Mircea Eliade Biography and List of Works

Romanian-born historian of religion and fiction writer, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of world religion in this century. Eliade was intensely prolific author of fiction and non-fiction alike, publishing over 1 300 pieces over 60 years. International fame he earned with LE MYTHE DE L'ÉTERNAL RETOUR (1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return), an interpretation of religious symbols and imagery.

Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest. After graduating in philosophy at Bucharest in 1928 he studied in India at the University of Calcutta, under Surendranath Dasgupta (1885-1952), and took his doctorate in 1933 with the thesis THE COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF YOGA TECHNIGUES. Eliade was appointed in the same year associate professor in the faculty of letters at Bucharest University.

In the 1930s and 1940s he published several works of fiction, where the sacred and the mythical often manifested themselves in everyday life as ordinary people are initiated into religious experience. The unifying element of Eliade's early fiction is a strong, immediately recognizable autobiographical bent. ISABEL SI APELE DIAVOLULUI (1930) was a thinly disguised story of a love affair between a European man and an Indian girl. In INTOARCEREA DIN RAI (1934) and HULIGANII (1935) the author went beyond his personal self, and depicted the 20th-century reincarnations of the older 'nihilists'. LUMINA CE SE STINGE (1934) was an experimental novel using a Joycean stream-of-consciousness technique. Eliade's growing interest in the supernatural was seen in DOMNISOARA CHRISTINA (1936), SARPELE (1937) and SECRETUL DOCTORULUI HONIGBERGER (1940, Two Tales of the Occult). His major theoretical and scholarly works from the 1940s includeTRAITE D'HISTOIRE DES RELIGIONS (1949, Patterns of Comparative Religion), Le mythe de l'éternel retrour, MYTHS, DREAMS AND MYSTERIES (1957), SHAMANISM (1968) and A HISTORY OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS (3 vols. 1976-1983).

From 1940 Eliade worked as a Romanian cultural attaché in London and in Lisbon (1941-44). After WW II he did not return to Romania, but held posts at various European universities, teaching among others for a while at the École des Hautes Ètudes. In 1956 he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago and remained in the United States until his death on April 23, 1986.

A central theme in Elaine's works is that the archaic religions made sacred the world in a fashion no longer available, but through the understanding of the relationship between the sacred and the profane it is possible to begin to understand the world of archaic people. Eliade was Christian and Jungian and his works, such as Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, and MYTH AND REALITY (1964), stress the relevance of ancient religions for contemporary man.

According to Eliade, shamanism is "one of the archaic techniques of ecstasy - at once mysticism, magic, and 'religion' in the broadest sense of the term". He wanted to restrict the term 'shaman' to those who went into trances and who would address the tribe through a spirit or would visit the spirit world and return. James Frazer described the evidence of superhuman powers in The Golden Bough (1890) bluntly as spurious, but Eliade himself was convinced that shamanism have a paranormal component. In Shamanism (1968) he argued, that epics of ancient poets and certain kinds of fairy tales derive from ecstatic journeys and mystical flights.

In his novels Eliade used conventional repertory of fantasy: vampires, serpents, ghosts, time slips, sources of immortality. Most of Eliade's fiction dealt in the post-war years the hidden world behind everyday reality. Among his masterpieces are FORÊT INTERDITE (1955, The Forbidden Forest), which appeared in English in 1978. THE OLD MAN AND THE BUREAUCRATS (1979) is an allusive and symbolic novella in which a schoolteacher detained for questioning by Communist authorities beguiles his captors with stories as in Thousand and One Nights.

For further reading: Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred by T.J.J. Altizer (1963); Myths & Symbols, ed. by J.K. Kitagawa and C. Long (1969); The Role of Myth in Religion: a Study of Mircea Eliade's Phenomenology of Religion by G.R. Slater (1973); Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred by Thomas J. Altizer (1975); Structure and Creativity in Religion by D. Allen (1977); L'herméneutique de Mircea Eliade by A. Marino (1981); Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907-1945 by Mac Linscott Ricketts (1988); Waiting for the Dawn, ed. by David Carrasco and Jane Marie Law (1991); Reading and Responding to Mircea Eliade's History of Religious Ideas by John R. Mason (1993); Mircea Eliade's Vision for a New Humanism by David Cave, John David Cave (1995); Reconstructing Eliade by Bryan S. Rennie (1996); Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade by Douglas Allen (1998); The Politics of Myth by Robert S. Ellwood (1999)

ISABEL SI APELE DIAVOLULUI, (1930)