A Eliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania INSTEAD OF DISCONTENTS Anyone interested in the twentieth-century fascination with myth will eventually have to come to terms with the work of Mircea Eliade. Quality aside, the sheer quantity of Eliade’s literary output requires he be given serious attention. In this sense Eliade seems perhaps like the ‘Sir James Frazer of our time’. Like the influence of Frazer, that of Eliade is reflected in a wide range of academic disciplines, from anthropology to literary criticism to religious studies. Indeed, since his arrival at the University of Chicago in 1956, Eliade has been, in effect, the historian of religions in the United States. A brief tour of bookstores or libraries would at least confirm that Eliade is perhaps the most visible representative of religious studies in the Western world. His books can be found under any number of categories, from ‘mythology’ to ‘philosophy’ to ‘religion’. So it is right that we should look closely at his extraordinary work. Since the issue has been raised, it seems only fair to discuss the difficulties about the quality of Eliade’s work. To be frank, the issue here is one of rigour. Much of Eliade’s work seems marred by evasive thinking.’ Instead of resolving difficulties earnestly and directly, he often evades problems by resorting to paradoxes, metaphors or other literary devices. Part of this is owing to his literary method of writing. When asked how he did his ‘scientific’ writing, Eliade is reputed to have replied, ‘[by] intuition, the same as when I write my novels’.” Eliade’s style is no mere accident, but rather a deliberate choice. Indeed, he admits as much in an interview with Claude-Henri Rocquet:Eliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 71 rocquer. You have an almost devilish gift for throwing your listeners off the scent, for twisting and turning your plots so that one becomes unable to tell true from false, left from right. FLIADE. That’s true. I even think it is a specific character of at least some of my prose writings. RocqueT. There is something impish about the pleasure you take in slightly bewildering your questioner, isn’t there? FLIADE. Perhaps that is part of a certain educational method. One mustn’t provide the reader with a perfectly transparent ‘story’. RocqueT. An educational method, yes, but also because you have a taste for labyrinths? ELIADE. And it’s an initiation test as well.? Although these remarks were made in the context of Eliade’s fiction, they seem true of his history of religions as well. In reaction to this characteristic of his writings, many scholars have avoided Eliade’s altogether. This is a great mistake — not only because of Eliade’s vast influence, but also because the key to the secrets of his ‘labyrinthine’ style opens many doors guarding the puzzles of his thought. This ‘key’ falls into our hands when we move beyond mere analysis of Eliade’s ideas to the larger meaning of them when seen within their historical contexts.* I shall begin by asking what Eliade takes a ‘myth’ to be. I do so because he himself never offers a fully ramified statement on the matter. We shall then be free to explore the nature of this conceptual proposal in the terms I have been recommending through this study — those of the theorist’s ‘internal’ and ‘external’ projects, of which the concept and theory of myth form an integral part. In this chapter I concentrate on the ‘external’ context of the political and religious projects in which Eliade participated in the first third of this century in his native Romania. In the next chapter I shall seek to relate these projects to the ‘internal’ context of Eliade’s more purely academic projects, reflecting his place in the academic study of religion and his particular research goals. As I think we shall see, Eliade’s ‘internal’ and ‘external’ projects are closely and interestingly related.7: Four Theories of Myth ELIADE’S CONCEPT OF MYTH Eliade defines ‘myth’ in a deceptively simple way: ‘myth is, before everything else, a tale. ... Modern man’s attraction to myths betrays his latent desire to be told stories. . . .’° Yet sandwiched between are qualifications which make Eliade and his theory of myth both complex and elusive: not only is myth a ‘tale’, he says; ‘it has no other function than to reveal how something came into being . . . how worlds are born and what happened afterward’.® Why does Eliade emphasise this? How can mere ‘tales’ be assigned such cosmological powers? Why does our love of a good story seem to glow with metaphysical meaning? These are only some of the questions that Eliade’s allusive way with myths raises for the attentive reader. By trying to piece together what Eliade understands by the word ‘myth’ we can understand why the study of mythology is of such overriding importance to him in his career as a historian of religion. But first let us explore the concept of myth he commends to us. Like Cassirer and Malinowski, Eliade ‘sees’ myth through a very special pair of conceptual spectacles. What are his proposals about the way in which we should see this widespread human phenomenon? It is not enough for Eliade to define myths with respect to their reference, as Max Muller and the solar mythologists do. He also believes, with Malinowski, that myths have a universal, common function, and, like Tylor, Levy-Bruhl, Freud and Jung, that they have a definite origin in certain human experiences. As I understand him, Eliade believes that myths have the following properties and functions. 1 They are stories about origins, beginnings, creations. 2 They function to provide men with an existential, ontological orientation by narrating the sacred, external events of their own origins, beginnings or creations. 3 They originate in the human experience of a yearning for such a fundamental orientation. To satisfy the yearning is to achieve a real appropriation of timelessness in the midst of history. Let me explain this concise formulation. When Eliade says that myths are always stories about origins, he means this in both broad and narrow senses. Broadly speaking, ‘a myth is alwaysEliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 73 related to a “creation”; it tells us how something came into existence, or how a pattern of behaviour, an institution, a manner of working were established’.” Narrowly speaking, Eliade believes both that a real creation of things in time occurred, and that all subsequent ‘creation’ stories, in the broad sense, actually refer to the first Creation of the world by God. Since this points to a radical part of Eliade’s programme, it is worth quoting several of his statements on the subject: all myths participate in some sort in the cosmological type of myth — for every account of what came to pass in the holy era of the Beginning (in illo tempore) is but another variant of the archetypal history: how the world came to be.® The creation of the World being the pre-eminent instance of creation, the cosmogony becomes the exemplary model for ‘creations’ of every kind. Origin myths continue and complete the cosmogonic myth.? The proof that the cosmogonic myth is not a mere variant of the species ‘origin myth’ resides in the fact that cosmogonies . . . serve as the model for all kinds of ‘creations’.!° Eliade’s interest in the priority of creation stories, and ultimately the Creation story, is not simply phenomenological or taxonomical. If it were, his view would be just as arbitrary and/or conventional as any other. In that Eliade interprets myths speculatively, the Creation has pride of place; in that he interprets myths existentially, all creations have special importance. Let us consider his speculative claims first. Eliade seems to have two main speculative reasons for his claims on behalf of the priority of the Creation. First, the temporal and ontological priority of the Creation entails its priority in value: A new state of things always implies a preceding state and the latter... is the World. . .. The cosmic milieu in which one lives, limited as it may be, constitutes the ‘World’; its origin, and ‘history’ precede any other individual history... . A thing has an ‘origin’ because it was created, that is, because a power clearly manifested itself in the World, an event took place.”74 Four Theories of Myth Elsewhere, referring to the above remarks, he comments, ‘by the very fact that the creation of the world precedes everything else, the cosmogony enjoys a special prestige’. Second, stories of the Creation show us the gods at work as man’s perfect exemplars. These stories, recounting as they do the most esteemed revelation of the most eminent beings, become the most important stories of a society. All mythology is ‘ontophany’, Eliade tells us, because the primal source of all being is laid bare. And ‘ontophany always implied theophany or hierophany’,"4 because the gods reveal themselves in making the world. In their finest hour, the gods become the most important model available to humans. For these two reasons, Eliade holds that the Creation story has a special place in the mythologies of the world. It is the model and exemplar for every other creation story, and, as we shall see, for every other story we might want to call a ‘myth’. But to make this move from the ontological and temporal priority of the Creation story to other creation stories, Eliade introduces the existential element typical of his thinking. In general, creation stories deserve to be accorded special prestige because of their existential value. To be sure, the Creation story shows its special relation to being and existence in a pre-eminent way. Eliade urges us to recognise how each creation story, however homely, re-enacts the Creation by being charged with special existential power. ‘Myth teaches ... the primordial “stories” that have constituted him [archaic man] existentially ..., Eliade tells us, and later affirms, ‘Myths constitute the paradigms for all significant acts.’’ Alert readers will of course recognise how Eliade’s existential view resembles Malinowski’s classic functional view of myth. Yet there are significant differences. Eliade takes Malinowski’s (naturalistic) functionalism and interprets it ontologically and existentially. Myths no longer satisfy human biological needs: they fulfil human existential needs for ‘cosmic’ orientation. A myth speaks for the ‘whole man’.”” It allows us to discover our ontological place in the universe’® and to see ourselves and our existence within some all-embracing vision of reality. Myth offers us our bearings in more than just the geographical sense: it reveals to us a message of cosmic significance which touches us at the roots of our deepest sense of contingency. For Eliade, the inner connection between myths and existentialEliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 7D orientation also accounts reciprocally, as it were, for the origin of myths. Myths are generated in man’s attempt to find an existential orientation: ‘it is impossible that they [myths] should not be found again in any and every existential situation of man in the Cosmos’.’” Put another way, ‘myths . . . have to be judged as. . . the privileged expressions of the existential situations of people belonging to various type of societies’. Like Tylor in his study of animism, Eliade can then account for the cross-cultural occurrence of myths in terms of a particular experience. This existential experience of orientation becomes in similar fashion to Tylor’s analysis of animistic experiences, a focal point of cross-cultural comparison of mythologies. When, says Eliade, ‘we compare an Oceanian symbol with a symbol from Northern Asia, we think we are entitled to do so . . . because the symbol itself expresses an awakening to the knowledge of a “limit-situation”’.74 One last word about Eliade’s regard for this existential experience which myths evoke and from which myths seem to be generated: the feeling of timelessness, the sense of presence at the beginning of the word — these feelings are true! Eliade believes myths act as sacraments of the imagination. Myth transports the pious listener to the time of absolute beginnings, as surely as Roman Catholics, for example, believe that the Eucharist makes ‘really present’ the events of salvation. In both cases there is a kind of ‘magic’. Believers in myths emerge from their historical time — that is, from the time constituted by the sum total of profane personal and intrapersonal events — and recover primordial time . . . which belongs to eternity ... it does not participate in temporal duration becuase it is composed of an eternal present.” Thus despite its deceptive simplicity, Eliade’s understanding of myth presents perhaps the most puzzling concept of myth we have met. What sort of scholar would talk with apparent credulity about the Creation as if it really happened, about some myths ‘participating’ in others, about the gods as if they really worked in illo tempore, about myths as if they really arose in moments of actual release from history and sacramentally produced such moments for their devotees? Clearly a person with views such as these belongs to a very different community of scholarship from Cassirer, Malinowski or76 Four Theories of Myth Lévi-Strauss, and has very different projects and strategies from them. Eliade’s ‘internal’ resources flow from other springs than those we have so far had occasion to uncover. Likewise, his participation in the non-academic - political and religious — projects of the Romanian right can also help us to understand the nature of his theory of myth as well as why he was attracted to particular scholarly traditions of myth study. AREAS OF DARKNESS: ELIADE AND TWENTIETH- CENTURY ROMANIA The sources of Mircea Eliade’s theory of myth seem obscured by the accidents and catastrophes of history: Romanian history - in particular, modern Romanian intellectual history - is virtually unknown. Romanian periodicals from the first third of this century are scattered about European libraries, but most documents from this period — if they survive at all — are available only in Romania. Only a few of the leaders of twentieth-century Romanian thought, such as Nicolae lorga, are known to Western readers, and on Eliade’s teacher, Nae Ionescu, the readily available sources amount to little more than a few encyclopaedia articles. Sadly, not one piece of Ionescu’s important oeuvre exists in English translation — or, for that matter, in any other European language but Romanian. What is more, Ionescu’s Romanian works are hard to come by. Eliade himself has not helped matters very much either. His diaries from his turbulent days in early-twentieth-century Romania have only recently seen light of day, despite the warm reception given his accounts of his years in France and the United States, 1945-69. And although Eliade’s recently translated novel, The Forbidden Forest (1978) deals with stunning accuracy (even to the very dates it records) with the horrors of Romanian history in the mid 1930s and the 1940s, the reader comes away more mystified than illuminated by what Eliade tells us. Who are these young people? What is their struggle? What social, political and religious worlds do they inhabit? Huliganii (Hooligans, 1935), the one novel which might initiate us into the excruciating revolutionary world of Eliade’s youth, has still not been translated from Romanian. The reader of The Forbidden Forest or the student of Eliade’s writings on messianism and revolution longs to know what voice he gives these passionate young ‘hooligans’. Are they misguided,Eliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania wi mistaken, or mystic seers? Is their cause just, their method appropriate or their legacy enduring? Nothing written about Hooligans addresses these questions. The pointers direct the hapless reader in no particular direction. Thus Eliade and his great enemy, history, seem joined in an improbable pact to let the wreckage of Romania’s past, as recorded in his novels, lie forgotten and neglected. One can well understand why Eliade should have distanced himself from the trauma of historical disaster. Survivors may dream about the lost country (Eliade claims Romanian to be the language of his dreams); they seldom volunteer to recite their personal and collective griefs for a curious public - seldom, that is, unless overriding causes intervene or appropriate media can be employed. Eliade seems to have chosen the mode of literary invention. In The Forbidden Forest, Eliade keeps a running account of political events in Romania — coup, counter-coup, betrayal and terror. In the midst of these tales of calamity and anarchy, Stefan, the central male character, who seems to speak for Eliade throughout the novel, sums up the personal lessons to be drawn from these events: ‘Today the master of all of us is the war’, Stefan began again. ‘It has confiscated the whole of contemporary history, the time in which we are fated to live. All Europe’s behaving like a monstrous robot set in motion by the news being released every minute from hundreds of radio stations. . . . Even when we're alone we think about the war all the time. That is, we're slaves of History. The terror of events is not only humiliating to each of us as human beings, but in the long run it’s sterile. . . . “,. . what does this struggle reveal to us? Only terror. . . . Against the terror of History there are only two possibilities of defense: action or contemplation. . . . Our only solution is to contemplate, that is to escape from historic Time, to find again another Time. . . With such views, it is small wonder that Eliade has chosen to deal with the disaster of his Romanian past by transmuting it into dreamlike fictions and, as we shall see, by transvaluing it through the method of ‘creative hermeneutics’. Quite simply, Eliade’s experience of modern Romanian history was a nightmare. It was the same for the rest of the ‘new78 Four Theories of Myth generation’ with whom he shared the vision of renascent Romania after the First World War. Eliade was by all accounts in the thick of things in his days in Bucharest, especially from 1930 to 1940. The Romanian existentialist Emile Cioran, Eliade’s lifelong friend, speaks of him at the age of twenty-five, just after his return from India, as someone ‘idolized’ by the ‘new generation’.* The latter- day prophet of contemplation was then the embodiment of the fashion for ‘frenzy’, the epitome of the ‘self-infatuation’ of youth. Our victim of ‘the terror of History’ in those heady days incarnated the ‘chafing will to create History’ that marked a whole generation of young Romanians. ‘Our mentor’, says Cioran, ‘was waging war against’ the old generation. Is this what Eliade had in mind in his diaries when recalling a piece he wrote for Nae Ionescu’s Cuvantul? The piece bore the title ‘Apologia pro causa sua’, and Eliade describes it in tones of deep embarrassment: ‘It was right in the middle of the polemics about the young generation’, he admits. ‘... And I shut up the “old fellows” once and for all.’ With the ruinous events of the 1930s, Eliade and the rest of the ‘new generation’ became casualties of History. Small wonder that Eliade displays little enthusiasm for retelling and hence reliving his own anguish. This at any rate seems to be one reason for his silence about his Romanian years. Another reason for his reluctance to speak of this time may be political. He, along with Emil Cioran, Eric Voegelin and others, seemed to possess what Susan Sontag once called (referring explicitly to Cioran and Voegelin) a ‘right wing “Catholic” sensibility’.” Despite the renewed respectability of this rather vaguely defined position in today’s political world, clouds of suspicion and bitterness still hang over it.** Although Eliade’s position today might properly be viewed as apolitical, there is little doubt about his spirited political engagement in Romania, especially during the years 1930-40 (though we remain ignorant of details). The main problems readers would find with Eliade’s politics in those years is the same facing anyone trying to make compassionate and fair assessments about that area of darkness, modern Romania. Eliade would, | think, like someone to interpret the period for his reading public, though he may lack the motivation to do so himself. After all, he makes no secret about his relations with Nae Ionescu and the independent Romanian right,*° or with Gheorghe Racoveanu.™ Then there is his (at least latter-day) sympathy for the German political ‘Decisionists’,”Eliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 79 Ernst Jiinger and Martin Heidegger. Interestingly enough, these two former political activists now, along with Cioran and Eliade, speak with the same voice of disillusionment about politics. There is, then, more than enough material here for an important and enlightening story. I shall try to tell as much of it as the available data permit. If the reader is willing to accept some limited goals and some historical reconstruction, we can at least begin to see Eliade’s theory of myth within its time. If the conclusions we reach have to be qualified by ignorance, at least the questions raised may provide a stimulus for scholars in possession of better data. But where to begin? Anyone who has been lost in a forest knows how all trees look alike, how each turn in the trail looks like the last. How do we find our bearings in the Romanian ‘forest’? With Eliade and myth one is again drawn home to that area of deep personal concern ~ his literary output, his story-telling craft. Fortunately, recent studies of Eliade’s literary work give us a rounded picture of someone previously only seen from the perspective of the history of religions. I shall use these studies of Eliade the story-teller to help illuminate both his theoretical work on myth and his involvement in his own times. BEARINGS: BOOKS AND LETTERS Before all else, Eliade is a writer. Indeed, he seems incorrigibly addicted to the craft. In religious studies alone his oeuvre includes dozens of volumes and scores of articles. Yet even more important for understanding this man is his passionate devotion to the creation of literary narrative, fiction. Only now, many years after his days of acclaim in Romania, is this becoming widely known and appreciated. This neglect is something of a pity, since creating fiction seems not only to have been Eliade’s first love, but perhaps his truest. He introduces The Forbidden Forest by confessing that writing fiction ‘was my only means of preserving my mental health, of avoiding neurosis’. Yet it may also have been his way of certifying his membership of the Romanian literary tradition typified by Nicolae lorga, Romania’s greatest man of letters in this century. lorga was outrageously prolific, producing over a thousand books and several thousand articles; he singlehandedly80 Four Theories of Myth ‘made’ a literature. If Eliade’s corpus also looks embarrasingly large, the reader will have to keep in mind the example of lorga’s cultural creativity. Pushing this comparison further, both lorga and Eliade seem to write and create prolifically out of the same deep sense of nationalist and metaphysical loyalty to vitality.* In a way, lorga wrote to create a modern Romanian historiography. Eliade seems to have written his early works with much of the same nationalist fire burning in his heart. Now, of course, with the demise of his own generation, Eliade’s drive for literary output assumes a natural therapeutic (and perhaps even memorial) character. He affirms his own lost life and that of his own generation by singlehandedly generating a literary oeuvre with, as it happens, a distinctly Romanian character. He seems a kind of saviour, bringing to life in fiction worlds that have cruelly passed away (as in The Forbidden Forest) or simply ‘worlds’ as products of creative imagining. However one cares to regard Eliade’s creative outpouring, it seems to point in this direction: he creates to renew his affirmation of life - whether that be his own life, that of the lost Romanian generation, or ‘Life’ in some philosophical sense related perhaps to German Lebensphilosophie. Matei Calinescu sums up these themes admirably in his recent review of Eliade’s (English) diaries: Obviously this huge and miscellaneous diary - a storehouse and work in progress at the same time — comprised the elements of a more personal journal meant to ‘save and preserve’ the writer’s past: sensations, insights, random reflections and fugitive intuitions, impressions and illuminations, in a word, all those things which nourish and strengthen personal memory in its fight against oblivion.** What, then, do Eliade’s literary works reveal about the way in which he has chosen to deny oblivion? What shape has his oeuvre taken throughout his long and fruitful career as a teller of tales? FROM POLITICS TO FANTASY: ELIADE’S LITERARY LIFE Although literary critics differ on the details of the major episodes of Eliade’s literary career, most seem to agree on certain broad descriptions of these phases.Eliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 81 These days Eliade is perhaps best known in literary circles for the work in his latest genre. In particular, most attention seems to have been given to the book of his that Eliade himself loves best, The Forbidden Forest. Although the novel was written some years ago and published in France as early as 1955, its appearance in English translation (in 1978) seems to have begun an entirely new appreciation of this already well appreciated scholar. Not only does this work show Eliade’s kinship with better known crafters of ‘fantastic’ fiction, such as Marquez and Borges; it also recapitulates in a remarkable way the major periods in Eliade’s writing-career. This in turns sheds light on the development of his fiction, as well as on his cosmopolitan associations in the field of literature. As a result, Eliade’s relations with the ‘magic realist’, Ernst Jiinger, with Eliade the co-founder of Antaios, make a fresh kind of sense. So too, as we shall see, do his links with the Romanian émigré existentialist writer Emil Cioran.” As a work of ‘objective fantasy’, to borrow Matei Calinescu’s description,** The Forbidden Forest dares to set the most ‘fantastic’ scenes against the most appealling historical events — the Second World War in Romania and England, primarily. Dreamlike narratives drift along through the nearly 600 pages of the novel, interspersed with reports of civil anarchy, shooting in the streets and assassinations. After a while, history itself seems to fade into the background like the nervous chatter of a radio in an adjacent room. The dream world seems to grow louder, blotting out profane sounds. As if to cut us off from our own world all the more completely, Eliade provides only the most minimal landmarks: a few precise dates, unconnected to others in the narrative (again, the drifting dream-world); the names of familiar places and historical figures (but how did they get there, and where have they been?). And so it goes on, until the charm of Eliade’s ‘objective fantasy’ seems to work as efficiently as a production line: for the reader, profane realities seem to swim ina sea of timeless relations, the chief of which is love itself. If times and places are ‘real’, so also are the magical meetings of lost lovers, regaining their earlier ardour in spite of their own physical deaths. Fittingly the novel ends with the ‘hero’, Stefan, uniting with the ‘dead’ Ileana in death itself: That moment - unique, infinite - revealed to him the total beatitude he had yearned for for so many years. It was there in82 Four Theories of Myth the glance she bestowed on him, bathed in tears. He had known from the beginning this was the way it would be. He had known that, feeling him very near her, she would turn her head and look at him. He had known that this last moment without end, would suffice.” In The Forbidden Forest, as in the more recent The Old Man and the Bureaucrats (1979), the spell of story (myth?) seems to work this trick of defeating ‘history’. One recalls Biris overcoming his literal-minded Communist tormentors by singing the Romanian folk ballad ‘Mioritza’. Biris sings his own death defiantly, into the faces of these officers of history. For him the story of resignation in the face of death is a preparation for an act of ‘cosmic liturgy’, an act of transcendent spirit.“’ One also calls to mind the old professor in The Old Man and the Bureaucrats before his interrogators, going on from one story to another, weaving a web of maya, a net of ensnaring narrative, which keeps him sane and his captors confused. In each case, stories create a world outside history, allowing their tellers to ‘pass’ out of the hands of their oppressors. Stories reconstitute a dream work, drawing their tellers out of their agonies. Timeless tales defeat brutal history, and this, for a fantasist such as Eliade, is ‘objective’ — especially in preserving his own sanity. In The Old Man and the Bureaucrats, interrogators themselves get caught up and implicated in the stories of the old professor. In The Forbidden Forest, Biris is transfigured in his death. In his own life, writing fiction and telling stories has proved to Eliade how ‘real’ they can be. It has been argued that Eliade’s interest in fantasy can be dated from the publication of Mademoiselle Christina in 1936. This was the first in a series of novels and short stories written in the mid thirties and early forties - among them $arpele (Snake, 1937), ‘Nights of Serampore’ (1940), ‘The Secret of Dr Honigberger’ (1940) and ‘The Island of Euthanasius’ (1943). These first attempts at fantasy-writing differ from Eliade’s later, ‘objective’ fantasies, such as The Forbidden Forest. Their rich, self-involved eroticism dominates. The Snake, though set in a Romanian wood, not an Indian jungle, tells a tale worthy of Hindu myths of Krishna, god of love. As the novel opens, a summer garden party is about to begin. Presiding is the exotic sportsman Andronic. Soon, under his direction, the midsummer’s night garden party becomes aEliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 83 venue for seduction. But this is no mere sexual adventure. Though erotic love Andronic reveals himself to his chosen beloved as a cosmic principle. The Forbidden Forest, by contrast, proclaims erotic restraint, even if love remains in this novel, as it always has been for Eliade, a ‘souvenir of Paradise’.” These early ‘fantastic’ works also seem to lack the focus in time and place of Eliade’s later ‘magic realist’, ‘objective fantasy’ novels. Both The Forbidden Forest and The Old Man and the Bureaucrats oppose story and contemporary politics, dream and _ specific history; The Snake could be set in any time or place. Even ‘Nights in Serampore’, which is closest to the ‘objective fantasy’ of the latter works, deals only generally with the horror of repeating an unhappy past. Any past might have done the same service; any eternal return might have been greeted with equal horror. The Forbidden Forest and The Old Man and the Bureaucrats seem more concerned with the specific historical past of Romania and its legacy in the present. But these differences should not blind us to the real beginnings made in 1936. Around this time the pieces from which a more focused and comprehensive vision would be fashioned were already being assembled. Mademoiselle Christina accepts the reality of ghosts, as Stefan was later to accept the reality of Ileana.“ In The Serpent Eliade introduces a theme later to dominate his entire thought: ‘the unrecognizability of miracle’.* His fascination with this theme of the ‘camouflage of the fantastic (and the absurd)’ in the ‘daily event’’ frames his whole epistemology of the sacred: for him the point is to see how the sacred is symbolised in the world. This, like uncovering a disguise, is a matter of interpretation, of hermeneutics. The main thing, for Eliade, is not to be taken in by the disguise, not to be taken in by ‘history’ and so-called ‘reality’. If a continuing interest in fantasy along with a certain growing detachment and objectivity seem to characterise Eliade’s development from 1936 through to the present, the writings just before 1936 seem to stand for something else altogether. Hooligans (1935) in particular was written in the midst of an ‘intense and frenzied’ period of activity and engagement, Eliade tells us. Looking back at this period, he notes that it was only afterwards that he felt ‘I had the right to detach myself from the Romanian context - and to begin to think and write for a larger public and from a “universal” perspective’.*” But what was this ‘intense’84 Four Theories of Myth period all about? What ‘particular’ concerns later gave way to ‘universal’ ones? How did they demand Eliade’s ‘engagement?’ How does Hooligans fit into this world of youthful frenzy and engagement, if at all? We may never know the answers to these questions, nor the potentially exciting story of Eliade’s life at this time. Still, critics of literature are agreed that Hooligans marks a turning-point in Eliade’s literary creation. After this novel, fantasy dominates, as we have seen in our short review of Eliade’s best- known works of fiction. Yet, chiefly in its superficial theme, The Forbidden Forest represents a return to the political concerns of Hooligans. Virgil Terunca claims that The Forbidden Forest ought to be regarded as a synthesis of themes from Hooligans and the fantasy writings of 1936 and later.** Eliade in fact confirms the special importance of Hooligans by observing how ‘modern’ its themes seem to be.” It can be no accident that his ‘best’ book, as he calls The Forbidden Forest, should also deal with the period of political upheaval in Romania between the wars. Hooligans must therefore be regarded with special attention both for the way it marks the end of one phase of Eliade’s literary career, and for the personal importance it and its themes have for the man himself. In Hooligans we seem worlds away from the erotic—fantastic world of The Snake, as Eliade’s description of the novel indicates: ‘The cruelty of some scenes exasperated me. Nevertheless perhaps it is precisely the savagery and bestiality of these hooligans twenty to twenty-five years old that give the novel its significance and actuality." Yet the continuities are significant. Virgil Ierunca, for example, comments on the cosmic significance of these hooligans — these ‘cynical, cruel, wild young men’, as Eliade calls them: their anger focuses on the very ‘status of man in the world’.* Their ‘revolt of the darkness’ tends toward the ‘destruction of the foundation of that which exists’. They thus seem to enact on the political level what Eliade’s religious-erotic fantasies would later realise on the literary level. Their overthrow of everydayness by brute force grotesquely anticipates Eliade’s magic dissolution of the ‘real’ in his fantasy fiction of 1936 and later. Even the erotic elements of Eliade’s later narratives are prefigured in the destructive force typical of certain strains of apocalyptic anarchism: these ‘furious negateurs’, lerunca says, ‘seek a paradise reconquered by the paradoxical weapons of violence and eroticism’.** But, unlike the blessed erotic diviners of Eliade’s later works, theseEliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 85 hooligans show us an eros that breaks free of the social and moral and most often oppresses them’.* This oppressiveness seems absent from the sometimes liberating eros of Eliade’s fantasy fiction. One reason why Hooligans seems important is because in it we can see some of the reasons for Eliade’s sense of ‘the terror of History’ — a history in fact terrorised by hooligans of Eliade’s own acquaintance. That he may have shared their one-time idealism seems borne out by his attachment to many of the same themes of transformation and revolt. Yet Hooligans and Eliade’s development into a fantasy writer seem rather to indicate his perhaps gradual realisation that even the most sublime ideas beget catastrophe if they are not tempered by ‘tolerance’, love and ‘fantasy’ - a certain distance from concrete ‘reality’. Because they lacked these humanising features, the hooligans seem to have afflicted Eliade with a ‘dread of the unknown’ which drove him away from history and into flights of literary fancy. Since Hooligans and its times represent a watershed for Eliade’s future work, we shall in due course examine the nature of the struggles portrayed in this novel. This is particularly vital since Eliade seems not to have been merely an idle onlooker in those days of turbulence. His precise role may never be known, but it seems far less important than the meaning the period had for him and for modern historians. First, however, we should consider how Eliade’s earliest publications prepared the ground out of which Hooligans sprang. This will give us a rounded picture of Eliade’s literary achievements while permitting me the privilege of interpreting these achievements in relation to Hooligans and its distant echo, The Forbidden Forest. Matei Calinescu says that Eliade’s earliest published writings (from the years 1930-5) show the deep impression made on him by his sojourn in India and demonstrate his attachment to the ‘Romanian school of authenticity’, a sort of early modernist- existentialist group whose members were committed to a literature of unmediated self-expression and who made communication of personal experience the major goal of writing.” Calinescu believes Eliade’s quest for authenticity was first worked out in terms of his own estranged (and youthful) self within the context of his Indian experiences. In Hooligans, Calinescu implies, this quest came to be defined in terms of the ‘“collective self” of his86 Four Theories of Myth generation of “angry young men”’.™ I think even more precise analogies may be found between these two segments of Eliade’s life and literature. These have to do with the all-important theme of ‘authenticity’. The main analogy seems to be this: Eliade’s revulsion against the collective, political and historical world of Romania’s hooligans is prefigured by his revulsion against the personal erotic and religious world he made for himself in India. In both cases, the quest for authenticity or failure to meet its standards seems to lead to unhappy conclusions. Eliade’s inability or unwillingness to mediate the erotic-religious opposition thrusts him toward the political-religious dichotomy. But this new problematic is no more reconcilable than the first: the problems of India push Eliade back to Romania. But the dilemmas of collective modern Romanian existence prove no more tractable than the personal ones of Eliade’s Indian experience. The ‘new life’ that Eliade often mentions in connection with his departure from Romania is about to begin, just as an earlier new life began when he left India. Let me fill in the details. Calinescu notes how in his ‘Indian’ stories (especially Maitreyi, 1933) the young Eliade struggles with the ‘insoluble conflict between asceticism and the “mythology of voluptuousness”’.@ Calinescu even succeeds in putting sweet flesh onto the fictional Maitreyi by identifying her as the daughter of Eliade’s Indian teacher, the renowned Indian philosopher S. N. Dasgupta. As luck would have it, in one of her many novels, It Does Not Die (1976)" this thoroughly modern Maitreyi has given us her own, ‘fictional’ version of the ardent twenty-three-year-old Eliade. Readers wishing to compare Eliade’s voluptuous Maitreyi with Maitreyi Devi’s It Does Not Die will not be wasting their time. Whatever else she says about our endearing ‘Mircea Euclid’, Maitreyi Devi communicates Eliade’s ardent and awkward struggles to achieve personal authenticity, as well as her own ‘voluptuousness’. But most important for understanding the unity of Eliade’s life and letters is the analogy between his struggle for personal authenticity, as reflected in Maitreyi, and the collective struggles for political authenticity which seem to animate Hooligans. Framed by the boundaries of the quest for authenticity, the individual struggle of the young Eliade with ‘voluptuousness’, on the one hand, and asceticism, on the other, seems to translate on theEliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 87 collective plane into the generational struggle between political action and contemplation. In The Forbidden Forest Eliade seems clearly to have solved the dilemma in favour of contemplation. Critical opinions of Hooligans seem to suggest at least a certain revulsion against radical action, even if no critic has mentioned the novel’s possible concern with contemplation. One would like to know more about the growth of Eliade’s ideas here, and how he resolved the collective dilemma of authenticity in modern Romania. This is even more interesting when we realise the political character of many of Eliade’s main ideas, such as ‘the terror of History’ and Eliade’s acceptance of messianism as a normal religio-political action. Does Hooligans repeat or revise the lessons of Eliade’s quest for personal authenticity in India? Does it represent a continuity in basic viewpoint, or does it reflect a shift? The pivotal place of Hooligans suggests that something important needed to be said. Yet our ignorance of that work leaves us only circumstantial ways of addressing these questions. Assuming, then, that one might usefully extrapolate from the structure of Eliade’s experiences in India (as he himself has recorded them) to his life in Romania as reflected in Hooligans, we ought to look closely at how Eliade understands his life in India and its relation to the life to which he returned in Romania. In his diary No Souvenirs Eliade writes, Chicago, 15 May Even now, reflecting on my ‘secret’ life in India, I hardly grasp its meaning. Ultimately, my existence in India was changed (not to say abolished) by my meeting with two young girls: M. and J. If I had not met them, or if, despite these meetings, I hadn’t let myself be drawn into irresponsible adventures — my life would have been entirely different. Because of M. I lost my right to become an integral part of ‘historical’ India; because of J. I lost everything I believed I had accomplished in the Himalayas: my integration into spiritual, transhistorical India. I understand, nevertheless ... that it had to happen that way. It is maya that put these two girls in my path, to force me to recover my wits and to find once again my own destiny. Which was: cultural creation in the Rumanian language, and in Rumania.”88 Four Theories of Myth I suggest we extrapolate from this courageous disclosure. One notices the opposition between action (‘voluptuousness’, history) and contemplation (asceticism, transhistory) mentioned earlier, and especially the mediating solution to the dilemma: emigration (whether spiritual or physical) and devotion to writing. It is structurally ‘given’, I want to suggest, that, as Eliade detached himself from the Indian scene of 1932 in order to devote himself to writing in Romania, so in turn he detached himself from Romania, first psychologically, then geographically, in 1940, in order to devote himself to another kind of writing altogether. As his departure from India corresponded with a shift toward political concerns in his writing (culminating in Hooligans), so his departure from Romania corresponded with a parallel shift toward ‘fantastic’ concerns in his fiction. Both moves, I think, seem to correspond ultimately to Eliade’s idea of the proper ‘way out’ of certain dilemmas.” We know from Eliade himself something of his reasons for leaving India. But, until we know more about the situation of Romania in the 1930s, we can know little of the real significance of Eliade’s choice to leave his own country. I want to argue at this point that we can know something about this situation, and that it helps us understand Eliade’s ideas about myth and religion, in particular, in a new way. The Romanian background of Eliade’s period of ‘intense and frenzied’ activity sheds light on what have become his enduring ideas about the nature of myth. ELIADE AND THE ‘NEW GENERATION’ If we assume a certain unity in Eliade’s life and accept that cultural creation in Romania became for him a solution to the dilemma of his existence in India, we are still in the dark about the colour and ambience of that creation. In particular, since this cultural creation seemed to have an integral political character, we should like (and need) to know something about the political currents flowing through the veins of Eliade and his peers in the Romanian ‘new generation’ after the First World War. With its tenacious national traditions, rooted in the Romanian Orthodox Church, Romania presented a wide range of options for the culturally concerned thinkers of the day. Would Eliade follow the exclusive lead of Nicholae orga, as Eliade and his commentatorsEliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 89 observe?® Or was Eliade as strongly eclectic in his early life as he seems to be now? Was his mental ‘desk’ as crowded then as his diary tells us his office desk is crowded now? ‘When I “work”, books, folders, papers pile up on the desk, pile up around me, on chairs, on the floor, remain there for weeks and weeks, become covered with dust or discolored in the sun . . .” Can there be any doubt that this is typical of Eliade? For all his breadth, Iorga’s focus was concentrated to a remarkable extent on politics and history. We already know how sceptical, even hostile, Eliade is toward historical knowledge and being. We also know how critical he can be of liberal-democratic politics — especially for its aversion to those religious aspects of human life that he believes perennial: myth, ritual, archetypal behaviour, and so on. One can, moreover, scarcely imagine Eliade a bureaucrat or a practical politician with responsibility as a government cabinet minister, as lorga was from 1913 to 1932 and in 1938. Eliade’s service to King Carol II’s government as cultural attaché in London (1940-1) and to the Antonescu regime in Lisbon as cultural officer (1941-5) is no way comparable to lorga’s active life in Romanian national and party politics. For one thing, Eliade served under both King Carol and the man who forced the King’s abdication, Antonescu — hardly, one would think, a very good measure of his partisan status in the iron-fisted world of Romanian party politics in the violent thirties. Either Eliade was acceptable to both the royalist and the Legionary right, or he did not matter at all. For another thing, whereas lorga played an active role in party politics (Eliade’s ‘history’), no particular political significance attached to Eliade’s political appointment in the cultural department of the Romanian foreign office. Of course, one would not expect to find Romanian Marxists in such favoured positions between the wars. Nor is it likely that the cunning King Carol ‘selected’ Eliade without some appreciation for his, at least symbolic, place in the hearts of the ‘new generation’. Carol’s cunning is shown in the way he sought to combat the populist opposition of the Legion of the Archangel Michael (commonly known by the name of its elite corps, the Iron Guard) by using their own methods: like them, the royalists adopted distinctive uniforms, used stiff-arm salutes and held mass rallies. The King knew how to wield the magic power of royalty and radical politics while maintaining his alliances with the Western powers and his Jewish mistress. So Carol and his camarilla would know what use a man such as90 Four Theories of Myth Eliade could be to them. Unlike Eliade’s political offices, lorga’s political appointments were achieved within the arena of party- political struggles and realised within the day-to-day practice of government administration. But this difference in political career corresponded to another, much deeper, difference in political temperament and philosophy between Iorga and Eliade. From the early 1930s the rising figure of Nae Ionescu seemed to eclipse other stars in Eliade’s world, especially in the area of political thinking.” Doeing”' records how in 1926” Eliade publicly criticised lorga’s scholarship in several articles in the Revista universitara. lorga’s protest against what he took to be unfair attacks on the quality of his work prompted Eliade to resign from the staff of the Revista universitara, whereupon he joined the staff of Cuvantul, retaining the connection until 1938. There he continued his critique of lorga, until Ionescu, who in 1928 became editor of Cuvantul, prompted him to desist. Although Eliade does not say so, this seems to be the context for his recollections in No Souvenirs concerning his ill-fated ‘Apologia pro causa sua’. Ionescu is reported to have said of this article, ‘This is unbearable self- centeredness.’” Eliade, admitting the fervent excesses of youth, recounts the incident with embarrassment and, I might add, considerable humility and courage. Iorga’s personal memoirs, written in 1933, seem to reflect bitterly on the episode: ‘In a students’ magazine, a boy, with the false mysticism which substitutes for definite religions and useful human ideals, laughed at that senseless book . . . written in bad French, by somebody who had copied two or three books of his predecessors. . . .’4 I mention Iorga’s remark primarily to show that the opposition between Iorga and Eliade was first of all real, and secondly drawn along the lines of the opposition between bourgeois secular politics (lorga) and the new, religiously rooted nativist radicalism represented by Ionescu and apparently espoused by Eliade. This is not to say that Iorga and Ionescu were irreconcilable opponents. Ionescu frequently gave credit to Iorga’s wisdom, integrity and good intentions. He could also cite Iorga’s authority for his own, not necessarily compatible, ideas. Iorga, for his part, sponsored lonescu’s appointment as Under Secretary of the Arts in 1932, and in early 1933, after the fiery lonescu had been imprisoned on the charge of having incited the Iron Guard’s assassination of the Liberal Prime Minister, I. G. Duca, repeatedly (seven times, it isEliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 91 said) solicited his release. So the matter is hardly clear-cut, although Eliade was personally and ideologically always closer to Jonescu. Before we examine the ideological links between Eliade and Ionescu, some notes of caution are in order. As with everything else in this period of Romanian history, there is much we do not know. Moreover, when we try to understand the political world of Ionescu, lorga and Eliade, we must remember the strongly partisan character of Romanian politics and the difficulty of finding non-partisan opinions of these men. A good example of this is provided by a publication sponsored by the Historical Academy of the Socialist Republic of Romania, The History of the Romanian People (1970). Although we know that Eliade and Ionescu were linked, they are treated in rather different ways: Eliade,” along with lIorga,” is enjoying a considerable revival of esteem in today’s Romania, but Ionescu does not enjoy the same recognition.”* Referring to Ionescu’s Cuvantul, for which Eliade wrote for some time, The History of the Romanian People says that it showed an ‘obviously obscurantist and retrograde tendency unbalancing to the youth’. But on the same page the narrator goes on to note, with particular reference to Eliade, that some of Cuvantul’s writers ‘subsequently changed their bearings and produced substantial works . . . and gained world fame’.” What ‘change of bearings’ the author has in mind is not explained. Perhaps he means Eliade’s retreat from politics altogether (Eliade reportedly even refuses to read daily newspapers). But there is no suggestion that Eliade explicitly abandoned any part of the tradition represented by Ionescu — however interpreted. Eliade heaps praise on his former mentor in his article on Ionescu in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.® He continues to edit the essays and conversations of Ionescu.*! He was well known in Romanian émigré circles in post-war Paris as a special friend of Ionescu’s.” He even affirms his faith in the wisdom of Ionescu’s political foresight as late as 1963, noting how Ionescu and the ‘European tight’ foresaw in 1930 the ‘Second World War, the decline of Europe, the triumph of Bolshevism’. Sealing this judgement Eliade concludes, ‘It’s what we young people were thinking also, between 1925 and 1933.’ Given the attempt to ‘rehabilitate’ Eliade’s political views, one might well ask whether he would wish to be ‘rehabilitated’ or feel he needs to be - especially if this means dishonouring the memory9D Four Theories of Myth of his beloved teacher. The issue is even more complex because Eliade says he diverged from the political views of Ionescu by the mid thirties, as we shall see in due course. What, however, did Jonescu stand for? How might his example have formed the youthful Eliade into the kind of writer who could produce, among other things, Hooligans in 1935 and Mademoiselle Christina a year later? NAE IONESCU AND THE ROMANIAN ‘TRADITIONALISTS’ As a result of the First World War, Romania regained a number of lost provinces, greatly enlarging her territory and population, and found herself with a new generation of hopeful leaders. Now was the time to consider the future. For the ‘modernists’ or ‘Europeanists’, this meant closer ties with the West, especially France, a continuation of the Romanian Enlightenment of the nineteenth century, and a broadly cosmopolitan Romania. For the “traditionalists’,“* however, all these were anathema. They were not specifically Romanian and did not give proper expression to the national spirit that was emerging in all segments of society. Nae Ionescu figured prominently in the ‘traditionalist’ movement, and especially on its ‘irrationalist’ side. Eliade was one of many younger Romanians to whom Ionescu provided nourishment and encouragement. What was ‘irrationalist traditionalism’ in the context of Romania in the 1930s? ‘Traditionalism’ seems to represent Ionescu’s rejection of the principles of 1789: the ‘spirit of social and political democracy’ and the ‘bourgeois capitalist economic system’. In place of what Tonescu called the ‘unnatural’ constitutions of bourgeois Europe™ (Cassirer’s Weimar and Lévi-Strauss’s Third Republic!), Ionescu would have put something (never specified) directly reflecting the will of the masses of Romanian Orthodox peasants — something giving the Volksgeist, ‘genius of the people’, its own clear voice in public affairs. ‘Irrationalism’ in Ionescu’s Romania was broadly similar to the ‘Volkish’ primitivism of Cassirer’s Germany and the romantic nationalism of Lévi-Strauss’s France, but with a distinctly Romanian existential and mystical religious turn. It is not gloomy Wagnerian Germanic religion which supports Ionescu’sEliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 93 irrationalism. Nor is it a revanchiste cult-and-culture Catholicism such as advocated by Maurras and Barres. It is, however, something close to these. Ionescu found his own equivalents in the mystic theology and Orthodox piety of Romania, and used them to the same ends as his fellow travellers in other parts of Europe used similar forms of religion in the 1920s and 1930s. For Ionescu the quest for positive human knowledge was a sinful assertion of human pride in the face of the divine. Even the moderate ‘scientific rationalism’ of Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss and others would on this view represent an inconsiderable alienation from the experience of wordless unity with the Godhead. Salvation was possible only if people gave up their desire for knowledge and sacrificed their intellects upon the altar of religious faith. Indeed, Ionescu exhorted his ‘new generation’ to belief precisely in the name of its absurdity! ‘I believe because it is absurd’ was the way he put the matter.” Ionescu, then, was no classic conservative: he vigorously urged change as against maintenance of the bourgeois status quo. At times his thought seems to follow the apparently independent lines laid out by Bergson’s activist élan vital, the nascent existentialism of the same period, and other kindred philosophical movements as given political expression in the Action Frangaise and by the German political ‘Decisionists’, Ernst Jiinger and Martin Heidegger.* For Ionescu as well as these partisans of action, reality consisted in ‘action, not in abstract systems of thought’.” Although we do not know much about what Ionescu actually did (aside from editing Cuvantul and speaking in public), his political existentialism was an apparently potent source of inspiration for those of the younger generation committed to some sort of radical action in modern Romania. On the ‘political’ side, ‘The Deed’ was the battle cry of Codreanu’s Iron Guard, the most radical and religious of all right-wing political groups in Ionescu’s Romania. Horia Sima, Codreanu’s successor as captain of the Iron Guard, was one of Jonescu’s students and a contemporary of Eliade’s. But, on the ‘aesthetic’ side, Eliade’s lifelong friend, Emil Cioran, the existentialist novelist and essayist, seems to typify another sort of individual moved to action by Ionescu — this time in the cultural sphere. Eliade seems to reflect this side of Ionescu’s influence.” Thus, among Ionescu and his followers a certain consensus of94 Four Theories of Myth opinion formed about the political and cultural options of their day. Western liberal democracy seemed to Ionescu and the ‘new generation’ a failure in Romania.” Only the secularised, urban, francophile bourgeoisie really participated in it, leaving out the broad mass of Romanian Orthodox peasants. To make matters worse, in so far as liberal democracy was secular and pluralist, it could not express and shape the increasingly frustrated national spirit of Orthodox Romanians. With its roots in the Enlightenment universalism of eighteenth-century France, liberal democracy seemed unwilling and unable to tap the nationalist mythico- religious sources of Romanian identity recognised and celebrated by romantic thinkers. Although the Enlightenment had won over Romanian intellectuals in the nineteenth century, it failed to enthuse the ‘new generation’ of intellectuals. They, like the Orthodox peasantry, were estranged for various reasons from the secular bourgeois culture and the system of parliamentary government that reflect it. The ‘new generation’ insisted on the importance of (1) Romanian tradition, (2) mythico-religious values and (3) a government that identified with the people. Communism could to some extent have addressed these needs, as even Codreanu admitted.” It was, after all, ‘populist’ in colour, and it was certainly fiercely critical of the bourgeoisie and its democratic government. Yet it had fallen in with the materialism and atheism of the corrupt modern world it sought to transform, and so, for Ionescu, seemed to lack any way of making contact with the religiosity of the Romanian peasantry. Moreover, Communism had manifest contacts with Romania’s perennial enemy, Russia, and perceived connections with Romania's perennial outsiders, the Jews. It offered no solution to Romania's deep need for national revival. But, if Ionescu showed distaste for liberal and radical left-wing solutions to Romania’s perceived cultural and political crisis, the same cannot be said for his attitude to right-wing remedies. Along with a whole range of traditionalist thinkers opposed to ‘modernity’, ‘Europeanism’, ‘Westernisation’, and so on, Ionescu tended towards the right. In the same company can be found Benedetto Croce (incidentally, a figure much admired by Eliade”) and, of course, the conservative German romantic thinkers whose news and influence we have already explored. In fact, Hitchins claims that much of Ionescu’s romantic world-view was imported direct from Germany. Ionescu studied philosophy in Munich, theEliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 95 home city of Oswald Spengler, from 1913 to 1919.% There he seems eagerly to have snatched up the irrationalist teachings of the neo-Idealist reaction against positivism. Eliade in fact connects Ionescu to the Lebensphilosophie we have identified as one of Cassirer’s chief intellectual targets.” It was no doubt the right wing of neo-romanticism which charmed Ionescu and eventually Eliade. Eliade also notes that Ionescu led the charge against positivism by lashing out against the epistemological claims of the sciences and the accomplishments of technology. Since all knowledge is relative, scientific knowledge is no better than any other. This moved Ionescu ‘towards forms of relativism’ which ‘were to Ionescu arguments in favor of a new mystical transcendentalism which rediscovered security, authority and discipline in God and religion’.*° He seems also to have been touched by broadly ‘Volkish’ neo-romantic notions. He nursed deep suspicions of the ‘city’ and therefore ‘civilisation’. One of the cornerstones of ‘Volkish’ thinking, the opposition between ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’, allowed Ionescu and others to contrast the sincerity and depth of simple wisdom to the superficiality and shallowness of worldly ‘knowledge’ in arguing for the superiority of peasant values.” Eliade seems to give this opposition, which he may have learned from Ionescu, a new life by universalising it into a general nostalgia and admiration for what he called ‘archaic man’. Readers should now know how powerfully these ‘escapist’ and irrationalist beliefs resonated down the corridors of political history. We have seen their influence in Cassirer’s Germany and will see it again when we turn to Lévi-Strauss’s France. In Ionescu’s Romania much the same relationship existed between irrationalist traditionalist ideas and political parties or movements. In Cassirer’s Weimar, ‘Volkish’ and romantic primitivist ideas married happily with the romanticism of the Nazi movement. In Lévi-Strauss’s France, emotionalist and anti-intellectual trends dovetailed naively with the traditionalist currents producing the Vichy regime. In Romania, Ionescu’s irrationalist traditionalism seemed to suit several groups. But prominent among them was Codreanu’s Iron Guard, the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Nagy-Talavera calls attention to the ‘sympathetic help’ Ionescu’s newspaper, Cuvantul, afforded the Legion during the decisive election of 1937, as well as to the ideological affinity between Tonescu’s thought and the mystical Orthodox Romanian96 Four Theories of Myth nationalism professed by the Legion.** In his Autobiography, Eliade teports how Ionescu received Codreanu in 1933, warmly praising him for having achieved real political objectives: ‘I’ve watered the trees, flowers and vegetables’, Ionescu said. ‘But I haven’t made the fruits. I've just helped them grow — protected them from cockleburs.’” Yet one sharp warning should be registered. Political labels are among our most potent libels. For this reason alone, readers should be especially wary about terms such as ‘right-wing’ in the Romanian context. Although such terms can be useful, they give an incomplete idea of the nature of such a movement as the Legion — especially in the specific period in question, the late 1920s to the mid 1930s or so. Readers should also be cautious in drawing inferences concerning Ionescu’s (and especially Eliade’s) involvement in Legionary politics. The facts are still not in our hands — and not even in the hand of scholars who, unlike myself, have a command of Romanian. Although scholarly opinion is unanimous about the ideological links between the Legion and Ionescu before 1938, Eliade is relatively silent about the details of this association or about his own feelings. In his Autobiography he makes no secret of Ionescu’s right-wing radicalism; he also claims that he eventually distanced himself from Ionescu. Yet it is odd how Eliade obscures the details and significance of Ionescu’s political views. In 1933, he tells us, Ionescu was ‘very impressed’ with the ‘revolution’ taking place in Germany. ‘A similar revolution would have to take place some day in Romania’, he prophesied.’ Eliade tells us that Ionescu was here pointing towards a revival of the populist Maniu’s short-lived National Peasant Party government of 1928. But no one with the slightest acquaintance with the language of Nazi ‘revolutionary’ ideology of 1933 could mistake the plain reference of Ionescu’s words of the same year to Hitler's accession to power, which would lead one to suspect that he was thinking of the Iron Guard. If, however, we venture into the realm of Eliade’s creative writing, he himself seems to speak out against the Legion. Stefan, the central character of The Forbidden Forest, makes clear his opposition to the Legion’s violent tactics. Although it may be treacherous to read from literature into life, Stefan seems to speak as much for the Eliade we know from the history of religions as for anyone in the novel.'®! We should take his words of disavowal to heart - remembering too the numerousEliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 97, differences of temperament between Ionescu and Eliade that we have already observed. Eliade’s apparently longstanding affection for dream and fantasy may have been put aside for a time in the 1930s. But surely the enduring quality of his personality and the key to understanding his work lie in his affection for fantasy. None of this denies the affinity between the ideas of the Legion and the Romanian ‘right-wing irrationalist traditionalists’, nor the intellectual home Eliade found there among other students and admirers of Nae Ionescu. With these qualifications in mind, let us examine something of the precise existential and political context out of which Eliade seems to have universalised a whole hermeneutic of myth and religion. ROMANIAN TRADITIONALISM IN GREEN SHIRTS: CODREANU’S LEGION Corneliu Codreanu (1899-1938) founded and led one of the most remarkable political movements of modern European history. Known officially as the Legion of the Archangel Michael, it bore the stamp of Codreanu’s charismatic zeal and religio-political vision. Accounts given of Codreanu’s campaigns among the Romanian peasantry picture him mounted on a white stallion, sporting the festive frock of a Romanian peasant and surrounded. by worshipping admirers. Gathering before the village church, Codreanu and his Legionaries would address the people, many of whom bore lighted candles and sacred icons to meet and hear the great hero. Here indeed seemed to be a leader who would unite piety and politics a powerful fusion of forces ready-made for a Romania eager for national revival. What powerful set of ideas did this colourful symbolism represent? To most scholars, the ideology of the Legion can be broadly described as populist, religious, traditionalist, political and revivalist. It was also fascist and anti-semitic, two features of the Legion’s world-view which in some sense grew out of its populism. ‘There is very much populism in fascism’, Peter Wiles observes. Citing the Legion as the ‘most perfect example’ of this, he goes on to explain that it was ‘in essence a populist movement that went fascist because of the large number of Jews in Rumania, and because it was the fashionable thing to be in Europe at the98 Four Theories of Myth time’. Wiles puts Iron Guard thinking into the Romanian context of rural, communal, nativist traditionalism. It was moreover a traditionalism with a strongly religious character, to which the Legion directly appealed. Nagy-Talavera nicely summarises this in the following passage: The Legionaries were always aware of their great differences with the Nazis and Fascists. . . . One of their leading intellectuals . explained: ‘Fascism worships the state, Nazism the race and the nation. Our movement strives not merely to fulfill the destiny of the Rumanian people - we want to fulfill it along the road of salvation.’ Another Legionary intellectual . . . called the Legion, ‘the only political movement with a religious structure’. Even ‘the ultimate goal of the nation [must be] Resurrection in Christ’. The Legionaries perceived the whole history of mankind, and particularly that of Rumania, as an uninterrupted Passion, a mystical Easter, in which every step, every motivation, consequently every goal, was a struggle between light and darkness. The road of the Legion must be the road of suffering, sacrifice, crucifixion, and resurrection.? The power of this religious populism derived directly from traditional Romanian religious piety. Peasant Romanians did not take on another set of beliefs when they supported the Legion; they simply affirmed beliefs already held. Orthodox Christianity has always placed greater emphasis on Easter than on Christmas, on the resurrection of Jesus rather than his birth. Echoing this, Codreanu gave vivid examples of how the resurrection would be realised paradigmatically in his own political programmes for Romanian national revival. In this respect the Legion merely assumed one role played by the Orthodox Church throughout Romanian history. Instead of merely preserving Romanian national identity, Codreanu could develop and interpret it in the light of the nation’s new fortunes and challenges. After centuries of virtual ‘burial’, Romanian nationalism rose again, heady with the Easter faith of Orthodoxy. Orthodox communal resurrection took political form in Codreanu’s popular national resurrection of the Romanian folk. Did the Legion not see all human history culminating in the ‘mystical Easter story’? This is no doubt one reason why Professor Weber thinks theEliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 99 Iron Guard was a kind of ‘cargo cult’. ‘Cargo cults’ are not mere revivalist movements, but movements of group resurrection. Like the Iron Guard, they are little movements with big ideas — or, to put it in a way that stresses their frequent pathetic and comic- opera qualities, attempts to renew the entire cosmos from a home base somewhere in Micronesia. As such they tend to be historical absurdities, composed of pretentious, alienated and passionate folk given more to theatrical gesture than to significant deed. Their outward confidence, heroic fury, overstated bravery and desperate deeds mask a pathetic inner despair, the fatalistic belief that everyone is arrayed against them, and that they will surely lose. This is why ‘cargo cults’ seem to press on towards a suicidal Gétterdimmerung, typically an atoning sacrament of self- immolation. This certainly seems to be the inner meaning of the cult of death so important to the Legion - death both as defiant gesture and as heroic, selfless act of comradeship. ‘Mioritza’, the Romanian folk ballad of a shepherd laying down his life in a nuptial death for the sake of others was, unsurprisingly, a Legionary ‘myth’. So too did ‘Mioritza’ take hold of the imaginations of Nae Ionescu and Eliade.'° Codreanu’s training as a revivalist saviour began early in his life and followed the pattern characteristic of such figures. While still an undergraduate in Iasi, he tried to rally round him like-minded people in a group committed to combating the noxious secularism of their age. Among the ‘evils’ identified were the university’s academic ceremonies, which Codreanu disrupted because they did not proceed according to Orthodox liturgical forms!” Ionescu’s attack on modernist thinking (positivism) seems to mirror Codreanu’s campaigns against modernist society. As Ionescu sought to open a path for metaphysics, mysticism and religious experience,’ so Codreanu sought to liberate the forces latent in traditional folk culture. Organised and led by the Legion, native Romania should rise to overthrow the alienating forces of cosmopolitan ‘civilisation’. It did not matter whether this so-called ‘modern civilisation’ was identified with capitalism or communism, science or industry, liberal democracy or secularity. The Legion opposed it. So also the Legion opposed those whom they perceived to be the bearers of the bad tidings of modernity - in Romania, as elsewhere in Europe, the Jews. Codreanu’s attack on these messengers of modernity followed the usual pattern of anti- semitism. He and his political traditionalists tried to exclude Jews100 Four Theories of Myth from university clubs and hostels, disrupted Jewish student theatrical productions and beat up leftists and Jews.” Thus like many naively romantic political movements, Codreanu’s irrationalist politics flew headlong towards violence. Because of its ‘sincere, sometimes fanatic religious beliefs and goals’? and its unqualified rejection of reason, the Legion was unable to check its own passions. In time this belief in the futility of reason typically leads to a breakdown in human communications and so to violence. Thus the Legion’s commitment to racism and violence was a natural outcome of its irrationalist world-view — something that philosophical irrationalists such as Ionescu perhaps did not foresee: ‘For crusaders the area of compromise is out of bounds — they must have complete power or none at all. The Legion’s mission was a holy crusade; its enemies were not only the enemies of Rumania but also the enemies of God.”"" This pattern of violence in fact continued as Codreanu’s movement took different forms and names. In 1919-20, his National Christian Movement engaged in strike-breaking against the perceived Communist threat among the working classes. By 1923, his student-led strikes against ‘anti-Christian’ elements in the universities (leftists and Jews) had succeeded in gaining nationwide support, which closed the universities for an entire semester. Thus by 1927, when Codreanu fourided the Legion, he had already had many years of experience of political agitation, and so too of opposition from the government, police and university authorities. Codreanu in fact replied to a rather severe case of police brutality against the Legion by shooting dead the police chief responsible. His acquittal in court stimulated the Legion to other acts of ‘revolution at all costs, be it in- or outside the limits of legality’."? It certainly built up the image of Codreanu as a popular iconoclast somehow immune from the ordinary rules of conduct. It may have marked, in short, the birth of the Legion as the ‘hooligans’ of Eliade’s novel. After the official foundation of the Legion, Codreanu continued to gather support, particularly among the peasantry and the traditionalist professors and youth of the universities. During that time, the Legion developed its organisation throughout Romania, building up local ‘nests’ and ultimately contesting the parliamentary elections of 1932, in which it won five seats. During the same period, it developed its strong anti-semitic, anti-Communist and generally xenophobic ideology.Eliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 101 It was during these early years of the 1930s that tensions between the Legion and the law heightened and that the anarchy suggested by Eliade’s Hooligans began to break loose. With every attempt at suppression, the Legion grew stronger and more ‘justified’ in its retaliation against the authorities. The elite corps of the Legion, the Iron Guard, punished its opponents with execution by appointed ‘death teams’. The government publically executed Iron Guardists, often leaving their bodies exposed in public places. International tensions increased to the extent that both Western and German governments urged successive Romanian administrations to neutralise or liquidate the Legion. But in the 1937 elections, the Legion emerged with the third-highest tally of votes. At this point King Carol II intervened, dissolved parliament and manufactured his own version of the Legion. Moving swiftly, Carol had Codreanu imprisoned (with the alleged complicity of lorga) and secretly executed in 1938. If there had been a reign of terror before, what followed completely overshadowed it. Within two years, Eliade would be safely away from the hooligan anarchy of Romania. It was, as he tells us in his diaries, a ‘departure which saved my life’.!'% Whether he was escaping the general anarchy of the times or the particular threats aimed at Legionary members and sympathisers (Ionescu and perhaps Eliade), one does not know. After Codreanu’s death the Legion lost all sense of restraint anyway. A movement which previously may have had only a hooligan element was now thoroughly dominated by hooligans. Any hopes the spiritual wing of the Romanian irrationalist traditionalist movement might have nurtured would by 1938 surely have been dissipated. Real ‘hell’ had indeed broken loose. Early in The Forbidden Forest, Biris describes Stefan in words that might well indicate Eliade’s own internal condition at the time: He suffered a nervous shock, that’s all. . . . History has taken revenge on him. He has a phobia against History. He has a horror of events. He'd like things to stand still the way they seemed in the paradise of his childhood. So History takes revenge and buries him as often as it can. It throws him into the detention camp by mistake. It kills men in his place, always by mistake. . . 14 But, before Codreanu’s Legion realised the worst of its inherent102 Four Theories of Myth potential, it had inspired among Ionescu and his circle a remarkable degree of hope. One cannot understand the attraction of the Legion for the ‘new generation’ without understanding something of this ideology. Still less can Eliade’s thought be understood outside the circle of these events and his Romanian ‘new generation’. After living through the explosions of anarchy set off by the Legion and others of like mind, Eliade seemed to reel back in horror and disillusionment. Not only was the ‘new generation’ overwhelmed by anarchy (and finally the Red Army): by the time Eliade left Romania, it had perhaps already sown the seeds of its own destruction. Thus the projects of the Romanian right, the ‘new generation’ and Ionescu’s irrationalist traditionalism provide the context essential to an ‘external’ understanding of Eliade’s thought in general, and his thought about myth in particular. What is more, Eliade was not merely a passive spectator in these cultural movements, perhaps only ‘reflecting’ them in his thinking and deeds: he was an active, if troubled and later transformed, participant in the cultural projects of elements of the Romanian right between the world wars. His thinking about myth, in particular, is a species of this right-wing political thinking, though for some time now it has been given to us in a universalised and at least avowedly apolitical form. Both Eliade’s religious vision and the political vision that influenced him share the same framework of a common human project, even if they render it in different ‘codes’. This common ‘code’ can, I think, be summarised as follows. 1 The radical traditionalism of the Romanian right becomes for Eliade not a mere political programme; but a sweeping ontological judgement upon the material, secular, modern world, asserting the value of nostalgia for the archaic, cosmic and telluric, understood as fundamental human categories. 2 The profound mythico-religious, Romanian Orthodox cum ‘Volkish’ feelings of the Romanian right become for Eliade the basis of his dominant religious viewpoint and of the particular sort of universal religious vision he embraces - archaic, cosmic and telluric. Although Eliade transforms some of the particulars of the political and religious vision of the Romanian right, he also, as we shallEliade and Myth in Twentieth-Century Romania 103 see, carries much of the substance of his vision forward to the new life he makes for himself after the ‘deluge’ of the Second World War. Fundamentally, both are ‘religious’ — a notion that naturally leads us to Eliade’s scholarly career as a historian of religions.5 Eliade’s Theory of Myth and the ‘History of Religions’ ELIADE’S ‘HISTORY OF RELIGIONS’: NEW ‘CULTURAL CREATIONS’ If the Romanian context of Eliade’s political and religious projects begins to shed light on Eliade’s theory of myth, then his place in the academic study of religion should complete the work of illuminating that theory. This chapter aims to describe that academic tradition of intellectual projects which Eliade both inherits from his teachers and transforms by his own hermeneutic powers, and to show how this ‘internal’ project of receiving and interpreting ideas merges with the ‘external’ projects of the radical Romanian ‘new generation’. In particular, we are interested in seeing how Eliade’s concept of ‘myth’ may represent a marriage of these two sorts of human project. Myth is no stranger to the study of religion. Since the days of Max Miller, it has had a central place in the agenda of interests and research projects of students of religion. For romantics such as Max Miiller, ‘myth’ has even been viewed as essentially religious, and religion as essentially mythic. For good or ill, students of religion still to some extent share this romantic legacy, given clear and substantial expression by Miiller. For his part, Eliade has always acknowledged this rich intellectual tradition.’ But since the days of Miiller the study of religion has developed a very wide and complex range of approaches. The sharpest division within the field is perhaps that between the so-called ‘positive’ sciences and ‘hermeneutics’, or even ‘descriptive’ and ‘normative’ studies. In the ‘anthropological’ setting, the ideal of public knowledge dominates, together with the conviction that intellectual claims ought ultimately to be checked in the interests of describing an ‘objective’ world. In the ‘hermeneutic’ tradition, 104Eliade’s Theory and the ‘History of Religions’ 105 the ideal of individual virtuosity dominates, together with the conviction that people make their worlds and thus cannot check their claims about them independently of the conceptions they hold of them. Thus, for ‘anthropologists’ what is said about ‘myth’ will be governed by the situation of myths in the world of differing histories and cultures: what is the nature of the mythology of this or that people or even of people in general? Anthropology answers such questions by considering the objective human setting and projects of the myths in question, a task that necessarily requires empirical studies of real people. For ‘hermeneuts’ the range of inquiry may be broader. The value of an interpretation of myth is judged not necessarily by how it squares with the ‘objective’ reality of its setting, but, rather, by whether it brings out certain meanings effectively. The decision to call certain biblical narratives ‘myths’ may arise from a strategy aimed at contrasting or comparing this notion with something thought to be its meaningful opposite, such as ‘history’. Thus, for some theologians, to interpret biblical narratives as ‘myths’ may be to oppose them to dry and factual accounts of human history. Here the term ‘myth’ is used to make certain points about the significance of biblical narratives at the partial expense of received notions of what ‘history’ is. One is exercising a certain virtuosity in choosing to use ‘myth’ in a way that advances a particular ideological and cultural strategy — for example, the propagation of Christianity. Of course, I do not think ‘anthropologists’ steer completely clear of interpretative or normative projects, any more than ‘hermeneutics’ completely avoids the ideal of an independent reality check. Neither complete ‘objectivism’ nor complete ‘subjectivism’ rules the real world of thinking. We are all mired somewhere in the middle. This is also true of religious studies. The study of religion tends, like all the other human ‘sciences’, to display a whole spectrum of approaches between ‘anthropology’ and ‘hermeneutics’, to take these terms in their strictest senses. In Eliade we confront our first example of a thinker who clearly places himself at the extreme ‘hermeneutic’ end of the spectrum, somebody whose theory of myth deliberately sets out to promote a certain practical view of the world, a kind of universal ideology and even a ‘new religious consciousness’. Thus, to understand Eliade’s theory of myth, we need to106 Four Theories of Myth understand the traditions ‘internal’ to his study of religion, and how he makes these his own. The main argument of this chapter is that Eliade’s ‘external’ projects for religious and_ political revolution in Romania informed and were absorbed by the intellectual projects ‘internal’ to his approach to the study of religion and myth. We begin by examining the way in which he subordinates one of the ‘positive’ human sciences, history, to his hermeneutic project. AN ‘ANTIHISTORIAN OF RELIGION’ Although Eliade frequently avows his regard and concern for history, in the end this avowal seems deliberately ironic. Something of this irony is nicely captured in Guilford Dudley’s neat description of Eliade as an ‘antihistorian of religion’.? This puts in another way Eliade’s ambivalent relation to the Romanian historian Nicholae Iorga. Eliade is not a historian in the tradition of orga; he is not an ordinary historian. Rooted as they are in the traumas of his Romanian past, Eliade’s feelings about history are as profound as they are radical. Eliade’s first published work to address what might be called the ‘history of religions’ was a piece on the mystery religions published in 1928 in the Romanian journal Logos.* We do not know what models of historical writing Eliade brought to the study of religion, but it is conceivable that in his earliest efforts he was influenced by Italian writers such as Croce, Giuseppe Tucci or even Raffaele Pettazoni. After all, when the article in Logos appeared he had just returned to Romania from a period of study in Rome, where, he tells us, he had informed himself about the lively currents in the Italian intellectual, political and aesthetic scene of the time.* In fact, he had gained some familiarity with Italian models of scholarship at least five years before he went to Rome. He had read Pettazoni by 1923,5 and apparently through him he came to know and lament the ‘pervasive influence of Croce’s historicism’.° Pettazoni believed that religion was a ‘purely historical phenomenon’, which is no doubt why Eliade labels him an ‘encyclopedist’.’ Eliade also mentions that during his two years in Italy he never met Pettazoni, even though they had kept up a correspondence since 1923.° In fact, they did not meet until 1949! Eliade’s diaries show that his liveliest memories of ItalyEliade’s Theory and the ‘History of Religions’ 107 were connected not with the academic work of historians, but rather with the work of cultural revolutionaries such as the Italian Futurists — hardly the kind of interest one associates with ‘history’ in the conventional sense. Whatever his models, however, Eliade stands for something foreign to the historian. For one thing, he opposes ‘history’ in methodological and ontological senses. He mistrusts ‘historical’ methods of treating religion because he believes religion itself transcends ‘historical’ being. He argues that, since the object of the study of religion is beyond historical reality, the student of religion must reflect that transcendence by adopting an a-historical method: ‘What distinguishes the historian of religion from the historian . is that he is dealing with facts which, although historical, reveal a behaviour that goes beyond the historical involvement of the human being.’ In similar vein, he cautions the reader, Iam not denying the importance of history . . . for the estimate of the true value of this or that symbol, as it was understood and lived in a specific culture. . . . But it is not by ‘placing’ a symbol in its own history that we can resolve the essential problem — namely, to know what is revealed to us, not by any particular version of a symbol, but by the whole of a symbolism.” Precisely what Eliade means by his ideal of ‘the whole of a symbolism’ need not detain us here. Yet his remark about this notion and its relation to history is reflected in another claim about the a-historical nature of religious data: the history of religions is concerned not only with the historical becoming of a religious form, but also with its structure. For religious forms are non-temporal; they are not necessarily bound to time. We have no proof that religious structures are created by certain types of civilisation or by certain historic moments. When we consider religious structures historically, it is their statistical frequency which matters. But religious reality is more complex: it transcends the plane of history.'! In such statements Eliade seems to go far beyond even the methodological anti-historicism of that host of thinkers who participated in the great neo-romantic reorientation of Western thought from 1890 on. He strides far beyond those devoted108 Four Theories of Myth synchronists Malinowski and Lévi-Strauss, to mention but two. Some would say that his ambitions on behalf of the transcendent lead him beyond the bounds of respectability — which is no doubt why many of his critics within the liberal academic community deal with his work so harshly. The spirited opposition mounted by Baird, Dudley, Penner and Smart (in which I share)! seems motivated by Eliade’s disregard of a crucial canon of good behaviour in the present scholarly community — falsifiability. Say what one will about the word ‘history’, Eliade’s decision to operate with methodological notions such as the ‘transhistorical’ and ‘non-temporal’* effectively means that his claims are unfalsifiable by any criteria grounded in the human world of time and space. Short of assurances that we can, so to speak, work outside the realm of time and space, as Eliade apparently believes he can, the claims of his theory are unfalsifiable. Whether it is really necessary for Eliade to go to this extreme, and whether some of his unhappiness with historical analysis can be satisfied by a synchronic method that draws short of ‘mystery’, are questions I shall leave to my concluding remarks. For the present, it is sufficient to realise how very radical Eliade’s methodology is - and therefore how very radical his approach to religion and myth must be. The demise of historicism spelt the end (or at least suspension) of a particular conception of academic work, as the new methodologies of functionalism and structuralism have demonstrated. If Eliade had his way, that revolution would be not only methodological but ontological as well.* One would have to admit as ‘evidence’ data transcending ‘ordinary’ historical human life - so granting the same plausibility to transcendent religious claims as to any other. In modern times at least, such moves have been resisted because we have, perhaps unthinkingly, accepted a distinction between ‘faith’ and ‘reason’, ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’. How and why these distinctions themselves arose is still a matter of some dispute. If there be any truth, however, to the view that knowledge is socially conditioned, then perhaps we should inquire into the social conditions of the belief in the distinction between ‘religious’ faith and ‘empirical’ fact — into the belief that claims to ‘knowledge’ ought to be measured by empirical standards. Certainly objections to Eliade’s programme would rest squarely on such grounds as these. To object, then, to Eliade’s theory entails objecting to the kind of social arrangementsEliade’s Theory and the ‘History of Religions’ 109 connected with it. In Eliade’s case the precise nature of such social arrangements seems at first obscure. In theory, however, they would place so-called ‘transcendental’ and ‘empirical’ cognitive claims on an equal footing - evidently in the manner of Eliade’s mentor, Nae Ionescu, the ‘irrationalist traditionalist’ philosopher.*® Historical or empirical grounds for believing a certain claim would stand on an equal footing with the ‘transhistorical’ or ‘non- temporal’ grounds Eliade mentions in his rejection of historical methodology. Claims to certain transcendental experiences, and the like, would have to be admitted as evidence. One might even imagine a return to the acceptance of ‘spectral evidence’, to choose an especially unflattering example of what Eliade’s position might commit us to accept. It is as well to raise this matter now, in connection with Eliade’s methodological attitude to history, since it will arise again when we come to discuss his hermeneutic method and the plans this entails for changing mankind. PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE AUTONOMY OF RELIGION As we know, Eliade’s work is studiously ‘labyrinthine’. He is a hard man to pin down. The otherwise patient scholar Geoffrey Kirk, for example, summarily dismisses Eliade as ‘repetitive’.’” Although Kirk is accurate enough, this is surely not sufficient. What reasons lie behind this kind of writing? We know that the repetition is not merely a formal deficiency. Eliade is working a strange sort of literary sorcery upon his readers — and more. Eliade’s aversion for ‘history’ is profound. We know how his experience of the tragic events in Romania during the 1930s fed his belief that historical being is catastrophic, and can readily appreciate how this might have taken the zest out of historical studies for him. Many of us would draw the same conclusions as he has done if we had passed through the same series of personal and collective ordeals. But this does not in itself say all that can be said. Eliade has not only suffered the ‘revenge’ of history, as it says in The Forbidden Forest:'® he is also powerfully attracted towards transhistorical reality in and for itself. Not only has history repelled him: the transcendent has also drawn him out of any absorption in history. Eliade has after all shown himself a serious religious man." His affection for transcendental reality dates from before the calamitous thirties and shows all the signs of a genuine110 Four Theories of Myth and deeply rooted spirituality. One does not venture to India to study and practise yoga under so eminent a figure as the Indian philosopher and historian of philosophy S. N. Dasgupta unless one has attained a certain level of religious development. Eliade also undertook the intensive rigours of yogic training in the Himalayas after leaving Dasgupta in 1930. Thus his attraction for a transhistorical vantage point would seem to reflect his own religious vocation and experience. At least two key methodological consequences follow from the nature of Eliade’s personal religious background. First, religion is an autonomous form of life — just as independent and ‘real’ as art, ethics and so on. Secondly, it thus demands to be studied by an equally autonomous academic discipline. It deserves to be studied, classified and explained for its own sake by an autonomous ‘history of religions’. Taken together, these two methodological positions define in a minimal way part of what has come to be known as the ‘phenomenology of religion’. It is because Eliade holds to the autonomy of religion and the value of describing this phenomenon that it makes good sense to see him within the academic tradition of an autonomous study of religion. Beginning with his interest in description, we shall see how this merged with a later, developing interest in autonomy, which had roots in the ‘crisis of the humanistic studies’ or ‘crisis of historicism’ described so well by Stuart Hughes, Georg Iggers, Fritz Ringer and others. And, in order to understand the place of phenomenology of religion in Eliade’s thought and in the great neo-romantic reorientation of thinking, we shall have to ask how the phenomenologists’ antecedents conceived their tasks and how these task changed with the tides of intellectual history. Perhaps no one says better what may have been on the minds of scholars interested in describing religion — rather than doing history or religion — than Eliade himself: In short, we have neglected this essential fact: That in the title of the ‘history of religions’ the accent ought not to be on the word history but upon the word religions. For although there are numerous ways of practising history . . . there is only one way of approaching religions — namely, to deal with religious facts. Before making the history of anything, one must have a proper understanding of what it is, in and for itself.”°Eliade’s Theory and the ‘History of Religions’ 111 Phenomenology of religion first aims to lay out what the phenomenon of religion is. Only after this preliminary descriptive and conceptual task is complete can one begin to trace the history of religion. ‘NAIVE’ PHENOMENOLOGY: DESCRIPTION AND CLASSIFICATION Scholars one might broadly call ‘phenomenologists of religion’ can be found as early as the mid nineteenth century. Once again, Max Miller seems to have been one of the first. Miiller merits the description ‘phenomenologist’ in the broad sense because he sought at least to describe religion and to classify it. Thus he spoke of kinds of great religious traditions (for example, ‘Indian’, ‘Semitic’) and religious phenomena (‘myth’, ‘ritual’). He sought to distinguish their specific characteristics and to compare them. Thus Miller is also generally acknowledged today as the father of the comparative study of religion — a title more fitting than ‘phenomenologist’ in the sense it came to have at the turn of the century. Miller pioneered many kinds of study: linguistics, the science of religion, mythology, and so on. In each field, he has had tremendous influence. The two figures usually identified as the first ‘phenomenologists of religion’, C. P. Tiele and P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye, are prime examples of this.” Both scholars insist that they merely followed in the path that Miller showed them. Their manuals of descriptive phenomenological studies, covering the broad range of the world’s religious phenomena, are worked out self-consciously within the scholarly project of Miiller’s ‘science of religion’. Chantepie’s Manual of the Science of Religion (1891) was translated from Dutch into English by Miiller’s talented daughter. Tiele’s Elements of the Science of Religion, the Gifford Lectures of 1896 (Miiller himself had been a Gifford Lecturer), follows the form of Miuiller’s own ‘science of religion’. But what are these works like, and what do they do to advance the theoretical and descriptive work begun by Miller? These are devoted studies, consumed with affection for the data they collect, describe and classify. The remind one of nothing so much as the folklore studies of the same period — studies incidentally also influenced by Miiller.” They are storehouses of112 Four Theories of Myth data, assembled (in Tiele’s case at least) to impress cultured despisers of religion that here indeed was a phenomenon rich and ramified, not crude or evolutionarily ‘primitive’.* The aim here was to retrieve and describe as much material as possible, so that the overall project of displaying the splendours of religion could proceed as Miiler had always intended. Tiele and Chantepie served this first phenomenological project well. They initiated a school of phenomenology of religion in the Netherlands which is still active today. We shall shortly take a look at the work of the chief representative of this school, Gerardus van der Leeuw. Two small points about these early descriptions of religion are, however, in order. First, it must be emphasised how thoroughly they accepted the ‘historicist’ assumptions of their time. Miiller did his work on myth and religion within the overall context of his work in comparative and historical philology — what I have called ‘philological diffusionism’. Both Tiele and Chantepie remained within this broadly historicist tradition, even as they worked out their schemes of classification and description. Tiele, for example, organises his work around a discussion of ‘development’. Chantepie is equally concerned to address evolutionary theory, and does so in the very first chapter of his Manual. The next eighteen chapters make up the ‘Phenomenological Section’ of the work, but the concluding ‘Historical Section’ is much wider in scope, taking up forty-six chapters. Second, one seeks in vain in. these studies for the concern about ‘autonomy’ that seems to nag at every phenomenologist of religion in the period when Eliade began to write on the subject. This point needs further discussion. Although Miiller, Tiele, and Chantepie implicitly cared about religion, in the sense that they thought it was worth studying, none of these early phenomenologists fretted about the ontological dignity or integrity of religious phenomena in the way that Eliade seems pressed to do. They just assumed it, perhaps naively. It was not until the turn of the century, when the rise of the new physics was seen to have epistemological repercussions on the humanities, that this naiveté became a liability. The new physics showed, to put it crudely, that fundamental recategorisations of reality were possible and could threaten ‘ordinary’ human conceptions of human nature itself. The ‘boo’ word here is ‘reductionism’. Over the humanities hung the threat of their ‘reduction’ to scientific studies, and of one ‘science’ gobbling upEliade’s Theory and the ‘History of Religions’ 113 another. As we have seen, Cassirer’s researches after the First World War were linked to this perceived ‘imperialism’ in the world of the sciences. In the study of religion the first major figure to take up this challenge to fundamental categorisation was Rudolf Otto, a theologian and philosopher who flourished in the first third of this century. As a combatant in the ‘crisis of the humanities’ he was bold and fearless. In the human studies as in the study of religion he ruled out any naturalistic explanation: in the domain of spirit the ... principle from which an explanation is derived is just the spirit itself, the reasonable spirit of man, with its predispositions, capacities, and its own inherent laws. This has to be presupposed: it cannot be explained. None can say how mind or spirit is ‘made’ — though this is in effect just what the theory of epigenesis is fain to attempt. .. . To try . . . to understand and deduce the human from the sub-human or brute mind is to try to fit the lock to the key instead of vice versa; it is to seek to illuminate the light by darkness.”° Since Eliade took up the broad programme of Otto as well as the descriptive phenomenologies of the Dutch school, we need to see how Otto operated. Put crudely, the issues were whether or not religion could be said to have any ontological basis — whether it was ‘autonomous’. Otto’s answer was resoundingly positive: ‘religion’ was an autonomous form of life because it rested on an autonomous form of experience. Eliade says virtually the same thing. OTTO: THE AUTONOMY OF RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Otto elaborated his project of demonstrating an autonomous religious form of experience in The Idea of the Holy (1917). This book created something of a rage in Germany, and won Otto worldwide recognition. Eliade is said to have read it as early as 1928.”” In form, the work is neo-Kantian. It seeks to show that religion is at least as ‘autonomous’ a form of ‘experience’ as morality, aesthetics, and so on. If morality was ‘about’ the114 Four Theories of Myth ‘goods’, aesthetics about the ‘beautiful’, then religion was about the ‘holy’ - or, more precisely, about the experience of the holy. Like Cassirer, Levy-Bruhl and, some would say, Lévi-Strauss, Otto sought to locate an a priori mode of human ‘spirit’ that made (in Otto’s case) the experience of the holy ‘possible’. If such a mode could be found, then the case against reductionism was in fact won, and the ontological status of religion secure. Referring explicitly to this ‘holy’ mode of ‘spirit’, Otto says, ‘This mental state is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined.’ It is clear that Eliade sympathises with Otto, from whom he apparently derives the idea of the necessary connection between the project of demonstrating the autonomy of religion and grounding that autonomy on a certain experience. Eliade tells us he wrote The Sacred and the Profane (1957) explicitly to carry on Otto’s work, ‘to present the phenomenon of the sacred in all its complexity’.”” There is also no shortage of places in which Eliade makes clear that his concern is with the autonomous experiential dimension unique to religion. Against the encroachment of the natural and social sciences, he says that they miss ‘the one unique and irreducible element - the element of the sacred’. Eliade’s autonomous study of religion is possible because religion ‘can be recognized as such’,*! ‘grasped at its own level’, studied as something ‘religious’® and ‘looked at . . . in itself, in that which belongs to it alone and can be explained in no other terms’ .*4 Thus, beyond what Eliade derives from the earliest (‘naive’) descriptive phenomenologists of religion, he also learns from the way in which Otto tackled the ‘crisis of the humanities’. Eliade gives what he takes to be ‘humanistic’ depth to the descrip- tive phenomenology of religion by seeking to make his phenomenology, like Otto’s, an autonomous and experiential one. ‘MATURE’ PHENOMENOLOGY: NOT HUSSERL, BUT VAN DER LEEUW Much of what today passes as ‘phenomenology of religion’ deals with religious materials in the spirit of Otto. Religion is an autonomous form of life and experience; these forms of life andEliade's Theory and the ‘History of Religions’ 115 experience demand to be identified, classified and understood in and for themselves and for the greater sake of a positive understanding of religion as such. But, if the earliest phenomenologists were naive about ontological and epistemological issues such as the autonomy of religion and the humanistic disciplines, the phenomenologists we meet now might have considered Otto at least as naive about the need for a proper method for phenomenology of religion: he and other phenomenologists (especially those teaching in theological faculties, as Otto did) lacked a sense of the need for a method that would generate religiously uncontroversial categories. Such a need was felt perhaps most keenly by some of our later, ‘mature’ phenomenologists, such as the Dutch school headed by Gerardus van der Leeuw. The Dutch school sought to produce broadly positive scientific results, understandings of religion which would achieve theoretical, ideological and interpretative neutrality and so find a place in the world of secular scholarship. But where would such a method be found? Where would one find a method which was both ‘scientific’ in the sense required for rigorous work, and yet not anti-humanistic? Van der Leeuw and others thought that Husserl supplied such a method. But, before leaping to conclusions, let us see how in fact Husserl’s phenomenology was employed, and the part Eliade plays in all this ferment. From the outset it ought to be noted that van der Leeuw’s ‘phenomenology of religion’ bears only the remotest similarity to the ‘phenomenological’ philosophy of Edmund Husserl.* Yet some harmony of interests may be observed. For one thing, both approaches seek to dignify our ordinary claims to know the world. Cassirer’s contemporaneous defence of ordinary language found a fitting parallel in the phenomenologist’s attempt to dignify perception. Flawed as our perceptive powers may be, one might control ordinary perception to achieve the discipline necessary to do ‘scientific’ work. In the Husserlian view, later partially adopted by van der Leeuw, one could aspire to a neutral view of things by consciously choosing to screen out the distorting influence of theories, prejudices, biases, and so on, by the process of ‘bracketing’. Van der Leeuw himself is quite explicit about these matters: phenomenology contents itself with the data without examining their content of truth or reality. We do not intend to pursue116 Four Theories of Myth causal relationships, but rather to search for comprehensible associations ... we do not intend to investigate the truth behind the appearance, but we shall try to understand the phenomena in their simple existence.* On objectivity, van de Leeuw was equally unambiguous: ‘This entire and apparently complicated procedure . . . has ultimately no other goal than pure objectivity. . . . It desires to gain access to the facts themselves.’” In the study of religion, such ‘bracketing’ typically means putting aside interpretative or theological questions such as the truth of a particular religious matter. One talks of Jesus as ‘saviour’, for example, without necessarily committing oneself to the proposition that Jesus indeed was the true saviour. A consistent phenomenologist ‘brackets’ the phenomenon of Jesus as a saviour and leaves questions of the truth of such claims to believers. Phenomenologists are more interested in the full comparative range of the category ‘saviour’, seeking in this way to isolate the phenomenon of ‘saviour’ within the cross-cultural history of religions. One use of ‘bracketing’ is, then, to assist classification and cross-cultural study of religion, without having to broach thorny interpretative and theological questions such as the truth of religious claims. But, if Husserl’s ‘bracketing’ permitted phenomenologists a certain claim to intellectual neutrality and objectivity, primarily in the service of classification, the method of phenomenology had its subjective side as well. Phenomenologists of religion here took up the lead provided by Wilhelm Dilthey. Years before Husserl’s phenomenology, Dilthey had insisted on an empathetic approach to religious phenomena: one had to seek an inner understanding of them as well. Both methods called for maximum understanding before judgements of truth could be made - if, indeed, they were ever to be made at all. Van der Leeuw speaks of the importance of the subjective element in understanding religion in two ways which Eliade might have found amenable. First, he stresses the importance of empathy as a integral part of phenomenological method, along with ‘bracketing’. For van de Leeuw, this method has five steps, of which empathy is the second. After ‘assigning names’ to what he observes,* a phenomenologist should sympathetically ‘interpolate’ these phenomena into his own life. Second, van derEliade’s Theory and the ‘History of Religions’ 17, Leeuw, like Otto, maintains the psychological focus inherent in Husserl’s phenomenology by giving experience pride of place within his analysis of religion: ‘every dogma, every act of worship can only become understood primarily as the reflection of some experiences’.*” Van der Leeuw’s regard for experience also takes a significant turn toward existentialism, since for him the experience of Angst has a special place in the origin of religion.*" Eliade’s specific debt to van der Leeuw is hard to estimate. Numerous references to van der Leeuw can be found in Eliade’s most phenomenological work, Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949). But one does not know how early these became part of Eliade’s way of thinking about religion. He himself declares that a ‘great part of the morphological and methodological conclusions of this book was given as lectures in my courses on the history of religions at the University of Bucharest’. This may have been as early as 1933, although one cannot be sure.* Eliade’s morphological work could also have been influenced by the type practised by Lucian Blaga in the manner of Spengler and Frobenius,“ but, of course, with as wide-ranging a reader as Eliade, it is neither important nor perhaps even possible to fix upon single sources of influence among the many practitioners of this broad phenomenology. Even Pettazoni cannot be discounted.* Known as an ‘historian’, Pettazoni also produced impressive phenomenological works, as well as a key methodological essay which argues for the reconciliation of history and phenomenology. We know that Eliade corresponded with Pettazoni from 1923 and that the two men shared universalist goals. Phenomenology of religion, says Pettazoni, sets itself above all to separate out the different structures from the multitude of religious phenomena. The structure, and it alone, can help us to find out the meaning of religious phenomena, independently of their position in time and space and of their attachment to a given cultural environment. Thus the phenomenology of religion reaches a universality which of necessity escapes a history of religion devoted to the study of particular religions. . . .“ This is not the programme of an ordinary historical study or of ‘naive’ phenomenology. Pettazoni reaches for the same universal goals as distinguish the work of Eliade. But, in Eliade’s view,118 Four Theories of Myth truly universal goals cannot be attained by searching out the promised land of theoretical or interpretative ‘objectivity’, as these words of Pettazoni may imply it can and as we have seen van der Leeuw certainly claimed. For all the appearances that he is engaged in the same type of descriptive phenomenological work as the ‘mature’ phenomenologists, such as van der Leeuw, Eliade is on an entirely different tack. He seems to be to van der Leeuw what Heidegger was to Husserl: all call themselves ‘phenomenologists’, but Eliade and Heidegger practise phenomenology in ways that they believe revolutionise the phenomenologies of their antecedents. Unlike van der Leeuw, who sought to exclude interpretation from the phenomenology of religion, Eliade wishes to place interpretation at the centre of his phenomenological work. ‘CREATIVE HERMENEUTICS’, ‘OBJECTIVE FANTASY’ AND THE STUDY OF RELIGION If Eliade can still be described as in some sense a ‘phenomenologist’, it is in the eccentric sense of such a thinker as Heidegger. Eliade’s final methodological resting-place is with ‘hermeneutics’. This is not to deny that he continues to keep faith with phenomenology’s concern for the autonomy of religion; it is also not to say that he abandons at least the external form of Dilthey’s method of Verstehen or the generally psychological and existential approaches connected with the followers of Dilthey. Indeed, Eliade still writes with the phenomenologist’s flair for morphology, form and pattern. Yet for him all these methodological techniques need to be brought under the final judgement of his special hermeneutic project for the study of religion. ‘History of religions’, then, is neither ‘history’ in the usual sense of the term, nor ‘phenomenology’ in the sense current in the comparative study of religion. ‘History of religions’ in Eliade’s usage is a radical hermeneutic project. Unless readers appreciate the radical nature of this intellectual project, they will miss the entire point of Eliade’s efforts to ‘interpret’ religion and myths. Let me then clarify what Eliade means by ‘hermeneutics’, since to a large extent he uses the term for hermeneutic purposes! The ordinary dictionary meaning of ‘hermeneutics’ is simply ‘interpretation’.”” But this is not the chief sense in which EliadeEliade’s Theory and the ‘History of Religions’ 119 uses the term. For him, ‘hermeneutics’ means a special kind of interpretation. It means more than that persons necessarily ‘interpret’ materials in order to appropriate some sort of significance. For in that sense ‘hermeneutics’ would denote nothing particular. Who does not admit he ‘interprets’ data — except perhaps the most hidebound positivist (if indeed such a being exists or ever had existed)? As a method of interpretation, ‘hermeneutics’ means something rather special for Eliade - as it does for a whole line of thinkers who identify themselves in this way. I have in mind, of course, such thinkers as Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur. Something of the special significance Eliade himself gives the term ‘hermeneutics’ can be seen in the historical pedigree he assigns the term itself. He self-consciously understands ‘hermeneutics’ in the manner of the Italian Renaissance ‘hermeticists’, whom he studied before and during his sojourn in Italy in 1928. In this context, ‘hermeneutics’ has an occult, even magical, ring, lent by its association with the god Hermes or Hermes Trismegistus. ‘Hermeneutics’ is the divine art of Hermes himself - ‘The god of commerce, invention, cunning, and theft, who also served as messenger and herald for the gods’ and ‘as patron of travelers and rogues’.”” Like the Renaissance hermeticists Bruno, Campanella and Ficino, Eliade seeks to ‘revive’ the archaic wisdom of Hermes for the purposes of an interpretative method.” To readers lacking Eliade’s appetite for neo-hermetic ‘commerce’ and ‘invention’, ‘creative hermeneutics’ may look like simple ‘cunning and theft’ — or at least just a good story. In both cases, the quest for meaning dominates. ‘Creative hermeneutics’ seeks to find and establish certain worlds of meaning in myths, for example. But, since models for this effort are drawn from a tradition of ‘cunning’ interpretation, and since, as we have seen, Eliade plays fast and loose with ordinary means of falsifying claims about mythico-religious materials, we may wonder what the ‘controls’ on this method are. There seem to be none. Now, this is again like Eliade’s attitude to the creation of fiction in the style of ‘objective fantasy’, where anything goes, so to speak, as long as the process culminates in an increase of meaning — where one seeks meanings everywhere, ‘even if they aren’t there’ .>) Eliade’s drive to find meaning (even where there is none) gives his hermeneutics a radically - perhaps wildly — creative character. This indeed fits Eliade’s own description of his method as ‘creative120 Four Theories of Myth hermeneutic’. It also fits with the size and range of his literary and scholarly output, noticed in the previous chapter. But Eliade’s claim to a ‘creative hermeneutic’ should also alert readers to its polemic tone. On one level, Eliade means to fling open the door to wider speculation in the study of religion. ‘Creative hermeneutics’ is unabashedly ‘speculative hermeneutics’. What else could explain Eliade’s disrespect for empirical and historical criteria of confirmation and falsification? ‘Historians of religion’ should get on with the positive job of bringing out the religious meanings of things, leaving others to worry about the logical problems of validation and falsification. ‘Creative’ hermeneuts have more positive things to worry about - namely, how to increase the meaningfulness of religious phenomena in an age of manifest secularity and insensitivity to such phenomena. At another — more strategic — level, Eliade’s ‘creative hermeneutics’ has to do with creation in a more practical sense. ‘Creative hermeneutics’ is a species of high-order propaganda, a sort of scholar’s magic which seeks to change the ways people see things. ‘Creative hermeneutics’, says Eliade, ‘changes man; it is more than instruction, it is also a spiritual technique susceptible of modifying the quality of existence itself... . A good history of religions book ought to produce in the reader an. . . awakening.’ Echoing his Romanian past of ‘cultural creation’ among the ‘new generation’, Eliade adds, ‘the history of religions envisages, in the end, cultural creation and the modification of man’.* Lest ‘creative hermeneutics’ appear more eccentric than it is, readers ought to see it alongside the twentieth-century movements to which Eliade likens it. In form and content, ‘creative hermeneutics’ resembles nothing more than Jungian psychology and surrealism. In form, each of these meaning-seeking movements tries deliberately to upset the everyday common sense view of existence. In content, each of these forms of cultural conjuring seek to uncover, beneath the common-sense level of reality, something described as archaic, primordial, _ primitive, fundamental, and so on. Consciously taking up the surrealist programme in a way not even Lévi-Strauss has attempted, Eliade praises the surrealists for the way they ‘elaborated a revolutionary aesthetic’ and ‘also formulated a technique by which they hoped to change the human condition’™ in the direction of a self-styled ‘archaic’ vision which looked forward to ‘destruction of the officialEliade’s Theory and the ‘History of Religions’ 121 cultural world’.*> Here we again see how Eliade the Romanian cultural revolutionary shines through in his mature and universalised work as a historian of religion. ‘Creative hermeneutics’ is no humdrum method of reading ancient texts: it is, as Eliade says a ‘total hermeneutics’, an all-out revolution launched against the profane world and its smug secular everydayness. The ‘creative hermeneutic’, like Eliade’s fiction, reveals the miraculous in the midst of the ordinary. It is an academic form of the method of ‘objective fantasy’. Attentive readers have by this time already made the natural connections between this vision of academic work and what we already know about Eliade’s revolutionary, Romanian, irrationalist and traditionalist past. Eliade’s ‘creative hermeneutics’ makes excellent sense as the universalised form of the ‘cultural creation’ he mentions in connection with his return to Romania from India in 1932.°” Now, instead of conjuring fantastic visions of Romanian national identity in the manner of other irrationalist traditionalists among the ‘new generation’, Eliade conjures an equally ‘fantastic’ vision of a universal human identity along the lines of his now generalised irrationalist traditionalism. The ‘new man‘* as envisaged by Codreanu, Ionescu and others on the Romanian radical religious right emerges transvalued, at least in form if not in content, as the ‘new humanism’ of Eliade’s ‘creative hermeneutical’ vision. Like the Romanian traditionalist image of the ‘new man’, Eliade’s vision of a ‘new humanism’ embraces the same image of a man as homo religiosus, archaic, and integrated into a personal wholeness. Even the Legion’s distaste for the bourgeoisie seems to persist in transvalued form in what Eliade says about the surrealists and depth psychologists: where Codreanu foresaw ‘no need to continue the old bourgeois form of life’, Eliade in a similar spirit seems to delight in the surrealist ‘attacks on bourgeois society and morality’ in the name of the history of religions. Thus one can see how Eliade has put together an approach to religious materials which is complex and deeply founded in the experiences of his own life. His drive to give new life to the meaning of his own Romanian past, in a new, universal form, accounts to some degree for his affinity to the method of ‘creative hermeneutics’ itself. As an endless source of new significances, ‘creative hermeneutics’ affirms that equally important dedication to the craft of writing that we have noticed in Eliade’s literary122 Four Theories of Myth outpourings. His devotion to literature with its production of fantastic forms, his flair for speculative, creative interpretation show how deeply Eliade has unified his life and letters in a common purpose — cultural creation. BEYOND THE ‘NEW GENERATION’: THE ROMANIAN ORIGINS OF ELIADE’S HERMENEUTICS — LUCIAN BLAGA Despite all we now know about the nature and circumstances of Eliade’s ‘creative hermeneutics’, we still remain ignorant of its ‘internal’ origins. Should we look to Heidegger and some of his own intellectual forebears, such as the Italian Futurists? We know how fond Eliade has always been of both Heidegger and the Futurists, especially Papini. One also may note similar themes in the thought of the early Heidegger and Eliade: their religious devotion to ‘the earth’, their revolutionary archaic will to upset the bourgeois world of the great traditions, their pronounced existential interpretations of ontology as central to their world- views, and so on. Without denying this apparent source of Eliade’s hermeneutics, I would suggest that a closer (and certainly better documented) source is available in the figure of the little- known Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga (1895-1961). I have fixed on Blaga not simply because Eliade knew him personally, but because they shared a remarkable number of social, cultural and political convictions. Indeed, they shared a broad encompassing cultural ‘hermeneutic’ project, focusing especially on myth. In making these claims, however, it is important to resist the facile notion that Blaga simply ‘handed over’, whole and entire, a ready-made hermeneutic method which Eliade adopted for the study of religion. It would also be mistaken to say that Eliade simply ‘took over’ Blaga’s style. Their relationship seems rather to have been that of intellectual peers, reflecting their position as approximate historical contemporaries. Although there was apparently some sort of transmission from Blaga to Eliade, as appropriate to scholars separated in age by a decade or so, it would seem more fruitful to see them together in thé company of the other artistic and intellectual figures active during the revolutionary period in Romania between the world wars. TheyEliade’s Theory and the ‘History of Religions’ 123 share the same ‘structure’, so to speak. Not only does Eliade acknowledge and admire Brancusi, for example: he also links Blaga and Brancusi in their belief in the creative power of the ‘primitive’ levels of Romanian culture. In this way, ‘creative hermeneutics’ confirms its radical cultural, political and religious revolutionary nature by showing itself as one of a range of similar movements emerging in the ferment and frustration of Romania between the world wars. But what is remarkable especially for this study is the very special place the interpretation of myth has in the hermeneutic projects of Blaga and Eliade. Myth was for Blaga, as for Eliade, no mere peripheral interest: it was the focal point of the cultural hermeneutic projects both men undertook. I shall therefore deal first with Blaga’s hermeneutic generally, and then conclude this discussion of Eliade’s theory of myth by showing how Blaga’s view seems to conform with Eliade’s. One way to view Blaga is as a kind of living alternative model which the young Eliade played off against the dominant intellectual influence on his political and religious life in Romania during the thirties, Nae Ionescu. We know how Ionescu fired the revolutionary soul of the ‘frenzied’ young Eliade; we also know how temperamentally unfit for rough-and-tumble politics the aesthetic young Eliade apparently always was. Perhaps there always were two Eliades, with ‘history’ calling forth first the one and then the other. In particular, I want to urge the view that Blaga’s influence worked more slowly, but perhaps more thoroughly, than Ionescu’s, eventually displacing it as the hell of hooliganised Romania broke loose from any restraints Eliade and Ionescu could place upon it. Behind Hooligans, that record of revulsion with power politics and turning-point in Eliade’s literary career, stands Blaga, not Ionescu. The task before Eliade was how to save his life and soul, not how to stir them to greater frenzy. For this, Blaga, not Ionescu, would be Eliade’s spiritual guide. For this, ‘objective fantasy’ and ‘creative hermeneutics’ would be the appropriate intellectual tools, not articles written in the pages of Ionescu’s Cuvantul. By looking into some key aspects of Blaga’s thought, we can see how Eliade’s views are related to them. Blaga was a thinker of great range and individuality. He wrote poetry whose influence is described by Hitchins as ‘catalytic’; he is counted one of the few original Romanian philosophers of the early twentieth century, although heavily indebted to neo-124 Four Theories of Myth romantic German thinkers such as Frobenius, Spengler and Nietszche. He dabbled in Jungian psychology, Romanian folklore, world history and German Expressionism and even wrote plays. For this reason alone, he is almost as hard to classify as Eliade himself. The similarity is not, to my mind, accidental. Blaga and Eliade share the same ‘structure’. Consider first the nature of Blaga’s philosophical system, with its stress on the importance of ‘mystery’, its praise for the irrational, unconscious and illogical®” — Eliade’s themes, all. Consider also the way he titles his principal philosophical work Mioritic Space,** referring to Romania's foremost myth, ‘Mioritza’; Eliade wrote an essay praising Blaga’s hermeneutic method in this work. Consider finally Blaga’s view of Romanian history as a ‘withdrawal from history’ into a world of the a-historical” — themes again beloved of Eliade with his hatred for history. From what little we know of Blaga, the links with Eliade seem convincing, at least at first glance. Eliade reportedly first read Blaga in 1926.7! No Souvenirs tells us that his acquaintance with Blaga and admiration of his work dates at least from 1933 or 1934.” But, whatever the precise date of the beginning of this relationship, Eliade has always been ready to credit Blaga with a key place in his intellectual world. 1 would suggest that, when Eliade tells us that in the late 1930s he began gradually to detach himself from the Romanian scene and to reorient his writings for a ‘larger public and from a “universal” perspective’, he is actually telling us either how he was passing from the influence of Ionescu to that of Blaga, or, simply, how he was embarking on the same path as Blaga had mapped out years earlier. Whatever the right analysis, the end result is the same: thereafter Eliade’s work was marked by a series of key characteristics indicating a shift away from the particular to the universal, as espoused by Blaga. First of all, Blaga was a ‘creative’ hermeneutic interpreter of myths and folklore.” Like Eliade in the practice of his ‘meaning- mad’ and uncontrolled ‘creative hermeneutic’ method (finding meanings even where there are none), Blaga believed that his hermeneutic was ‘legitimate in that it enabled . . . [him] to find those deeper meanings . . . that can be apprehended only from the viewpoint afforded by a certain level of speculation’.” This seems nothing more than the ‘speculative’ and ‘creative’ aspects of the universalising ‘creative hermeneutic’ practised by Eliade, put in Blaga’s own terms.Eliade’s Theory and the ‘History of Religions’ 125 It will come, then, as no surprise that Blaga was devoted to another form of universalist hermeneutics — the depth psychology of Carl Jung. Indeed, Blaga saw his own hermeneutic work as a hybrid form of death psychology and ontology,” a synthesis mirrored quite possibly in Eliade’s thought. Again like Eliade, Blaga shared Jung’s belief that definite styles of culture were the products of creative unconscious levels of the human mind. It is well known that Eliade goes beyond Jung in speaking of universal and transcendental unconscious archetypes which work themselves out in myths and other human symbolisms. But in this he takes the road of Blaga again by linking these archetypes with a universal human religiosity.” Eliade notes in his diaries that he visited Blaga in Switzerland in 1937, and how impressed he was by Blaga’s ‘depth’.” Whether Blaga was then already a Jungian is unknown; so is the date when Eliade entered the Jungian ‘hermeneutic’ camp.” But the connection of Blaga and Jung shows us that the possible impact of Blaga’s Jungian hermeneutics may well have been decisive for the formation of aspects of Eliade’s neo-Jungian hermeneutics. Thus, when Blaga did turn to traditional Romanian themes such as national identity, his analyses were couched in terms remote from the perspectives of practical or revolutionary politicians, and even, as it happens, from the visions of political philosophical thinkers such as Nae Ionescu.” Blaga preferred to speak of certain metaphysical formative principles as the root of national identity, rather than, like Ionescu, of the values and life- styles of the Romanian peasantry.” In all this Blaga seemed not to care in the least whether his analyses of ‘principles’ of the Romanian spirit were taken up by politicians. His analyses were intended to reveal ontological, ‘universal’ meaning in local Romanian life; they were in this sense a ‘universal’, not national, hermeneutics, even if the universal could often seem quite particular. For example, Blaga, like other Romanian traditionalists (Eliade, for one), thought that the essence of Romanian religion was to be found among the Romanian peasantry, properly understood — ‘archaic man’, in Eliade’s usage. Though Eliade often links this notion with specific historical examples of ‘primitive’ folk, he is careful to avoid identifying it with any one of them.® Now, even though Ionescu and Blaga saw the essence of Romanian religion in equally ontological and thus universal terms, Ionescu always maintained a traditional Romanian Christian126 Four Theories of Myth interpretation of it, while Blaga rolled back the history of Orthodoxy in Romania in order to locate the essence of Romanian religion in the mythical world of Romania’s autochthonous Thracians.* Like Eliade himself (at least according to Cioran),*> Blaga was ‘pre-Christian and heretical, if not atheistic’. Thus Blaga perhaps provides Eliade with the idea of ‘archaic religion’, for which Eliade believes his ‘creative hermeneutics’ discovers evidence in religious documents from every time and place. From this brief survey of part of Blaga’s hermeneutic style and its substance, one can begin to see how Eliade’s hermeneutic might either have derived from Blaga or have developed independently under the same conditions as Blaga’s. In any case, the crucial issue for this study is the extent to which Eliade and Blaga present a common front on the study of myth. Neither Blaga nor Eliade was ever simply a Romanian patriot or ‘Volkish’ thinker. Both realised ambitions to transcend the Romanian cultural context, even if they did so in perhaps very Romanian ways and because of Romanian historical events. As a case in point, both Blaga and Eliade replace whatever idea they may have had about the particular nature of the Romanian ‘folk’ with the universal transcendental anthropological notion of ‘archaic’ humanity.*” Eliade does this most conspicuously in his theory of myth, and in the process seems to trace a path similar to Blaga’s. Hitchins speaks® of Blaga’s ‘a-historical’ treatment of Romanian village life and his attachment for a primitive archetype of humanity in general. Eliade is famous for his theory of ‘archaic man’ as one who abides in the ‘paradisiac stage of primordial humanity’,” ‘not to be found in the historical past’, ‘not calculable chronologically’.”' For Eliade, ‘archaic man’ is ‘mythical man’, properly speaking. ‘Archaic man’ lives myths consciously; modern man can only recall them in dreams or respond to them in hearing or reading. For Eliade our prime need is to get back into experiential contact with our ‘archaic’ natures. ‘Creative hermeneutics’ is the spiritual technique he believes can get us there. Blaga, as we have seen, may have been the first master of this technique to touch Eliade’s soul — in the process, ‘saving’ it. By centring his theoretical anthropology on the notion of ‘archaic man’, Eliade controls many of the theoretical moves he is able to make in spelling out the elements of his concept of myth, and thus ensures that the ‘archaic’ perspective informs the whole concept. This, I think, needs no extended demonstration, and itEliade’s Theory and the ‘History of Religions’ 127 will suffice to restate in short what Eliade’s concept of myth is and then briefly to illustrate it at work in his discussion, with special reference to Blaga, of the Romanian Volksmythos ‘Mioritza’. First the concept: myth is a story about the origins and ultimately the Creation of the world, functioning to produce a fundamental existential orientation in human nature by putting people in touch with a timeless archaic time informed by the creative archetypes of the Creation. Turning to ‘Mioritza’, it will be recalled that in The Forbidden Forest it serves Biris’s life-affirming song in the face of imminent death,” and that for the Romanian traditionalists it was a special symbol, grounded in the being of Romanian life and addressing what they took to be their historic predicament. In a way, Eliade’s decision to write about ‘Mioritza’ and Blaga’s special relation to it (as author of Mioritic Space) confirms Blaga’s special relation to Eliade, the ‘new generation’ and the place of myth in Eliade’s thought. If any feature of Romanian cultural life would need to be transformed as Eliade moved onto a universal plane of activity, it would be ‘Mioritza’. That he chooses Blaga to illustrate how this can effectively be done is a fact which speaks for itself. ‘Mioritza’ is no longer simply the breath of the soul of Romania: it is in a way part of universal human nature.” For this, I think, Eliade has to thank Blaga. Thanks to intellectual historians such as Keith Hitchins, we know how deeply indebted to German neo-romantic thought Blaga was. We know too how he drew inspiration from Frobenius, Spengler, Nietzsche and others well known as students of myth, and how, especially, Frobenius and the other Kulturkreis thinkers played ‘Volkish’ themes originally sounded by Herder and then taken up by anthropo-geographers such as Friedrich Ratzel.* We know the familiar refrain of the supposed organic relation between a people and their native land.® In time the Volk reflect the land, and the land reflects the Volk. Myths, then, as embodiments of the ‘genius of the people’, reflect in special ways the spatial and physical nature of the land the people inhabit. For Blaga and Eliade, as Romanians, the myth that did this was ‘Mioritza’. It is, says Eliade, ‘an exemplary expression of the Romanian soul’. Elaborating on this theme, he says, In short, if the ‘Mioritza’ is found in every region inhabited by Romanians, if no piece of folk poetry has enjoyed such128 Four Theories of Myth popularity, . . . if new variants are constantly being recorded, a preliminary conclusion is inescapable: we are in the presence of a still living creation of the folk, which touches the folk soul like no other; .. . there is a total and spontaneous ‘adherence’ of the Romanian people to the poetic beauties and the symbolism of the ballad, with all their ritual or speculative implications. So we may conclude that the choice of certain modern authors when they raised ‘Mioritza’ to the rank of archetype of Romanian folk spirituality was not entirely arbitrary. In insisting on the uniqueness of ‘Mioritza’, they did no more than follow the choice of an entire people.” We know, of course, that Blaga was one of these ‘modern authors’ and that in his hands ‘Mioritza’ acquired universal proportions. It expressed a Romanian ‘mode of existence in the world and the most effective response they can make to destiny when, as so often in the past, it proves to be hostile and tragic. And this response each time constitutes a new spiritual creation.”” We can now see Eliade himself as another of these ‘modern authors’. Here, in his own words, we can hear his own ‘human voice’: [Mioritza] transmutes the misfortune that sentences him to death into a majestic and spectacular sacramental mystery that, in the end, enables him to triumph over his own fate... . The Mioritic hero succeeded in finding a meaning in his misfortune by assuming it, not as a personal ‘historical’ event but as a sacramental mystery. Hence he imposed a meaning on the absurd itself, by responding to misfortune and death by a cosmic and spectacular marriage ceremony.” What better place for Eliade to say these soulful things than in the midst of a discussion of a myth, and a Romanian myth at that — one specially related to his own history and to the person who perhaps saved him from it, Lucian Blaga. ‘Internal’ streams of history thus flow into Eliade’s thought from many diverse sources and merge with the ‘external’ context of his own history. The way in which his life and letters merge is intricate and in some ways improbable, but, I hope, illuminating.