Mircéa Eliade (1907–1986)

"I don't believe in God, but I miss him."
--Julian Barnes

This short story, read with the Goodreads The Short Story Club group*, sent me on quite a stimulating and challenging journey. In a week, I have gone from 3 star rating to a full 5.

Briefly, the story takes place in India in the early 20th century, when three Western scholars of Eastern languages and myths one night suddenly time travel to the scene of a legendary murder. They come to believe their time travel experience was a show more side-effect of a native Indian scholar who happened to be nearby performing a Tantric ritual. The subsequent effect on the Western scholars is long-lasting and resistant. The night was a contradiction to their intellectual and religious perspectives.

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to do the same kind of reconciling. I had never heard of author Mircea Eliade before but felt certain that this fiction work's introduction to--per Wikipedia-- "One of the most influential scholars of religion of the 20th century and interpreter of religious experience..." was key to understanding a meatier message.

As I understand it (and that isn't saying much), Eliade's studies address the experience of mankind's various religions as deeply authentic, if not "real." He breaks out religious experiences between those of "archaic man" and "modern man." He notes that in spite of a progression from archaic man's belief in the cosmic cycle perspective of Time and history to the modern (Christian) man's one direction arrow of Time and history, there remains a primal, even archetypical, longing to experience what it is that older religions had provided. It is built-in to humans.

Superficial googling and also reading a few GR reviews, I picked up tantalizing amounts of new terminology and concepts. I have now put Eliade high on my list to read, starting with his non-fiction The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion.

Coincidentally, very recently I read a work that explains exactly what that longing might look like to fellow atheists, preferers of Science, the curious reasoners of all flavors, Isaac Asimov's The Last Question. It made me indescribably happy to momentarily consider how that longing might manifest in future mankind, and where it might end up in a few billion years.

That longing in humans, a mix of our hubris and recognition of seemingly infinite possibilities, is explained in Nights at Serampore by the answer of a swami to the narrator after he described his many puzzlements of that night,

"Your reasoning is all very fine, and yet it's completely wrong just the same..."

* Join the group here https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/1187035 show less

A challenge (especially for radicals) to rethink the very recent, very circumscribed notion that history is a necessarily progressive force. Eliade's examination of myth and ritual in traditional societies suggests that for modern humans, the truth is closer to Stephen Daedalus' idea: "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken."

Eliade recommended this book as the place to start if one wanted to read his works. It appeared in French shortly after World War Two, as the world faced what he called “the terror of history.” This terror arose not solely from the scale of destruction in that war, capped off by the use of atomic weapons; this simply augmented a feeling that arose with historical awareness as the linear view of time replaced the traditional cyclical view.
For most of the book, Eliade explores this show more traditional view. For him, this was universally held by what he considers archaic man. Despite this term, Eliade felt that this view still characterized the thinking of many. His shorthand for these many, even in his day, is the agricultural world. He lets his opinion of such show when he writes that they “obstinately adhere to an anhistorical position.”
Archaic humankind, according to Eliade, has a negative view of history, dealing with it in one of three ways. The first is to abolish it periodically (happy new year, everyone). The second is to devaluate it by refusing to recognize that anything new has happened. Any seemingly new event is assimilated to transhistorical models and archetypes. The third is to give it a metahistorical meaning. In this view, we are living in the downward swing of a long cycle, at the close of which, the universe will be renewed by an all-consuming fire or flood. These three approaches afforded humans consolation in time of trouble.
Eliade credits the Hebrew prophets with being the first to value history, although even they did not consistently espouse it. See, for instance, the assimilation of conquering tyrants of their day to Satan (Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28).
They valued history based on their conviction that God was guiding its course toward a consummation in a golden age (or individual salvation). Of course, as Eliade notes, even this is, in the end, an antihistorical attitude. Nevertheless, this enabled them to find consolation even though time was linear. Even as faith in God declined in the modern world, the linearity of time continued to be equated with progress. In the mid-twentieth century, when Eliade wrote, this optimism had become untenable. Any modern person had one of two options: faith or despair. Actually, he sees a third possibility, reverting to a cyclical view of history (for example, Nietzsche).
I found this book readable. It held my interest throughout, despite my reservations about the sweeping generality of Eliade’s view of archaic humanity. show less

This is the definitive account of Shamanism, and a feat of aggregating world knowledge along the lines of Joseph Campbell and Fraser, although more scholarly (and probably accurate). While it might be tough sledding, it is the worth the expenditure .Not only are we given the importance of the three cosmic zones but also the Shamanistic approaches to navigating them. We are also told about the Center of the World, the path of navigation but most fascinating to me was the almost universal show more concern among all humans with how to recall the souls of the dead. And in each of these Eliade can very thoroughly track their particular manifestations in societies throughout the world, though his starting place is Siberia. The other linking premise is that the journey of the Shaman is different from possession, it is something that must be learned and there is, inevitably, an initiation though there is some variety culturally between those who have inherited the gift of the spirit language and those who were called. As the title says, ecstasy is the key differentiator between the shaman and the witch, magician or fakir. If this subject interests you, this is the mother lode. Look no further. show less