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Journal II, 1957-1969
Mircea Eliade's journal of the years 1957-1969, originally published in English under the title No Souvenirs, is the testimony of a "wandering scholar" caught between three worlds: his native Romania, the France he fled to, and his last homeland, the United States. The journal is filled with his work, dreams, memories of his youth, stories of his travels, the reflections of each day.
362 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
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About the author
Mircea Eliade
561 books2,715 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 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 2, 2011
Still working on it, so far quite pleasent to read, he drops a lot of names like Karl Jaspers vists him in Japan and they talk about Heidegger ... that kind of Sh...t. Engaging document on post war orientation.
February 25, 2016
Mircea Eliade was a leading scholar of comparative religions. These journal selections provide a fascinating portrait of the man and the times (the late 1950s and 1960s), as well as glimpses of numerous academic and cultural personalities. Ideas abound.
Eliade wrote with intelligence and clarity about personal and professional topics. Nothing is trivial. No skimming is necessary. It is a fine book for reading slowly over time, enjoying the company of a man who wrote novels and stories in addition to scholarly works. He wanted his fiction to survive but he knew it might not. This journal should.
Eliade wrote with intelligence and clarity about personal and professional topics. Nothing is trivial. No skimming is necessary. It is a fine book for reading slowly over time, enjoying the company of a man who wrote novels and stories in addition to scholarly works. He wanted his fiction to survive but he knew it might not. This journal should.
July 26, 2014
For those interested in the intellectual history of the last century, this collection of some of Eliade's journal entries will be very interesting. I seem to remember volume II being the most interesting, with fascinating musings on and candid accounts of Jung, Danielou, Guenon, Scholem, Huxley and many others, but be sure to look through all four volumes, in addition to Portugal Journal.
January 6, 2023
The Romanian novelist and historian of religions Mircea Eliade kept a personal journal from his teens onwards, although what he wrote in them before WWII is now lost – he left them in the care of friends when he went to work as a cultural attaché in, first London, then Lisbon, and they appear to have been irretrievably lost in the chaos of war. His The Portugal Journal, on the other hand, which he kept between 1941-5, has survived; and has been published in an English translation by Mac Linscott Ricketts, who has also translated the journal Eliade kept in Paris from 1945-55, and his two volumes of Autobiography. By contrast, the Journal Eliade kept in Chicago from 1957-69 was (like much of his fiction) first translated from the Romanian into French, and only thence into English.
Despite this somewhat roundabout route, the arrival repays the journey: Eliade is always an engaging writer, and it is fascinating to read his thoughts on his own books and their themes, without the huge quantity of references with which his ‘scientific’ works are sometimes overloaded, and with a more personal emphasis. Thus, leafing through one of the first books he published after the War (Patterns in Comparative Religion), he wonders if anyone reading it has grasped its “secret message”: that “myths and religions, in all their variety, are the result of the vacuum left in the world by the retreat of God … The movement of religious man toward the transcendent sometimes makes me think of the desperate gesture of the orphan, left alone in the world.” This from a man who had by then lost his father and his first wife, and would never again see his mother as he was in permanent exile from his homeland…
Eliade also attempts to convey “the vision and the joy” (in Goethe’s phrase) of realising that the various “historico-religious forms” are the varied and partial attempts to convey fundamental experiences such as the discovery of the sacredness of heaven and earth. None of the myths, symbols or divine images can successfully translate the reality, so they must inevitably be replaced by new religious expressions, themselves equally “incomplete and approximate”. But by analysing all the different expressions, “one begins to see the structures of the religious universe: one finds out the archetypes, the models of these divine figures … Every religious expression is therefore only a mutilation of plenary experience.”
Here we see Eliade once more engaging with the Primordial Tradition of René Guénon and Julius Evola, which had been such a big influence on his developing thought in the Thirties, but from which he had been keen to dissociate himself since the War. The Traditionalists precisely saw all religious expressions in known history as a “mutilation” of the Hyperborean “plenary experience” which was only known in its integral ‘fullness’ at the beginning of our era, the Golden Age. But the mature Eliade is clear that this “should not be understood on the level of historical reality (as they claim). These speculations constitute a universe of systematically articulated meanings: they are to be compared to a great poem or a novel.” Like the “imaginary universes” of Marx and Freud, they are “mythological creations,” not “scientific explanations.”
Indeed, it is alongside and in contradistinction to such systems that he wishes to establish the importance of the history of religions. Just as Marx analysed the “social unconscious” and Freud the “personal unconscious”, then the history of religions should isolate that which is transconscious, in order to identify the presence of the transcendent in human experience. For, as he points out in the Preface to the English edition: “The correct analyses of myths and of mythical thought, of symbols and primordial images … are, in my opinion, the only way to open the Western mind and to introduce a new, planetary humanism.”
And it is precisely his mind-opening agenda which leads Eliade to become fascinated, and eventually alarmed, by the burgeoning Sixties counter-culture, which he encounters directly as it influences his students at the University of Chicago – including “liberated sexuality”, “the almost ritual beatitude of nudity” and the “unprecedented success of hallucinogenic drugs among the young”. The hippie movement is “quasi-religious” because “it is a reaction against the absence of meaning and the vacuousness of an alienated existence … These young people … have found a meaning in life, they believe in an absolute reality which can be accessible to them. Finally they live in freedom, spontaneity, detachment from everything.”
Eliade believes he has much to learn from these “specialists in LSD and mescaline,” mystics in revolt against institutionalised religion; but he also cannot avoid the part his own writings have played. An undergraduate and self-styled “shaman mystic” comes to tell him about his “initiatic experience” while drumming in a band. He had brought to a rehearsal a paper kite on which a winged devil was drawn, which he had found earlier on the beach while high on marijuana. He finds himself drumming more and more intensely as he feels the devil penetrating him; he falls to the ground, believing himself to be dead; but then it is as if his strength is multiplying and he realises that he can help people by communicating his power to them through drumming. It is only when someone lends him Eliade’s book on shamanism that he realises he has undergone an initiation.
After listening to the undergraduate’s accounts of talking to a cat in “LSD beatitude,” of orgies, magic, Zen meditation and clairvoyance, Eliade comments: “Paradisiac experiences must not be translated in quantitative and temporal terms (the permanence of certain objective physical realities). One can ‘dream’ or anticipate paradisiac beatitude a fraction of a second, or one can live it a few minutes or a few hours – but then one comes back into the world.”
Sadly, as we know, not everyone comes back.
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...
Despite this somewhat roundabout route, the arrival repays the journey: Eliade is always an engaging writer, and it is fascinating to read his thoughts on his own books and their themes, without the huge quantity of references with which his ‘scientific’ works are sometimes overloaded, and with a more personal emphasis. Thus, leafing through one of the first books he published after the War (Patterns in Comparative Religion), he wonders if anyone reading it has grasped its “secret message”: that “myths and religions, in all their variety, are the result of the vacuum left in the world by the retreat of God … The movement of religious man toward the transcendent sometimes makes me think of the desperate gesture of the orphan, left alone in the world.” This from a man who had by then lost his father and his first wife, and would never again see his mother as he was in permanent exile from his homeland…
Eliade also attempts to convey “the vision and the joy” (in Goethe’s phrase) of realising that the various “historico-religious forms” are the varied and partial attempts to convey fundamental experiences such as the discovery of the sacredness of heaven and earth. None of the myths, symbols or divine images can successfully translate the reality, so they must inevitably be replaced by new religious expressions, themselves equally “incomplete and approximate”. But by analysing all the different expressions, “one begins to see the structures of the religious universe: one finds out the archetypes, the models of these divine figures … Every religious expression is therefore only a mutilation of plenary experience.”
Here we see Eliade once more engaging with the Primordial Tradition of René Guénon and Julius Evola, which had been such a big influence on his developing thought in the Thirties, but from which he had been keen to dissociate himself since the War. The Traditionalists precisely saw all religious expressions in known history as a “mutilation” of the Hyperborean “plenary experience” which was only known in its integral ‘fullness’ at the beginning of our era, the Golden Age. But the mature Eliade is clear that this “should not be understood on the level of historical reality (as they claim). These speculations constitute a universe of systematically articulated meanings: they are to be compared to a great poem or a novel.” Like the “imaginary universes” of Marx and Freud, they are “mythological creations,” not “scientific explanations.”
Indeed, it is alongside and in contradistinction to such systems that he wishes to establish the importance of the history of religions. Just as Marx analysed the “social unconscious” and Freud the “personal unconscious”, then the history of religions should isolate that which is transconscious, in order to identify the presence of the transcendent in human experience. For, as he points out in the Preface to the English edition: “The correct analyses of myths and of mythical thought, of symbols and primordial images … are, in my opinion, the only way to open the Western mind and to introduce a new, planetary humanism.”
And it is precisely his mind-opening agenda which leads Eliade to become fascinated, and eventually alarmed, by the burgeoning Sixties counter-culture, which he encounters directly as it influences his students at the University of Chicago – including “liberated sexuality”, “the almost ritual beatitude of nudity” and the “unprecedented success of hallucinogenic drugs among the young”. The hippie movement is “quasi-religious” because “it is a reaction against the absence of meaning and the vacuousness of an alienated existence … These young people … have found a meaning in life, they believe in an absolute reality which can be accessible to them. Finally they live in freedom, spontaneity, detachment from everything.”
Eliade believes he has much to learn from these “specialists in LSD and mescaline,” mystics in revolt against institutionalised religion; but he also cannot avoid the part his own writings have played. An undergraduate and self-styled “shaman mystic” comes to tell him about his “initiatic experience” while drumming in a band. He had brought to a rehearsal a paper kite on which a winged devil was drawn, which he had found earlier on the beach while high on marijuana. He finds himself drumming more and more intensely as he feels the devil penetrating him; he falls to the ground, believing himself to be dead; but then it is as if his strength is multiplying and he realises that he can help people by communicating his power to them through drumming. It is only when someone lends him Eliade’s book on shamanism that he realises he has undergone an initiation.
After listening to the undergraduate’s accounts of talking to a cat in “LSD beatitude,” of orgies, magic, Zen meditation and clairvoyance, Eliade comments: “Paradisiac experiences must not be translated in quantitative and temporal terms (the permanence of certain objective physical realities). One can ‘dream’ or anticipate paradisiac beatitude a fraction of a second, or one can live it a few minutes or a few hours – but then one comes back into the world.”
Sadly, as we know, not everyone comes back.
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...
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews