Volume 7, Number 6 · October 20, 1966
Sermons By a Man on a Ladder
By Edmund R. Leach
Mephistopheles and the Androgyne
by Mircea Eliade
Sheed & Ward, 224 pp., $5.00
The Two and the One
by Mircea Eliade
Harvill Press (London), 223 pp., 30s
Principal English translations of the works of Mircea Eliade (the date of first publication in any language is given in parentheses):
The Myth of the Eternal Return
by Mircea Eliade
(1949), Bollingen-Pantheon, 1954
Cosmos and History
by Mircea Eliade
Harper Torchbooks, 1959
Patterns in Comparative Religion
by Mircea Eliade
(1949), Sheed & Ward, 1958
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom
by Mircea Eliade
(1954), Bollingen-Pantheon, 1958
Birth and Rebirth
by Mircea Eliade
(1958), Harper, 1958
Rites and Symbols of Initiation
by Mircea Eliade
Harper Torchbooks, 1965
The Sacred and the Profane
by Mircea Eliade
(1957), Harper Torchbooks 1959; Harper Torchbooks, 1961
Myths, Dreams and Mysteries
by Mircea Eliade
(1957), Harper, 1960
Images and Symbols
by Mircea Eliade
(1952), Sheed & Ward, 1961
The Forge and the Crucible
by Mircea Eliade
(1956), Harper-Allenson, 1962
Shamanism: Archiac Techniques of Ecstasy
by Mircea Eliade
(1951), Bollingen-Pantheon, 1964
Merlin and his magic forest must be cut down to size before we can see the shape of the trees, but first let us examine the undergrowth. After graduating from the University of Bucharest in 1928 Mircea Eliade spent three years in Calcutta studying classical texts of Indian mysticism. His special concern was with the ascetic and ecstatic techniques whereby the would-be saint, having achieved a state of psychological dissociation, can persuade himself that he has access to the powers of the other world, being himself neither alive nor dead, neither on earth nor in heaven. All of Eliade's subsequent writings have been concerned with this central theme, the symbolic modes through which communication is established between the sacred and the profane. His attitude is that of a Jesuit: he is scholar and believer at the same time. Eliade left Romania at the end of the war and later settled in Paris; for the past ten years he has been Professor of the History of Religion in the University of Chicago. The 'history' which he pursues is not concerned with chronological sequences or the analysis of the causes and consequences of particular events, but rather with the development of human thought over vast regions of time and space. But this evolution is a very simple two-stage affair: for Eliade modern man stands to archaic man as Christianity to pre-Christianity. The cosmological ideas which characterize archaic religion are everywhere the same and may be exemplified, in Frazerian fashion, by any snippets of exotic ethnography which conveniently come to hand. Modern man is unique because the religious mythology of Judeo-Christianity is set in a matrix of chronological time. Christian time is on-going, it had a beginning and will have an end but it is non-repetitive, it is 'historical.' In all other religions, time is a cyclical process. Instead of advancing boldly towards the discovery of a New Jerusalem, archaic man is content to engage in recurrent but imperfect imitation of divinely ordained archetypes fashioned by the ancestral deities in the first beginning.
Review, 3070 words
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