Eliade spoke of himself in eulogistic terms, notably comparing himself favorably to Goethe and Romania's national poet Mihai Eminescu, Cernat accused the writer of "egolatry", and deduced that Eliade was "ready to step over dead bodies for the sake of his spiritual 'mission' ". The same passages led philosopher and journalist Cătălin Avramescu to argue that Eliade's behavior was evidence of "".
Eliade also wrote various essays of literary criticism. In his youth, alongside his study on Julius Evola, he published essays which introduced the Romanian public to representatives of modern Spanish literature and philosophy, among them Adolfo Bonilla San Martín, Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, Eugenio d'Ors, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. He also wrote an essay on the works of James Joyce, connecting it with his own theories on the eternal return ("Joyce's saturated with nostalgia for the myth of the eternal repetition"), and deeming Joyce himself an anti-Historicism "archaic" figure among the modernists.Eliade, in Robert Spoo, James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare, Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 1994, p. 158. In the 1930s, Eliade edited the collected works of Romanian historian Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu.
M. L. Ricketts discovered and translated into English a previously unpublished play written by Mircea Eliade in Paris 1946 Aventura Spirituală ('A Spiritual Adventure'). It was published first in Theory in Action – the journal of the Transformative Studies Institute, vol. 5 (2012): 2–58 -, and then in Italian (M. Eliade, Tutto il teatro, Milano: Edizioni Bietti, 2016).
Late in the 1930s, Mihail Sebastian was marginalized by Romania's antisemitic policies, and came to reflect on his Romanian friend's association with the far right. The subsequent ideological break between him and Eliade has been compared by writer Gabriela Adameșteanu with that between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. In his Journal, published long after his 1945 death, Sebastian claimed that Eliade's actions during the 1930s show him to be an antisemite. According to Sebastian, Eliade had been friendly to him until the start of his political commitments, after which he severed all ties.Sebastian, passim Before their friendship came apart, however, Sebastian claimed that he took notes on their conversations (which he later published) during which Eliade was supposed to have expressed antisemitic views. According to Sebastian, Eliade said in 1939:
The Poles' resistance in Warsaw is a Jewish resistance. Only yids are capable of the blackmail of putting women and children in the front line, to take advantage of the Nazi Germany' sense of scruple. The Germans have no interest in the destruction of Romania. Only a pro-German government can save us... What is happening on the frontier with Bukovina is a scandal, because new waves of Jews are flooding into the country. Rather than a Romania again invaded by kikes, it would be better to have a German protectorate.Sebastian, p. 238.
The friendship between Eliade and Sebastian drastically declined during the war: the latter writer, fearing for his security during the pro-Nazi Ion Antonescu regime ( see Romania during World War II), hoped that Eliade, by then a diplomat, could intervene in his favor; however, upon his brief return to Romania, Eliade did not see or approach Sebastian.
Later, Mircea Eliade expressed his regret at not having had the chance to redeem his friendship with Sebastian before the latter was killed in a car accident. Paul Cernat notes that Eliade's statement includes an admission that he "counted on Sebastian's support, in order to get back into Romanian life and culture", and proposes that Eliade may have expected his friend to vouch for him in front of hostile authorities. Some of Sebastian's late recordings in his diary show that their author was reflecting with nostalgia on his relationship with Eliade, and that he deplored the outcome.
Eliade provided two distinct explanations for not having met with Sebastian: one was related to his claim of being followed around by the Gestapo, and the other, expressed in his diaries, was that the shame of representing a regime that humiliated Jews had made him avoid facing his former friend. Another take on the matter was advanced in 1972 by the Israeli magazine Toladot, which claimed that, as an official representative, Eliade was aware of Antonescu's agreement to implement the Final Solution in Romania and of how this could affect Sebastian ( see Holocaust in Romania). In addition, rumors were sparked that Sebastian and Nina Mareș had a physical relationship, one which could have contributed to the clash between the two literary figures.
Beyond his involvement with a movement known for its antisemitism, Eliade did not usually comment on Jewish issues. However, an article titled Piloții orbi ("The Blind Pilots"), contributed to the journal Vremea in 1936, showed that he supported at least some Iron Guard accusations against the Jewish community:
Since the war that, Jews have occupied the villages of Maramureș and Bukovina, and gained the absolute majority in the towns and cities in Bessarabia. ... It would be absurd to expect Jews to resign themselves to become a minority with certain rights and very many duties—after they have tasted the honey of power and conquered as many command positions as they have. Jews are currently fighting with all forces to maintain their positions, expecting a future offensive—and, as far as I am concerned, I understand their fight and admire their vitality, tenacity, genius.Eliade, 1936, in Ornea, pp. 412–413; partially in the Final Report, p. 49.
One year later, a text, accompanied by his picture, was featured as answer to an inquiry by the Iron Guard's Buna Vestire about the reasons he had for supporting the movement. A short section of it summarizes an anti-Jewish attitude:
Can the Romanian nation end its life in the saddest decay witnessed by history, undermined by misery and syphilis, conquered by Jews and torn to pieces by foreigners, demoralized, betrayed, sold for a few million Romanian leu?Eliade, 1937, in Ornea, p. 413; in the Final Report, p. 49
According to the literary critic Z. Ornea, in the 1980s Eliade denied authorship of the text. He explained the use of his signature, his picture, and the picture's caption, as having been applied by the magazine's editor, Mihail Polihroniade, to a piece the latter had written after having failed to obtain Eliade's contribution; he also claimed that, given his respect for Polihroniade, he had not wished to publicize this matter previously.Ornea, p. 206; Ornea is skeptical of these explanations, given the long period of time spent before Eliade gave them, and especially the fact that the article itself, despite the haste in which it must have been written, has remarkably detailed references to many articles written by Eliade in various papers over a period of time.
Eliade ran in the 1937 Romanian general election, as a member of the
The depolitisation of Eliade after the start of his diplomatic career was also mistrusted by his former close friend Eugène Ionesco, who indicated that, upon the close of World War II, Eliade's personal beliefs as communicated to his friends amounted to "all is over now that Communism has won".Ionesco, 1945, in Ornea, p. 184 This forms part of Ionesco's severe and succinct review of the careers of Legionary-inspired intellectuals, many of them his friends and former friends, in a letter he sent to Tudor Vianu.Ornea, pp. 184–185 In 1946, Ionesco indicated to Petru Comarnescu that he did not want to see either Eliade or Cioran, and that he considered the two of them "Legionaries for ever"—adding "we are to one another".Ionesco, 1946, in Ornea, p. 211
Eliade's former friend, the communist Belu Zilber, who was attending the Paris Conference in 1946, refused to see Eliade, arguing that, as an Iron Guard affiliate, the latter had "denounced left-wingers", and contrasting him with Cioran ("They are both Legionaries, but Cioran is honest").Stelian Tănase, "Belu Zilber" (III) , in 22, Nr.702, August 2003; retrieved October 4, 2007 Three years later, Eliade's political activities were brought into discussion as he was getting ready to publish a translation of his Techniques du Yoga with the left-leaning Italian company Giulio Einaudi Editore—the denunciation was probably orchestrated by Romanian officials.Ornea, p. 210
In August 1954, when Horia Sima, who led the Iron Guard during its exile, was rejected by a faction inside the movement, Mircea Eliade's name was included on a list of persons who supported the latter—although this may have happened without his consent. According to exiled dissident and novelist Dumitru Ţepeneag, around that date, Eliade expressed his sympathy for Iron Guard members in general, whom he viewed as "courageous".Constantin Coroiu, "Un român la Paris", in Evenimentul, August 31, 2006; retrieved October 4, 2007 However, according to Robert Ellwood, the Eliade he met in the 1960s was entirely apolitical, remained aloof from "the passionate politics of that era in the United States", and "reportedly ... never read newspapers"Ellwood, p. 83 (an assessment shared by Sorin Alexandrescu). Eliade's student Ioan Petru Culianu noted that journalists had come to refer to the Romanian scholar as "the great recluse". Despite Eliade's withdrawal from radical politics, Ellwood indicates, he still remained concerned with Romania's welfare. He saw himself and other exiled Romanian intellectuals as members of a circle who worked to "maintain the culture of a free Romania and, above all, to publish texts that had become unpublishable in Romania itself".Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth, in Ellwood, p. 115
Beginning in 1969, Eliade's past became the subject of public debate in Israel. At the time, historian Gershom Scholem asked Eliade to explain his attitudes, which the latter did using vague terms.Oişteanu, "Angajamentul..." As a result of this exchange, Scholem declared his dissatisfaction, and argued that Israel could not extend a welcome to the Romanian academic. During the final years of Eliade's life, his disciple Culianu exposed and publicly criticized his 1930s pro-Iron Guard activities; relations between the two soured as a result.Sorin Antohi, "Exploring the Legacy of Ioan Petru Culianu", in the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen Post, Newsletter 72, Spring 2001; retrieved July 16, 2007; Ted Anton, "The Killing of Professor Culianu", in Lingua Franca, Volume 2, No. 6, September/October 1992; retrieved July 29, 2007; Oişteanu, "Angajamentul..." Eliade's other Romanian disciple, Andrei Oişteanu, noted that, in the years following Eliade's death, conversations with various people who had known the scholar had made Culianu less certain of his earlier stances, and had led him to declare: "Mr. Eliade was never antisemitic, a member of the Iron Guard, or pro-Nazi. But, in any case, I am led to believe that he was closer to the Iron Guard than I would have liked to believe."Culianu, in Oişteanu, "Angajamentul..."
At an early stage of his polemic with Culianu, Eliade complained in writing that "it is not possible to write an objective history" of the Iron Guard and its leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. Arguing that people "would only accept apologetics ... or executions", he contended: "After Buchenwald and Auschwitz, even honest people cannot afford being objective".Eliade, in Ellwood, p. 91; in Oişteanu, "Angajamentul..."
Other scholars, like Bryan S. Rennie, have claimed that there is, to date, no evidence of Eliade's membership, active services rendered, or of any real involvement with any fascist or totalitarian movements or membership organizations, nor that there is any evidence of his continued support for nationalist ideals after their inherently violent nature was revealed. They further assert that there is no imprint of overt political beliefs in Eliade's scholarship, and also claim that Eliade's critics are following political agendas.Bryan S. Rennie, Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1996, pp. 149–177. Romanian scholar Mircea Handoca, editor of Eliade's writings, argues that the controversy surrounding Eliade was encouraged by a group of exiled writers, of whom Manea was a main representative, and believes that Eliade's association with the Guard was a conjectural one, determined by the young author's Christian values and conservative stance, as well as by his belief that a Legionary Romania could mirror Portugal's Estado Novo. Handoca opined that Eliade changed his stance after discovering that the Legionaries had turned violent, and argued that there was no evidence of Eliade's actual affiliation with the Iron Guard as a political movement. Additionally, Joaquín Garrigós, who translated Eliade's works into Spanish, claimed that none of Eliade's texts he ever encountered show him to be an antisemite. Mircea Eliade's nephew and commentator Sorin Alexandrescu himself proposed that Eliade's politics were essentially conservative and patriotic, in part motivated by a fear of the Soviet Union which he shared with many other young intellectuals. Based on Mircea Eliade's admiration for Gandhi, various other authors assess that Eliade remained committed to nonviolence.
Robert Ellwood also places Eliade's involvement with the Iron Guard in relation to scholar's conservatism, and connects this aspect of Eliade's life with both his nostalgia and his study of primal societies. According to Ellwood, the part of Eliade that felt attracted to the "freedom of new beginnings suggested by primal myths" is the same part that felt attracted to the Guard, with its almost mythological notion of a new beginning through a "national resurrection".Ellwood, pp. 100–101 On a more basic level, Ellwood describes Eliade as an "instinctively spiritual" person who saw the Iron Guard as a spiritual movement.Ellwood, p. 86 In Ellwood's view, Eliade was aware that the "golden age" of antiquity was no longer accessible to secular man, that it could be recalled but not re-established. Thus, a "more accessible" object for nostalgia was a "secondary silver age within the last few hundred years"—the Kingdom of Romania's 19th century cultural renaissance.Ellwood, p. xiv To the young Eliade, the Iron Guard seemed like a path for returning to the silver age of Romania's glory, being a movement "dedicated to the cultural and national renewal of the Romanian people by appeal to their spiritual roots". Ellwood describes the young Eliade as someone "capable of being fired up by mythological archetypes and with no awareness of the evil that was to be unleashed".Ellwood, p. 91
Because of Eliade's withdrawal from politics, and also because the later Eliade's religiosity was very personal and idiosyncratic, Ellwood believes the later Eliade probably would have rejected the "corporate sacred" of the Iron Guard. According to Ellwood, the later Eliade had the same desire for a Romanian "resurrection" that had motivated the early Eliade to support the Iron Guard, but he now channeled it apolitically through his efforts to "maintain the culture of a free Romania" abroad.Ellwood, p. 115 In one of his writings, Eliade says, "Against the terror of History there are only two possibilities of defense: action or contemplation."Eliade, The Forbidden Forest, in Ellwood, p. 101 According to Ellwood, the young Eliade took the former option, trying to reform the world through action, whereas the older Eliade tried to resist the terror of history intellectually.
Eliade's own version of events, presenting his involvement in far right politics as marginal, was judged to contain several inaccuracies and unverifiable claims.Ornea, pp. 202, 208–211, 239–240 For instance, Eliade depicted his arrest as having been solely caused by his friendship with Nae Ionescu.Ornea, pp. 202, 209 On another occasion, answering Gershom Scholem's query, he is known to have explicitly denied ever having contributed to Buna Vestire. According to Sorin Antohi, "Eliade died without ever clearly expressing regret for his Iron Guard sympathies".Antohi, preface to Liiceanu, p. xxiii Z. Ornea noted that, in a short section of his Autobiography where he discusses the Einaudi incident, Eliade speaks of "my imprudent acts and errors committed in youth", as "a series of malentendus that would follow me all my life."Eliade, in Ornea, p. 210 Ornea commented that this was the only instance where the Romanian academic spoke of his political involvement with a dose of self-criticism, and contrasted the statement with Eliade's usual refusal to discuss his stances "pertinently". Reviewing the arguments brought in support of Eliade, Sergio Vila-Sanjuán concluded: "Nevertheless, Eliade's pro-Legionary columns endure in the newspaper libraries, he never showed his regret for this connection with and always, right up to his final writings, he invoked the figure of his teacher Nae Ionescu."
In his Felix Culpa, Manea directly accused Eliade of having embellished his memoirs to minimize an embarrassing past. A secondary debate surrounding Eliade's alleged unwillingness to dissociate with the Guard took place after Jurnalul portughez saw print. Sorin Alexandrescu expressed a belief that notes in the diary show Eliade's "break with his far right past". Cătălin Avramescu defined this conclusion as "whitewashing", and, answering to Alexandrescu's claim that his uncle's support for the Guard was always superficial, argued that Jurnal portughez and other writings of the time showed Eliade's disenchantment with the Legionaries' Christian stance in tandem with his growing sympathy for Nazism and its Nazi occultism. Paul Cernat, who stressed that it was the only one of Eliade's autobiographical works not to have been reworked by its author, concluded that the book documented Eliade's own efforts to "camouflage" his political sympathies without rejecting them altogether.
Oișteanu argued that, in old age, Eliade moved away from his earlier stances and even came to sympathize with the non-Marxism Left and the hippie youth movement. He noted that Eliade initially felt apprehensive about the consequences of hippie activism, but that the interests they shared, as well as their advocacy of communalism and free love had made him argue that hippies were "a quasi-religious movement" that was "rediscovering the sacrality of Life".Eliade, in Oişteanu, "Mircea Eliade şi mişcarea hippie" Andrei Oișteanu, who proposed that Eliade's critics were divided into a "maximalist" and a "minimalist" camp (trying to, respectively, enhance or shadow the impact Legionary ideas had on Eliade), argued in favor of moderation, and indicated that Eliade's fascism needed to be correlated to the political choices of his generation.
Iphigenia's story of self-sacrifice, turned voluntary in Eliade's version, was taken by various commentators, beginning with Mihail Sebastian, as a favorable allusion to the Iron Guard's beliefs on commitment and death, as well as to the bloody outcome of the 1941 Legionary Rebellion. Ten years after its premiere, the play was reprinted by Legionary refugees in Argentina: on the occasion, the text was reviewed for publishing by Eliade himself. Reading Iphigenia was what partly sparked Culianu's investigation of his mentor's early political affiliations.
A special debate was sparked by Un om mare. Culianu viewed it as a direct reference to Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and his rise in popularity, an interpretation partly based on the similarity between, on one hand, two monikers ascribed to the Legionary leader (by, respectively, his adversaries and his followers), and, on the other, the main character's name ( Cucoanes). Matei Călinescu did not reject Culianu's version, but argued that, on its own, the piece was beyond political interpretations. Commenting on this dialog, literary historian and essayist Mircea Iorgulescu objected to the original verdict, indicating his belief that there was no historical evidence to substantiate Culianu's point of view.
Alongside Eliade's main works, his attempted novel of youth, Minunata călătorie a celor cinci cărăbuși in țara furnicilor roșii, which depicts a population of red ants living in a totalitarian society and forming bands to harass the beetles, was seen as a potential allusion to the Soviet Union and to communism. Despite Eliade's ultimate reception in Communist Romania, this writing could not be published during the period, after Censorship singled out fragments which they saw as especially problematic.
To evaluate the legacy of Eliade and Joachim Wach within the discipline of the history of religions, the University of Chicago chose 2006 (the intermediate year between the 50th anniversary of Wach's death and the 100th anniversary of Eliade's birth), to hold a two-day conference to reflect upon their academic contributions and their political lives in their social and historical contexts, as well as the relationship between their works and their lives.
In 1990, after the Romanian Revolution, Eliade was elected posthumously to the Romanian Academy. In Romania, Mircea Eliade's legacy in the field of the history of religions is mirrored by the journal Archaeus (founded 1997, and affiliated with the University of Bucharest Faculty of History). The 6th European Association for the Study of Religion and International Association for the History of Religions Special Conference on Religious History of Europe and Asia took place from September 20 to September 23, 2006, in Bucharest. An important section of the Congress was dedicated to the memory of Mircea Eliade, whose legacy in the field of history of religions was scrutinized by various scholars, some of whom were his direct students at the University of Chicago.; retrieved July 29, 2007
As Antohi noted, Eliade, Emil Cioran and Constantin Noica "represent in Romanian culture ultimate expressions of excellence, Eliade being regarded as proof that Romania's Interwar period culture (and, by extension, Romanian culture as a whole) was able to reach the ultimate levels of depth, sophistication and creativity." A Romanian Television 1 poll carried out in 2006 nominated Mircea Eliade as the 7th Greatest Romanian in history; his case was argued by the journalist Dragoş Bucurenci ( see 100 greatest Romanians). His name was given to a boulevard in the northern Bucharest area of Primăverii, to a street in Cluj-Napoca, and to high schools in Bucharest, Sighişoara, and Reşiţa. The Eliades' house on Melodiei Street was torn down during the communist regime, and an apartment block was raised in its place; his second residence, on Dacia Boulevard, features a memorial plaque in his honor.
Eliade's image in contemporary culture also has political implications. Historian Irina Livezeanu proposed that the respect he enjoys in Romania is matched by that of other "nationalist thinkers and politicians" who "have reentered the contemporary scene largely as heroes of a pre- and anticommunist past", including Nae Ionescu and Cioran, but also Ion Antonescu and Nichifor Crainic.Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930, Cornell University Press, New York City, 1995, p. x. In parallel, according to Oişteanu (who relied his assessment on Eliade's own personal notes), Eliade's interest in the American hippie community was reciprocated by members of the latter, some of whom reportedly viewed Eliade as "a guru".
Eliade has also been hailed as an inspiration by German representatives of the Neue Rechte, claiming legacy from the Conservative Revolutionary movement (among them is the controversial magazine Junge Freiheit and the essayist Karlheinz Weißmann). "Biografia lui Mircea Eliade la o editură germană radicală de dreapta" ("Mircea Eliade's Biography at a Right-Wing Radical German Publishing House") , in Altitudini, Nr. 17, July 2007; retrieved November 8, 2007 In 2007, Florin Ţurcanu's biographical volume on Eliade was issued in a German translation by the Antaios publishing house, which is mouthpiece for the Neue Rechte. The edition was not reviewed by the mainstream German press. Other sections of the European far right also claim Eliade as an inspiration, and consider his contacts with the Iron Guard to be a merit—among their representatives are the Italian Neo-fascism Claudio Mutti and Romanian groups who trace their origin to the Legionary Movement.
Several authors, including Ioan Petru Culianu, have drawn a parallel between Eugène Ionesco's Absurdist play of 1959, Rhinoceros, which depicts the population of a small town falling victim to a mass metamorphosis, and the impact fascism had on Ionesco's closest friends (Eliade included).Oişteanu, "Angajamentul..."; Ornea, pp. 19, 181
In 2000, Saul Bellow published his controversial Ravelstein novel. Having for its setting the University of Chicago, it had among its characters Radu Grielescu, who was identified by several critics as Eliade. The latter's portrayal, accomplished through statements made by the eponymous character, is polemical: Grielescu, who is identified as a disciple of Nae Ionescu, took part in the Bucharest Pogrom, and is in Chicago as a refugee scholar, searching for the friendship of a Jewish colleague as a means to rehabilitate himself.Mircea Iorgulescu, "Portretul artistului ca delincvent politic" ("The Portrait of the Artist as a Political Offender"), Part I , in 22, Nr.637, May 2002; retrieved July 16, 2007 In 2005, the Romanian literary critic and translator Antoaneta Ralian, who was an acquaintance of Bellow's, argued that much of the negative portrayal was owed to a personal choice Bellow made (after having divorced from Alexandra Bellow, his Romanian wife and Eliade disciple). Antoaneta Ralian, interviewed on the occasion of Saul Bellow's death , BBC, April 7, 2005 (hosted by hotnews.ro); retrieved July 16, 2007 She also mentioned that, during a 1979 interview, Bellow had expressed admiration for Eliade.
The film Mircea Eliade et la redécouverte du Sacré (1987), and part of the television series Architecture et Géographie sacrées by Paul Barbă Neagră, discuss Eliade's works.
Eliade's Iphigenia was again included in theater programs during the late years of the Nicolae Ceauşescu regime: in January 1982, a new version, directed by Ion Cojar, premiered at the National Theater Bucharest, starring Mircea Albulescu, Tania Filip and Adrian Pintea in some of the main roles.
has been the basis for two theater adaptations: ''Cazul Gavrilescu'' ('The Gavrilescu Case'), directed by [[Gelu Colceag]] and hosted by the Nottara Theater; and an eponymous play by director Alexandru Hausvater, first staged by the Odeon Theater in 2003, starring, among others, Adriana Trandafir, Florin Zamfirescu, and Carmen Tănase.
In March 2007, on Eliade's 100th birthday, the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company hosted the Mircea Eliade Week, during which radio drama adaptations of several works were broadcast. "Săptămâna Mircea Eliade la Radio România" ("The Mircea Eliade Week on Radio Romania") (2007 press communique) , at the LiterNet publishing house; retrieved December 4, 2007 In September of that year, director and dramatist Cezarina Udrescu staged a multimedia performance based on a number of works Mircea Eliade wrote during his stay in Portugal; titled Apocalipsa după Mircea Eliade ('The Apocalypse According to Mircea Eliade'), and shown as part of a Romanian Radio cultural campaign, it starred Ion Caramitru, Oana Pellea and Răzvan Vasilescu.
Domnișoara Christina has been the subject of two operas: the first, carrying the same Romanian title, was authored by Romanian composer Șerban Nichifor and premiered in 1981 at the Romanian Radio; the second, titled La señorita Cristina, was written by Spanish composer Luis de Pablo and premiered in 2000 at the Teatro Real in Madrid.
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