Mircea Eliade

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• Mircea Eliade

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Eliades Background

• Eliade was born in Bucharest, Romania (1907)
• In 1925, enrolled at the University of Bucharest
  where he studied philosophy
• In 1928 he sailed for Calcutta to study Sanskrit
  and philosophy under Surendranath Dasgupta
  (1885-1952)
• He returned to Bucharest in 1932 and successfully
  submitted his analysis of Yoga as his doctoral
  thesis

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Eliades Background

• In 1945 he moved to Paris where his acquaintance
  with George Dumézil, an important scholar of
  comparative mythology, secured a part-time post
  for him at the École des Hautes Études at the
  Sorbonne teaching comparative religion.
• In 1958 he was invited to assume the chair of
  the History of Religions department in Chicago.
  There he stayed until his death in 1986

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Thoughts

• In Cosmos and History The Myth of the Eternal
  Return (1954), Eliade distinguishes between
• Religious humanity, who perceives time as
  heterogeneous sacred and profane
• Non-religious humanity, who perceives time as
  homogenous all the same time

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Religious Humanity

• Profane time experienced as linear
• Sacred time experienced as cyclical and
  re-actualizable
• By means of myths and rituals which give access
  to this sacred time, religious humanity protects
  itself against the terror of history, that
  human existence is a pointless exercise ending in
  oblivion.

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Religious Humanity

• In other words, Sacred time always involves a
  return to a paradigmatic mythic time in the past,
  the time of the creation, the Exodus, the Last
  Supper, etc
• Yet Eliade contended that non-religious humanity
  in any pure sense is a very rare phenomenon.
• Sacred time usually concealed in the world,
  hidden in myth and ritual

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Religious Humanity

• In the Sacred and Profane (1957), Eliade examines
  the Archaic Man, the tribal human who dwells
  continually in the two planes (the sacred and
  profane)
• Archaic Man believed in the supernatural realm
• This belief reflected through its actions in
  society

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What is the Sacred?

• A Transcendental deity? (Hegal)
• A wholly other? (Rudolf Otto)
• A social construction (Durkheim)?
• Eliade himself repeatedly identifies the sacred
  as the real, yet he states clearly that "the
  sacred is a structure of human consciousness"
• This would argue more for the third
  interpretation a social construction of both the
  sacred and of reality

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What is the Sacred?

• Yet he also defined the sacred as the source of
  significance, meaning, power and being,
  manifesting in three distinct forms
• Hierophanies (physical representation of the
  holy)
• Cratophanies (physical representation of power)
• Ontophanies (physical representation of Being)

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What is the Sacred?

• This idea sounds more like Rudolf Otto
• The Idea of the Holy (1916)
• The subject experiences the mysterious, awesome
  and beautiful
• Mysterium tremendum (a mystery that both
  frightens and fascinates
• Leaves the individual feeling insignificant
• This feeling the basis of all religions

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What is the Sacred?

• Eliade claimed that one of the most important
  senses of a hierophany, an appearance of the
  holy, was as an ontophany, an appearance of
  Being.
• The location of the hierophany becomes the axis
  mundi.
• Villagers then builds toward the axis mundi,
  giving order and form to the village

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Sacred Space

• "Religious man sought to live as near as possible
  to the Center of the World." (p. 43)
• "To settle in a territory, to build a dwelling,
  demands a vital decision for both the whole
  community and the individual. For what is
  involved is undertaking the creation of the world
  that one has chosen to inhabit. Hence it is
  necessary to imitate the work of the gods, the
  cosmogony. (p. 51)

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Imago Mundi

• "The habitation always undergoes a process of
  sanctification, because it constitutes an imago
  mundi microcosm of the world and the world is a
  divine creation. (p. 52)
• In this way the original appearance of the holy
  hierophany yields a order of social existence
  ontophany

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Dwelling with the Holy

• Why do human cultures engage in this behavior?
• Eliade thought because Archaic Humanity wanted to
  dwell within the holyto become the holy itself.
• Yet this behavior only made the separation
  between the holy and humans more profound.

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Sacred and Profane

• Eliade assumed that Archaic Humanity wished to
  return to the beginning of time and space to
  live in the world as it came for the Creators
  hands, fresh, pure, and strong. (Sacred and
  Profane, p. 91)
• Key purpose of ritual to reenact the return to
  the primordialwhen all was sacred.
• Mythic return rejected with the emergence of
  Judaism and Christianity, claims Eliade.

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What is the Sacred?

• So maybe the sacred is more than mere social
  construction?
• Eliade never clarifies this conflict
• Instead, suggests that some persons will
  encounter the sacred dimension of a phenomenon
  while others will not based on preparation for
  apprehension (trained to see an object as sacred)

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From the Sacred to Religion

• So, if one must be trained to apprehend the
  sacred, this must be the role of religion.
• Religion is the apprehension of relative worth
  conferred through non-historical realities
  (including all abstract and imaginary entities)
• Religion is the cause of human behaviors, not the
  effect.

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From the Sacred to Religion

• But religion must be revealed and confirmed
  through historical phenomena
• This dual nature of religion, thought Eliade, was
  a universal dimension of humankind.
• Myth becomes a paradigmatic model for all human
  activities.
• From myth, Humans symbolically transform the
  world into a cosmos.
• Humans desire to live in the sacred to transcend
  subjective experience

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The Study of Religion

• Eliade believed that while religions were
  historically bound phenomenon (like Zeus to
  Ancient Greece), all religions operate on general
  forms or archetypes (such as sky god)
• Scholars can learn a great deal by looking for
  the archetypes or forms and how they change from
  one culture to the next.

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What of Symbols?

• Patterns of Comparative Religion (1949)
• Almost anything can become a symbol when infused
  with the supernatural
• Dialectic of the sacred
• Symbols appeal to religious imagination, not
  reason
• Hence an object can sacred and profane
  simultaneously.

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Convergence Theory and Symbols

• Different gods originated as symbolizations of
  different aspects of nature.
• This resulted in the formation of departmental
  gods
• sky gods
• storm gods
• moon gods.
• These gods subsequently acquired characteristics
  from other spheres of nature symbolism, so that
  all sorts of blends between the various aspects
  of nature were formed.

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Convergence Theory and Symbols

• As tribal communities become agrarian, sky gods
  (distant, aloof, removed, mysterious) transformed
  into storm gods (entities responsible for rain,
  clouds, thunder, fertility, sexuality)
• Sky gods also could transform to son gods, whose
  actions reflected the cyclic dynamics of life and
  death

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Convergence Theory and Symbols

• Water becomes the archetypical movement from
  chaos to order, from pollution to purity, from
  barrenness to renewal
• Stone serves as the archetypical expression of
  the non-changing, impermeable nature of the sacred

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Symbolic Thinking

• Symbolic thinking must display two dimensions or
  features
• Structural how a symbol organizes elements of
  reality into a system
• Valuation how symbols are grant worth within
  reality not all symbols are equal

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Structural Dimension of Symbols

• No symbol exists in isolation
• Symbol connect with other images to fashion and
  extend the idea of the sacred
• Sun god yields symbol of solar disk
• Symbol carved on walls, worn around neck, paraded
  on a certain day
• In this manner, the sacred is extended from its
  initial appearance.

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Valuation Dimension of Symbols

• Eliade does believe some symbol systems (images,
  myths, structures) superior to others
• Bigger is better the more complex the symbol
  system the more universal it must be.
• For instance, Christian mythology incorporates
  numerous symbol systems cosmic tree, son god,
  water, wine, stone, etc.
• The tendency of myth is to move toward complexity
  through associations with other symbol systems.
  These acquisitions occur in a universalizing
  manner.

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The Future of Religion

• Archaic Religion possessed the desire of mythic
  return going back to the beginning of creation
• Judaism and Christianity move archaic religion
  from a de-evolutionary to an evolutionary view of
  history. Sacred now in history, not nature.
• This idea of history yields Modern Historicism -
  philosophy replacing religion.
• In other words, the sacred does not exist in
  either nature nor history. The sacred does not
  exist remember Marx?

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The Future of Religion

• But can such non-religious philosophies
  ultimately be satisfying, asked Eliade.
• Athletics, television, movies, plays, games all
  reflect the concept of the Mythic Return. It
  never left after all!
• Modern Historicism replaced with a return to
  Archaic Religion.