title: Tommy Kirk

text: Disney then cast Kirk as student inventor Merlin Jones in "The Misadventures of Merlin Jones" (1964), again opposite Funicello. The film was directed by Robert Stevenson, who was frequently assigned Disney comedies. It became an unexpected box-office sensation, earning $4 million in rentals in North America, and Disney invited Funicello and him back to make a sequel, "The Monkey's Uncle" (1965). "The Monkey's Uncle" came out in July 1965 and was almost as successful as "Merlin Jones".


title: Tommy Kirk

text: Kirk began to work steadily in television throughout 1956 and 1957 in episodes of "Lux Video Theatre" ("Green Promise"), "Frontier" ("The Devil and Doctor O'Hara"), "Big Town" ("Adult Delinquents"), "Crossroads" ("The Rabbi Davis Story"), "Gunsmoke" ("Cow Doctor"), "Letter to Loretta" ("But for God's Grace", "Little League") and "Matinee Theatre" ("The Outing", "The Others" – a version of "Turn of the Screw").


title: Tommy Kirk

text: Kirk supported Angie Dickinson in a short feature called "Down Liberty Road", a.k.a. "Freedom Highway" (1956), a short commercial travelogue produced by Greyhound Lines to promote their Scenicruiser buses.


title: Tommy Kirk

text: Concurrent with his film career at Disney, Kirk continued to guest star on television series, such as "The O. Henry Playhouse" ("Christmas by Injunction"), "The Californians" (as Billy Kilgore in "Little Lost Man"), "Matinee Theatre" ("Look Out for John Tucker"), "Playhouse 90" ("A Corner of the Garden"),"The Millionaire" ('Millionaire Charles Bradwell") (1959) "Bachelor Father" ("A Key for Kelly"), "Mr. Novak", "Love in the Wrong Season" (1963), "Angel" ("Goodbye Young Lovers"), and "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" ("Ten Minutes from Now") (1964).


title: Tommy Kirk

text: The news of Kirk's termination from Disney Studios was not made public, but Kirk was soon working for American International Pictures (AIP), which needed a leading man to co-star with Funicello in a musical they were preparing, "The Maid and the Martian". Kirk was cast as a Martian who arrives on Earth and falls in with a bunch of partying teenagers. The movie was later retitled "Pajama Party" (1964) and was a box-office hit. AIP then cast him in "The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini" (1966) with Deborah Walley. Soon after, Walley and he were put in "It's a Bikini World", filmed in late 1965 under the direction of Stephanie Rothman. It was not released until 1967. Also for AIP, he appeared in a TV special, "The Wild Weird World of Dr. Goldfoot" (1965), made to promote "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine", which aired in November 1965. In December, he announced he would make three more films for Exclusive, starting with "Teacher, Teacher", alongside Bob Denver and Dawn Wells but the film would not be made.


title: Tommy Kirk

text: Following his work for AIP, Kirk spent the remainder of the 1960s making various low-budget films, including "The Unkissed Bride" for Jack H. Harris; "Village of the Giants" (1965) for Bert I. Gordon; "Track of Thunder" and "Catalina Caper" in 1967""; and two films for Texan director Larry Buchanan: "Mars Needs Women" (1968) and "It's Alive!" (1969). Kirk got along well with Buchanan and the two would often spend time together off-set.


title: Tommy Kirk

text: Kirk said he reached bottom in 1970 when he did two movies that were not Screen Actors Guild, "Ride the Hot Wind" and "Blood of Ghastly Horror", causing him to almost lose his SAG card. "Finally, I said, to hell with the whole thing, to hell with show business, I'm gonna make a new life for myself, and I got off drugs, completely kicked all that stuff." In the 1970s, he was in an episode of "The Streets of San Francisco" and the low-budget western "My Name Is Legend" (1975).


title: Tommy Kirk

text: Kirk was gay. Due to public taboos against homosexuality, he had no way to find others like him and spent his teenage years having "stolen, back alley" affairs. Kirk remained lonely and unhappy in the belief, later proved correct, that his sexuality would ruin his career.


title: Tommy Kirk

text: While filming "The Misadventures of Merlin Jones" in 1963, 21 year old Kirk began a relationship with a 15 year old boy, and was caught having sex with him at a swimming pool in Burbank. The boy's mother informed Disney, who elected not to renew Kirk's contract. Walt Disney personally fired Kirk, but when "Merlin Jones" became an unexpected hit, Disney allowed him to return long enough to film a sequel, "The Monkey's Uncle."


title: Tommy Kirk

text: Kirk publicly came out as gay in a 1973 interview with Marvin Jones. At the time he was studying acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, while working as a busboy in a Los Angeles restaurant.


title: Tommy Kirk

text: On Christmas Eve 1964, Kirk was arrested for suspicion of possession of marijuana at a house in Hollywood. The district attorney's office subsequently refused to file a complaint against him on the marijuana charge. The city attorney's office, however, filed an illegal drugs charge, because officers found a vial of barbiturates in his car. This charge was dismissed by a judge in early January when Kirk's attorney established that the barbiturates had been prescribed by a physician. However, the damage to his career had been done. He was replaced on "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini" (1965) by Dwayne Hickman (intended as AIP's follow-up to "Pajama Party"), on "The Sons of Katie Elder" by Michael Anderson, Jr. and on "Beach Ball" by Edd Byrnes. His initial casting in these films was announced in late 1964.


title: Tommy Kirk

text: Kirk got over his drug addiction and gave up acting in the mid-1970s. He worked as a waiter and a chauffeur before going into the carpet-cleaning business in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, an operation which he ran for 20 years. In 1990, Kirk said he was "poor", but had "No bitterness. No regrets." He wrote an unproduced script about Abraham Lincoln and continued to act occasionally, including in the R-rated spoof "Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold". He also enjoyed writing and occasionally appearing at retro film conventions.


title: Tommy Kirk

text: Kirk was inducted as a Disney Legend on October 9, 2006, alongside his former co-stars Tim Considine and Kevin Corcoran. His other repeat co-stars, Annette Funicello and Fred MacMurray, had already been inducted in 1992 and 1987, respectively. Also in 2006, the first of Kirk's "Hardy Boys" serials was issued on DVD in the fifth "wave" of the Walt Disney Treasures series. At that point, he was retired with "a nice pension" and living in Redding, California.


title: Tommy Kirk

text: Kirk died at his Las Vegas, Nevada home on September 28, 2021, at the age of 79. His neighbor and "Old Yeller" costar Beverly Washburn said Kirk died peacefully at home. Washburn alerted Kirk's friend and fellow Disney actor, Paul Petersen. Petersen announced the death on Facebook, noting that Kirk's family had disowned him. No cause of death was released.


title: Lincoln family

text: The Lincoln family is an American family of English origins. It includes the fourth United States Attorney General, Levi Lincoln, Sr., senators Levi Lincoln, Jr. and Enoch Lincoln, and Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States.


title: Lincoln family

text: There were ten known descendants of Abraham Lincoln. The president's branch of the family is believed to have been extinct since its last undisputed descendant, Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, died on December 24, 1985, without any acknowledged children.


title: Lincoln family

text: Samuel Lincoln's father Edward Lincoln was born about 1575 and remained in Hingham, Norfolk, England. He died on February 11, 1640, and was buried in the graveyard of St Andrew's Church. Edward was the only son of Richard Lincoln (buried 1620) and Elizabeth Remching. After the death of his wife, Richard married three more times. There is some debate and at the time, some contesting discussions relating to the contents of Richard's will. Richard was left an inheritance from his father who in turn had it left from his father before him. By convention, his son Edward would inherit the lands and holdings in Hingham, Norfolk, but Richard's 4th wife had instead convinced him to leave the entire proceeds of the will to her and his three youngest children. With no reason to stay, Edward's children, including Thomas 'the weaver' Lincoln and Samuel Lincoln of Hingham, Norfolk, England, made the perilous journey to the New World.


title: Lincoln family

text: The Lincoln family arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637, when Samuel Lincoln (1622–1690), the son of Edward Lincoln, sailed on the ship "John & Dorothy" from Great Yarmouth. He is considered as the patriarch of the Lincoln family in the United States.


title: Lincoln family

text: Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) was a lawyer, politician and the 16th president of the United States from 1861 to 1865. He was born in a one-room log cabin on Sinking Spring Farm near Hodgenville, Kentucky, to Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks. He married Mary Ann Todd and had four children: Robert, Edward, Willie, and Tad.


title: Lincoln family

text: Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith (1904–1985) was a gentleman farmer and great-grandson of Abraham Lincoln. He became the last undisputed descendant of Abraham Lincoln when his sister, Mary, died in 1975, having no children.


title: R-27 (air-to-air missile)

text: The Vympel R-27 (NATO reporting name AA-10 Alamo) is a family of air-to-air missile developed by the Soviet Union. It remains in service with the Russian Air Force, air forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States and air forces of many other countries as standard medium range air-to-air missile even though they have the more advanced R-77.


title: R-27 (air-to-air missile)

text: The R-27 is manufactured in infrared-homing (R-27T, R-27ET), semi-active-radar-homing (R-27R, R-27ER), and active-radar-homing (R-27EA) versions. R-27 family missiles are produced by both Russian and Ukrainian manufacturers. The R-27 missile is carried by the Mikoyan MiG-29 and Sukhoi Su-27 family fighters. The R-27 missile is also license-produced in China, though the production license was bought from Ukraine instead of Russia.


title: R-27 (air-to-air missile)

text: R-27R and ER variants can be used in any meteorological conditions. Launch can made at less than 5 "g" overload and less 50 deg/s roll rate. It is allowed to redesignate targets during flight, or sharing target illumination with other aircraft.


title: R-27 (air-to-air missile)

text: R-27T and ET variants can be used out of cloudiness, at least 15 degrees away from the bearing of sun, and 4 degrees away from the bearing of moon and ground-based heat-contrasting conditions. In cases of maximum head-on range launches where lock-command cannot be utilised, missile can not be fired. Seeker must acquire target before launch. On combat operations section of the Su-27 manual, this mode of usage is especially recommended for head-on usage for passive attacks at targets with 0 degrees approach angle (i.e. another fighter moving to intercept), leaving target unalerted to incoming missile. Launch can be made at 0 to 7 "g", but limited to 6 "g" if roll induced slip is more than 2× diameter of the ball.


title: R-27 (air-to-air missile)

text: In the 1999 Eritrean-Ethiopian War, Eritrean MiG-29s fought Ethiopian Su-27s both piloted by Russian mercenaries. Only one R-27 fired by an Ethiopian Su-27 at an Eritrean MiG-29 proximity-fuzed near enough the MiG that the damaged aircraft eventually crashed on landing.


title: R-27 (air-to-air missile)

text: During the War in Donbas, the Ukrainian Air Force claimed that one of its Su-25 was shot down by a Russian Air Force MiG-29 using a R-27T on 16 July 2014. Russian officials denied any involvement.


title: R-27 (air-to-air missile)

text: During the Yemeni Civil War (2015–present) Houthis have used R-27T missiles modified to serve as surface to air missiles. A video released on January 7, 2018, also shows a modified R-27T hitting a Saudi led coalition fighter on a Forward looking infrared camera. Houthi sources claim to have downed a F-15. Rebels later released footage showing an aircraft wreck, however serial numbers on the wreckage suggested that the downed aircraft was a Panavia Tornado, also operated by Saudi forces. On January 8, the Saudi Press Agency admitted the loss of an aircraft over Yemen, though it did not clarify whether it was a Tornado or an F-15, blaming the crash to 'a technical issue' and reporting that the pilots ejected and recovered by friendly forces.


title: R-27 (air-to-air missile)

text: On 21 March 2018, Houthi rebels released a video where they hit and possibly shot down a Saudi F-15 in Saada province. In the video a R-27T air to air missile adapted for surface to air use was launched, appearing to have successfully hit a jet. As in the video of the previous similar hit recorded on 8 January, the target, while clearly hit, did not appear to be downed. Saudi forces confirmed the hit, while saying the jet safely landed at a Saudi base. Saudi official sources confirmed the incident reporting that it happened at 3:48 pm local time after a surface-to-air defense missile was launched at the fighter jet from inside Saada airport.


title: Fraktur

text: Fraktur () is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. The blackletter lines are broken up; that is, their forms contain many angles when compared to the curves of the Antiqua (common) typefaces modeled after antique Roman square capitals and Carolingian minuscule. From this, Fraktur is sometimes contrasted with the "Latin alphabet" in northern European texts, which is sometimes called the "German alphabet", simply being a typeface of the Latin alphabet. Similarly, the term "Fraktur" or "Gothic" is sometimes applied to "all" of the blackletter typefaces (known in German as , "Broken Script").


title: Fraktur

text: The word derives from Latin ("a break"), built from , passive participle of ("to break"), the same root as the English word "fracture".


title: Fraktur

text: Besides the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet, Fraktur includes the ( ), vowels with umlauts, and the ("long s"). Some Fraktur typefaces also include a variant form of the letter r known as the r rotunda, and many include a variety of ligatures which are left over from cursive handwriting and have rules for their use. Most older Fraktur typefaces make no distinction between the majuscules and (where the common shape is more suggestive of a ), even though the minuscules and are differentiated.


title: Fraktur

text: One difference between the Fraktur and other blackletter scripts is that in the lower case , the left part of the bow is broken, but the right part is not. In Danish texts composed in Fraktur, the letter was already preferred to the German and Swedish in the 16th century.


title: Fraktur

text: In the Latvian variant of Fraktur, used mainly until the 1920s, there are additional characters used to denote Latvian letters with diacritical marks. Stroked letters , , , , are used for palatalized consonants (, , , , ) stroked variants of and distinguish voiced and unvoiced sibilants or affricates ( for voiced [z], for unvoiced [s], [ž] / [š], [dž] / [č]), while accents (, , , , , ) together with digraphs (, etc.) are used for long vowels (, , , , ). Stroked variants of are also used in pre-1950 Sorbian orthography.


title: Fraktur

text: The first Fraktur typeface arose in the early 16th century, when Emperor Maximilian I commissioned the design of the "Triumphal Arch" woodcut by Albrecht Dürer and had a new typeface created specifically for this purpose, designed by Hieronymus Andreae. Fraktur types for printing were established by the Augsburg publisher Johann Schönsperger at the issuance of a series of Maximilian's works such as his "Prayer Book" (, 1513) or the illustrated "Theuerdank" poem (1517).


title: Fraktur

text: Fraktur quickly overtook the earlier Schwabacher and Textualis typefaces in popularity, and a wide variety of Fraktur fonts were carved and became common in the German-speaking world and areas under German influence (Scandinavia, Estonia, Latvia, Central Europe). In the 18th century, the German Theuerdank Fraktur was further developed by the Leipzig typographer Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf to create the typeset Breitkopf Fraktur. While over the succeeding centuries, most Central Europeans switched to Antiqua, German speakers remained a notable holdout.


title: Fraktur

text: Typesetting in Fraktur was still very common in the early 20th century in all German-speaking countries and areas, as well as in Norway, Estonia, and Latvia, and was still used to a very small extent in Sweden, Finland and Denmark, even though other countries typeset in Antiqua. Some books at that time used related blackletter fonts such as Schwabacher; however, the predominant typeface was the Normalfraktur, which came in slight variations.


title: Fraktur

text: From the late 18th century to the late 19th century, Fraktur was progressively replaced by Antiqua as a symbol of the classicist age and emerging cosmopolitanism in most of the countries in Europe that had previously used Fraktur. This move was hotly debated in Germany, where it was known as the Antiqua–Fraktur dispute. The shift affected mostly scientific writing in Germany, whereas most belletristic literature and newspapers continued to be printed in Fraktur.


title: Fraktur

text: The Fraktur typefaces remained in use in Nazi Germany, when they were initially represented as true German script; official Nazi documents and letterheads employed the font, and the cover of Hitler's used a hand-drawn version of it. However, more modernized fonts of the type such as were in fact the most popular typefaces in Nazi Germany, especially for running text as opposed to decorative uses such as in titles. These fonts were designed in the early 20th century, mainly the 1930s, as grotesque versions of blackletter typefaces. The Nazis heavily used these fonts themselves, though the shift remained controversial; in fact, the press was at times scolded for its frequent use of "Roman characters" under "Jewish influence" and German émigrés were urged to use only "German script". On January 3, 1941, the Nazi Party ended this controversy by switching to international scripts such as Antiqua. Martin Bormann issued a circular to all public offices which declared Fraktur (and its corollary, the -based handwriting) to be (Jewish letters) and prohibited their further use. German historian Albert Kapr has speculated that the regime viewed Fraktur as inhibiting communication in the occupied territories during World War II.


title: Fraktur

text: Even with the abolition of Fraktur, some publications include elements of it in headlines. However, academic works occasionally continued to use Fraktur in the text itself. Notably, Joachim Jeremias's work ("The Letters to Timothy and Titus") was published in 1963 using Fraktur. More often, some ligatures ch, ck from Fraktur were used in antiqua-typed editions up to the offset type period. Fraktur saw a brief resurgence after the war, but thereafter fell out of common use.


title: Fraktur

text: Fraktur is today used mostly for decorative typesetting: for example, a number of traditional German newspapers such as the , as well as the Norwegian , still print their name in Fraktur on the masthead (as indeed do some newspapers in other European countries and the U.S.) and it is also popular for pub signs and the like. In this modern decorative use, the traditional rules about the use of long s and short s and of ligatures are often disregarded.


title: Fraktur

text: Individual Fraktur letters are sometimes used in mathematics, which often denotes associated or parallel concepts by the same letter in different fonts. For example, a Lie group is often denoted by "G", while its associated Lie algebra is formula_1. A ring ideal might be denoted by formula_2 (or formula_3 if a prime ideal) while an element is formula_4. The Fraktur formula_5 is also sometimes used to denote the cardinality of the continuum, that is, the cardinality of the real line. In model theory, formula_6 is used to denote an arbitrary model, with "A" as its universe. Fraktur is also used in other ways at the discretion of the author.


title: Fraktur

text: Fraktur is still used among traditional Anabaptists to print German texts, while Kurrent is used as hand writing for German texts. Groups that use both forms of traditional German script are the Amish, Old Order Mennonites, Hutterites, and traditional Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonites who live mostly in Latin America today.


title: Fraktur

text: In the figures below, the German sentence that appears after the names of the fonts (Walbaum-Fraktur in Fig. 1 and Humboldtfraktur in Fig. 2 reads, . It means "Victor chases twelve boxers across the Sylt dike" and contains all 26 letters of the alphabet plus the umlauted glyphs used in German, making it an example of a pangram.


title: Fraktur

text: Unicode does not encode Fraktur as a separate script. Instead, Fraktur is considered a "presentation form" of the Latin alphabet. Thus, the additional ligatures that are required for Fraktur typefaces will not be encoded in Unicode: support for these ligatures is a font engineering issue left up to font developers.


title: Fraktur

text: There are, however, two sets of "Fraktur" symbols in the Unicode blocks of Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols, Letterlike Symbols, and Latin Extended-E. The long s, ß, and the umlauted vowels are not encoded, as the characters are meant to be used in mathematics and phonetics, so they are not suitable for typesetting German-language texts.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Mircea Eliade (; – April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that "hierophanies" form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most instrumental contributions to religious studies was his theory of "eternal return", which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least in the minds of the religious, actually participate in them.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: His literary works belong to the fantastic and autobiographical genres. The best known are the novels "Maitreyi" ('La Nuit Bengali' or 'Bengal Nights'), "Noaptea de Sânziene" ('The Forbidden Forest'), "Isabel și apele diavolului" ('Isabel and the Devil's Waters'), and "Romanul Adolescentului Miop" ('Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent'); the novellas "Domnișoara Christina" ('Miss Christina') and "Tinerețe fără tinerețe" ('Youth Without Youth'); and the short stories "Secretul doctorului Honigberger" ('The Secret of Dr. Honigberger') and "" ('With the Gypsy Girls').


title: Mircea Eliade

text: 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". In the 1940s, he served as cultural attaché to the United Kingdom and Portugal. Several times during the late 1930s, Eliade publicly expressed his support for the Iron Guard, a Christian fascist political organization. His political involvement at the time, as well as his other far right connections, were frequently criticised after World War II.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Noted for his vast erudition, Eliade had fluent command of five languages (Romanian, French, German, Italian, and English) and a reading knowledge of three others (Hebrew, Persian, and Sanskrit). He was elected a posthumous member of the Romanian Academy.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Born in Bucharest, he was the son of Romanian Land Forces officer Gheorghe Eliade (whose original surname was Ieremia) and Jeana "née" Vasilescu. An Orthodox believer, Gheorghe 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. His family moved between Tecuci and Bucharest, ultimately settling in the capital in 1914, and purchasing a house on Melodiei Street, near Piața Rosetti, where Mircea Eliade resided until late in his teens.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: 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 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.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: He described this stage in his life as marked by an unrepeatable epiphany. Recalling his entrance into a drawing room that an "eerie iridescent light" had turned into "a fairy-tale palace", he wrote,


title: Mircea Eliade

text: I practiced for many years [the] exercise of recapturing that epiphanic moment, and I would always find again the same plenitude. I would slip into it as into a fragment of time devoid of duration—without beginning, middle, or end. During my last years of lycée, when I struggled with profound attacks of melancholy, I still succeeded at times in returning to the golden green light of that afternoon. [...] But even though the beatitude was the same, it was now impossible to bear because it aggravated my sadness too much. By this time I knew the world to which the drawing room belonged [...] was a world forever lost.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: 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.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: After completing his primary education at the school on Mântuleasa Street, Eliade attended the Spiru Haret National College in the same class as Arșavir Acterian, Haig Acterian, and Petre Viforeanu (and several years the senior of Nicolae Steinhardt, who eventually became a close friend of Eliade's). Among his other colleagues was future philosopher Constantin Noica and Noica's friend, future art historian Barbu Brezianu.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: As a child, Eliade was fascinated with the natural world, which formed the setting of his very first literary attempts, as well as with Romanian folklore and the Christian faith as expressed by peasants. Growing up, he aimed to find and record what he believed was the common source of all religious traditions. The young Eliade's interest in physical exercise and adventure led him to pursue mountaineering and sailing, and he also joined the Romanian Boy Scouts.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: With a group of friends, he designed and sailed a boat on the Danube, from Tulcea to the Black Sea. In parallel, 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. In order to cultivate his willpower, he would force himself to swallow insects and only slept four to five hours a night. At one point, Eliade was failing four subjects, among which was the study of the Romanian language.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Instead, he became interested in natural science and chemistry, as well as the occult, and wrote short pieces on entomological subjects. Despite his father's concern that he was in danger of losing his already weak eyesight, Eliade read passionately. One of his favorite authors was Honoré de Balzac, whose work he studied carefully. Eliade also became acquainted with the modernist short stories of Giovanni Papini and social anthropology studies by James George Frazer.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: His interest in the two writers led him to learn Italian and English in private, and he also began studying Persian and Hebrew. At the time, Eliade became acquainted with Saadi's poems and the ancient Mesopotamian "Epic of Gilgamesh". He was also interested in philosophy—studying, among others, Socrates, Vasile Conta, and the Stoics Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and read works of history—the two Romanian historians who influenced him from early on were Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu and Nicolae Iorga. His first published work was the 1921 "Inamicul viermelui de mătase" ("The Silkworm's Enemy"), followed by "Cum am găsit piatra filosofală" ("How I Found the Philosophers' Stone"). Four years later, Eliade completed work on his debut volume, the autobiographical "Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Between 1925 and 1928, he attended the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in 1928, earning his diploma with a study on Early Modern Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella. In 1927, Eliade traveled to Italy, where he met Papini and collaborated with the scholar Giuseppe Tucci.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: It was during his student years that Eliade met Nae Ionescu, who lectured in Logic, becoming one of his disciples and friends. He 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 Rădulescu-Motru, Dimitrie Gusti, and Tudor Vianu (all of whom owed inspiration to the defunct literary society "Junimea", albeit in varying degrees).


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade's scholarly works began after a long period of study in British India, at the University of Calcutta. Finding that the Maharaja of Kassimbazar sponsored European scholars to study in India, Eliade applied and was granted an allowance for four years, which was later doubled by a Romanian scholarship. In autumn 1928, he sailed for Calcutta to study Sanskrit and philosophy under Surendranath Dasgupta, a Bengali Cambridge alumnus and professor at Calcutta University, the author of a five volume "History of Indian Philosophy". Before reaching the Indian subcontinent, Eliade also made a brief visit to Egypt. Once in India, he visited large areas of the region, and spent a short period at a Himalayan "ashram".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: He studied the basics of Indian philosophy, and, in parallel, learned Sanskrit, Pali and Bengali under Dasgupta's direction. At the time, he also became interested in the actions of Mahatma Gandhi and the "Satyagraha" as a phenomenon; later, Eliade adapted Gandhian ideas in his discourse on spirituality and Romania.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In 1930, while living with Dasgupta, Eliade fell in love with his host's daughter, Maitreyi Devi, later writing a barely disguised autobiographical novel "Maitreyi" (also known as "La Nuit Bengali" or "Bengal Nights"), in which he claimed that he carried on a physical relationship with her.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade received his PhD in 1933, with a thesis on Yoga practices. The book, which was translated into French three years later, had significant impact in academia, both in Romania and abroad.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: He later recalled that the book was an early step for understanding not just Indian religious practices, but also Romanian spirituality. During the same period, Eliade began a correspondence with the Ceylonese-born philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy. In 1936–1937, he functioned as honorary assistant for Ionescu's course, lecturing in Metaphysics.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In 1933, Mircea Eliade had a physical relationship with the actress Sorana Țopa, while falling in love with Nina Mareș, whom he ultimately married. The latter, introduced to him by his new friend Mihail Sebastian, already had a daughter, Giza, from a man who had divorced her. Eliade subsequently adopted Giza, and the three of them moved to an apartment at 141 Dacia Boulevard. He left his residence in 1936, during a trip he made to the United Kingdom and Germany, when he first visited London, Oxford and Berlin.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: After contributing various and generally polemical pieces in university magazines, Eliade came to the attention of journalist Pamfil Șeicaru, who invited him to collaborate on the nationalist paper "Cuvântul", which was noted for its harsh tones. By then, "Cuvântul" was also hosting articles by Nae Ionescu.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: As one of the figures in the "Criterion" literary society (1933–1934), Eliade's initial encounter with the traditional far right was polemical: the group's conferences were stormed by members of A. C. Cuza's National-Christian Defense League, who objected to what they viewed as pacifism and addressed antisemitic insults to several speakers, including Sebastian; in 1933, he was among the signers of a manifesto opposing Nazi Germany's state-enforced racism.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In 1934, at a time when Sebastian was publicly insulted by Nae Ionescu, who prefaced his book ("De două mii de ani...") with thoughts on the "eternal damnation" of Jews, Mircea Eliade spoke out against this perspective, and commented that Ionescu's references to the verdict "Outside the Church there is no salvation" contradicted the notion of God's omnipotence. However, he contended that Ionescu's text was not evidence of antisemitism.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In 1936, reflecting on the early history of the Romanian Kingdom and its Jewish community, he deplored the expulsion of Jewish scholars from Romania, making specific references to Moses Gaster, Heimann Hariton Tiktin and Lazăr Șăineanu. Eliade's views at the time focused on innovation—in the summer of 1933, he replied to an anti-modernist critique written by George Călinescu:


title: Mircea Eliade

text: All I wish for is a deep change, a complete transformation. But, for God's sake, in any direction other than spirituality.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: He and friends Emil Cioran and Constantin Noica were by then under the influence of "Trăirism", a school of thought that was formed around the ideals expressed by Ionescu. A form of existentialism, "Trăirism" was also the synthesis of traditional and newer right-wing beliefs. Early on, a public polemic was sparked between Eliade and Camil Petrescu: the two eventually reconciled and later became good friends.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Like Mihail Sebastian, who was himself becoming influenced by Ionescu, he maintained contacts with intellectuals from all sides of the political spectrum: their entourage included the right-wing Dan Botta and Mircea Vulcănescu, the non-political Petrescu and Ionel Jianu, and Belu Zilber, who was a member of the illegal Romanian Communist Party.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: The group also included Haig Acterian, Mihail Polihroniade, Petru Comarnescu, Marietta Sadova and Floria Capsali.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: He was also close to Marcel Avramescu, a former Surrealist writer whom he introduced to the works of René Guénon. A doctor in the Kabbalah and future Romanian Orthodox cleric, Avramescu joined Eliade in editing the short-lived esoteric magazine "Memra" (the only one of its kind in Romania).


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Among the intellectuals who attended his lectures were Mihai Şora (whom he deemed his favorite student), Eugen Schileru and Miron Constantinescu—known later as, respectively, a philosopher, an art critic, and a sociologist and political figure of the communist regime. Mariana Klein, who became Șora's wife, was one of Eliade's female students, and later authored works on his scholarship.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade later recounted that he had himself enlisted Zilber as a "Cuvântul" contributor, in order for him to provide a Marxist perspective on the issues discussed by the journal. Their relation soured in 1935, when the latter publicly accused Eliade of serving as an agent for the secret police, "Siguranța Statului" (Sebastian answered to the statement by alleging that Zilber was himself a secret agent, and the latter eventually retracted his claim).


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade's articles before and after his adherence to the principles of the Iron Guard (or, as it was usually known at the time, the "Legionary Movement"), beginning with his "Itinerar spiritual" ("Spiritual Itinerary", serialized in "Cuvântul" in 1927), center on several political ideals advocated by the far right.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: They displayed his rejection of liberalism and the modernizing goals of the 1848 Wallachian revolution (perceived as "an abstract apology of Mankind" and "ape-like imitation of [Western] Europe"), as well as for democracy itself (accusing it of "managing to crush all attempts at national renaissance", and later praising Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy on the grounds that, according to Eliade, "[in Italy,] he who thinks for himself is promoted to the highest office in the shortest of times"). He approved of an ethnic nationalist state centered on the Orthodox Church (in 1927, despite his still-vivid interest in Theosophy, he recommended young intellectuals "the return to the Church"), which he opposed to, among others, the secular nationalism of Constantin Rădulescu-Motru; referring to this particular ideal as "Romanianism", Eliade was, in 1934, still viewing it as "neither fascism, nor chauvinism".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: 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.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In 1936, Eliade was the focus of a campaign in the far right press, being targeted for having authored "pornography" in his "Domnișoara Christina" and "Isabel și apele diavolului"; similar accusations were aimed at other cultural figures, including Tudor Arghezi and Geo Bogza. Assessments of Eliade's work were in sharp contrast to one another: also in 1936, Eliade accepted an award from the Romanian Writers' Society, of which he had been a member since 1934. In summer 1937, through an official decision which came as a result of the accusations, and despite student protests, he was stripped of his position at the university.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade decided to sue the Ministry of Education, asking for a symbolic compensation of 1 leu. He won the trial, and regained his position as Nae Ionescu's assistant.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Nevertheless, by 1937, he gave his intellectual support to the Iron Guard, in which he saw "a Christian revolution aimed at creating a new Romania", and a group able "to reconcile Romania with God". His articles of the time, published in Iron Guard papers such as "Sfarmă Piatră" and "Buna Vestire", contain ample praises of the movement's leaders (Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Ion Moța, Vasile Marin, and Gheorghe Cantacuzino-Grănicerul). The transition he went through was similar to that of his fellow generation members and close collaborators—among the notable exceptions to this rule were Petru Comarnescu, sociologist Henri H. Stahl and future dramatist Eugène Ionesco, as well as Sebastian.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: He eventually enrolled in the "Totul pentru Țară" ("Everything for the Fatherland" Party), the political expression of the Iron Guard, and contributed to its 1937 electoral campaign in Prahova County—as indicated by his inclusion on a list of party members with county-level responsibilities (published in "Buna Vestire").


title: Mircea Eliade

text: The stance taken by Eliade resulted in his arrest on July 14, 1938, after a crackdown on the Iron Guard authorized by King Carol II. At the time of his arrest, he had just interrupted a column on "Provincia și legionarismul" ("The Province and Legionary Ideology") in "Vremea", having been singled out by Prime Minister Armand Călinescu as an author of Iron Guard propaganda.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade was kept for three weeks in a cell at the "Siguranța Statului" Headquarters, in an attempt to have him sign a "declaration of dissociation" with the Iron Guard, but he refused to do so. In the first week of August he was transferred to a makeshift camp at Miercurea-Ciuc. When Eliade began coughing blood in October 1938, he was taken to a clinic in Moroeni. Eliade was simply released on November 12, and subsequently spent his time writing his play "Iphigenia" (also known as "Ifigenia"). In April 1940, with the help of Alexandru Rosetti, he became Cultural Attaché to the United Kingdom, a posting cut short when Romanian-British foreign relations were broken.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: After leaving London he was assigned the office of Counsel and Press Officer (later Cultural Attaché) to the Romanian Embassy in Portugal, where he was kept on as diplomat by the National Legionary State (the Iron Guard government) and, ultimately, by Ion Antonescu's regime. His office involved disseminating propaganda in favor of the Romanian state. In 1941, during his time in Portugal, Eliade stayed in Estoril, at the Hotel Palácio. He would later find a house in Cascais, at Rua da Saudade.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In February 1941, weeks after the bloody Legionary Rebellion was crushed by Antonescu, "Iphigenia" was staged by the National Theater Bucharest—the play soon raised concerns that it owed inspiration to the Iron Guard's ideology, and even that its inclusion in the program was a Legionary attempt at subversion.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In 1942, Eliade authored a volume in praise of the "Estado Novo", established in Portugal by António de Oliveira Salazar, claiming that "The Salazarian state, a Christian and totalitarian one, is first and foremost based on love". On July 7 of the same year, he was received by Salazar himself, who assigned Eliade the task of warning Antonescu to withdraw the Romanian Army from the Eastern Front ("[In his place], I would not be grinding it in Russia"). Eliade also 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.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In autumn 1943, he traveled to occupied France, where he rejoined Emil Cioran, also meeting with scholar Georges Dumézil and the collaborationist writer Paul Morand. At the same time, he applied for a position of lecturer at the University of Bucharest, but withdrew from the race, leaving Constantin Noica and Ion Zamfirescu to dispute the position, in front of a panel of academics comprising Lucian Blaga and Dimitrie Gusti (Zamfirescu's eventual selection, going against Blaga's recommendation, was to be the topic of a controversy). In his private notes, Eliade wrote that he took no further interest in the office, because his visits abroad had convinced him that he had "something great to say", and that he could not function within the confines of "a minor culture". Also during the war, 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 Córdoba. It was during his trips to Spain that Eliade met philosophers José Ortega y Gasset and Eugeni d'Ors. He maintained a friendship with d'Ors, and met him again on several occasions after the war.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Nina Eliade fell ill with uterine cancer and died during their stay in Lisbon, in late 1944. As the widower later wrote, the disease was probably caused by an abortion procedure she had undergone at an early stage of their relationship. He came to suffer from clinical depression, which increased as Romania and her Axis allies suffered major defeats on the Eastern Front. Contemplating a return to Romania as a soldier or a monk, he was on a continuous search for effective antidepressants, medicating himself with passion flower extract, and, eventually, with methamphetamine. This was probably not his first experience with drugs: vague mentions in his notebooks have been read as indication that Mircea Eliade was taking opium during his travels to Calcutta. Later, discussing the works of Aldous Huxley, 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".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: At signs that the Romanian communist regime was about to take hold, Eliade opted not to return to the country. On September 16, 1945, he moved to France with his adopted daughter Giza. Once there, he resumed contacts with Dumézil, who helped him recover his position in academia. On Dumézil's recommendation, he taught at the "École Pratique des Hautes Études" in Paris. It was estimated that, at the time, it was not uncommon for him to work 15 hours a day. Eliade married a second time, to the Romanian exile Christinel Cotescu. His second wife, the descendant of boyars, was the sister-in-law of the conductor Ionel Perlea.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Together with Emil Cioran and other Romanian expatriates, Eliade rallied with the former diplomat Alexandru Busuioceanu, helping him publicize anti-communist opinion to the Western European public. He was also briefly involved in publishing a Romanian-language magazine, titled "Luceafărul" ("The Morning Star"), and was again in contact with Mihai Șora, who had been granted a scholarship to study in France, and with Șora's wife Mariana. In 1947, he was facing material constraints, and Ananda Coomaraswamy found him a job as a French-language teacher in the United States, at a school in Arizona; the arrangement ended upon Coomaraswamy's death in September.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Beginning in 1948, he wrote for the journal "Critique", edited by French philosopher Georges Bataille. The following year, he went on a visit to Italy, where he wrote the first 300 pages of his novel "Noaptea de Sânziene" (he visited the country a third time in 1952). He collaborated with Carl Jung and the "Eranos" circle after Henry Corbin recommended him in 1949, and wrote for the "Antaios" magazine (edited by Ernst Jünger). In 1950, Eliade began attending "Eranos" conferences, meeting Jung, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, Gershom Scholem and Paul Radin. He described "Eranos" as "one of the most creative cultural experiences of the modern Western world."


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In October 1956, he moved to the United States, settling in Chicago the following year. He had been invited by Joachim Wach to give a series of lectures at Wach's home institution, the University of Chicago. Eliade and Wach are generally admitted to be the founders of the "Chicago school" that basically defined the study of religions for the second half of the 20th century. Upon Wach's death before the lectures were delivered, Eliade was appointed as his replacement, becoming, in 1964, the "Sewell Avery Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions". Beginning in 1954, with the first edition of his volume on "Eternal Return", Eliade also enjoyed commercial success: the book went through several editions under different titles, and sold over 100,000 copies.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In 1966, Mircea Eliade became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also 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. It was also during that period that Mircea Eliade completed his voluminous and influential "History of Religious Ideas", which grouped together the overviews of his main original interpretations of religious history. He occasionally traveled out of the United States, attending the Congress for the History of Religions in Marburg (1960), and visiting Sweden and Norway in 1970.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Initially, Eliade was attacked with virulence by the Romanian Communist Party press, chiefly by "România Liberă"—which described him as "the Iron Guard's ideologue, enemy of the working class, apologist of Salazar's dictatorship". However, the regime also made secretive attempts to enlist his and Cioran's support: Haig Acterian's widow, theater director Marietta Sadova, was sent to Paris in order to re-establish contacts with the two. Although the move was planned by Romanian officials, her encounters were to be used as evidence incriminating her at a February 1960 trial for treason (where Constantin Noica and Dinu Pillat were the main defendants). Romania's secret police, the Securitate, also portrayed Eliade as a spy for the British Secret Intelligence Service and a former agent of the Gestapo.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: He was slowly rehabilitated at home beginning in the early 1960s, under the rule of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. In the 1970s, Eliade was approached by the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime in several ways, in order to have him return. The move was prompted by the officially sanctioned nationalism and Romania's claim to independence from the Eastern Bloc, as both phenomena came to see Eliade's prestige as an asset. An unprecedented event occurred with the interview that was granted by Mircea Eliade to poet Adrian Păunescu, during the latter's 1970 visit to Chicago; Eliade complimented both Păunescu's activism and his support for official tenets, expressing a belief that


title: Mircea Eliade

text: the youth of Eastern Europe is clearly superior to that of Western Europe. [...] I am convinced that, within ten years, the young revolutionary generation shan't be behaving as does today the noisy minority of Western contesters. [...] Eastern youth have seen the abolition of traditional institutions, have accepted it [...] and are not yet content with the structures enforced, but rather seek to improve them.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Păunescu's visit to Chicago was followed by those of the nationalist official writer Eugen Barbu and by Eliade's friend Constantin Noica (who had since been released from jail). At the time, Eliade contemplated returning to Romania, but was eventually persuaded by fellow Romanian intellectuals in exile (including Radio Free Europe's Virgil Ierunca and Monica Lovinescu) to reject Communist proposals. In 1977, he joined other exiled Romanian intellectuals in signing a telegram protesting the repressive measures newly enforced by the Ceaușescu regime. Writing in 2007, Romanian anthropologist Andrei Oișteanu recounted how, around 1984, the Securitate unsuccessfully attempted to become an agent of influence in Eliade's Chicago circle.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: During his later years, Eliade's past was progressively exposed publicly, the stress of which probably contributed to the decline of his health. By then, his writing career was hampered by severe arthritis. The last academic honors bestowed upon him were the French Academy's Bordin Prize (1977) and the title of "Doctor Honoris Causa", granted by George Washington University (1985).


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Mircea Eliade died at the Bernard Mitchell Hospital in April 1986. Eight days previously, he suffered a stroke while reading Emil Cioran's "Exercises of Admiration", and had subsequently lost his speech function. Four months before, a fire had destroyed part of his office at the Meadville Lombard Theological School (an event which he had interpreted as an omen). Eliade's Romanian disciple Ioan Petru Culianu, who recalled the scientific community's reaction to the news, described Eliade's death as "a "mahaparanirvana"", thus comparing it to the passing of Gautama Buddha. His body was cremated in Chicago, and the funeral ceremony was held on University grounds, at the Rockefeller Chapel. It was attended by 1,200 people, and included a public reading of Eliade's text in which he recalled the epiphany of his childhood—the lecture was given by novelist Saul Bellow, Eliade's colleague at the university. His student and the bearer of his legacy, Charles H. Long, co-founder of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, gave the eulogy. His grave is located in Oak Woods Cemetery.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In his work on the history of religion, Eliade is most highly regarded for his writings on Alchemy, Shamanism, Yoga and what he called the eternal return—the implicit belief, supposedly present in religious thought in general, that religious behavior is not only an imitation of, but also a participation in, sacred events, and thus restores the mythical time of origins. Eliade's thinking was in part influenced by Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Nae Ionescu and the writings of the Traditionalist School (René Guénon and Julius Evola). For instance, Eliade's "The Sacred and the Profane" partially builds on Otto's "The Idea of the Holy" to show how religion emerges from the experience of the sacred, and myths of time and nature.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade is known for his attempt to find broad, cross-cultural parallels and unities in religion, particularly in myths. Wendy Doniger, Eliade's colleague from 1978 until his death, has observed that "Eliade argued boldly for universals where he might more safely have argued for widely prevalent patterns." His "Treatise on the History of Religions" was praised by French philologist Georges Dumézil for its coherence and ability to synthesize diverse and distinct mythologies.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Robert Ellwood describes Eliade's approach to religion as follows. Eliade approaches religion by imagining an ideally "religious" person, whom he calls "homo religiosus" in his writings. Eliade's theories basically describe how this "homo religiosus" would view the world. This does not mean that all religious practitioners actually think and act like "homo religiosus". Instead, it means that religious behavior "says through its own language" that the world is as "homo religiosus" would see it, whether or not the real-life participants in religious behavior are aware of it. However, Ellwood writes that Eliade "tends to slide over that last qualification", implying that traditional societies actually thought like "homo religiosus".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade argues that "Yahweh is both kind and wrathful; the God of the Christian mystics and theologians is terrible and gentle at once." He also thought that the Indian and Chinese mystic tried to attain "a state of perfect indifference and neutrality" that resulted in a coincidence of opposites in which "pleasure and pain, desire and repulsion, cold and heat [...] are expunged from his awareness."


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade's understanding of religion centers on his concept of hierophany (manifestation of the Sacred)—a concept that includes, but is not limited to, the older and more restrictive concept of theophany (manifestation of a god). From the perspective of religious thought, Eliade argues, hierophanies give structure and orientation to the world, establishing a sacred order. The "profane" space of nonreligious experience can only be divided up geometrically: it has no "qualitative differentiation and, hence, no orientation [is] given by virtue of its inherent structure." Thus, profane space gives man no pattern for his behavior. In contrast to profane space, the site of a hierophany has a sacred structure to which religious man conforms himself. A hierophany amounts to a "revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the non-reality of the vast surrounding expanse." As an example of "sacred space" demanding a certain response from man, Eliade gives the story of Moses halting before Yahweh's manifestation as a burning bush ("Exodus" 3:5) and taking off his shoes.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade notes that, in traditional societies, myth represents the absolute truth about primordial time. According to the myths, this was the time when the Sacred first appeared, establishing the world's structure—myths claim to describe the primordial events that made society and the natural world be that which they are. Eliade argues that all myths are, in that sense, origin myths: "myth, then, is always an account of a "creation.""


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Many traditional societies believe that the power of a thing lies in its origin. If origin is equivalent to power, then "it is the first manifestation of a thing that is significant and valid" (a thing's reality and value therefore lies only in its first appearance).


title: Mircea Eliade

text: According to Eliade's theory, only the Sacred has value, only a thing's first appearance has value and, therefore, only the Sacred's first appearance has value. Myth describes the Sacred's first appearance; therefore, the mythical age is sacred time, the only time of value: "primitive man was interested only in the "beginnings" [...] to him it mattered little what had happened to himself, or to others like him, in more or less distant times." Eliade postulated this as the reason for the "nostalgia for origins" that appears in many religions, the desire to return to a primordial Paradise.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade argues that traditional man attributes no value to the linear march of historical events: only the events of the mythical age have value. To give his own life value, traditional man performs myths and rituals. Because the Sacred's essence lies only in the mythical age, only in the Sacred's first appearance, any later appearance is actually the first appearance; by recounting or re-enacting mythical events, myths and rituals "re-actualize" those events. Eliade often uses the term "archetypes" to refer to the mythical models established by the Sacred, although Eliade's use of the term should be distinguished from the use of the term in Jungian psychology.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Thus, argues Eliade, religious behavior does not only commemorate, but also participates in, sacred events:


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In "imitating" the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythical hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade called this concept the "eternal return" (distinguished from the philosophical concept of "eternal return"). Wendy Doniger noted that Eliade's theory of the eternal return "has become a truism in the study of religions."


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade attributes the well-known "cyclic" vision of time in ancient thought to belief in the eternal return. For instance, the New Year ceremonies among the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, and other Near Eastern peoples re-enacted their cosmogonic myths. Therefore, by the logic of the eternal return, each New Year ceremony "was" the beginning of the world for these peoples. According to Eliade, these peoples felt a need to return to the Beginning at regular intervals, turning time into a circle.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: 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 (which, Eliade indicated, he viewed as empty of any inherent value or sacrality). 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. Traditional societies escape this anxiety to an extent, as they refuse to completely acknowledge historical time. But the return to the sources involved an apocalyptic experience. Doina Ruști, analyzing the story"The Old Man and The Bureaucrats" ("Pe strada Mântuleasa"), says The memories create the chaos, because "the myth makes irruption in a world in tormented birth, without memory, and transform all in a labyrinth".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade claims that many myths, rituals, and mystical experiences involve a "coincidence of opposites," or "coincidentia oppositorum". In fact, he calls the "coincidentia oppositorum" "the mythical pattern." Many myths, Eliade notes, "present us with a twofold revelation":


title: Mircea Eliade

text: they express on the one hand the diametrical opposition of two divine figures sprung from one and the same principle and destined, in many versions, to be reconciled at some "illud tempus" of eschatology, and on the other, the "coincidentia oppositorum" in the very nature of the divinity, which shows itself, by turns or even simultaneously, benevolent and terrible, creative and destructive, solar and serpentine, and so on (in other words, actual and potential).


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade argues that "Yahweh is both kind and wrathful; the God of the Christian mystics and theologians is terrible and gentle at once." He also thought that the Indian and Chinese mystic tried to attain "a state of perfect indifference and neutrality" that resulted in a coincidence of opposites in which "pleasure and pain, desire and repulsion, cold and heat [...] are expunged from his awareness".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: According to Eliade, the "coincidentia oppositorum"'s appeal lies in "man's deep dissatisfaction with his actual situation, with what is called the human condition". In many mythologies, the end of the mythical age involves a "fall", a fundamental "ontological change in the structure of the World". Because the "coincidentia oppositorum" is a contradiction, it represents a denial of the world's current logical structure, a reversal of the "fall".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Also, traditional man's dissatisfaction with the post-mythical age expresses itself as a feeling of being "torn and separate". In many mythologies, the lost mythical age was a Paradise, "a paradoxical state in which the contraries exist side by side without conflict, and the multiplications form aspects of a mysterious Unity". The "coincidentia oppositorum" expresses a wish to recover the lost unity of the mythical Paradise, for it presents a reconciliation of opposites and the unification of diversity:


title: Mircea Eliade

text: On the level of pre-systematic thought, the mystery of totality embodies man's endeavor to reach a perspective in which the contraries are abolished, the Spirit of Evil reveals itself as a stimulant of Good, and Demons appear as the night aspect of the Gods.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade acknowledges that not all religious behavior has all the attributes described in his theory of sacred time and the eternal return. The Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions embrace linear, historical time as sacred or capable of sanctification, while some Eastern traditions largely reject the notion of sacred time, seeking escape from the cycles of time.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Because they contain rituals, Judaism and Christianity necessarily—Eliade argues—retain a sense of cyclic time:


title: Mircea Eliade

text: "by the very fact that it is a religion", Christianity had to keep at least one mythical aspect—liturgical Time, that is, the periodic rediscovery of the "illud tempus" of the beginnings [and] an "imitation" of the Christ as "exemplary pattern".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: However, Judaism and Christianity do not see time as a circle endlessly turning on itself; nor do they see such a cycle as desirable, as a way to participate in the Sacred. Instead, these religions embrace the concept of linear history progressing toward the Messianic Age or the Last Judgment, thus initiating the idea of "progress" (humans are to work for a Paradise in the future). However, Eliade's understanding of Judaeo-Christian eschatology can also be understood as cyclical in that the "end of time" is a return to God: "The final catastrophe will put an end to history, hence will restore man to eternity and beatitude."


title: Mircea Eliade

text: The pre-Islamic Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, which made a notable "contribution to the religious formation of the West", also has a linear sense of time; although, according to Eliade, the Hebrews' linear sense of time predates their being influenced by Zoroastrianism. In fact, 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. However, Eliade argues, Judaism elaborated its mythology of linear time by adding elements borrowed from Zoroastrianism—including ethical dualism, a savior figure, the future resurrection of the body, and the idea of cosmic progress toward "the final triumph of Good."


title: Mircea Eliade

text: The Indian religions of the East generally retain a cyclic view of time—for instance, the Hindu doctrine of "kalpas". According to Eliade, most religions that accept the cyclic view of time also embrace it: they see it as a way to return to the sacred time. However, in Buddhism, Jainism, and some forms of Hinduism, the Sacred lies outside the flux of the material world (called "maya", or "illusion"), and one can only reach it by escaping from the cycles of time. Because the Sacred lies outside cyclic time, which conditions humans, people can only reach the Sacred by escaping the human condition. According to Eliade, Yoga techniques aim at escaping the limitations of the body, allowing the soul ("atman") to rise above "maya" and reach the Sacred ("nirvana", "moksha"). Imagery of "freedom", and of death to one's old body and rebirth with a new body, occur frequently in Yogic texts, representing escape from the bondage of the temporal human condition. Eliade discusses these themes in detail in "Yoga: Immortality and Freedom".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: A recurrent theme in Eliade's myth analysis is the "axis mundi", the Center of the World. According to Eliade, the Cosmic Center is a necessary corollary to the division of reality into the Sacred and the profane. The Sacred contains all value, and the world gains purpose and meaning only through hierophanies:


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation is established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Because profane space gives man no orientation for his life, the Sacred must manifest itself in a hierophany, thereby establishing a sacred site around which man can orient himself. The site of a hierophany establishes a "fixed point, a center". This Center abolishes the "homogeneity and relativity of profane space", for it becomes "the central axis for all future orientation".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: A manifestation of the Sacred in profane space is, by definition, an example of something breaking through from one plane of existence to another. Therefore, the initial hierophany that establishes the Center must be a point at which there is contact between different planes—this, Eliade argues, explains the frequent mythical imagery of a Cosmic Tree or Pillar joining Heaven, Earth, and the underworld.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: 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. In addition, the designs of traditional buildings, especially temples, usually imitate the mythical image of the "axis mundi" joining the different cosmic levels. For instance, the Babylonian ziggurats were built to resemble cosmic mountains passing through the heavenly spheres, and the rock of the Temple in Jerusalem was supposed to reach deep into the "tehom", or primordial waters.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: According to the logic of the eternal return, the site of each such symbolic Center will actually be the Center of the World:


title: Mircea Eliade

text: It may be said, in general, that the majority of the sacred and ritual trees that we meet with in the history of religions are only replicas, imperfect copies of this exemplary archetype, the Cosmic Tree. Thus, all these sacred trees are thought of as situated at the Centre of the World, and all the ritual trees or posts [...] are, as it were, magically projected into the Centre of the World.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: According to Eliade's interpretation, religious man apparently feels the need to live not only near, but "at", the mythical Center as much as possible, given that the center is the point of communication with the Sacred.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Thus, Eliade argues, many traditional societies share common outlines in their mythical geographies. In the middle of the known world is the sacred Center, "a place that is sacred above all"; this Center anchors the established order. Around the sacred Center lies the known world, the realm of established order; and beyond the known world is a chaotic and dangerous realm, "peopled by ghosts, demons, [and] 'foreigners' (who are [identified with] demons and the souls of the dead)". According to Eliade, traditional societies place their known world at the Center because (from their perspective) their known world is the realm that obeys a recognizable order, and it therefore must be the realm in which the Sacred manifests itself; the regions beyond the known world, which seem strange and foreign, must lie far from the center, outside the order established by the Sacred.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: According to some "evolutionistic" theories of religion, especially that of Edward Burnett Tylor, cultures naturally progress from animism and polytheism to monotheism. According to this view, more advanced cultures should be more monotheistic, and more primitive cultures should be more polytheistic. However, many of the most "primitive", pre-agricultural societies believe in a supreme sky-god. Thus, according to Eliade, post-19th-century scholars have rejected Tylor's theory of evolution from animism. Based on the discovery of supreme sky-gods among "primitives", Eliade suspects that the earliest humans worshiped a heavenly Supreme Being. In "Patterns in Comparative Religion", he writes, "The most popular prayer in the world is addressed to 'Our Father who art in heaven.' It is possible that man's earliest prayers were addressed to the same heavenly father."


title: Mircea Eliade

text: However, Eliade disagrees with Wilhelm Schmidt, who thought the earliest form of religion was a strict monotheism. Eliade dismisses this theory of "primordial monotheism" ("Urmonotheismus") as "rigid" and unworkable. "At most," he writes, "this schema [Schmidt's theory] renders an account of human [religious] evolution since the Paleolithic era". If an "Urmonotheismus" did exist, Eliade adds, it probably differed in many ways from the conceptions of God in many modern monotheistic faiths: for instance, the primordial High God could manifest himself as an animal without losing his status as a celestial Supreme Being.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: According to Eliade, heavenly Supreme Beings are actually less common in more advanced cultures. 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. Even in primitive hunter-gatherer societies, the High God is a vague, distant figure, dwelling high above the world. Often he has no cult and receives prayer only as a last resort, when all else has failed. Eliade calls the distant High God a "deus otiosus" ("idle god").


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In belief systems that involve a "deus otiosus", the distant High God is believed to have been closer to humans during the mythical age. After finishing his works of creation, the High God "forsook the earth and withdrew into the highest heaven". This is an example of the Sacred's distance from "profane" life, life lived after the mythical age: by escaping from the profane condition through religious behavior, figures such as the shaman return to the conditions of the mythical age, which include nearness to the High God ("by his "flight" or ascension, the shaman [...] meets the God of Heaven face to face and speaks directly to him, as man sometimes did "in illo tempore""). The shamanistic behaviors surrounding the High God are a particularly clear example of the eternal return.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade's scholarly work includes a study of shamanism, "", a survey of shamanistic practices in different areas. His "Myths, Dreams and Mysteries" also addresses shamanism in some detail.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In "Shamanism", 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 (it is from one of the titles for this function, namely, "šamán", considered by Eliade to be of Tungusic origin, that the term itself was introduced into Western languages). Eliade defines a shaman as follows:


title: Mircea Eliade

text: he is believed to cure, like all doctors, and to perform miracles of the fakir type, like all magicians [...] But beyond this, he is a psychopomp, and he may also be a priest, mystic, and poet.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: If we define shamanism this way, Eliade claims, we find that the term covers a collection of phenomena that share a common and unique "structure" and "history." (When thus defined, shamanism tends to occur in its purest forms in hunting and pastoral societies like those of Siberia and Central Asia, which revere a celestial High God "on the way to becoming a "deus otiosus"." Eliade takes the shamanism of those regions as his most representative example.)


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In his examinations of shamanism, Eliade emphasizes the shaman's attribute of regaining man's condition before the "Fall" out of sacred time: "The most representative mystical experience of the archaic societies, that of shamanism, betrays the "Nostalgia for Paradise", the desire to recover the state of freedom and beatitude before 'the Fall'." This concern—which, by itself, is the concern of almost all religious behavior, according to Eliade—manifests itself in specific ways in shamanism.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: According to Eliade, one of the most common shamanistic themes is the shaman's supposed death and resurrection. This occurs in particular during his initiation. Often, the procedure is supposed to be performed by spirits who dismember the shaman and strip the flesh from his bones, then put him back together and revive him. In more than one way, this death and resurrection represents the shaman's elevation above human nature.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: First, the shaman dies so that he can rise above human nature on a quite literal level. After he has been dismembered by the initiatory spirits, they often replace his old organs with new, magical ones (the shaman dies to his profane self so that he can rise again as a new, sanctified, being). Second, by being reduced to his bones, the shaman experiences rebirth on a more symbolic level: in many hunting and herding societies, the bone represents the source of life, so reduction to a skeleton "is equivalent to re-entering the womb of this primordial life, that is, to a complete renewal, a mystical rebirth". Eliade considers this return to the source of life essentially equivalent to the eternal return.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Third, the shamanistic phenomenon of repeated death and resurrection also represents a transfiguration in other ways. The shaman dies not once but many times: having died during initiation and risen again with new powers, the shaman can send his spirit out of his body on errands; thus, his whole career consists of repeated deaths and resurrections. The shaman's new ability to die and return to life shows that he is no longer bound by the laws of profane time, particularly the law of death: "the ability to 'die' and come to life again [...] denotes that [the shaman] has surpassed the human condition."


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Having risen above the human condition, the shaman is not bound by the flow of history. Therefore, he enjoys the conditions of the mythical age. In many myths, humans can speak with animals; and, after their initiations, many shamans claim to be able to communicate with animals. According to Eliade, this is one manifestation of the shaman's return to "the "illud tempus" described to us by the paradisiac myths."


title: Mircea Eliade

text: The shaman can descend to the underworld or ascend to heaven, often by climbing the World Tree, the cosmic pillar, the sacred ladder, or some other form of the "axis mundi". Often, the shaman will ascend to heaven to speak with the High God. Because the gods (particularly the High God, according to Eliade's "deus otiosus" concept) were closer to humans during the mythical age, the shaman's easy communication with the High God represents an abolition of history and a return to the mythical age.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Because of his ability to communicate with the gods and descend to the land of the dead, the shaman frequently functions as a psychopomp and a medicine man.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In addition to his political essays, the young Mircea Eliade authored others, philosophical in content. Connected with the ideology of Trăirism, they were often prophetic in tone, and saw Eliade being hailed as a herald by various representatives of his generation. When Eliade was 21 years old and publishing his "Itinerar spiritual", literary critic Şerban Cioculescu described him as "the column leader of the spiritually mystical and Orthodox youth." Cioculescu discussed his "impressive erudition", but argued that it was "occasionally plethoric, poetically inebriating itself through abuse." Cioculescu's colleague Perpessicius saw the young author and his generation as marked by "the specter of war", a notion he connected to various essays of the 1920s and 30s in which Eliade threatened the world with the verdict that a new conflict was looming (while asking that young people be allowed to manifest their will and fully experience freedom before perishing).


title: Mircea Eliade

text: One of Eliade's noted contributions in this respect was the 1932 "Soliloquii" ('Soliloquies'), which explored existential philosophy. George Călinescu who saw in it "an echo of Nae Ionescu's lectures", traced a parallel with the essays of another of Ionescu's disciples, Emil Cioran, while noting that Cioran's were "of a more exulted tone and written in the aphoristic form of Kierkegaard." Călinescu recorded Eliade's rejection of objectivity, citing the author's stated indifference towards any "naïveté" or "contradictions" that the reader could possibly reproach him, as well as his dismissive thoughts of "theoretical data" and mainstream philosophy in general (Eliade saw the latter as "inert, infertile and pathogenic"). Eliade thus argued, "a sincere brain is unassailable, for it denies itself to any relationship with outside truths."


title: Mircea Eliade

text: The young writer was however careful to clarify that the existence he took into consideration was not the life of "instincts and personal idiosyncrasies", which he believed determined the lives of many humans, but that of a distinct set comprising "personalities". He described "personalities" as characterized by both "purpose" and "a much more complicated and dangerous alchemy." This differentiation, George Călinescu believed, echoed Ionescu's metaphor of man, seen as "the only animal who can fail at living", and the duck, who "shall remain a duck no matter what it does". According to Eliade, the purpose of personalities is infinity: "consciously and gloriously bringing [existence] to waste, into as many skies as possible, continuously fulfilling and polishing oneself, seeking ascent and not circumference."


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In Eliade's view, two roads await man in this process. One is glory, determined by either work or procreation, and the other the asceticism of religion or magic—both, Călinescu believed, were aimed at reaching the absolute, even in those cases where Eliade described the latter as an "abyssal experience" into which man may take the plunge. The critic pointed out that the addition of "a magical solution" to the options taken into consideration seemed to be Eliade's own original contributions to his mentor's philosophy, and proposed that it may have owed inspiration to Julius Evola and his disciples. He also 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" (a reflection of "imitatio dei", having salvation for its ultimate goal).


title: Mircea Eliade

text: By profession, Eliade was a historian of religion. However, his scholarly works draw heavily on philosophical and psychological terminology. In addition, they contain a number of philosophical arguments about religion. In particular, Eliade often implies the existence of a universal psychological or spiritual "essence" behind all religious phenomena. Because of these arguments, some have accused Eliade of overgeneralization and "essentialism," or even of promoting a theological agenda under the guise of historical scholarship. However, others argue that Eliade is better understood as a scholar who is willing to openly discuss sacred experience and its consequences.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In studying religion, Eliade rejects certain "reductionist" approaches. Eliade thinks a religious phenomenon cannot be reduced to a product of culture and history. He insists that, although religion involves "the social man, the economic man, and so forth", nonetheless "all these conditioning factors together do not, of themselves, add up to the life of the spirit."


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Using this anti-reductionist position, Eliade argues against those who accuse him of overgeneralizing, of looking for universals at the expense of particulars. Eliade admits that every religious phenomenon is shaped by the particular culture and history that produced it:


title: Mircea Eliade

text: When the Son of God incarnated and became the Christ, he had to speak Aramaic; he could only conduct himself as a Hebrew of his times [...] His religious message, however universal it might be, was conditioned by the past and present history of the Hebrew people. If the Son of God had been born in India, his spoken language would have had to conform itself to the structure of the Indian languages.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: However, Eliade argues against those he calls "historicist or existentialist philosophers" who do not recognize "man in general" behind particular men produced by particular situations (Eliade cites Immanuel Kant as the likely forerunner of this kind of "historicism".) He adds that human consciousness transcends (is not reducible to) its historical and cultural conditioning, and even suggests the possibility of a "transconscious". By this, Eliade does not necessarily mean anything supernatural or mystical: within the "transconscious," he places religious motifs, symbols, images, and nostalgias that are supposedly universal and whose causes therefore cannot be reduced to historical and cultural conditioning.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: According to Eliade, traditional man feels that things "acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality". To traditional man, the profane world is "meaningless", and a thing rises out of the profane world only by conforming to an ideal, mythical model.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade describes this view of reality as a fundamental part of "primitive ontology" (the study of "existence" or "reality"). Here he sees a similarity with the philosophy of Plato, who believed that physical phenomena are pale and transient imitations of eternal models or "Forms" ("see Theory of forms"). He argued:


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Plato could be regarded as the outstanding philosopher of 'primitive mentality,' that is, as the thinker who succeeded in giving philosophic currency and validity to the modes of life and behavior of archaic humanity.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade thinks the Platonic "theory of forms" is "primitive ontology" persisting in Greek philosophy. He claims that Platonism is the "most fully elaborated" version of this primitive ontology.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In "The Structure of Religious Knowing: Encountering the Sacred in Eliade and Lonergan", John Daniel Dadosky argues that, by making this statement, Eliade was acknowledging "indebtedness to Greek philosophy in general, and to Plato's theory of forms specifically, for his own theory of archetypes and repetition". However, Dadosky also states that "one should be cautious when trying to assess Eliade's indebtedness to Plato". Dadosky quotes Robert Segal, a professor of religion, who draws a distinction between Platonism and Eliade's "primitive ontology": for Eliade, the ideal models are patterns that a person or object may or may not imitate; for Plato, there is a Form for everything, and everything imitates a Form by the very fact that it exists.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Behind the diverse cultural forms of different religions, Eliade proposes a universal: traditional man, he claims, "always believes that there is an absolute reality, "the sacred", which transcends this world but manifests itself in this world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real." Furthermore, traditional man's behavior gains purpose and meaning through the Sacred: "By imitating divine behavior, man puts and keeps himself close to the gods—that is, in the real and the significant." According to Eliade, "modern nonreligious man assumes a new existential situation." For traditional man, historical events gain significance by imitating sacred, transcendent events. In contrast, nonreligious man lacks sacred models for how history or human behavior should be, so he must decide on his own how history should proceed—he "regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and refuses all appeal to transcendence".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: From the standpoint of religious thought, the world has an objective purpose established by mythical events, to which man should conform himself: "Myth teaches [religious man] the primordial 'stories' that have constituted him existentially." From the standpoint of secular thought, any purpose must be invented and imposed on the world by man. Because of this new "existential situation," Eliade argues, the Sacred becomes the primary obstacle to nonreligious man's "freedom". In viewing himself as the proper maker of history, nonreligious man resists all notions of an externally (for instance, divinely) imposed order or model he must obey: modern man ""makes himself", and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world. [...] He will not truly be free until he has killed the last god."


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade says that secular man cannot escape his bondage to religious thought. By its very nature, secularism depends on religion for its sense of identity: by resisting sacred models, by insisting that man make history on his own, secular man identifies himself only through opposition to religious thought: "He [secular man] recognizes himself in proportion as he 'frees' and 'purifies' himself from the 'superstitions' of his ancestors." Furthermore, modern man "still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals". For example, modern social events still have similarities to traditional initiation rituals, and modern novels feature mythical motifs and themes. Finally, secular man still participates in something like the eternal return: by reading modern literature, "modern man succeeds in obtaining an 'escape from time' comparable to the 'emergence from time' effected by myths".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade sees traces of religious thought even in secular academia. He thinks modern scientists are motivated by the religious desire to return to the sacred time of origins:


title: Mircea Eliade

text: One could say that the anxious search for the origins of Life and Mind; the fascination in the 'mysteries of Nature'; the urge to penetrate and decipher the inner structure of Matter—all these longings and drives denote a sort of nostalgia for the primordial, for the original universal "matrix". Matter, Substance, represents the "absolute origin", the beginning of all things.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade believes the rise of materialism in the 19th century forced the religious nostalgia for "origins" to express itself in science. He mentions his own field of History of Religions as one of the fields that was obsessed with origins during the 19th century:


title: Mircea Eliade

text: The new discipline of History of Religions developed rapidly in this cultural context. And, of course, it followed a like pattern: the positivistic approach to the facts and the search for origins, for the very beginning of religion.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: All Western historiography was during that time obsessed with the quest of "origins". [...] This search for the origins of human institutions and cultural creations prolongs and completes the naturalist's quest for the origin of species, the biologist's dream of grasping the origin of life, the geologist's and the astronomer's endeavor to understand the origin of the Earth and the Universe. From a psychological point of view, one can decipher here the same nostalgia for the 'primordial' and the 'original'.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In some of his writings, Eliade describes modern political ideologies as secularized mythology. According to Eliade, Marxism "takes up and carries on one of the great eschatological myths of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean world, namely: the redemptive part to be played by the Just (the 'elect', the 'anointed', the 'innocent', the 'missioners', in our own days the proletariat), whose sufferings are invoked to change the ontological status of the world." Eliade sees the widespread myth of the Golden Age, "which, according to a number of traditions, lies at the beginning and the end of History", as the "precedent" for Karl Marx's vision of a classless society. Finally, he sees Marx's belief in the final triumph of the good (the proletariat) over the evil (the bourgeoisie) as "a truly messianic Judaeo-Christian ideology". Despite Marx's hostility toward religion, Eliade implies, his ideology works within a conceptual framework inherited from religious mythology.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Likewise, Eliade notes that Nazism involved a pseudo-pagan mysticism based on ancient Germanic religion. He suggests that the differences between the Nazis' pseudo-Germanic mythology and Marx's pseudo-Judaeo-Christian mythology explain their differing success:


title: Mircea Eliade

text: In comparison with the vigorous optimism of the communist myth, the mythology propagated by the national socialists seems particularly inept; and this is not only because of the limitations of the racial myth (how could one imagine that the rest of Europe would voluntarily accept submission to the master-race?), but above all because of the fundamental pessimism of the Germanic mythology. [...] For the eschaton prophesied and expected by the ancient Germans was the ragnarok—that is, a catastrophic end of the world.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: According to Eliade, modern man displays "traces" of "mythological behavior" because he intensely needs sacred time and the eternal return. Despite modern man's claims to be nonreligious, he ultimately cannot find value in the linear progression of historical events; even modern man feels the "terror of history": "Here too [...] there is always the struggle against Time, the hope to be freed from the weight of 'dead Time,' of the Time that crushes and kills."


title: Mircea Eliade

text: This "terror of history" becomes especially acute when violent and threatening historical events confront modern man—the mere fact that a terrible event has happened, that it is part of history, is of little comfort to those who suffer from it. Eliade asks rhetorically how modern man can "tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history—from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings—if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning". He 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. Without the Sacred to confer an absolute, objective value upon historical events, modern man is left with "a relativistic or nihilistic view of history" and a resulting "spiritual aridity". In chapter 4 ("The Terror of History") of "The Myth of the Eternal Return" and chapter 9 ("Religious Symbolism and the Modern Man's Anxiety") of "Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries", Eliade argues at length that the rejection of religious thought is a primary cause of modern man's anxieties.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade argues that modern man may escape the "Terror of history" by learning from traditional cultures. For example, Eliade thinks Hinduism has advice for modern Westerners. According to many branches of Hinduism, the world of historical time is illusory, and the only absolute reality is the immortal soul or "atman" within man. According to Eliade, Hindus thus escape the terror of history by refusing to see historical time as the true reality.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade notes that a Western or Continental philosopher might feel suspicious toward this Hindu view of history:


title: Mircea Eliade

text: One can easily guess what a European historical and existentialist philosopher might reply [...] You ask me, he would say, to 'die to History'; but man is not, and he "cannot be" anything else but History, for his very essence is temporality. You are asking me, then, to give up my authentic existence and to take refuge in an abstraction, in pure Being, in the "atman": I am to sacrifice my dignity as a creator of History in order to live an a-historic, inauthentic existence, empty of all human content. Well, I prefer to put up with my anxiety: at least, it cannot deprive me of a certain heroic grandeur, that of becoming conscious of, and accepting, the human condition.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: However, Eliade argues that the Hindu approach to history does not necessarily lead to a rejection of history. On the contrary, in Hinduism historical human existence is not the "absurdity" that many Continental philosophers see it as. According to Hinduism, history is a divine creation, and one may live contentedly within it as long as one maintains a certain degree of detachment from it: "One is devoured by Time, by History, not because one lives in them, but because one thinks them "real" and, in consequence, one forgets or undervalues eternity." Furthermore, Eliade argues that Westerners can learn from non-Western cultures to see something besides absurdity in suffering and death. Traditional cultures see suffering and death as a rite of passage. In fact, their initiation rituals often involve a symbolic death and resurrection, or symbolic ordeals followed by relief. Thus, Eliade argues, modern man can learn to see his historical ordeals, even death, as necessary initiations into the next stage of one's existence.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: 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". Many traditional cultures have myths about the end of their world or civilization; however, these myths do not succeed "in paralysing either Life or Culture". These traditional cultures emphasize cyclic time and, therefore, the inevitable rise of a new world or civilization on the ruins of the old. Thus, they feel comforted even in contemplating the end times.


title: Mircea Eliade

text: Eliade argues that a Western spiritual rebirth can happen within the framework of Western spiritual traditions. However, he says, to start this rebirth, Westerners may need to be stimulated by ideas from non-Western cultures. In his "Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries", Eliade claims that a "genuine encounter" between cultures "might well constitute the point of departure for a new humanism, upon a world scale".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: 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". He thus sees in Christianity the ultimate example of a religion embracing linear, historical time. When God is born as a man, into the stream of history, "all history becomes a theophany". According to Eliade, "Christianity strives to "save" history". In Christianity, the Sacred enters a human being (Christ) to save humans, but it also enters history to "save" history and turn otherwise ordinary, historical events into something "capable of transmitting a trans-historical message".


title: Mircea Eliade

text: From Eliade's perspective, Christianity's "trans-historical message" may be the most important help that modern man could have in confronting the terror of history. In his book "Mito" ("Myth"), Italian researcher Furio Jesi argues that Eliade denies man the position of a true protagonist in history: for Eliade, true human experience lies not in intellectually "making history", but in man's experiences of joy and grief. Thus, from Eliade's perspective, the Christ story becomes the perfect myth for modern man. In Christianity, God willingly entered historical time by being born as Christ, and accepted the suffering that followed. By identifying with Christ, modern man can learn to confront painful historical events. Ultimately, according to Jesi, Eliade sees Christianity as the only religion that can save man from the "Terror of history".