148 Facts About Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day.

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.

Several times during the late 1930s, Mircea Eliade publicly expressed his support for the Iron Guard, a Christian fascist political organization.

Mircea Eliade was elected a posthumous member of the Romanian Academy.

An Orthodox believer, Gheorghe Mircea Eliade registered his son's birth four days before the actual date, to coincide with the liturgical calendar feast of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste.

Mircea Eliade had a sister, Corina, the mother of semiologist Sorin Alexandrescu.

Mircea Eliade's family moved between Tecuci and Bucharest, ultimately settling in the capital in 1914, and purchasing a house on Melodiei Street, near Piata Rosetti, where Mircea Eliade resided until late in his teens.

Mircea 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 Mircea Eliade was about ten years of age, he witnessed the bombing of Bucharest by German zeppelins and the patriotic fervor in the occupied capital at news that Romania was able to stop the Central Powers' advance into Moldavia.

Mircea Eliade described this stage in his life as marked by an unrepeatable epiphany.

Robert Ellwood, a professor of religion who did his graduate studies under Mircea Eliade, saw this type of nostalgia as one of the most characteristic themes in Eliade's life and academic writings.

In parallel, Mircea 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.

At one point, Mircea Eliade was failing four subjects, among which was the study of the Romanian language.

Mircea Eliade became acquainted with the modernist short stories of Giovanni Papini and social anthropology studies by James George Frazer.

At the time, Mircea Eliade became acquainted with Saadi's poems and the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.

Four years later, Mircea Eliade completed work on his debut volume, the autobiographical Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent.

In 1927, Mircea Eliade traveled to Italy, where he met Papini and collaborated with the scholar Giuseppe Tucci.

Mircea Eliade was especially attracted to Ionescu's radical ideas and his interest in religion, which signified a break with the rationalist tradition represented by senior academics such as Constantin Radulescu-Motru, Dimitrie Gusti, and Tudor Vianu.

Mircea Eliade studied the basics of Indian philosophy, and, in parallel, learned Sanskrit, Pali and Bengali under Dasgupta's direction.

At the time, he became interested in the actions of Mahatma Gandhi and the Satyagraha as a phenomenon; later, Mircea Eliade adapted Gandhian ideas in his discourse on spirituality and Romania.

In 1930, while living with Dasgupta, Mircea Eliade fell in love with his host's daughter, Maitreyi Devi, later writing a barely disguised autobiographical novel Maitreyi, in which he claimed that he carried on a physical relationship with her.

Mircea Eliade received his PhD in 1933, with a thesis on Yoga practices.

Mircea Eliade later recalled that the book was an early step for understanding not just Indian religious practices, but Romanian spirituality.

In 1933, Mircea Eliade had a physical relationship with the actress Sorana Topa, while falling in love with Nina Mares, whom he ultimately married.

Mircea Eliade subsequently adopted Giza, and the three of them moved to an apartment at 141 Dacia Boulevard.

Mircea Eliade left his residence in 1936, during a trip he made to the United Kingdom and Germany, when he first visited London, Oxford and Berlin.

Mircea Eliade was close to Marcel Avramescu, a former Surrealist writer whom he introduced to the works of Rene Guenon.

Mircea Eliade later recounted that he had himself enlisted Zilber as a Cuvantul contributor, in order for him to provide a Marxist perspective on the issues discussed by the journal.

Mircea Eliade approved of an ethnic nationalist state centered on the Orthodox Church, which he opposed to, among others, the secular nationalism of Constantin Radulescu-Motru; referring to this particular ideal as "Romanianism", Eliade was, in 1934, still viewing it as "neither fascism, nor chauvinism".

Mircea 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.

In 1936, Mircea Eliade was the focus of a campaign in the far right press, being targeted for having authored "pornography" in his Domnisoara Christina and Isabel si apele diavolului; similar accusations were aimed at other cultural figures, including Tudor Arghezi and Geo Bogza.

Mircea Eliade decided to sue the Ministry of Education, asking for a symbolic compensation of 1 leu.

Mircea Eliade won the trial, and regained his position as Nae Ionescu's assistant.

The stance taken by Mircea Eliade resulted in his arrest on July 14,1938, after a crackdown on the Iron Guard authorized by King Carol II.

Mircea Eliade was kept for three weeks in a cell at the Siguranta Statului Headquarters, in an attempt to have him sign a "declaration of dissociation" with the Iron Guard, but he refused to do so.

When Mircea Eliade began coughing blood in October 1938, he was taken to a clinic in Moroeni.

Mircea Eliade's office involved disseminating propaganda in favor of the Romanian state.

In 1941, during his time in Portugal, Mircea Eliade stayed in Estoril, at the Hotel Palacio.

In 1942, Mircea Eliade authored a volume in praise of the Estado Novo, established in Portugal by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, claiming that "The Salazarian state, a Christian and totalitarian one, is first and foremost based on love".

Mircea Eliade 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.

Also during the war, Mircea 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 Cordoba.

Mircea Eliade maintained a friendship with d'Ors, and met him again on several occasions after the war.

Nina Mircea Eliade fell ill with uterine cancer and died during their stay in Lisbon, in late 1944.

Mircea Eliade came to suffer from clinical depression, which increased as Romania and her Axis allies suffered major defeats on the Eastern Front.

Later, discussing the works of Aldous Huxley, Mircea 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".

At signs that the Romanian communist regime was about to take hold, Mircea Eliade opted not to return to the country.

Mircea Eliade married a second time, to the Romanian exile Christinel Cotescu.

Together with Emil Cioran and other Romanian expatriates, Mircea Eliade rallied with the former diplomat Alexandru Busuioceanu, helping him publicize anti-communist opinion to the Western European public.

Mircea Eliade was briefly involved in publishing a Romanian-language magazine, titled Luceafarul, and was again in contact with Mihai Sora, who had been granted a scholarship to study in France, and with Sora's wife Mariana.

Mircea Eliade collaborated with Carl Jung and the Eranos circle after Henry Corbin recommended him in 1949, and wrote for the Antaios magazine.

In 1950, Mircea Eliade began attending Eranos conferences, meeting Jung, Olga Frobe-Kapteyn, Gershom Scholem and Paul Radin.

Mircea Eliade had been invited by Joachim Wach to give a series of lectures at Wach's home institution, the University of Chicago.

In 1966, Mircea Eliade became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Mircea Eliade 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.

Mircea Eliade occasionally traveled out of the United States, attending the Congress for the History of Religions in Marburg, and visiting Sweden and Norway in 1970.

Mircea Eliade was slowly rehabilitated at home beginning in the early 1960s, under the rule of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.

At the time, Mircea Eliade contemplated returning to Romania, but was eventually persuaded by fellow Romanian intellectuals in exile to reject Communist proposals.

Mircea Eliade died at the Bernard Mitchell Hospital in April 1986.

Mircea Eliade's body was cremated in Chicago, and the funeral ceremony was held on University grounds, at the Rockefeller Chapel.

Mircea Eliade's thinking was in part influenced by Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Nae Ionescu and the writings of the Traditionalist School.

Mircea Eliade is known for his attempt to find broad, cross-cultural parallels and unities in religion, particularly in myths.

However, Ellwood writes that Mircea Eliade "tends to slide over that last qualification", implying that traditional societies actually thought like homo religiosus.

Mircea Eliade often uses the term "archetypes" to refer to the mythical models established by the Sacred, although Mircea Eliade's use of the term should be distinguished from the use of the term in Jungian psychology.

Mircea Eliade called this concept the "eternal return".

Mircea 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.

Mircea 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.

Mircea Eliade acknowledges that not all religious behavior has all the attributes described in his theory of sacred time and the eternal return.

Mircea 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.

Mircea Eliade discusses these themes in detail in Yoga: Immortality and Freedom.

Mircea 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.

However, Mircea Eliade disagrees with Wilhelm Schmidt, who thought the earliest form of religion was a strict monotheism.

Mircea Eliade dismisses this theory of "primordial monotheism" as "rigid" and unworkable.

Mircea Eliade speculates that the discovery of agriculture brought a host of fertility gods and goddesses into the forefront, causing the celestial Supreme Being to fade away and eventually vanish from many ancient religions.

Mircea Eliade calls the distant High God a deus otiosus.

In Shamanism, Mircea 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.

Mircea Eliade considers this return to the source of life essentially equivalent to the eternal return.

One of Mircea Eliade's noted contributions in this respect was the 1932 Soliloquii, which explored existential philosophy.

Mircea Eliade 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".

In particular, Mircea Eliade often implies the existence of a universal psychological or spiritual "essence" behind all religious phenomena.

However, others argue that Mircea Eliade is better understood as a scholar who is willing to openly discuss sacred experience and its consequences.

Mircea Eliade thinks a religious phenomenon cannot be reduced to a product of culture and history.

Mircea Eliade admits that every religious phenomenon is shaped by the particular culture and history that produced it:.

Mircea Eliade describes this view of reality as a fundamental part of "primitive ontology".

Mircea Eliade thinks the Platonic theory of forms is "primitive ontology" persisting in Greek philosophy.

Mircea Eliade says that secular man cannot escape his bondage to religious thought.

Mircea Eliade sees traces of religious thought even in secular academia.

Mircea Eliade thinks modern scientists are motivated by the religious desire to return to the sacred time of origins:.

Mircea Eliade believes the rise of materialism in the 19th century forced the religious nostalgia for "origins" to express itself in science.

In some of his writings, Mircea Eliade describes modern political ideologies as secularized mythology.

Mircea Eliade suggests that the differences between the Nazis' pseudo-Germanic mythology and Marx's pseudo-Judaeo-Christian mythology explain their differing success:.

Mircea Eliade 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.

In chapter 4 of The Myth of the Eternal Return and chapter 9 of Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, Mircea Eliade argues at length that the rejection of religious thought is a primary cause of modern man's anxieties.

For example, Mircea Eliade thinks Hinduism has advice for modern Westerners.

However, Mircea Eliade argues that the Hindu approach to history does not necessarily lead to a rejection of history.

Mircea 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".

Mircea Eliade argues that a Western spiritual rebirth can happen within the framework of Western spiritual traditions.

Mircea Eliade sees the Abrahamic religions as a turning point between the ancient, cyclic view of time and the modern, linear view of time, noting that, in their case, sacred events are not limited to a far-off primordial age, but continue throughout history: "time is no longer [only] the circular Time of the Eternal Return; it has become linear and irreversible Time".

Mircea Eliade thus sees in Christianity the ultimate example of a religion embracing linear, historical time.

Ultimately, according to Jesi, Mircea Eliade sees Christianity as the only religion that can save man from the "Terror of history".

Mircea Eliade 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".

Mircea Eliade was drawn back to it, yet he knew he could not live there, and that all was not well with it.

Mircea Eliade cites a wide variety of myths and rituals to support his theories.

In Kirk's view, Mircea 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.

Kirk concludes, "Mircea Eliade's idea is a valuable perception about certain myths, not a guide to the proper understanding of all of them".

However, although Doniger agrees that Mircea 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".

Whether they were true or not, she argues, Mircea Eliade's theories are still useful "as starting points for the comparative study of religion".

Mircea Eliade argues that Eliade's theories have been able to accommodate "new data to which Eliade did not have access".

Mircea Eliade contends that Eliade never did any field work or contacted any indigenous groups that practiced Shamanism, and that his work was synthesized from various sources without being supported by direct field research.

Writer and academic Marcel Tolcea has argued that, through Evola's particular interpretation of Guenon's works, Mircea Eliade kept a traceable connection with far right ideologies in his academic contributions.

Mircea Eliade replied that his works were written for a contemporary public, and not to initiates of esoteric circles.

Notably, Mircea Eliade was preoccupied with the cult of Thracian deity Zalmoxis and its supposed monotheism.

Mircea Eliade concludes that the later Eliade was, in fact, a "radical modernist".

Mircea Eliade read with interest the prose of Romain Rolland, Henrik Ibsen, and the Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire and Denis Diderot.

Polemically, Calinescu proposed that Mircea Eliade's supposed focus on "aggressive youth" served to instill his interwar Romanian writers with the idea that they had a common destiny as a generation apart.

Mircea Eliade 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".

George Calinescu objected to the narrative, arguing that both the physical affair and the father's rage seemed artificial, while commenting that Mircea Eliade placing doubt on his Indian characters' honesty had turned the plot into a piece of "ethnological humor".

Mircea Eliade lets the reader understand that they are in fact talking about the same woman.

Mircea Eliade himself explained that Memoriile unui soldat de plumb was an ambitious project, designed as a fresco to include the birth of the Universe, abiogenesis, human evolution, and the entire world history.

Mircea Eliade depicted the plot as focused on "major impurity", summarizing the story's references to necrophilia, menstrual fetish and ephebophilia.

Mircea Eliade was however dissatisfied with this introduction of iconic images, describing it as "languishing".

The short story Un om mare, which Mircea Eliade authored during his stay in Portugal, shows a common person, the engineer Cucoanes, who grows steadily and uncontrollably, reaching immense proportions and ultimately disappearing into the wilderness of the Bucegi Mountains.

Mircea Eliade himself referenced the story and Aldous Huxley's experiments in the same section of his private notes, a matter which allowed Matei Calinescu to propose that Un om mare was a direct product of its author's experience with drugs.

Mircea Eliade reinterpreted the Greek mythological figure Iphigeneia in his eponymous 1941 play.

In contrast with early renditions of the myth by authors such as Euripides and Jean Racine, Mircea Eliade's version ends with the sacrifice being carried out in full.

The travels to Spain, partly recorded in Jurnal portughez, led to a separate volume, Jurnal cordobez, which Mircea Eliade compiled from various independent notebooks.

Mircea Eliade wrote an essay on the works of James Joyce, connecting it with his own theories on the eternal return, and deeming Joyce himself an anti-historicist "archaic" figure among the modernists.

The subsequent ideological break between him and Mircea Eliade has been compared by writer Gabriela Adamesteanu with that between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

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.

Mircea 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.

Beyond his involvement with a movement known for its antisemitism, Mircea Eliade did not usually comment on Jewish issues.

Mircea Eliade 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 claimed that, given his respect for Polihroniade, he had not wished to publicize this matter previously.

In Jurnal portughez, Mircea Eliade defines himself as "a Legionary", and speaks of his own "Legionary climax" as a stage he had gone through during the early 1940s.

Mircea Eliade 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".

At the time, historian Gershom Scholem asked Mircea Eliade to explain his attitudes, which the latter did using vague terms.

At an early stage of his polemic with Culianu, Mircea Eliade complained in writing that "it is not possible to write an objective history" of the Iron Guard and its leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.

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 Mircea Eliade changed his stance after discovering that the Legionaries had turned violent, and argued that there was no evidence of Mircea Eliade's actual affiliation with the Iron Guard as a political movement.

In Ellwood's view, Mircea 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.

For instance, Mircea Eliade depicted his arrest as having been solely caused by his friendship with Nae Ionescu.

Oisteanu argued that, in old age, Mircea Eliade moved away from his earlier stances and even came to sympathize with the non-Marxist Left and the hippie youth movement.

Mircea Eliade 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".

Andrei Oisteanu, who proposed that Mircea Eliade's critics were divided into a "maximalist" and a "minimalist" camp, argued in favor of moderation, and indicated that Mircea Eliade's fascism needed to be correlated to the political choices of his generation.

In 1990, after the Romanian Revolution, Mircea Eliade was elected posthumously to the Romanian Academy.

Mircea Eliade's name was given to a boulevard in the northern Bucharest area of Primaverii, to a street in Cluj-Napoca, and to high schools in Bucharest, Sighisoara, and Resita.

Mircea Eliade has been hailed as an inspiration by German representatives of the Neue Rechte, claiming legacy from the Conservative Revolutionary movement.

In 2007, Florin Turcanu's biographical volume on Mircea Eliade was issued in a German translation by the Antaios publishing house, which is mouthpiece for the Neue Rechte.

Early on, Mircea Eliade's novels were the subject of satire: before the two of them became friends, Nicolae Steinhardt, using the pen name Antisthius, authored and published parodies of them.

Mircea Eliade mentioned that, during a 1979 interview, Bellow had expressed admiration for Eliade.