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Zalmoxis, the Vanishing God: Comparative Studies in the Religions and Folklore of Dacia and Eastern Europe
English, French (translation)
260 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
9 people are currently reading
354 people want to read
About the author
Mircea Eliade
561 books2,714 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 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 9, 2009
* una din explicatiile referitoare la etimologia numelui dacilor e legata de lycantropie, care, zice-se, ar fi fost foarte trendy in zona balcano-carpatica.
* prin faptul ca au avut in Zalmoxis un zeu suprem, se presupune ca daco-getii s-au apropiat mai usor de crestinism decit celelalte popoare politeiste din jur.
* una din versiunile legendei mesterului Manole, cea ungureasca, vorbeste despre 12 mesteri care lucrau la constructia cetatii Deva. Exista si aici elementul sacrificiului - prima sotie care va veni sa aduca mincare, insa lipseste elementul supranatural (visul lui Manole sau in alte cazuri zina, arhanghelul etc.) Eu de ce nu am stiut asta pina acum?
* cultul matragunei mi se pare foarte cool [ritualurile, babele mestere si cintecele care insotesc culesul matragunei:] si e cam tot ce pot spune despre el :D
* Miorita. Jules Michelet despre: "frumoasa poveste de comuniune a omului cu intreaga creatie, insa resemnarea in fata mortii e prea usoara si din pacate e trasatura nationala" - citat aprox. Citeodata tind sa-i dau dreptate la partea cu resemnarea.
Eliade crede ca decizia pastorului de a-si accepta destinul nu tradeaza o conceptie pesimista asupra existentei, iar raspunsul lui e o "reinterpretare a crestinismului, in care momentele istorice sint asumate ca momente apartinind dramei cristologice".
* prin faptul ca au avut in Zalmoxis un zeu suprem, se presupune ca daco-getii s-au apropiat mai usor de crestinism decit celelalte popoare politeiste din jur.
* una din versiunile legendei mesterului Manole, cea ungureasca, vorbeste despre 12 mesteri care lucrau la constructia cetatii Deva. Exista si aici elementul sacrificiului - prima sotie care va veni sa aduca mincare, insa lipseste elementul supranatural (visul lui Manole sau in alte cazuri zina, arhanghelul etc.) Eu de ce nu am stiut asta pina acum?
* cultul matragunei mi se pare foarte cool [ritualurile, babele mestere si cintecele care insotesc culesul matragunei:] si e cam tot ce pot spune despre el :D
* Miorita. Jules Michelet despre: "frumoasa poveste de comuniune a omului cu intreaga creatie, insa resemnarea in fata mortii e prea usoara si din pacate e trasatura nationala" - citat aprox. Citeodata tind sa-i dau dreptate la partea cu resemnarea.
Eliade crede ca decizia pastorului de a-si accepta destinul nu tradeaza o conceptie pesimista asupra existentei, iar raspunsul lui e o "reinterpretare a crestinismului, in care momentele istorice sint asumate ca momente apartinind dramei cristologice".
June 3, 2016
Zalmoxis, The Vanishing God is one of those books that you see and your inhibitions about adding yet another superfluous title to your library wilt before it. The title alone makes it a keeper. But, too bad, this is barely for the laymen, a dense, citation packed exploration of various aspects of Eastern European religion. Zalmoxis himself, a cave-bound god of immortality, is only the first chapter. Other topics covered here include Dacian wolf cults (my favorite chapter) and the wolf as a symbol, origins of the myth of the "creation dive", ritual hunts, Romanian folk ballads involving construction sacrifice, mandrake, and another folk ballad about a prophetic sheep.
All-in-all it sounds endless fascinating and at times it is. Eliade even goes above and beyond his focus on mostly non-Slavic Eastern Europe and looks at how many myths and legends have ancient, primal roots, since they're shared in places as far-flung as North America and India. This is a search for the imaginary universes of ancient men and women, not such much comparative religious study.
Still, though, it is jampacked with references and quotes and such, and can often be little more than stifling lists of things with breaks the mood of the work. Eliade is at his best when he's describing crazy, wacky mythical stuff.
All-in-all it sounds endless fascinating and at times it is. Eliade even goes above and beyond his focus on mostly non-Slavic Eastern Europe and looks at how many myths and legends have ancient, primal roots, since they're shared in places as far-flung as North America and India. This is a search for the imaginary universes of ancient men and women, not such much comparative religious study.
Still, though, it is jampacked with references and quotes and such, and can often be little more than stifling lists of things with breaks the mood of the work. Eliade is at his best when he's describing crazy, wacky mythical stuff.
October 3, 2015
every religion is a little bit too much connected. eliade wrote, argued and compared every possible story in the world to show this, in an academic way.
my first book of eliade, but definitely will not be the last.
my first book of eliade, but definitely will not be the last.
March 23, 2020
It is remarkable the breadth of Eliade's study. It is even more remarkable given the dearth of information on these topics. Also, I am very happy with the very clear reasoning and discourse.
However, this work is not exhaustive. Neither does it propose an overarching thesis that binds all the religious motives that do occur in this geographical area. Sadly this might be impossible to do, given how little has remained. :(
I somehow love that Eliade looks like a true scientist. He simplifies the problem and studies it, but he never simplifies it more than it is necessary. It is obvious that he thought a lot about the possible origin of these motives and rituals. It is sadly only due to the lack of information that he only managed to provide a collection of these motives, that at times, alas, seems disparate.
However, this work is not exhaustive. Neither does it propose an overarching thesis that binds all the religious motives that do occur in this geographical area. Sadly this might be impossible to do, given how little has remained. :(
I somehow love that Eliade looks like a true scientist. He simplifies the problem and studies it, but he never simplifies it more than it is necessary. It is obvious that he thought a lot about the possible origin of these motives and rituals. It is sadly only due to the lack of information that he only managed to provide a collection of these motives, that at times, alas, seems disparate.
January 4, 2023
In the early Seventies, the historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1907–86) put together a collection of essays on the myths and folklore of Dacia and Eastern Europe. The essays are, it must be admitted, among his more drily academic; and I found myself wondering whether he felt constrained by the intense emotions he felt whenever the subject of his homeland was involved – for Dacia is the old Roman name for Romania, the country where Eliade was born, grew up, and established himself as a novelist and a leading intellectual light of the interwar generation. But since the Second World War he had found himself in permanent exile – in Paris initially, where he published many of the works which would cement his scholarly reputation – and, since the late Fifties, in Chicago.
His Journals are full of regret for his separation from his homeland and horror at the news he receives of the crimes of its Communist rulers. He even finds himself wondering if the trials his country is enduring are initiatory tests from which it will one day emerge, renewed. Sadly, he would not live long enough to find out.
The earliest essay in the collection – a study of the magical, medicinal and erotic powers attributed to the mandrake plant in Romanian folklore – was in fact written in 1938. “The mandragora”, he writes, “has a twofold power. Its strange virtues can be directed either toward good or evil, can be summoned for love and health, or for hate or madness.” As “the herb of life and death”, it can be seen as a manifestation of the coincidentia oppositorum with which Eliade would be obsessed throughout his scholarly work.
This coming together of unlikely opposites also lies at the heart of a study of a folk cosmogony in which the Devil and God are co-creators. In an exploration of the origins of the Dacians as a “martial brotherhood” engendered under the sign of the Wolf, Eliade concludes “that a great many legends and popular beliefs about werewolves can be explained by a process of folklorisation, that is, by the projection of concrete rituals, whether shamanic or of martial initiation, into the world of the imagination.” Whether or not there is a specifically Romanian shamanism is the topic of another essay.
A study which gives its title to the whole collection was one which he worked on for twenty-five years. Taking as its starting point an anecdote from Herodotus about one of Pythagoras’ slaves, Eliade divines that Zalmoxis was a euhemerised god of the Getae (the main Dacian tribe) whose cult “had the character of a mystery religion” in which “the ‘revelation’ that he brings to the Getae is communicated through a well-known mythico-ritual scenario of ‘death’ (occultation) and ‘return to earth’ (epiphany), a scenario used by various figures engaged in founding a new era or establishing an eschatological cult…” For Eliade, to reconstruct the myth and cult of Zalmoxis as God of the Mysteries and Master of Initiation is also to rediscover the ancient Geto-Dacian culture, which had all but disappeared after the Roman conquest of the region. It was only from the mid-nineteenth century onwards that pride in their Roman descent was challenged in Romanian historiography by what has been called “the revolt of the autochthonous base,” that is, “the recovery of the most distant past of the Romanian people … Zalmoxis is revivified because he incarnates the religious genius of the Daco-Getae, because, in the last analysis, he represents the spirituality of the ‘autochthons,’ of the almost mythical ancestors conquered and assimilated by the Romans.”
Between 1944, when he began the essay, and 1969, when he finished it for publication, Eliade’s homeland was conquered by the Red Army and assimilated into the Communist system. In 1943, as he recounts in his Journal, he had discussed the figure of Zalmoxis with the Romanian-Jewish poet and philosopher Benjamin Fondane (who would be murdered at Auschwitz the following year).
Apparently, Fondane had stressed that the surviving myth “doesn’t teach us very much. It still must be deciphered and interpreted, and it is to this task that contemporary Romanian historians, poets and philosophers must apply themselves. It is only in doing so that Zalmoxis can become the equal, as a figure or symbol, of the Greek divinities, and thus contribute to the enrichment of European culture.” When Eliade bemoaned the historical “bad luck” which meant that certain peoples such as the Geto-Dacians and certain figures such as Zalmoxis were almost forgotten, Fondane attributed the phenomenon rather to “the lack of creative imagination among the representatives of the culture in question.”
Although Eliade concludes that he is not very sure that Fondane was right, it is interesting that shortly after the meeting he should begin work on revivifying Zalmoxis, as if to prove that he, at least, did not lack “creative imagination”. I, for my part, like to imagine that Fondane was, in fact, right; that, in no small measure thanks to Eliade’s bringing them into the light, forgotten Masters of Initiation such as Zalmoxis can indeed enrich European culture, as the Christian West rediscovers its pagan heritage. For myths and legends are true, but it is not the truth of “historical reality. ‘Myth’ and ‘history’ represent two different modes of existing in the World … A people, as well as an individual, can be conscious of its responsibilities in history and courageously assume them, while at the same time continuing to enjoy the ancient myths and legends and to create new ones; for they account for other dimensions of human existence.”
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...
His Journals are full of regret for his separation from his homeland and horror at the news he receives of the crimes of its Communist rulers. He even finds himself wondering if the trials his country is enduring are initiatory tests from which it will one day emerge, renewed. Sadly, he would not live long enough to find out.
The earliest essay in the collection – a study of the magical, medicinal and erotic powers attributed to the mandrake plant in Romanian folklore – was in fact written in 1938. “The mandragora”, he writes, “has a twofold power. Its strange virtues can be directed either toward good or evil, can be summoned for love and health, or for hate or madness.” As “the herb of life and death”, it can be seen as a manifestation of the coincidentia oppositorum with which Eliade would be obsessed throughout his scholarly work.
This coming together of unlikely opposites also lies at the heart of a study of a folk cosmogony in which the Devil and God are co-creators. In an exploration of the origins of the Dacians as a “martial brotherhood” engendered under the sign of the Wolf, Eliade concludes “that a great many legends and popular beliefs about werewolves can be explained by a process of folklorisation, that is, by the projection of concrete rituals, whether shamanic or of martial initiation, into the world of the imagination.” Whether or not there is a specifically Romanian shamanism is the topic of another essay.
A study which gives its title to the whole collection was one which he worked on for twenty-five years. Taking as its starting point an anecdote from Herodotus about one of Pythagoras’ slaves, Eliade divines that Zalmoxis was a euhemerised god of the Getae (the main Dacian tribe) whose cult “had the character of a mystery religion” in which “the ‘revelation’ that he brings to the Getae is communicated through a well-known mythico-ritual scenario of ‘death’ (occultation) and ‘return to earth’ (epiphany), a scenario used by various figures engaged in founding a new era or establishing an eschatological cult…” For Eliade, to reconstruct the myth and cult of Zalmoxis as God of the Mysteries and Master of Initiation is also to rediscover the ancient Geto-Dacian culture, which had all but disappeared after the Roman conquest of the region. It was only from the mid-nineteenth century onwards that pride in their Roman descent was challenged in Romanian historiography by what has been called “the revolt of the autochthonous base,” that is, “the recovery of the most distant past of the Romanian people … Zalmoxis is revivified because he incarnates the religious genius of the Daco-Getae, because, in the last analysis, he represents the spirituality of the ‘autochthons,’ of the almost mythical ancestors conquered and assimilated by the Romans.”
Between 1944, when he began the essay, and 1969, when he finished it for publication, Eliade’s homeland was conquered by the Red Army and assimilated into the Communist system. In 1943, as he recounts in his Journal, he had discussed the figure of Zalmoxis with the Romanian-Jewish poet and philosopher Benjamin Fondane (who would be murdered at Auschwitz the following year).
Apparently, Fondane had stressed that the surviving myth “doesn’t teach us very much. It still must be deciphered and interpreted, and it is to this task that contemporary Romanian historians, poets and philosophers must apply themselves. It is only in doing so that Zalmoxis can become the equal, as a figure or symbol, of the Greek divinities, and thus contribute to the enrichment of European culture.” When Eliade bemoaned the historical “bad luck” which meant that certain peoples such as the Geto-Dacians and certain figures such as Zalmoxis were almost forgotten, Fondane attributed the phenomenon rather to “the lack of creative imagination among the representatives of the culture in question.”
Although Eliade concludes that he is not very sure that Fondane was right, it is interesting that shortly after the meeting he should begin work on revivifying Zalmoxis, as if to prove that he, at least, did not lack “creative imagination”. I, for my part, like to imagine that Fondane was, in fact, right; that, in no small measure thanks to Eliade’s bringing them into the light, forgotten Masters of Initiation such as Zalmoxis can indeed enrich European culture, as the Christian West rediscovers its pagan heritage. For myths and legends are true, but it is not the truth of “historical reality. ‘Myth’ and ‘history’ represent two different modes of existing in the World … A people, as well as an individual, can be conscious of its responsibilities in history and courageously assume them, while at the same time continuing to enjoy the ancient myths and legends and to create new ones; for they account for other dimensions of human existence.”
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...
November 12, 2016
«Páginas olvidadas por Eliade mismo —no las recordará en ningún lugar— y que vuelven a aparecer ahora al ser rescatadas de una edición no venal publicada en 1943 en Madrid.»
La verdad es que estas páginas parecen tan olvidadas por Eliade mismo que resulta muy difícil creer que fue su autor. Un breviario de historia de Rumanía que mas bien parece un panfleto publicitario.
La verdad es que estas páginas parecen tan olvidadas por Eliade mismo que resulta muy difícil creer que fue su autor. Un breviario de historia de Rumanía que mas bien parece un panfleto publicitario.
February 22, 2026
The book itself generally deals with Eastern European mythology and folklore. The opening chapters about the Geto-Dacian culture are very valuable and highly recommended, and the parts about pre-Zoroastrian Iranian cultures are also great.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews