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Mefistofel și androginul
Studiile adunate in acest volum de dimensiuni reduse ilustreaza demersul unui istoric al religiilor animat de dorinta de a explica o parte din comportamentele religioase si valorile spirituale ale populatiilor neeuropene. Nu am ezitat sa facem apel la fapte culturale cunoscute din traditia occidentala, ori de cate ori acestea puteau oferi un termen de comparatie edificator pentru cercetarea noastra. Asemenea apropieri vor permite, fara indoiala, specialistilor sa schiteze perspectivele unui nou umanism al viitorului.
208 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1962
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301 people want to read
About the author
Mircea Eliade
558 books2,710 followersRomanian-born historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the pre-eminent interpreters of world religion in the last century. Eliade was an intensely prolific author of fiction and non-fiction alike, publishing over 1,300 pieces over 60 years. He earned international fame with LE MYTHE DE L'ÉTERNAL RETOUR (1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return), an interpretation of religious symbols and imagery. Eliade was much interested in the world of the unconscious. The central theme in his novels was erotic love.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 1, 2025
Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was an expert in the study of comparative religion. The Two and the One is a collection of five essays, the second of which -- "Mephistopheles and the Androgyne or the Mystery of the Whole" -- goes a long way towards describing why there is evil in the world. Al;so excellent is "Experiences of the Mystic Light" and "Cosmic and Eschatological Renewal."
This is the first work of Eliade's that I have read, but it won't be the last.
This is the first work of Eliade's that I have read, but it won't be the last.
May 23, 2015
In later life, Eliade became involved in the Eranos conferences and personally acquainted with C.G. Jung (d. 1961), the Swiss depth psychologist. This book appeared to reflect this association, Eliade and Jung having many points of contact.
January 10, 2023
By the 1960s, Mircea Eliade, the leading Romanian novelist and essayist of the interwar years, had effectively re-invented himself as Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. Eliade saw several of his most important books issued in English translation in quick succession, leading some of his American students to be astonished at the rate of his productivity!
Most of his work in the first decades after the end of the war, including the titles for which he is today best known, were written in French, while he lived in Paris, and were first published there. This is the case with the lectures he delivered from 1950 onwards at the Eranos conferences, where leading figures in the study of myths and religious symbols assembled every year, on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Switzerland, to share gifts of insight. The spiritus rector of the conferences was the analytical psychologist C.G. Jung, whom Eliade met several times, and even interviewed for a newspaper. Eliade always acknowledged the influence of Jung, but felt that his concept of the collective unconscious should not be used to deny the reality of what Eliade called the ‘trans-conscious.’
Nevertheless, he agreed with Jung that, in the twentieth century, religion had been banished into the “deep levels of the psyche” – as a result, as he said in his 1957 Eranos lecture, “the unconscious is always religious.” Exploring the meaning of experiences of mystic, inner light in both ancient and modern civilisations, he finds that “all experiences of supernatural light present this common denominator: anyone receiving such an experience undergoes a change of being: he acquires another mode of being, which gives him access to the world of the spirit”, for “a meeting with the light indicates a spiritual rebirth.” It reveals “existence as a divine creation, or the world sanctified by the presence of God.”
His lecture the following year focused on the union of the contraries of good and evil, male and female, in “the mystery of the totality” – the coincidentia oppositorum that is “the ultimate reality” – taking such diverse forms as “the gnostic myth that Christ and Satan are brothers” or the alchemical myth of the androgyne as the archetype of the perfect human being, in whom “the magico-religious powers belonging to both sexes” are united. But Eliade warns against confusing “the two fields of reference”: What is true of eternity is not necessarily true in time.
Through mystical techniques and ritual practices, people have always tried to rise above that duality which is the existential condition of the fallen, time-bound cosmos, and restore the “primordial unity” which characterises the experience of eternity. But what Eliade calls “aberrant” practices can arise when a ritual reality is confused with an anatomico-physiological one: “The history of religions knows ... examples of the confusion of levels, examples in which men have endeavoured to obtain on the level of physiological experience a mode of spiritual being only accessible by ritual or mystical means ... a desperate effort to attain by concrete ... means the paradoxical totality of Man.”
Ultimately, the myths and symbols of the coincidentia oppositorum, and the various rites and techniques for achieving it, reveal our “deep dissatisfaction” with the “torn and separate” human condition, and “a nostalgia for a paradoxical state in which the contraries exist side by side without conflict” – a nostalgia, that is, for a lost Paradise. That nostalgia can also take the form of a desire for “cosmic and eschatological renewal” – the subject of Eliade’s 1959 Eranos lecture. Here he waxes uncharacteristically lyrical when discussing our difficulty in understanding “the religious value of the ritual meal of first-fruits”, which follows the symbolic renewal of the world by the re-enactment of the mythical cosmogony: “To open ourselves to such an experience we must think of a modern man’s emotion on his first discovery of love ... For the first time: that is everything … a sort of epiphany … a meeting that gives sense to the whole of existence.”
This nostalgia is inverted by Marxism, which has its own myth of the Golden Age, characterised as the establishment of “a sort of earthly paradise” by “the final triumph of the proletariat” – but it is a myth emptied of its religious significance, ‘de-sacramentalised,’ demystified. This type of reductionism has as its aim “to rid the world of extra-mundane values. It is a systematic banalisation of the World undertaken for the purpose of conquering and mastering it. But the conquest of the World is … an idiosyncrasy of Western man. Other societies pursue different aims … It is the meaning of human existence that matters, and this meaning is of a spiritual order.”
In his Eranos lecture for 1960 – ‘Myths and Symbols of the Rope’ – Eliade shows how the infamous Indian rope-trick is not mere fakery, but a means to open the imagination of the spectator to the reality of a hidden, transcendent world – an apt description, one might think, of Eliade’s own vocation as a writer.
The four lectures have been collected here together with a methodological study – ‘Observations on Religious Symbolism’ – in which Eliade enumerates several different aspects of what symbols reveal, a revelation more profound and more fundamental than a mere reflection of objective reality – for “all authentic religious experience implies a desperate effort to penetrate to the root of things, the ultimate reality.”
In archaic cultures, symbols are always religious because they reveal the real condition of the World – one which is not evident on the plane of immediate experience; and the real is equivalent to the sacred. Religious symbolism is able to express several meanings simultaneously, thus allowing man to discover the underlying unity of being; and perhaps most important of all, to express “the paradox of a passage from one mode of existence to another”. For symbols can “express the contradictory aspects of ultimate reality” – the coincidentia oppositorum – whereby polarities can be “integrated into a unity” and “the negative and sinister aspects of the Cosmos and the Gods” not only find a “justification,” but reveal themselves “as an integral part of all reality or sacrality.” Finally, symbols, unlike concepts, express a “lived” spirituality that engages human existence directly, bringing meaning into it: “To ‘live’ a symbol and correctly decipher its message implies an opening toward the Spirit and finally access to the universal.”
There is more on Eliade and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter). A series of posts on Eliade begins here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
Most of his work in the first decades after the end of the war, including the titles for which he is today best known, were written in French, while he lived in Paris, and were first published there. This is the case with the lectures he delivered from 1950 onwards at the Eranos conferences, where leading figures in the study of myths and religious symbols assembled every year, on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Switzerland, to share gifts of insight. The spiritus rector of the conferences was the analytical psychologist C.G. Jung, whom Eliade met several times, and even interviewed for a newspaper. Eliade always acknowledged the influence of Jung, but felt that his concept of the collective unconscious should not be used to deny the reality of what Eliade called the ‘trans-conscious.’
Nevertheless, he agreed with Jung that, in the twentieth century, religion had been banished into the “deep levels of the psyche” – as a result, as he said in his 1957 Eranos lecture, “the unconscious is always religious.” Exploring the meaning of experiences of mystic, inner light in both ancient and modern civilisations, he finds that “all experiences of supernatural light present this common denominator: anyone receiving such an experience undergoes a change of being: he acquires another mode of being, which gives him access to the world of the spirit”, for “a meeting with the light indicates a spiritual rebirth.” It reveals “existence as a divine creation, or the world sanctified by the presence of God.”
His lecture the following year focused on the union of the contraries of good and evil, male and female, in “the mystery of the totality” – the coincidentia oppositorum that is “the ultimate reality” – taking such diverse forms as “the gnostic myth that Christ and Satan are brothers” or the alchemical myth of the androgyne as the archetype of the perfect human being, in whom “the magico-religious powers belonging to both sexes” are united. But Eliade warns against confusing “the two fields of reference”: What is true of eternity is not necessarily true in time.
Through mystical techniques and ritual practices, people have always tried to rise above that duality which is the existential condition of the fallen, time-bound cosmos, and restore the “primordial unity” which characterises the experience of eternity. But what Eliade calls “aberrant” practices can arise when a ritual reality is confused with an anatomico-physiological one: “The history of religions knows ... examples of the confusion of levels, examples in which men have endeavoured to obtain on the level of physiological experience a mode of spiritual being only accessible by ritual or mystical means ... a desperate effort to attain by concrete ... means the paradoxical totality of Man.”
Ultimately, the myths and symbols of the coincidentia oppositorum, and the various rites and techniques for achieving it, reveal our “deep dissatisfaction” with the “torn and separate” human condition, and “a nostalgia for a paradoxical state in which the contraries exist side by side without conflict” – a nostalgia, that is, for a lost Paradise. That nostalgia can also take the form of a desire for “cosmic and eschatological renewal” – the subject of Eliade’s 1959 Eranos lecture. Here he waxes uncharacteristically lyrical when discussing our difficulty in understanding “the religious value of the ritual meal of first-fruits”, which follows the symbolic renewal of the world by the re-enactment of the mythical cosmogony: “To open ourselves to such an experience we must think of a modern man’s emotion on his first discovery of love ... For the first time: that is everything … a sort of epiphany … a meeting that gives sense to the whole of existence.”
This nostalgia is inverted by Marxism, which has its own myth of the Golden Age, characterised as the establishment of “a sort of earthly paradise” by “the final triumph of the proletariat” – but it is a myth emptied of its religious significance, ‘de-sacramentalised,’ demystified. This type of reductionism has as its aim “to rid the world of extra-mundane values. It is a systematic banalisation of the World undertaken for the purpose of conquering and mastering it. But the conquest of the World is … an idiosyncrasy of Western man. Other societies pursue different aims … It is the meaning of human existence that matters, and this meaning is of a spiritual order.”
In his Eranos lecture for 1960 – ‘Myths and Symbols of the Rope’ – Eliade shows how the infamous Indian rope-trick is not mere fakery, but a means to open the imagination of the spectator to the reality of a hidden, transcendent world – an apt description, one might think, of Eliade’s own vocation as a writer.
The four lectures have been collected here together with a methodological study – ‘Observations on Religious Symbolism’ – in which Eliade enumerates several different aspects of what symbols reveal, a revelation more profound and more fundamental than a mere reflection of objective reality – for “all authentic religious experience implies a desperate effort to penetrate to the root of things, the ultimate reality.”
In archaic cultures, symbols are always religious because they reveal the real condition of the World – one which is not evident on the plane of immediate experience; and the real is equivalent to the sacred. Religious symbolism is able to express several meanings simultaneously, thus allowing man to discover the underlying unity of being; and perhaps most important of all, to express “the paradox of a passage from one mode of existence to another”. For symbols can “express the contradictory aspects of ultimate reality” – the coincidentia oppositorum – whereby polarities can be “integrated into a unity” and “the negative and sinister aspects of the Cosmos and the Gods” not only find a “justification,” but reveal themselves “as an integral part of all reality or sacrality.” Finally, symbols, unlike concepts, express a “lived” spirituality that engages human existence directly, bringing meaning into it: “To ‘live’ a symbol and correctly decipher its message implies an opening toward the Spirit and finally access to the universal.”
There is more on Eliade and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter). A series of posts on Eliade begins here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
April 3, 2019
В по-голямата й част книгата ми хареса. Единствено началната глава за светлината беше скучна за мен и половината я пропуснах. В останалите обаче се говори за природата на Мефистофел и Бог(споменават се българските вярвания), за двуполовите богове и символното сливане на хората в опит да достигнат първоначалното състояние. В друга глава се запознаваме с няколко тихоокеански вярвания и т.н. "карго-култове", дори съпоставка с марксизма в разликите и общото в очакванията относно края на дните и периодичното обновление. Към края говорим за въжета, axis mundi и прочие. Заслужава си четенето.
January 24, 2012
This is the... 3rd book I read in French. But the books I read before in French were easy, like Journal de Julie Z... With this one, I have to pass my exam. In Polish :) We'll see how it goes on Monday, but I actually enjoyed it, Eliade writes interesting stuff, with interesting examples.
December 19, 2019
Filled with insights, though the nature of the presentation doesn't allow for the usual density of Eliade's prose. Feels a bit loose and thrown together as a book, but the essays on symbolism in general and the mythology of ropes, threads, etc., were very eye opening.
August 19, 2019
Cuando el espíritu ya no es capaz de percibir la significación metafísica de un símbolo, éste es entendido en niveles cada vez más groseros...
August 31, 2023
"სულიერი ცოდნის ყოვლისშემძლეობის, პიროვნული თავისუფლების, ნაცნობი სამყაროდან გასვლის უნარის მთელი ისტორია იბადება ადამიანში იმ მომენტში, როდესაც „მჭვრეტელის“ მდგომარეობაში აღმოჩნდება."
July 26, 2014
I remember most the longest essay here, 'Mephistopheles and the Androgyne', and it is a very interesting study of the cosmological problem of the reconciliation of opposites, but like most of Eliade's works, since he lacks, or at least does not mention, a transcendent reference point, it is not as clear or as interesting as the metaphysical perspective. Recommended for the large quantity of examples from ancient texts, but for a much more profound and interesting study, see Julius Evola's The Metaphysics of Sex.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews