Exile's Odyssey

Memorii #2

by Mircea Eliade, Mac Linscott Ricketts (Translator)

"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

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir, Religion, Philosophy

248 pages, Hardcover

First published July 18, 1988

About the author

Romanian-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.

Reviews

[Alexbookworm · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am fascinated!

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We had to answer one question only: are we capable of being major culture, or are we condemned to produce – as we had done up till 1916 – a culture of provincial type, crossed meteorically at intervals by solitary geniuses like Eminescu, Hasdeu, and Iorga?"

"Prima Noctis, the beginning of a new existence, is like ab initio, the creation of a new Cosmos. Those infinite waters, the chaos before Creation, symbolize par excellence the feminine principle, the primordial motive force. Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte (only the first step counts) – this maxim sums up a whole body of feminine wisdom."

"It takes a lot of courage to waste time in full view of the world (on reading detective novels)."

"This verifies once more my belief that the most important thing is to be able to forget – because to learn is infinitely more easy."

"And the discovery that I made then: that you don’t learn a language unless you love an author intensely."

"I’m not interested in the total admiration of a person. What I am interested in is his curiosity, which requires him to be just as broad as I. A curiosity robust enough, at any rate, to be able to follow me in all I do and think – even if he criticizes me and reject me in places."

"To a zealous reader of my literary works, I prefer lucid but curious one, whom no erudite adventure terrifies, whom no abstract periplus wearies. A reader curious, young, enthusiastic – how often do I dream with him in my mind, how manybooks have I addressed to him alone, like a long friendly reader."

"Although I have a number of “discoveries” in my mind, I lack the courage to write them down and publish them, until I verify all the data and consult all that has been written on the problem. In this way I spend five or six years on a book of science which I ought to have written in three months. The superstition of verifying everything, of reading everything, of knowing everything that has been done before your work – as if all this could improve in some way your own idea…"

From whence comes this symbol so rich in meanings, found in China, Mesopotamia, and the Near East? Pliny and Aelian considered the unicorn an emblem of solitude. In pre-Christian times it was the symbol of sovereignty. Christianity transformed its pagan significance and sanctified it: the unicorn became, in turn, the symbol of monastic life (pagan solitude), of Christ, and later the emblem of the Holy Virgin."

"There are all kinds of geography in the world. There are islands that reveal the meaning of Paradise; there are others that raise vice and orgy to the rank of necessity and the dignity of categories. Everything collaborated, in such venereal geography, to the dissolution of your being in vice, despair, and dream: everything from a too-hot sun to flowers of noxious beauty, from ultrasoft vowels to a too-broad culture, in which mysticism can become physiology and vice versa.
There are other places on earth where you are forced to sense and think about the aesthetic, which only then reveals itself to you as a category of the real. Spiritual geography differs from concrete geography precisely through this transfiguration of the landscape, through its transformation into category, into call, into instrument of revelation."

"Two people cannot live together without being turned into demons, or else having their beings enhanced with angelic substance. Man does not remain man except in isolation. Living together with another person leads man, of necessity, to an angelic or demonic level. In most instances, the first meeting of the two natures is “possessed”; if the love isn’t strong enough for you to feel secure in giving yourself, the opposite ordinarily happens: you try to emerge the other person into yourself, to absorb the other after first having decomposed him or her. Actually, for the man who has ceased to be alone, there remains only one path to salvation: to give himself wholly, without reverse."

"However paradoxical it might seem, morality has no prestige. A man who is decent, good, clever, etc. exercises no “magic.” Moral perfection brings you no comrades, not even any “admirers.” (This is probably the destiny of living a moral life: to live alone.) However, it is enough for the news of your “anarchy” to leak out, and you find obstacles falling before you, you sense the admiration of others directed toward you. It is purely and simply a matter or prestige. That is, in a word, of magic. Any anarchic act fascinates, amazes, attracts. This is true everywhere in the order of reality. Nothing attracts us, nothing interests us, nothing holds sway over us – but that which differs from the rest, even if it is only a matter of an accident."

"The man who has not been seriously concerned, at least once in his life, with theological problems, is irremediably mediocre."

"The spiritual sterility of America, its overwhelming vulgarity, goes hand in hand with the secularization of theology, with the transformation of a stunning system of metaphysics and Revelation into innumerable systems of ethics, hygiene, social policies, birth control, etc."

"Jazz, the snobbish fashion of Negro art, Expressionism, and solar heresies have promoted dark, opaque, mineralized skin as the new prototype of European beauty."

"In fact, the power of man to transform his life and his surroundings to the point of transfiguration is unlimited. It is a real power, not an illusion. The man who loves transforms his beloved into a Beatrice or an Isolde – and then it is only one step further to the transfiguration of the banal “hearth” into the most perfect medieval stage setting."

"Poetry, as well as culture in general, adds something to nature. It contributes not only to the beautification of the Cosmos, but also to its “signification” (if I may be allowed such an expression.) Things not only appear more beautiful after they have been sung about by a great poet, but they appear to us, above all, with signification."

"I have the sentiment that do not err in identifying elements of the human tragedy in nature and in ruins of works erected by the hand of man. Any religion is a book sealed with seven seals for the one who doesn't understand that witnesses to the beliefs and thoughts of ancient man are to be found always in nature. The fall of man into history brought with it the participation of nature in history. Nature does not merely imitate works of art, as Oscar Wilde's paradox puts it; sometimes it imitates also human dramas - yet not the greatest ones ..."

"The sentiment of the past frightens, and at the same time it awakens a terrific desire to consume the present, to exhaust the moment."

"I defended myself as best I could. I defended myself especially by writing."

"Mus recalled my long article about Barabudur; he had deciphered it, with the help of a Romăno-French dictionary, at Saigon, on the eve of the war." (I weep for humanity)

"In particular, that the imagination is not an arbitrary invention; etymologically, it is cognate with imago, "representation, imitation," and with imitor, "to imitate, to reproduce." The imagination imitates exemplary models – "images" reactualizes them repeats them over and over."

[Jeffrey Dixon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first volume of the memoirs of Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), the Romanian-born historian of religions, covers the first thirty years of his life (Autobiography, Volume 1: 1907-1937, Journey East, Journey West), including his fabled sojourn in India; it ends, tantalisingly, on the cusp of his near-disastrous entanglement with the mystical but paramilitary Legion of the Archangel Michael, a movement for spiritual renewal which would degenerate into the blood-soaked and anti-Semitic Iron Guard. Near-disastrous, that is, both because of the physical danger it would put him in, in the short term; but also because, in the long term, it would damage his reputation as a champion of a new Humanism.
Fortunately, the first three chapters of the second volume cover the controversies of his last years in his native country, before he became a permanent exile; and are of great interest to admirers of Eliade’s scholarly work who are aware of his scandalous associations with extremist politics and want to hear how he justified it. Eliade’s version is that his teacher and mentor, the philosopher Nae Ionescu (“I considered him my ‘master,’ the guide who had been given me to enable me to fulfil my destiny”), was fascinated by the “mystery of History” which led him to engage in journalism and become embroiled in politics. Eliade, who claims he wanted only to be a “creator in the realm of culture,” had supported Ionescu’s “political concepts and opinions” out of a sense of solidarity with the Master; and it was only when his Maestru died, leaving him spiritually orphaned, that Eliade felt liberated “from the ideas, hopes, and decisions of the professor in the last few years, with which, out of devotion, I had made common cause.”
Before then, however, as “the ideologist of the Legionary movement,” Ionescu was arrested when the king imposed a dictatorship; and Eliade soon joined his Master in prison. Meanwhile, the leader of the Legion, Corneliu Codreanu, was executed, leading Eliade to write this obituary: “For him, the Legionary movement did not constitute a political phenomenon but was, in its essence, ethical and religious. He repeated time and again that he was not interested in the acquisition of power but in the creation of a ‘new man’ ... and he believed, furthermore, in his own destiny and in the protection of the Archangel Michael.” Eliade, who insists that he did not believe that his generation had a political destiny, only a cultural one, was lucky to have the protection of more earthly powers, who arranged for him to be transferred to a sanatorium when he became ill; and thence home.
Shortly thereafter he was offered a post as cultural attaché in first London, then Lisbon, which meant he was out of the country when the Legionaries took their vengeance in a campaign of terror which included anti-Jewish pogroms. Eliade considers that by doing so they had “nullified the religious meaning” of Codreanu’s sacrifice; and that, through their “excesses and crimes”, they had “irreparably discredited the Iron Guard, considered from then on as a terrorist and pro-Nazi movement.”
With regard to this account, the reader will have to provide his own answer to the question Eliade himself would later ask: “At bottom, the problem is this: how to recognize the real camouflaged in appearances?” The loss of Eliade’s pre-war journals, which he had to leave behind in Romania, may have been a convenient disaster; but it was not only his politics but also his personal philosophy which it was said he was camouflaging “under the mask of erudition.”
For a similar ambiguity surrounds the extent of the influence on his thinking of the Traditionalist school of metaphysics represented primarily by the brahminical René Guénon and the intellectual kshatriya Julius Evola (whose relationship with the Italian Fascists was never “camouflaged”): the idea that the religious beliefs of all peoples are the expression, however degraded over time, of primordial Truth; and that those cultures which still provide a valid initiation can show us the Way to spiritual Life. In his Portugal Journal, written during WWII, Eliade admits that he has only confessed to a few friends his Traditionalist views; but in his Autobiography, discussing a post-war meeting with Evola, he claims to be “suspicious” of the “artificial, ahistorical character” of the Primordial Tradition. Further, while agreeing with Evola about the decadence of contemporary Western culture, Eliade refuses to despair because he believes in “the creativity of the human spirit” which he considers to be our greatest defence against the Terror of History.
And is it not this creativity, rather than his personal flaws, which remains his legacy? In a series of books published in the Fifties, Eliade’s thought matured beyond dogmatic Traditionalism, developing the proposition that the sacred is a category of human consciousness. He championed a phenomenological approach to what he called the trans-conscious, insisting on treating religious beliefs on their own terms rather than submitting them to the reductionism of sociology or historicism. And although this approach is now academically suspect, he found like minds at the Eranos conferences in Switzerland, at which he lectured throughout the decade.
The Autobiography gives us fascinating – but all too brief – snapshots of the luminaries with whom he mingled – notably Carl Jung, Henry Corbin and Gershom Scholem. I would love to have heard more about the methodological differences which nearly made him lose his temper with the Hungarian scholar Karl Kerényi, for example; or about his fear that his “passion for erudition” might get in the way of his own experience of the sacred; or about the attacks of melancholy which were alone “capable of disturbing and shaking the imperialistic security of theology”.
We do see the man behind the mask of erudition, grieving for his lost homeland and losing his first wife to cancer; trying to write in cramped flats with noisy neighbours; courting his second wife, who encourages him to continue his literary work despite its poor reception in France (difficult for a man who had been an acclaimed novelist in his native country); surviving his own brush with cancer; and struggling against time to complete the scholarly works on which his reputation now stands...but that struggle came to an end when his Autobiography had only reached 1960, so readers who wish to follow his life to the end must turn to the published Journals.

There is more on Eliade, literature and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: 'Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter)'. The series of posts dedicated to the life and work of Eliade begins here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...