Mircea Eliade

History of Religions and a New Humanism

Despite the manuals, periodicals, and bibliographies today available to scholars, it is progressively more difficult to keep up with the advances being made in all departments of the History of Religions.1 Hence it is progressively more difficult to become a historian of religions. A scholar regretfully finds himself becoming a specialist in one religion or even in a particular period or a single aspect of that religion. This situation has induced us to bring out a new periodical. Our purpose is not simply to make one more review available to scholars (though the lack of a periodical of this nature in the United States would be reason enough for our venture) but more especially to provide an aid to orientation in a field that is constantly widening and to stimulate exchanges of views among specialists who, as a rule, do not follow the progress made in other disciplines. Such an orientation and exchange of views will, we hope, be made possible by summaries of the most recent advances achieved concerning certain key problems in the History of Religions, by methodological discussions, and by attempts to improve the hermeneutics of religious data.

The Sacred in the Secular World

The fact that this dimension is not immediately obvious in our society should not deter us from attempting to decipher it. How are we to go about this attempt, though? The study of the history of religions has already provided us with the appropriate tools. In the discussion that follows, I will apply the findings and methodology of that study to modern man in order to demonstrate that and how a hermeneutical

Archaic Roman religion, with an appendix on the religion of the Etruscans

The second of two volumes discussing archaic Roman religion. From the study of texts, inscriptions, and archaeology of Roman sacred places, this volume traces the formation of archaic Roman religion from Indo-European sources through the development of the rites and beliefs of the Roman republic. The author describes a religion that was not only influenced by other religions, but influenced them as well, in mutual efforts to distinguish one nation from another. Even so, certain continuities were sustained in order to achieve a religion that crossed generations and ways of life. The worship of certain gods became the special concerns of certain parts of society, all of which needed attention to assure Romes success in war, civil administration, and the production of food and gooods.

Cosmogonic Myth and ‘Sacred History’

It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected by the scholar. From Plato and Fontenelle to Schelling and Bultmann, philosophers and theologians have proposed innumerable definitions of myth. But all of these have one thing in common: they are based on the analysis of Greek mythology. Now, for a historian of religions this choice is not a very happy one. It is true that only in Greece did myth inspire and guide epic poetry, tragedy and comedy, as well as the plastic arts; but it is no less true that it is especially in Greek culture that myth was submitted to a long and penetrating analysis, from which it emerged radically ‘de-mythicised’. If in every European language the word ‘myth’ denotes a ‘fiction’, it is because the Greeks proclaimed it to be such twenty-five centuries ago. What is even more serious for an historian of religion: we do not know a single Greek myth within its ritual context. Of course this is not the case with the paleo-Oriental and Asiatic religions; it is especially not the case with the so-called ‘primitive’ religions. As is well known, a living myth is always connected with a cult, inspiring and justifying a religious behaviour. None of this of course means that Greek myth should not figure in an investigation of the mythical phenomenon. But it would seem unwise to begin our kind of inquiry by the study of Greek documents, and even more so to restrict it to such documents. The mythology which informs Homer, Hesiod and the tragic poets represents already a selection and an interpretation of archaic materials, some of which had become almost unintelligible. In short, our best chance of understanding the structure of mythical thought is to study cultures where myth is a ‘living thing’, where it constitutes the very ground of the religious life; in other words, where myth, far from indicating a fiction , is considered to reveal the truth par excellence .

South American High Gods. Part II

Although in it there are numerous lacunae, the ethnology of South America provides a rich body of materials for the historian of religions-so much so that he almost feels it to be a privileged area of study for him. There is an enormous corpus of documented material. It is at times distressingly uneven, but it does have the merit of having been collected now for almost four centuries. (As a matter of fact, Alfred Metraux, a few years before his tragic death, was considering a projected history of South American religion which would have been based exclusively upon the writings of missionaries and travelers.)1 Another distinctive feature of South American ethnology is that, although acculturation is rapidly transforming and disfiguring what is left of traditional societies, the possibility of recovering, in its integrity, a tribal religious system is not to be precluded. Completely unexpected, for instance, was Reichel-Dolmatoffs discovery of the Desanas theology, a model and justification of the tribes religion and social structure (see below, pp. 261 ff.). But for the historian of religions, the importance of South America lies especially in the richness and complexity of its

The Prestige of the Cosmogonic Myth

A myth relates a sacred story, that is to say, it recounts a primordial event that occurred at the beginning of time. But to tell a sacred story is equivalent to revealing a mystery, because the characters in a myth are not human beings. They are either gods or civilizing heroes, and therefore their gesta constitute mysteries: man would not know these tales if they were not revealed to him. Consequently, a myth is a story of what happened-what the gods and supernatural beings did-at the beginning of time. &dquo;To recount&dquo; a myth is to proclaim what occurred then. Once &dquo;told,&dquo; in other words, once revealed, the myth becomes the apodictic truth: it establishes truth. &dquo;It is so because it is said to be so,&dquo; the Netsilik Eskimos declared in order to justify the validity of their sacred history and their religious traditions. The myth proclaims the advent of a new cosmic situation or

Some Notes on "Theosophia Perennis": Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Henry Corbin

Dr. Roger Lipsey is to be congratulated for this three-volume summa, sumptuously published by the Princeton University Press. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy was a prolific writer, and in the last fifteen years of his life a rather difficult one. He liked to contribute to less known or obscure periodicals in India, Portugal, France, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia. Moreover, although well known as a historian of Indian art and as an orientalist, Coomaraswamy scattered his numberless articles in journals devoted to medieval studies (Speculum), the history of science (Isis), modern languages (Papers of Modern Languages Association), literary criticism (Criterion), history of religions (Review of Religion; Zalmoxis: Revue des etudes religieuses), hermetism (Jbtudes traditionnelles), or pathological psychology (Psychiatry). One is tempted to think that Coomaraswamy purposely multiplied the obstacles in the path of his most faithful readers. He eventually decided to collect his papers, but he published only one volume (Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought) and that one rather late-in 1946, one year before his death. Most of his latest and most significant essays were almost impossible to consult outside the large American university

The Forge and the Crucible: A Postscript

Since no author can afford to rewrite his books every ten or twenty years, he is at least obliged to inform his readers of the progress made by recent research. I tried such a critical and bibliographical mise au point while preparing the second edition of my Shamanism.l In the following notes I intend to make a similar mise au point with regard to the religious meanings of archaic and traditional metallurgical practices and the original significance of alchemy. I have discussed these problems more than once since 1935,2 but I will refer mostly to The Forge and the Crucible.3 Approaching the subject from the perspective of a historian of religions, I will not insist on the vast literature published by historians of metallurgical techniques and ancient chemistry. Among such contributions, I will refer only to those containing materials or information relevant to the themes discussed in The

Survivals and Camouflages of Myths

The relations between Christianity and mythical thought can hardly be presented in a few pages. For the fact is that their relations raise several quite separate problems. First of all, there is the equivocal use of the term &dquo;myth.&dquo; The earliest Christian theologians took the word in the sense that had become current some centuries earlier in the Greco-Roman world, i.e., &dquo;fable, fiction, lie.&dquo; They therefore refused to see a &dquo;mythical&dquo; figure in Jesus and a &dquo;myth&dquo; in the Messianic drama. From the second century on, Christian theologians had to defend the historicity of Jesus against the Docetists and the Gnostics as well as against the pagan philosophers. We shall presently see the arguments they employed to support their thesis and the difhculties they had to meet. The second problem is in some measure bound up with the first. It does not impugn the historicity of Jesus but questions

A History of Religious Ideas: Volume 2.-From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity

In volume 2 of this monumental work, Mircea Eliade continues his magisterial progress through the history of religous ideas. The religions of ancient China, Brahmanism and Hinduism, Buddha and his contemporaries, Roman religion, Celtic and German religion, Judaism, the Hellenistic period, the Iranian syntheses, and the birth of Christianity - all are encompassed in this volume.