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Journal IV, 1979-1985
Journal IV is the first publication, in a translation from the Romanian manuscript, of the journal that Mircea Eliade kept during the last seven years of his life. In this period, Eliade is ensconced as a famous scholar—his works are being translated into many languages and books about him arrive regularly in the mail. His encounters with scholars of like repute are recorded in the journal; after a party in Paris, Eliade shares a taxi with Claude Lévi-Strauss and inadvertently makes off with his raincoat.
Running like a fault line through the peak of his success, however, is Eliade's painful awareness of his physical decline—failing vision, arthritic hands, and continual fatigue. Again and again he repeats how little time he has to finish the projects he is working on—his autobiography, the third and fourth volumes of his History of Religious Ideas, and the duties associated with his editorship of the Encyclopedia of Religion. He poignantly recounts the sharpest blow: the disorganization and eventual destruction by fire of his personal library.
Within the scope of Journal IV Eliade and his world go to ruin. What does not decline is the vivid and persistent voice of Eliade the writer, an unbreaking voice that—with death only months away—plans a reply to critics, plots out an article, and ruminates on characters to people another novella.
Running like a fault line through the peak of his success, however, is Eliade's painful awareness of his physical decline—failing vision, arthritic hands, and continual fatigue. Again and again he repeats how little time he has to finish the projects he is working on—his autobiography, the third and fourth volumes of his History of Religious Ideas, and the duties associated with his editorship of the Encyclopedia of Religion. He poignantly recounts the sharpest blow: the disorganization and eventual destruction by fire of his personal library.
Within the scope of Journal IV Eliade and his world go to ruin. What does not decline is the vivid and persistent voice of Eliade the writer, an unbreaking voice that—with death only months away—plans a reply to critics, plots out an article, and ruminates on characters to people another novella.
175 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
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About the author
Mircea Eliade
558 books2,700 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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December 17, 2022
In the first three volumes of his published journals, as well as in The Portugal Journal and his two volumes of Autobiography, we follow the trajectory of a Romanian novelist and essayist who, having left his homeland to work in London and Lisbon during WWII, is unable to return when Romania is “russified,” and re-invents himself as a historian of religions in Paris and Chicago.
In the fourth volume of his journals, we meet a man beset by the infirmities of age, knowing that his most original work is behind him. He still has some insightful things to say, for example, about the way the great world religions have “assimilated local cults and divinities,” thus preserving “a great many marginal, provincial beliefs and conceptions otherwise condemned, with time, to fossilisation and disappearance.” The “assimilation of aboriginal gods” by the archetypes of newer religions “is a process still going on today. These innumerable and continuous assimilations solidify the structure of the deity, reconfirming his/her universality.”
It is the universality behind the particular that has always interested Eliade, dating back to his encounter in the Thirties with the Primordial Tradition of René Guénon and Julius Evola: proponents of the idea that all religions have degenerated from a prehistoric revelation, emanating from a lost sacred centre. But it is something else from that decade that now haunts Eliade: his association with the ultra-nationalist Legion of the Archangel Michael, which can be seen as the political and paramilitary wing of Traditionalism.
By the Eighties, this little-known episode in Eliade’s youth (he even spent some months in prison for refusing to disassociate himself from the Legion), was increasingly becoming known and talked about, leading him to be accused of anti-Semitism and fascism (“I have been suspected and slandered by many in Israel”). These “calumnies and insults” he attempts to rebut through the research of his biographer, Mac Ricketts (“I try to explain; I recall for him certain articles, conversations, and events of those years.”), whose knowledge of the Romanian language – he is the translator of this along with the first volume of Eliade’s Journals (Journal I, 1945-1955) – gives him unique access to early documents.
As Eliade explains in the second volume of his autobiography (Exile's Odyssey), it was his mentor Nae Ionescu who led him, however briefly, from philosophy to right-wing politics; and it was the turn of the Legion from a mystical form of Christian nationalism to violent extremism which alienated him from the movement, even before Ionescu’s death in 1940. It was precisely his friendship with Ionescu which made him persona non grata in Communist Romania after the war; he could never go home again.
But hearing the horror stories of those who remained, Eliade begins to wonder whether his ill-judged political association was not, in fact, a ‘happy fault.’ As he writes in October 1984 (that Orwellian year!), after a sleepless night: “I kept thinking of what I would have suffered had I remained in the homeland as professor and writer. If it hadn’t been for that felix culpa: my adoration of Nae Ionescu and all the baleful consequences (in 1935-40) of that relationship.” He later adds: “At best, I’d have died of tuberculosis in a prison.”
It is not just difficult memories which trouble him in his later years, however. Eliade was beset by physical ailments such as arthritis and cataracts which affected his ability to read and write: “And in spite of everything,” he wrote in his Journal in November 1983, “I persist in believing in the ‘initiatory’ meaning of these sufferings and debilities. I’m not just thinking of death. At my age, that’s no longer a problem. The ‘initiation’ pertains to something else: a ‘new life,’ i.e., a total regeneration which reveals to me another kind of creativity.”
What kind of creativity that might have been, we will never know, for he died in April 1986: He was indeed still having ideas for a novella but, in a touching last entry, he finds it impossible to work on it as, on a “superb” cloudless day, he becomes fascinated by the shapes and colours of the bags worn by the children that he sees leaving their school: It is an illustration of what he himself called his “obsessing fascination” with “banal” details: “It’s as though it were … a sign that’s been made to me (as usual – at least, this is my conviction – the most profound mysteries and revelations are camouflaged in commonplace events).”
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...
In the fourth volume of his journals, we meet a man beset by the infirmities of age, knowing that his most original work is behind him. He still has some insightful things to say, for example, about the way the great world religions have “assimilated local cults and divinities,” thus preserving “a great many marginal, provincial beliefs and conceptions otherwise condemned, with time, to fossilisation and disappearance.” The “assimilation of aboriginal gods” by the archetypes of newer religions “is a process still going on today. These innumerable and continuous assimilations solidify the structure of the deity, reconfirming his/her universality.”
It is the universality behind the particular that has always interested Eliade, dating back to his encounter in the Thirties with the Primordial Tradition of René Guénon and Julius Evola: proponents of the idea that all religions have degenerated from a prehistoric revelation, emanating from a lost sacred centre. But it is something else from that decade that now haunts Eliade: his association with the ultra-nationalist Legion of the Archangel Michael, which can be seen as the political and paramilitary wing of Traditionalism.
By the Eighties, this little-known episode in Eliade’s youth (he even spent some months in prison for refusing to disassociate himself from the Legion), was increasingly becoming known and talked about, leading him to be accused of anti-Semitism and fascism (“I have been suspected and slandered by many in Israel”). These “calumnies and insults” he attempts to rebut through the research of his biographer, Mac Ricketts (“I try to explain; I recall for him certain articles, conversations, and events of those years.”), whose knowledge of the Romanian language – he is the translator of this along with the first volume of Eliade’s Journals (Journal I, 1945-1955) – gives him unique access to early documents.
As Eliade explains in the second volume of his autobiography (Exile's Odyssey), it was his mentor Nae Ionescu who led him, however briefly, from philosophy to right-wing politics; and it was the turn of the Legion from a mystical form of Christian nationalism to violent extremism which alienated him from the movement, even before Ionescu’s death in 1940. It was precisely his friendship with Ionescu which made him persona non grata in Communist Romania after the war; he could never go home again.
But hearing the horror stories of those who remained, Eliade begins to wonder whether his ill-judged political association was not, in fact, a ‘happy fault.’ As he writes in October 1984 (that Orwellian year!), after a sleepless night: “I kept thinking of what I would have suffered had I remained in the homeland as professor and writer. If it hadn’t been for that felix culpa: my adoration of Nae Ionescu and all the baleful consequences (in 1935-40) of that relationship.” He later adds: “At best, I’d have died of tuberculosis in a prison.”
It is not just difficult memories which trouble him in his later years, however. Eliade was beset by physical ailments such as arthritis and cataracts which affected his ability to read and write: “And in spite of everything,” he wrote in his Journal in November 1983, “I persist in believing in the ‘initiatory’ meaning of these sufferings and debilities. I’m not just thinking of death. At my age, that’s no longer a problem. The ‘initiation’ pertains to something else: a ‘new life,’ i.e., a total regeneration which reveals to me another kind of creativity.”
What kind of creativity that might have been, we will never know, for he died in April 1986: He was indeed still having ideas for a novella but, in a touching last entry, he finds it impossible to work on it as, on a “superb” cloudless day, he becomes fascinated by the shapes and colours of the bags worn by the children that he sees leaving their school: It is an illustration of what he himself called his “obsessing fascination” with “banal” details: “It’s as though it were … a sign that’s been made to me (as usual – at least, this is my conviction – the most profound mysteries and revelations are camouflaged in commonplace events).”
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...
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