Eliade I: The Hour of the Wolf

A couple of months before my thirty-second birthday I dreamed I was Mircea Eliade.
It was three days before Midsummer Eve 1985 and I was immersed in a study of symbolism, trying to write a book on the Tarot and recording in my Journal some of the most powerful archetypal dreams I have ever had. One of these dreams involved a fight with a wolf and, in order better to understand its significance for me, I turned to a writer whose books I was immersed in at that time, the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) – whose name, truth to tell, I did not even know how to pronounce (apparently it’s something like Meer-cha Elee-a-day).
I had been turned on to Eliade by a friend who was studying anthropology. She had been listening to my impassioned arguments with a mutual friend, an astrologer, about all things esoteric; and recommended that I read a book she had studied at university, entitled Occultism, Witchcraft & Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religion. It was a collection of essays, mostly delivered as lectures and therefore not addressed to specialists (and I was at that time most definitely a generalist bordering on dilettantism) but designed to be accessible to “any intelligent reader” (among whom I counted myself).
It was the ideal introduction to Eliade, most of whose books were dauntingly heavy; and I immediately checked out my local library, where I discovered a copy of a far more substantial and seminal work, Patterns in Comparative Religion. I was hooked. It became my ‘bible,’ a book that revealed the underlying structures of the myths and heroic tales that I had loved since childhood.
At that time, I was already steeped in the writings of Carl Jung; but Jung on myth tended to be difficult to follow – his books have an almost ‘stream of consciousness’ quality about them (which is why so many of his followers have written books attempting to ‘translate’ his ideas into plain language, with varying degrees of success). Eliade, by contrast, wrote in a refreshingly direct and ordered manner which appealed to my ordered mind. At his best, he created cosmos out of chaos.
Another book of his that I read at this time – and which had a powerful impact on me – was his study of initiation rituals, which he characterises as ‘mysteries of death and rebirth.’ It is a treasure trove of information organised in an almost encyclopaedic fashion; but what I found particularly fascinating was his discussion of initiatory dreams.
I was keeping a detailed dream diary then, so I know that, when I woke up from my wolf dream, it was three o’clock, not long before dawn as we neared the solstice. I knew that ‘the darkest hour before the dawn’ is traditionally known as the Hour of the Wolf – apart from The Seventh Seal, Bergman’s 1968 film of this name is my favourite of his oeuvre (not surprisingly, perhaps, with its themes of madness and demonic haunting).
In my dream I fight and kill the wolf; but then find myself turning into a werewolf. I now discovered from reading Eliade that turning into a wolf could be part of a shamanic or martial initiation; and that we could still recognise patterns of initiation “in the imaginative and dream life of modern man.”
It was precisely such an initiatory pattern that I believed the dream revealed: The wolf was my animal shadow, which I had to overcome; but what you conquer you become, or it can become you. You risk becoming the monster you fight. In the dream, I started improvising a humorous song – a chant, or an enchantment to soothe the savage beast within my breast.
My dream initiation was a turning point. I abandoned my involvement with the peace and anti-nuclear movements which had been a big part of my life in the early Eighties and concentrated my efforts instead on helping to develop a local mental health support network. At the same time, I continued my studies in esotericism; but I now had a new intellectual guide to help me find sound pathways through that terra incognita.
Eliade was nothing short of a revelation – here was an enormously erudite scholar who seemed to have the whole world of religion, ancient and modern, at his fingertips – but who, unlike the narrow specialists, could also see the wider implications of his subject in culture and politics. Over the next few years, I would read everything by Eliade that I could get my hands on; but even at my first encounter I was impressed by the fundamentals of his approach to religion. His argument that “the sacred” has to be studied as a category of human experience in its own right and not reduced to psychology or sociology excited me because at a stroke it frees us from the unhelpful dualism of belief/unbelief; just as the examples he gives of how mythic consciousness lives on, disguised as rationalism, in modern minds free us from the poisonous delusion that we are superior to ‘archaic’ peoples in anything other than the technology at our disposal.
More practically, his books provided me with solid data about mythology and religious symbols on which my imagination could feed and at the same time acted as a relatively trustworthy model for my own researches. Eliade would continue to influence my approach to the study of religion for decades to come; and adopting his more rigorous attitude to the material would eventually help me to see through some of the more dubious writers on the esoteric fringe (like Carlos Castaneda) whom I had fallen for in my teens. But it would also lead me to become more critical of serious writers such as Robert Graves, the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and the Wiccan activist Starhawk, with whose spiritual and political Goddess Movement I had aligned myself in the Eighties.
Ironically, it is Eliade himself who is often attacked as being untrustworthy these days; but I can’t help feeling that that is as much to do with the discovery, towards the end of his life, of the unsavoury political associations of his youth, as it is to do with changing scholarly fashions.
But more of that anon: Reading him for the first time in the Eighties, I knew nothing about the man or his life. I did not even register the fact that he died in April 1986; which may have been just as well because, at that time, I saw enormous literal significance in my dreams and I may have felt that dreaming that I was a man who had less than a year to live meant that this was an omen of my own fate.
A few years later, when I came across the first volume of Eliade's memoirs (Autobiography, Volume 1: 1907-1937, Journey East, Journey West), with a photo of the author on the cover, I was struck by what I perceived as my own facial resemblance to the young Romanian (although, significantly, my friends couldn’t see it!). This gave a whole new perspective to my dreaming that I was Eliade! And when I realised that he had died about nine months after my initiation dream, the last sentences of his book on birth and rebirth took on an added poignancy: “If we can say that initiation constitutes a specific dimension of human existence, this is true above all because it is only in initiation that death is given a positive value. Death prepares the new, purely spiritual birth, access to a mode of being not subject to the destroying actions of Time.”
Eliade claimed that reading could be a modern means of initiation; and I certainly felt that reading Eliade was part of mine. But the extent of my unconscious identification (and conscious admiration) of him raises the question: Who was Mircea Eliade?
Eliade’s enormous body of work (short stories and novels as well as essays and books) constitutes part of what has been called ‘an alternative intellectual history of the twentieth century;’ but it remains controversial for two important reasons:
Firstly, because the personal is political: His early belief that Romania, at the crossroads of East and West, could be at the centre of a European spiritual renewal led him to make common cause with the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a movement whose name suggests its fusion of mysticism and para-militarism and whose legionaries became better known as the notorious Iron Guard. As anti-Semitic as it was anti-capitalist and anti-communist, the Legion was crushed in 1941, but by then Eliade was safe in neutral Portugal, working as a cultural attaché. After the war he moved to France and thence to Chicago where he pursued a prestigious academic career, trying to cover the traces of his earlier intellectual flirtation with Fascism and always denying that he was anti-Semitic; but, of course, in Fifties America he had no need to conceal his hatred for communism; while his criticisms of capitalist consumerism would chime with the anti-materialism of the Sixties counter-culture.
During the Thirties Eliade had also come under the influence of the Traditionalist school of metaphysics represented primarily by René Guénon and Julius Evola; and he set out to provide scholarly evidence for their and his belief (later modified) that the religious beliefs of all peoples are the expression, however degraded over time, of primordial Truth; and that those cultures which still provide a valid initiation can show us the Way to spiritual Life. But Eliade translated this belief into the proposition that the sacred is a category of human consciousness and developed a phenomenological approach to what he called the trans-conscious, insisting on treating religious beliefs on their own terms rather than submitting them to the reductionism of sociology or historicism. It is this academically-suspect insistence on the reality of the sacred that is the second most controversial aspect of his thought.
But if so, he was in stellar company. He had already published French-language books on Yoga (1936), the Myth of the Eternal Return (favourably reviewed by Guénon) and Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949), when he was approached by the Theosophist Olga Froebe-Kapteyn; and asked to lecture at Eranos in Switzerland in the summer of 1950 on the subject of Man and Rite. Frau Froebe had been organising these multi-disciplinary conferences since 1933; and Eliade would soon find himself hobnobbing with the likes of Carl Jung (the founder of analytical psychology), Henry Corbin (the scholar of esoteric Islam) and Gershom Scholem (the historian of Kabbalah). When Jung retired from lecturing due to ill-health, Eliade, Corbin and Scholem would become the three musketeers of ‘religion after religion,’ dominating the conferences in the Fifties and Sixties with their presentations of the harmonia abrahamica: the belief that Judaism, Christianity and Islam constitute three branches of the sophia perennis, a holy trinity which stands against the extremes of religious fundamentalism on one hand and scientism on the other, neither blind faith nor blind materialism.
Eliade’s first lecture, given in French (like most of his scholarly work – he continued to write fiction in his native Romanian), was on the Symbolism of the Centre. It was first published seventy years ago, in the Eranos Yearbook for 1951; and first published in English translation sixty years ago, in a book entitled Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism. Given these anniversaries, 2021 seems an appropriate year for me to start with a look at his life and work through his writings, which will occupy the next few months.
I will begin with his own account of his upbringing and youth, as found in the first volume of his memoirs and in a slightly fictionalised form in two early novels.

Next month: An Almost Luciferic Titanism