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Tales of the Sacred and the Supernatural
Book by Eliade, Mircea
108 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1981
About the author
Mircea Eliade
564 books2,727 followersRomanian-born historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the pre-eminent interpreters of world religion in the last century. Eliade was an intensely prolific author of fiction and non-fiction alike, publishing over 1,300 pieces over 60 years. He earned international fame with LE MYTHE DE L'ÉTERNAL RETOUR (1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return), an interpretation of religious symbols and imagery. Eliade was much interested in the world of the unconscious. The central theme in his novels was erotic love.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 3, 2021
The book Tales of the Sacred and the Supernatural comprises two novellas: Les Trois Grâces and With the Gypsy Girls – both are among the best stories written by Mircea Eliade.
Although the stories deal with the supernatural phenomena, they belong rather to magical realism that to Gothic literature.
With the Gypsy Girls is a marvelous allegory of brevity and levity of human life.
And Les Trois Grâces is a mystery full of the mystical musings on the biblical secret of the original sin.
It takes just one step beyond… and one finds oneself in the land of the unknown.
She looked him in the eye fleetingly but deeply, then took his hand and quickly led him to a little old house, which you would scarcely have guessed was there, hidden among lilac and dwarf elder bushes. She opened the door and gently pushed him inside. Gavrilescu found himself in a curious semidarkness, as if the windows had blue and green panes.
Although the stories deal with the supernatural phenomena, they belong rather to magical realism that to Gothic literature.
The one who had taken a step toward him, completely naked, very swarthy, with black hair and eyes, was without doubt the gypsy girl. The second girl was naked too, but covered with a pale green veil; her body was preternaturally white, so that it gleamed like mother-of-pearl; on her feet she wore gilded slippers. She could only be the Greek girl. The third was without doubt the Jewish girl: she had on a long skirt of cherry-colored velvet, which hugged her body at the waist, leaving her breasts and shoulders bare; her abundant hair, red with fiery glints, was skillfully braided and piled on the top of her head.
With the Gypsy Girls is a marvelous allegory of brevity and levity of human life.
And Les Trois Grâces is a mystery full of the mystical musings on the biblical secret of the original sin.
Because we know today, Father, that God did not wish to, or could not, destroy his own creation. Man has remained the same, the way Adam and Eve were in Paradise before sinning. The same - that is, endowed with the same biological potentialities. In the human body everything has been preserved, Father, including therefore the secret of eternal life with which Adam had been gifted.
It takes just one step beyond… and one finds oneself in the land of the unknown.
March 2, 2018
“Hildegard,” he spoke after a while. “Something’s happening to me, and I really don’t know what it is. If I hadn’t seen you speaking to the driver, I would say that I was dreaming…”
“We all dream,” she said. “That’s how it all begins. As in a dream…”
“We all dream,” she said. “That’s how it all begins. As in a dream…”
October 18, 2009
Two novellas by Mircea Eliade, as I have said before, full of mythological themes, philosophical explorations, and camouflaged meaning. Les Trois Graces is the better of the two stories.
February 27, 2020
I needed to re-read some passages and it took some thinking to guess what has happened to Gavrilescu. I think the last sentence is... well I might be wrong. Anyway, every time I read Eliade's fiction, it's like I just had some ayahuasca spiked with some DMT.
And about treatment for cancer that would be used for rejuvenation... hey, he was right, there is a great book (a must-read book) How to Starve Cancer ...without starving yourself: The Discovery of a Metabolic Cocktail That Could Transform the Lives of Millions check it out.
And about treatment for cancer that would be used for rejuvenation... hey, he was right, there is a great book (a must-read book) How to Starve Cancer ...without starving yourself: The Discovery of a Metabolic Cocktail That Could Transform the Lives of Millions check it out.
June 4, 2025
I think I now like Eliade more for his stories than his non-fiction.
"We're all dreaming," she said. "That's how it begins. As if in a dream..."
I need a cigarette and a pint now - I should be musing over this line for an hour or two, absentmindedly!
"We're all dreaming," she said. "That's how it begins. As if in a dream..."
I need a cigarette and a pint now - I should be musing over this line for an hour or two, absentmindedly!
December 30, 2022
In this slim volume, Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) has graced us with two enigmatic tales of magical realism – ‘graced’ here being the operative word, as those three ladies, the Graces (or are they les Grasses, the pleasingly plump? Or three villas in the woods?) appear, barely disguised as cancer patients, in the first story. The doctor whose experimental treatments saved them, has also gifted (cursed?) them with periodical rejuvenation; he dies in a mysterious accident at the summer solstice, which for Eliade (as in his most famous novel, The Forbidden Forest) is the most likely time for a rupture in the fabric of reality.
The doctor had been experimenting beyond the limits of what Blake calls ‘fixed science,’ seeking clues in the apocrypha; and had been shut down by the Communist authorities, because they lacked imagination: “Everyone was afraid that the success of the treatment would provoke a recrudescence of religious obscurantism.” In effect, through esoteric studies, the doctor had uncovered the reason for the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise – the medical equivalent of the fruit of the Tree of Life. The last words on his lips – his Rosebud moment – are ‘Les Trois Grâces…’ As his friends struggle to make sense of it all, one suggests: “If he wanted to tell us something, it was probably this: I realise I’m lost, but I’m not afraid of death, and neither should you be. And perhaps he wanted to tell us that death is a fulfilment, an integral perfection of all the higher faculties with which we were endowed.”
Was this Eliade’s own belief? Less than five years after this book was published, he would find out the answer for himself.
A fictionalised version of Eliade himself also appears in the second of the short stories in this collection, ‘With the Gypsy Girls’ – for, as the critic Andrei Terian has pointed out, Eliade’s central character, Gavrilescu, is transformed into the historian of religions Radu Grielescu in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein. Like Eliade, Grielescu is described as a disciple of Nae Ionescu, the philosopher who championed the anti-Semitic nationalist movement, the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Though he always denied being a Legionary, Eliade’s association with the movement in the late Thirties was increasingly being questioned by the Eighties, when Bellow, in his roman à clef, wickedly presented Grielescu “as a parvenu who tries to conceal his guilty past by surrounding himself with Jewish friends.”
But it is gypsies rather than Jews whom Gavrilescu befriends. He is a piano teacher with “the soul of an artist.” Like Eliade, a scholar who wanted to be better known for his literary works, Gavrilescu can say: “I live for the soul.” His initiation into the other world of the gypsies involves an encounter with three girls – the Three Graces again? – but when he emerges from their house, twelve years have passed. The dream is over – or has it just begun? For dream, as Eliade points out in the fascinating Foreword to this collection, is “the safety valve” of the human thirst for transcendence.
There is more on Eliade, literature and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter). A series of posts on Eliade begins here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
The doctor had been experimenting beyond the limits of what Blake calls ‘fixed science,’ seeking clues in the apocrypha; and had been shut down by the Communist authorities, because they lacked imagination: “Everyone was afraid that the success of the treatment would provoke a recrudescence of religious obscurantism.” In effect, through esoteric studies, the doctor had uncovered the reason for the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise – the medical equivalent of the fruit of the Tree of Life. The last words on his lips – his Rosebud moment – are ‘Les Trois Grâces…’ As his friends struggle to make sense of it all, one suggests: “If he wanted to tell us something, it was probably this: I realise I’m lost, but I’m not afraid of death, and neither should you be. And perhaps he wanted to tell us that death is a fulfilment, an integral perfection of all the higher faculties with which we were endowed.”
Was this Eliade’s own belief? Less than five years after this book was published, he would find out the answer for himself.
A fictionalised version of Eliade himself also appears in the second of the short stories in this collection, ‘With the Gypsy Girls’ – for, as the critic Andrei Terian has pointed out, Eliade’s central character, Gavrilescu, is transformed into the historian of religions Radu Grielescu in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein. Like Eliade, Grielescu is described as a disciple of Nae Ionescu, the philosopher who championed the anti-Semitic nationalist movement, the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Though he always denied being a Legionary, Eliade’s association with the movement in the late Thirties was increasingly being questioned by the Eighties, when Bellow, in his roman à clef, wickedly presented Grielescu “as a parvenu who tries to conceal his guilty past by surrounding himself with Jewish friends.”
But it is gypsies rather than Jews whom Gavrilescu befriends. He is a piano teacher with “the soul of an artist.” Like Eliade, a scholar who wanted to be better known for his literary works, Gavrilescu can say: “I live for the soul.” His initiation into the other world of the gypsies involves an encounter with three girls – the Three Graces again? – but when he emerges from their house, twelve years have passed. The dream is over – or has it just begun? For dream, as Eliade points out in the fascinating Foreword to this collection, is “the safety valve” of the human thirst for transcendence.
There is more on Eliade, literature and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter). A series of posts on Eliade begins here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews