Waiting for the Dawn: Mircea Eliade in Perspective

by Davíd Carrasco, Jane M. Law (Editor)

First published in 1991,  Waiting for the Dawn  is the result of a year-long interdisciplinary study of Mircea Eliade’s scholarly, literary, and autobiographical works which took place at the University of Colorado in 1982. With a preface by Davíd Carrasco that takes into account recent developments in Eliade scholarship, this important work is back in print after renewed interest in Eliade thanks to Francis Ford Coppola’s screen adaptation  Youth without Youth  (2007).

Genres: Religion

194 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1991

About the author

Davíd L. Carrasco is currently Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of Latin America Studies at Harvard. He is a Mexican-American academic historian of religion, anthropologist, and a Mesoamericanist scholar who has published widely on the Aztecs.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Dixon · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1982, less than four years before his death, the venerable historian of religions Mircea Eliade visited the University of Colorado for the final week of an interdisciplinary seminar exploring the three main facets of his work: that is, his fiction and autobiographical writings, in addition to his scholarship. The result was a slim hardback, which came out in 1985, containing selections from all three facets of his oeuvre, along with tributes from his fellow scholars. The highlight for me was Edward P. Nolan’s essay on Eliade’s magnum opus, The Forbidden Forest, a portrait of the artist as shaman. The volume under review is the expanded edition which was issued in paperback in 1991 – additional delights include a plethora of photographs of Eliade, along with an English translation of his last short story.
The three worlds that Eliade the writer inhabited are, for him, inseparable: the life story that Eliade tells in his journals and two volumes of memoirs show that his scholarship and his literary fiction are both equally valid expressions of his creativity; he could never abandon either for long, without doing damage to his soul. For, as he puts it in his address to the seminar, “artistic imagination has a mythological, i.e., religious, source.”
This religious source would manifest itself to Eliade, as a teacher in the Sixties and Seventies, in unexpected ways. When he published his ground-breaking study of shamanism (the English translation came out in 1964), it was a subject of little interest to the academic world, being considered to be “either a psychopathic phenomenon, a primitive healing practice, or an archaic type of black magic”; but “the complexity, the rigour, and the rich spiritual meaning of shamanistic initiations and practices”, which he played no small part in demonstrating, were key to the phenomenal success of the books of Carlos Castaneda, indispensable reading in the counter-culture of the late Sixties/ early Seventies.
“Probably”, he adds, “such interest was incited in great part by the fascination of the youth culture with hallucinogens, especially LSD.” In his Journals, Eliade frequently comments on such interests among his students, from whom he felt, at least initially, academics such as himself had much to learn. “What strikes an historian of religions”, he continues, “is the fact that the ‘trips’ obtained through hallucinogens have an ‘ecstatic’ structure and are acknowledged as such by some users of LSD. Evidently, without a spiritual preparation, the ‘trips’ cannot become a ‘mystic experience.’ But it is important to notice that a part of contemporary youth tries to re-actualise an archaic, prehistoric technique, even if the results are, medically speaking, more or less disastrous.” Moreover, an awareness of the “psycho-mental risks” involved in taking hallucinogens may help us to experience illness as initiatory ordeals leading to “the integration of personality and spiritual transformation” – which is precisely what “traditional initiation” was all about.
For Eliade, however, the way to avoid such risks to his mental health was not to take an acid trip, but to balance his scientific research with the world of “literary imagination” – oscillating between the diurnal and nocturnal modes of the spirit, knowing that both are essential to man, and that the one can inform the other. Moreover, creative writing “constitutes an instrument of knowledge because the literary imagination reveals unknown dimensions or aspects of the human condition.” We need to dream, to narrate, to create imaginary universes, mythical spaces – safety-valves for the “thirst for transcendence” – for, in doing so, we imitate God’s work, become the demiurge of a new cosmos: “From it, from this actualisation of primordiality, everything begins.”
Eliade’s literary world is represented in this collection by the first publication of his last short story, an enigmatic work of magical realism, entitled ‘In the Shadow of a Lily,’ and translated into English by the indefatigable Mac Linscott Ricketts. At one point, one of the characters in the story exclaims: ‘I feel as though I’m going to lose my mind and start screaming! What’s it all about?’ I must admit that, by this point in the narrative, I was starting to feel the same way! Disappearing lorries, UFOs…this could make a good episode of the X-Files. But Eliade’s message is not so much that the truth is out there, but that it is in here…The fate of the Romanian exiles at the heart of the story is the reflection of an archetypal truth: The whole world lives in Exile, but only a few know it. Those who know, the gnostics, are preparing for the end of Exile; their Noah’s Ark is camouflaged, in our technological era, as a series of mysterious trucks which vanish at midnight, carrying with them, to another world, refugees from this one: “Signs are being made to us, but we pass them by without seeing them.”
And talking of signs being made to us, let us not pass the photos by. One in particular stands out for a lover of Sixties and Seventies Marvels like myself: Eliade surrounded by the super-heroic, mythical images of the great comics artist Jack Kirby, co-creator of the Mighty Thor’s twentieth century incarnation, but also of the Eternals and many other “new gods” and demi-gods. Here be giants…
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...