Eliade III: A Snake in the Parlour

Mircea Eliade was twenty years old when, like so many backpackers of the Sixties and Seventies, he would set off for the East in search of…what? Unlike the transatlantic hippies, Eliade did not talk about ‘enlightenment’; ostensibly, he was going to study Indian philosophy as a counterbalance to the Renaissance philosophy he was studying in Romania; but his studies would include yoga in theory and practice.
Shortly after arriving Eliade suffered a severe case of sunstroke, temporarily abandoned his studies and discovered the delights of partying and cheap opium. He spent a week in a “state of semi-consciousness and fantasy” which inspired him to write a dream-like novel, entitled Isabel și apele diavolului– Isabel and the Devil’s Waters, although it has not yet been translated into English – a heady mixture of eroticism and diabolism, which sometimes reads as if deliberately intended to shock provincial readers back home, which is precisely what it did.
One of the dedicatees of Isabel is a blind beggar, Eliade’s encounter with whom helped him to overcome one of the frequent attacks of melancholy which had assailed him since his teens. But, after a trip to the Himalayas, he knew there was something wrong with what he was coming to feel was his “obscure and unfulfilled existence” in the “banal and sterile milieu” of the Anglo-Indian boarding house where he was staying. A trip with his mentor Dasgupta to visit the renowned poet Rabindranath Tagore gave him a taste of a more authentic way of life; and, when he discovered that he had accidentally brought a small python back with him, hidden in his belongings, we might feel that the Snake in the Parlour is a fitting symbol of the temptation that would lead him out of one mode of existence and into another.
Eliade took up Dasgupta’s offer to stay in his mentor’s home where, the older man promised, he would initiate him into the practice of yoga; and what piqued Eliade’s interest was Tantra, because it was “not entirely ascetic, idealistic, and pessimistic.” We see here the polarity that would sustain so much of Eliade’s writing, the tension of the opposites of immanence and transcendence. As he wrote in his memoirs (Autobiography, Volume 1: 1907-1937, Journey East, Journey West): “There exists a whole tradition that accepts life and the body; it does not consider them illusory nor the source of suffering, but exalts incarnate existence as the only mode of being in the world in which absolute freedom can be won. From then on I understood that … India has believed in the possibility of a blessed and autonomous existence, here on earth and in Time.”
There were growing conflicts in the country, colonial police violence and inter-communal massacres developing alongside the Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience campaigns with which Eliade strongly identified: He believed that he saw in it a nationalism of the spirit; and that the “magical power of suffering” in which the nationalists placed their trust was also that which inspired the first Christians. This perspective may have influenced his naively idealistic view of the Romanian nationalism he would encounter in the Thirties, under the banner of the Legion of the Archangel Michael.
Despite being sometimes the object of abuse as a European, Eliade started to fall in love with India; and would soon fall in love with an Indian. This event was presaged by his writing a new novel in which a fire breaks out in the library of a professor after a mysterious orgiastic (Tantric) rite has been enacted with the professor’s young assistant and a madman.
The novel is entitled Lumina ce se stinge – The Light That Fails, although, like Isabel, it has never been translated into English (although there is a French translation by Alain Paruit, La lumière qui s'éteint) - the reference being to the hero’s losing his sight as a result of an injury sustained while rescuing the assistant. There follows some sort of magical battle, although the stream-of-consciousness technique Eliade uses renders the book, as he himself admitted, nigh on unreadable.
By a curious synchronicity, a drama involving a library also began to be enacted in Eliade’s non-fictional life, when Dasgupta’s daughter was asked to assist Eliade in preparing the index for the professor’s latest book. What followed was the basis for Eliade’s most famous novel, which for once has been translated into English, as Bengal Nights.
In the novel, a young engineer called Alain is sent by his company to Bengal, where the local boss befriends him; and, with a view to adopting him, lets him stay in his family home. Alain, despite his prejudices about the native culture and people (“a hitherto unconscious notion of my superiority”), soon starts to fall for the “enchantment” of both India and his boss’ teenage daughter Maitreyi.
Alain seems to be speaking for Eliade when he writes that he was “sure that the encounter of this ancient world with our modern work had yet to find its novelist.” If Alain is working on construction projects in the jungle, India is at the same time working on him; and, despite having to give up some of the personal freedoms of the European, Alain chooses to accept a “magical” life which no white man, he believes, “had ever experienced at source.”
Alain at first thinks of himself as a civilised man among barbarians: When Maitreyi’s sister tells him that all trees have souls, he starts repeating to himself: Pantheism! Pantheism! But gradually his delusion of his own superiority weakens as his rationalist worldview encounters Maitreyi’s poetic, dreaming philosophy in which everyone has their own god. He experiences their first, tentative intimacy as “that miracle of human ascent into the supernatural through touch and sight.”
Their first kiss transports Alain into what Eliade often calls illud tempus, that once-upon-a-time when we are in the eternal present of the earthly paradise: “An unknown beatitude flooded every particle of my being and enraptured my body; in that plenitude, I recognized my truest self. A wave of joy lifted me out of myself, without dividing or destroying me, or pushing me towards madness. Never had I lived so immediately in the present as I did during those few minutes, when I seemed to live outside of all time. That embrace was something much more than love.”
The serpent in the garden (or snake in the parlour) is jealousy: Before Alain, Maitreyi has loved her guru and, like her sister, a tree. Alain feels torn between wanting to become a Hindu himself, while acknowledging that they “all nurtured in the recesses of their beings a whole impenetrable history and mythology” which makes them “unintelligible” to him.
And one of the things that Alain does not understand is that for Maitreyi, their intimacy can only lead to marriage. She has a ring created for Alain by a jeweller and swears by Mother Earth to be Alain’s alone; he feels horrified by her mystical exaltation, despite having tried to convince himself that he has eschewed the “common sense” of western civilisation. He knows that he could never adopt the “sacrifice, renunciation, the complete acceptance of the will of fate” that a traditional Hindu marriage would entail.
But, as things turn out, he doesn’t have to: Maitreyi’s younger sister, the tree-lover, accidentally gives them away; and Alain is banished from the house, forbidden from ever again contacting Maitreyi. Although she manages to send him increasingly distraught messages, vowing to remain faithful to him until they can meet again in Eternity, Alain feels that she is starting to mythologise him; but he is “hungry for the real, the immediate, the living.”
…And this is pretty much what happened to Eliade in real life, as recounted in his Autobiography. Feeling that his connection with ‘historical’ India had been short-circuited, he set off for a Himalayan ashram to practise yoga. But once again “eternal māyā, in her blind wisdom,” intervened. He got involved in tantric sex rituals with a South African cellist who was also staying there; but came to realise that he had let himself be deceived by his imagination. As a result, he had lost his chance “to integrate ‘eternal,’ trans-historical India.” He realised that he could only pursue the Absolute once he had exhausted his creative potential as a writer and scholar: “My vocation was culture, not sainthood.”
It was time to go home.

Next month: Beyond History