Eliade II: An Almost Luciferic Titanism

Mircea Eliade began writing his memoirs in the Sixties, by which time he was established at Chicago and about to become the leading figure in the history of religions for the second half of the twentieth century. He had ‘made it’; so, it was a good time to look back at where it all began, in Bucharest in 1907.
Eliade’s anamnesis has elements of the magical realism that will be found in much of his later fiction: At the age of five he sees a girl the same age pass by him, then stop and turn her head; from then on, visualising her image would produce a blissful state in which his surroundings disappeared: “I would remain suspended, as in an unnatural sigh prolonged to infinity. For years the image of the girl … was a kind of secret talisman for me, because it allowed me to take refuge instantly in that fragment of incomparable time.”
On another occasion he saw the drawing-room of his house transformed into “a fairy-tale palace”, bathed in a “light from another world.” For long after he would re-evoke the “beatitude” of that moment; but with increasing sadness for “a world forever lost.” It was his first experience of that once-upon-a-time beyond Time which he would call illud tempus; it was his first experience of nostalgia for Paradise. It was also an initiatory experience which would cause him to re-evaluate, later in life, the importance of icons as material transmitters of light within his native Orthodox faith
He was nine when Romania entered the First World War; and it is then that he began his first experiments in writing. He intensely visualised Romanian soldiers in action, but they started to take on a life of their own. It is akin to what Jung calls ‘active imagination’; but at this age what he jotted down in a notebook could not do justice to his fantasies.
As an adolescent he had his first article – about silkworms – published in a newspaper. He thought his vocation was as a scientific populariser, but this combined with his love of literature when he published a story entitled ‘How I Found the Philosopher’s Stone.’ The scientist in him triumphs over the budding alchemist when the hero discovers only ‘fool’s gold’; but there is also a suggestion that dreams can cross over into the waking world.
He had tentatively begun what he had no way of knowing would become a career; but his desire to be scientific was challenged when he gave a lecture about the god Rama to a cultural association set up by his peers. Unfortunately, his source material was taken from a book on the Great Initiates by the esotericist and Theosophist Edouard Schuré, whom Eliade soon after discovered had “invented” it. But this taught him a lesson which would hold him in good stead in adult life: “I think at that time there arose within me a mistrust of dilettantes, a fear of letting myself be duped by an amateur, an increasingly insistent desire to go directly to the sources, to consult exclusively the works of specialists, to exhaust the bibliography.”
I had a similar experience when I discovered that Robert Graves, who had re-awakened my love of mythology when I first moved to Wales, was too idiosyncratic to be relied on as an authority. Eliade’s example helped me to curb my own dilettantism; and stood me in good stead when I was trying to get published.
Eliade had started keeping a detailed journal; and he used this as the basis for his first, semi-autobiographical, novel, which was published in serial form in the literary magazines to which he had become a prolific contributor. It has recently been translated into English as Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent; and was followed by Gaudeamus which takes the narrator from school to university, but remained unpublished until after Eliade’s death.
With regard to Eliade’s novel of adolescence, I feel about it much as I do about the precocious juvenile works of composers such as Mozart: I’m impressed that they could do it, but they mainly make me look forward to seeing what they can do when they’re grown up. It is Gaudeamus, despite Eliade’s own dissatisfaction with it, which gives us a taste of the successful novelist he would become. Here we see the beginning of his engagement with spirituality; and he dramatizes some episodes which are described more straight-forwardly in the first volume of his memoirs (Autobiography, Volume 1: 1907-1937, Journey East, Journey West).
Although both the Diary and Gaudeamus impress as works written by a teenager at the time of the events they describe, the corresponding chapters in the first volume of Eliade’s Autobiography make up with the benefit of hindsight for whatever they lack in freshness and immediacy.
The fateful turn from the natural sciences to the humanities in Eliade’s intellectual journey is signalled by his immersion in the works of Balzac: much as he loves the realistic Human Comedy for which the novelist is famous, he especially delights in Balzac’s lesser-known fantasies: “This giant who moved in so many worlds captivated me; he was not content to be ‘in the mainstream of current thought,’ but he introduced the androgyne into modern literature and invented a great many mythologies pertaining to the ‘will’ and ‘energy’ of the man of action.” Eliade, who later wrote about the myth of the androgyne, would himself strive to be an intellectual Man of Action, moving in the worlds of literature and scholarship.
Eliade started getting interested in Theosophy and its offshoot, the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner; and in eastern mysteries: “During those years of almost mystical admiration for the ancient Orient, when I believed in the mysteries of the Pyramids, the deep wisdom of the Chaldeans, and the occult sciences of the Persian magi, my efforts were nurtured by the hope that one day I would solve all the ‘secrets’ of religions, of history, and of man’s destiny on earth.” He would have a good go, it must be admitted.
Frazer’s Golden Bough revealed to him “the inexhaustible universe of primitive religions and folklore”; and he also read Frazer’s disciple Jane Ellen Harrison, who transformed the study of the classics. But it was in the autumn of 1924 that Eliade first encountered the man who would have such a powerful – and potentially disastrous – influence over his intellectual development: the professor of metaphysics Nae Ionescu. The first lecture of Ionescu’s that Eliade attended left him struggling with the problem of evil in Goethe’s Faust: “Had Goethe been tempted by the Manicheistic anthropology of those medieval sects that had survived in camouflaged form until the late Renaissance?” Wouldn’t we all like to know?
Amid his ferocious reading schedule, Eliade managed to fit in some drinking and romancing, like normal students. One evening a girl called round to his attic flat to ask him to explain the meaning of the word katharsis…You couldn’t make it up…
For his thesis, Eliade chose Italian Renaissance philosophy, seeing in it an attempt to balance immanence and transcendence, pantheism and mysticism, natural philosophy and Oriental spirituality; and re-discovering in it “faith in the unlimited possibilities of man, the concept of creative freedom, and an almost Luciferic titanism – that is, all the obsessions of my youth.”
He was still only twenty; and determined to live life to the full at an age when everything seems possible; and of a generation which, growing up in the ‘greater’ Romania created at the end of the First World War, had to discover its place in the wider world. He wrote a Spiritual Itinerary (now lost) in which, attempting to free himself from the consequences of his “adolescent scientism and agnosticism”, he found himself re-evaluating his Eastern Orthodox heritage. His mentor Ionescu stressed that Romanians are born Orthodox; but Eliade felt he had to sail away on spiritual adventures before he could re-discover his birth-right.
And sail away is something the young man did quite literally when, following his request to study Indian philosophy with its most celebrated historian, Surendranath Dasgupta, he was offered a five-year scholarship by the Maharajah of Kassimbazar. Eliade was eager to “encounter the mystery” that was waiting for him to decipher: the mystery, that is, of his own existence…

Next month: A Snake in the Parlour