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Memorii #1
Autobiography, Volume 1: 1907-1937, Journey East, Journey West
"Here finally are Eliade's memoirs of the first thirty years of his life in Mac Linscott Rickett's crisp and lucid English translation. They present a fascinating account of the early development of a Renaissance talent, expressed in everything from daily and periodical journalism, realistic and fantastic fiction, and general nonfiction works to distinguished contributions to the history of religions. Autobiography follows an apparently amazingly candid report of this remarkable man's progression from a mischievous street urchin and literary prodigy, through his various love affairs, a decisive and traumatic Indian sojourn, and active, brilliant participation in pre-World War II Romanian cultural life."—Seymour Cain, Religious Studies Review
347 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
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About the author
Mircea Eliade
557 books2,692 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 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 7, 2018
it is literature, history, it is a diary and a university lecture, it is a magazine article and a travel book, it is philosophy and raw reality, a glimpse into one of the best minds of Romanian people. It is about a great generation and its leader and we, as Romanians, ought to know about it and build on it.
October 21, 2014
Extraordinary autobiography, by an extraordinary man.
November 29, 2013
though quite incomplete and self-censored and leaving all his unsavory associations and actions only hinted, still a great (re) read
January 16, 2023
Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) was a Romanian born historian of religions whose enormous body of work (short stories and novels as well as essays and books) constitutes part of what has been called ‘an alternative intellectual history of the twentieth century;’ and which remains enormously controversial for two important reasons:
Firstly, because in his scholarly work he championed the now academically-suspect proposition that the sacred is a category of human consciousness which must be treated on its own terms rather than submitted to the reductionism of sociology or historicism. Secondly, because the personal is political: His early belief that Romania, at the crossroads of East and West, could be at the centre of a European spiritual renewal led him to make common cause with the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a movement whose name suggests its fusion of mysticism and para-militarism and whose legionaries became better known as the notoriously anti-Semitic Iron Guard. This youthful intellectual flirtation would only become well-known towards the end of his life and would cast a shadow over his reputation.
It is therefore fascinating to read Eliade’s own account of the first thirty years of his life to discover clues to what would follow. We learn, for example, of the beginning of the attacks of melancholia which would beset him for many years and which he attributed to a sense of the irremediable loss of time past: “Sometimes I regretted that I had not been reared in the country, that I did not know as a child the village life that seemed to me to be the only true kind, and that now I was severed irrevocably from that idyllic world.” Here we see the personal psychological impetus that led to his idealisation of unchanging peasant life, a Nostalgia for Paradise which would contrast with the Terror of History experienced by modern man; and can see how he would have been drawn to a movement that appeared to offer Romanians the chance for spiritual renewal through reconnection with the people rooted in the native soil and their ancient cultural heritage.
We also glimpse his gradual turning from the sciences to literature (this is a teenager who, in his first novel, would attempt to show “that to realize the impossibility of belief in an anthropomorphic God is an experience as exciting as the first taste of physical love”!) and the history of religions, for the study of which he would later attempt to establish a scientific basis, much as Jung would do with analytical psychology and with equally dubious success. Meanwhile we see him progressing through Rudolf Steiner’s ‘spiritual science’ of Anthroposophy, the occult ‘sciences’ and James Frazer’s armchair anthropology as he becomes increasingly captivated by the East: “During those years of almost mystical admiration for the ancient Orient, when I believed in the mysteries of the Pyramids, the deep wisdom of the Chaldeans, and the occult sciences of the Persian magi, my efforts were nurtured by the hope that one day I would solve all the ‘secrets’ of religions, of history, and of man’s destiny on earth.”
Early attempts to overcome sleep and to surpass his conditioning by forcing himself to eat disgusting things matured into an interest in Yoga; and his journey to India to practise meditation and study with an Indian philosopher is the subject of Part Two of his Autobiography. He was soon drawn to Tantrism, in which he discovered “a technique of liberation in which life was not sacrificed, but was transfigured.” His attempt to experience that blessedness in the person of his philosopher’s daughter is the subject of perhaps his most famous novel (Bengal Nights); and of a belated response by the lady in question (Maitreyi Devi’s It Does Not Die).
Rejecting sainthood for culture, Eliade returned to Romania where he got increasingly involved in the literary and political life of his homeland, realising that “if the fantastic or the supernatural or the supra-historical is somehow accessible to us, we cannot encounter it except camouflaged in the banal.” If he would spend the rest of his life revealing the supernatural camouflaged in history, Eliade would also do his best to camouflage his involvement with the Legion at this time; but he had a more immediate concern with whether he would remain free to “make culture” – for in Spring 1938 a royal dictatorship was imposed – and it is here that Part Three of this first volume of his Autobiography ends.
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...
Firstly, because in his scholarly work he championed the now academically-suspect proposition that the sacred is a category of human consciousness which must be treated on its own terms rather than submitted to the reductionism of sociology or historicism. Secondly, because the personal is political: His early belief that Romania, at the crossroads of East and West, could be at the centre of a European spiritual renewal led him to make common cause with the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a movement whose name suggests its fusion of mysticism and para-militarism and whose legionaries became better known as the notoriously anti-Semitic Iron Guard. This youthful intellectual flirtation would only become well-known towards the end of his life and would cast a shadow over his reputation.
It is therefore fascinating to read Eliade’s own account of the first thirty years of his life to discover clues to what would follow. We learn, for example, of the beginning of the attacks of melancholia which would beset him for many years and which he attributed to a sense of the irremediable loss of time past: “Sometimes I regretted that I had not been reared in the country, that I did not know as a child the village life that seemed to me to be the only true kind, and that now I was severed irrevocably from that idyllic world.” Here we see the personal psychological impetus that led to his idealisation of unchanging peasant life, a Nostalgia for Paradise which would contrast with the Terror of History experienced by modern man; and can see how he would have been drawn to a movement that appeared to offer Romanians the chance for spiritual renewal through reconnection with the people rooted in the native soil and their ancient cultural heritage.
We also glimpse his gradual turning from the sciences to literature (this is a teenager who, in his first novel, would attempt to show “that to realize the impossibility of belief in an anthropomorphic God is an experience as exciting as the first taste of physical love”!) and the history of religions, for the study of which he would later attempt to establish a scientific basis, much as Jung would do with analytical psychology and with equally dubious success. Meanwhile we see him progressing through Rudolf Steiner’s ‘spiritual science’ of Anthroposophy, the occult ‘sciences’ and James Frazer’s armchair anthropology as he becomes increasingly captivated by the East: “During those years of almost mystical admiration for the ancient Orient, when I believed in the mysteries of the Pyramids, the deep wisdom of the Chaldeans, and the occult sciences of the Persian magi, my efforts were nurtured by the hope that one day I would solve all the ‘secrets’ of religions, of history, and of man’s destiny on earth.”
Early attempts to overcome sleep and to surpass his conditioning by forcing himself to eat disgusting things matured into an interest in Yoga; and his journey to India to practise meditation and study with an Indian philosopher is the subject of Part Two of his Autobiography. He was soon drawn to Tantrism, in which he discovered “a technique of liberation in which life was not sacrificed, but was transfigured.” His attempt to experience that blessedness in the person of his philosopher’s daughter is the subject of perhaps his most famous novel (Bengal Nights); and of a belated response by the lady in question (Maitreyi Devi’s It Does Not Die).
Rejecting sainthood for culture, Eliade returned to Romania where he got increasingly involved in the literary and political life of his homeland, realising that “if the fantastic or the supernatural or the supra-historical is somehow accessible to us, we cannot encounter it except camouflaged in the banal.” If he would spend the rest of his life revealing the supernatural camouflaged in history, Eliade would also do his best to camouflage his involvement with the Legion at this time; but he had a more immediate concern with whether he would remain free to “make culture” – for in Spring 1938 a royal dictatorship was imposed – and it is here that Part Three of this first volume of his Autobiography ends.
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...
May 12, 2020
"Before I realize what was happening, I found I had become interested not only in the natural sciences but also in all these new universes that the foreign literature, biographies, and popular books revealed to me. I came to read a book a day, but I soon discovered that at this pace I should never be able to finish."
"And great was my surprise and fury upon learning soon afterward that it was a case of "mystical" story that Shure himself had invented! I think that at that time there arose within me a mistrust of dilettantes, a fear of letting myself be duped by an amateur, an increasingly insistent desire to go directly to the sources, to consult exclusively the works of specialists, to exhaust the bibliography."
"As was my habit, I would work six or seven hours without stopping, then read a book of philosophy or history of religions, and return to the mathematics book for another four or five hours"
"...thins I knew because they were not found in our textbooks..."
"But above all I discovered the great importance of the fact that I was twenty. I understood that I had to enjoy every second, that there are gifts we are not given twice, that one day I might regret everything that I had not done and had not "lived" now, when all things seemed possible."
"Ordinarily, I would devote myself entirely to Sanskrit grammar and Indian philosophy from morning till night. I would study for several hours from a book on Sanskrit, read next from an Indian philosophical text in English translation, and then turn back to the Sanskrit grammar. I read nothing else."
"... but I sensed that was on the road to becoming another man. Sometimes I slept only two or three hours a night, yet I was never tired. I worked all the time, and I worked better than ever before. I understood then the basis of all that vainglorious beatitude that some ascetics, masters f Hatha-yoga, proclaim. I understood, too, the reason why certain yogis consider themselves to be like the gods, if not even superior to them, and why they talk about the transmutation and even the immortality of the body."
"It seemed to me that I was beginning to discern elements of unity in all peasant cultures, from China and Southeast Asia to the Mediterranean and Portugal. I was finding everywhere what I later called "cosmic religiosity"' that is, the leading role played by symbols and images, the religious respect for the earth and life, the belief that the sacred is manifested directly through the mystery of fecundity and cosmic repetition and not through events of history."
"Undoubtedly, however, among the elements of unity in the peasant cultures of Southeastern Europe, the most important was the Thracian substratum. Upon this substratum, in the course of time, the cultural influences of the Greeks, the Roman Empire, the Byzantines, and especially Christianity were superimposed."
"I no longer imposed anything on myself; I did not force myself to become anyone or do anything now... I began to feel that the deep dimensions of existence are beyond the ebb and flow of the tides of events. I perceived that if I should succeed in situating myself in such a dimension, I should become in a certain sense "invulnerable." That is, whatever my happen, I should continue to remain myself, and as such I should be free to fulfill my destiny."
"No longer did he read to gain information, but to understand, to learn how those great philosophers thought: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel."
"It was no just a matter of "inspiration," but more especially of the presence, intensified to the point of hallucination, of the characters. I could not write well except when I felt the characters, with an almost physical intensity, present before me, beside me."
P.S. cockchafer aka Melolontha vulgaris - vulgaris indeed:)
"And great was my surprise and fury upon learning soon afterward that it was a case of "mystical" story that Shure himself had invented! I think that at that time there arose within me a mistrust of dilettantes, a fear of letting myself be duped by an amateur, an increasingly insistent desire to go directly to the sources, to consult exclusively the works of specialists, to exhaust the bibliography."
"As was my habit, I would work six or seven hours without stopping, then read a book of philosophy or history of religions, and return to the mathematics book for another four or five hours"
"...thins I knew because they were not found in our textbooks..."
"But above all I discovered the great importance of the fact that I was twenty. I understood that I had to enjoy every second, that there are gifts we are not given twice, that one day I might regret everything that I had not done and had not "lived" now, when all things seemed possible."
"Ordinarily, I would devote myself entirely to Sanskrit grammar and Indian philosophy from morning till night. I would study for several hours from a book on Sanskrit, read next from an Indian philosophical text in English translation, and then turn back to the Sanskrit grammar. I read nothing else."
"... but I sensed that was on the road to becoming another man. Sometimes I slept only two or three hours a night, yet I was never tired. I worked all the time, and I worked better than ever before. I understood then the basis of all that vainglorious beatitude that some ascetics, masters f Hatha-yoga, proclaim. I understood, too, the reason why certain yogis consider themselves to be like the gods, if not even superior to them, and why they talk about the transmutation and even the immortality of the body."
"It seemed to me that I was beginning to discern elements of unity in all peasant cultures, from China and Southeast Asia to the Mediterranean and Portugal. I was finding everywhere what I later called "cosmic religiosity"' that is, the leading role played by symbols and images, the religious respect for the earth and life, the belief that the sacred is manifested directly through the mystery of fecundity and cosmic repetition and not through events of history."
"Undoubtedly, however, among the elements of unity in the peasant cultures of Southeastern Europe, the most important was the Thracian substratum. Upon this substratum, in the course of time, the cultural influences of the Greeks, the Roman Empire, the Byzantines, and especially Christianity were superimposed."
"I no longer imposed anything on myself; I did not force myself to become anyone or do anything now... I began to feel that the deep dimensions of existence are beyond the ebb and flow of the tides of events. I perceived that if I should succeed in situating myself in such a dimension, I should become in a certain sense "invulnerable." That is, whatever my happen, I should continue to remain myself, and as such I should be free to fulfill my destiny."
"No longer did he read to gain information, but to understand, to learn how those great philosophers thought: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel."
"It was no just a matter of "inspiration," but more especially of the presence, intensified to the point of hallucination, of the characters. I could not write well except when I felt the characters, with an almost physical intensity, present before me, beside me."
P.S. cockchafer aka Melolontha vulgaris - vulgaris indeed:)
October 24, 2016
миний гурван ширээний номны нэг
May 1, 2023
Eliade...the soul of Romanian people. A wonderful mind, a true Renaissance scholar. For Romanians, this book is a testimony to what the interwar period meant for our culture and how many great minds were birthed during that time, together with the constant political turbulence. His worship of his Romanian master, Nae Ionescu, is enlightening. A true master-discipol relationship is being so authentically described.
His romantic encounters, particularly his relationship with Sorana and Nina and the contrast between these two relationships are things young women can learn a lot from. Whilst he expresses on several occasions profound respect for Sorana's mind, he highlights how a woman's excellence is irrelevant if she cannot answer a particular need. Sorana's behaviour shows how women can experience romance in their head, destroying the reality and potential of any love story. Sorana failed to understand love is a Free Entity, a Force which lives by itself and not something you can suffocate in an ideal. She was consumed by the idea of a romantic encounter, by an ideal, neglecting the spiritual aspect of love, the only aspect which matters....living it all in an intellectual realm and eventually experiencing heartbreak.
The few pages he dedicates to his marriage with Nina shows Eliade's journey into manhood and spirituality. He needed to dedicate himself to a cause which was greater than himself, that of saving a woman from the tragedy of life and taking the responsibility of marriage whilst being fully absorbed in his vocation.
But more importantly, the way he explains his creative process is fascinating. Eliade...the poor Romanian writer, blunt, uncensored...writing and researching for hours, every day. Aiming to create quality and unique books and research papers whilst paying his rent.
A true inspiration. A model of love, hard work, awareness when it comes to our wasted time, imagination and his talent to overcome hardship, to never really lament, focusing on spending all his time on writing, on "living his destiny", that of saving the Romanian Culture.
His romantic encounters, particularly his relationship with Sorana and Nina and the contrast between these two relationships are things young women can learn a lot from. Whilst he expresses on several occasions profound respect for Sorana's mind, he highlights how a woman's excellence is irrelevant if she cannot answer a particular need. Sorana's behaviour shows how women can experience romance in their head, destroying the reality and potential of any love story. Sorana failed to understand love is a Free Entity, a Force which lives by itself and not something you can suffocate in an ideal. She was consumed by the idea of a romantic encounter, by an ideal, neglecting the spiritual aspect of love, the only aspect which matters....living it all in an intellectual realm and eventually experiencing heartbreak.
The few pages he dedicates to his marriage with Nina shows Eliade's journey into manhood and spirituality. He needed to dedicate himself to a cause which was greater than himself, that of saving a woman from the tragedy of life and taking the responsibility of marriage whilst being fully absorbed in his vocation.
But more importantly, the way he explains his creative process is fascinating. Eliade...the poor Romanian writer, blunt, uncensored...writing and researching for hours, every day. Aiming to create quality and unique books and research papers whilst paying his rent.
A true inspiration. A model of love, hard work, awareness when it comes to our wasted time, imagination and his talent to overcome hardship, to never really lament, focusing on spending all his time on writing, on "living his destiny", that of saving the Romanian Culture.
Want to read
March 13, 2025Nella versione italiana edita da Jaca Book:
Le promesse dell’equinozio. Memorie I. 1907-1937
Le promesse dell’equinozio. Memorie I. 1907-1937
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews