Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade , 1907-86, American philosopher and historian of comparative religion, b. Bucharest. He studied Indian philosophy and Sanskrit at the Univ. of Calcutta (1928-31) and taught history of religion and metaphysics in Bucharest (1933-39). A diplomat during World War II, he taught at the Sorbonne (1946-48) and the Univ. of Chicago (1957-85). His work in the systematic study of religions was pioneering; much of his work concentrated on the nature of religious culture and of myths and mystical experiences. Eliade's analysis of rites of passage, rituals marking key transitional moments in the life cycle (e.g., birth, adult initiation, death), influenced many anthropologists. His often controversial books include scholarly works such as The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949), The Sacred and the Profane (1959), and A History of Religious Ideas (3 vol., 1978-85) and novels such as The Forbidden Forest (1955) and The Old Man and the Bureaucrats (1979). Eliade was also editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion (16 vol., 1986).

Eliade, Mircea (1907–86). Advocate of what is called ‘history of religions’, which in his case is better seen as an attempt to discern elemental, timeless, patterns of religious life. Religion is taken to be the manifestation of ‘Being’. Symbolic forms, redolent of the sacred, are influenced by historical circumstances but are not themselves the product of history. The task is to use the comparative method to arrive at what is constant; to arrive at what goes beyond the contingencies of time.

Working with a model of the human as homo religiosus, of the human as motivated by an irreducible religious intentionality, Eliade drew most of his material from archaic cultures. Supposedly providing the most powerful evidence of the ‘morphology of the sacred’, these cultures are held to signal the contemporary need for greater ontological rootage. See also SHAMANISM.