Download - In defence of Eliade: Toward bridging the communications gap between anthropology and the history of religions

IN DEFENCE OF ELIADE Toward Bridging the Communications Gap between Anthro- pology and the History of Religions

Mac Linscott Ricketts Louisburg College, N.C.

Despite the fact that the anthropological study of the religious life of ‘primitive peoples’ overlaps the researches of certain historians of religions (or ‘comparative religionists’), one finds in the writings of English- speaking anthropologists an almost total absence of reference to the theories of historians of religions. When, by careful searching, one suc- ceeds in locating an illusion to an historian of religions in an anthropological work, one finds, as a rule, either scorn or misunderstanding-or both.

Ake Hultkrantz, Swedish ethnologist and world-renowned student of American Indian religions, recently remarked about this situation with respect to the United States:

. . . There is an important difference in orientation between anthropology and history of religions, and it is particularly felt in the United States where, to my knowledge, the communication between the two disciplines is very po0r.l

What Hultkrantz says about the state of affairs in the States seems equally true of the British scene. British anthropologists seem scarcely aware that historians of religion or comparative religionists exist; or worse, when they are noticed, it is for the purpose of discrediting their efforts at inter- preting anthropological data.a

Academicians are notoriously jealous of their territorial rights, and this fact alone constitutes a formidable barrier against cross-disciplinary understanding. As an historian of religions whose major interests lie in the forms of religion found among preliterate peoples, I suppose I am regarded by professional anthropologists as an interloper-a trespasser in a field belonging to others, which was bought by their fathers at high cost and whose right it is now to till it according to techniques handed down within the family.

But even those anthropologists who are not, on principle, opposed to considering other approaches to their subject seem to have an inbred, irrational intolerance for ‘religionists’, assuming that we have some theological axe to grind which makes us unreliable as scholars. This, I must insist, is not necessarily so. While it has been true of philosophers of religion and many in the field of comparative religion in the past, the history of religions school of today is endeavouring to overcome the

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image of its predecessors and to conduct its researches in a fully objective manner, without presuming, for example, to evaluate the ‘truth’ of any religious proposition or the relative moral quality of any religious ritual.

From my examination of the rare references to writings of historians of religions occurring in publications of American and British anthropologists, I discover that the distrust and disfavour which these writers evidence is traceable largely to their having misunderstood what historians of religion were trying to say. This misunderstanding in part is the fault of historians of religion who have not expressed themselves with sufficient clarity; it is in part due to differences in orientation and purpose between the humanities and the social sciences; and it is due in part, I fear, to the above-mentioned prejudice of anthropologists which has precluded their giving a fair hearing to historians of religions.

As an historian of religions who is very grateful for the work of devoted anthropologists without which my work would be impossible, I find this state of affairs deplorable. It is my purpose in writing this article, which I hope will be read by both anthropologists and ‘religionists’, to help clear the air for a dialogue between the two disciplines by stating the position of the history of religions, correcting the errors in some things that have been said about us by anthropologists, and pointing to ways in which anthropology might be enriched through insights afforded by the history of religions.

Background of the History of Religions When I use the term, ‘history of religions’, I have in mind the methodo-

logical approach that is epitomized in Mircea Eliade of the University of Chicago. Some of my colleagues may object that this is to delimit the term too narrowly, for in fact many who study religions comparatively and historically do not subscribe to Eliade’s methodology or hypotheses. However, if the discipline has a characteristic methodology, it is Eliade’s, and if it has a leader, it is this man, for it is to him that more historians of religions look for direction than to anyone else living.

William Lessa and Evon Vogt, editors of the admirable anthropological anthology, Reader in Comfiaratiue Religioq3 inadvertently disclose their misunderstanding of the history of religions which probably is a wide- spread one among anthropologists when they say (speaking of their choice of ‘comparative religion’ as a title) that theologians and others working in this more traditional and restricted field have substituted lately ‘history of religions’ and ‘phenomenology of religions’ for the older and more familiar term ‘comparative religion’.4 In actuality, so far as Eliade and the ‘Chicago School’ are concerned, much more is involved than a change of nomenclature. Had Lessa and Vogt been properly cognizant of the novelty of the history of religions, they might have seen fit to include selections from Eliade’s work in their broadly eclectic book.5

The history of religions as a distinct discipline traces its origins back about a century to Frederick Max Muller who envisioned and to some extent established a ‘science of religions’ separate from both theology and philosophy. However unlike sociology, anthropology, psychology,

IN DEFENCE OF ELIADE ‘5 and other disciplines which arose in the nineteenth century, the science of religions did not succeed in making a place for itself in the academic world, partly because it could not make up its mind as to whether it was a science or one of the humanities. In Germany the term Allgemeine Religionswissenschaft came into currency; in Great Britain and the United States one spoke most commonly of Comparative Religion in designating studies which embraced all the world’s religions, including those of ‘primitive’ peoples. However, in the United States, at least, ‘comparative religion’ was taught for the most part by men trained in philosophy or one of the theological disciplines, and the usual method was to compare religions as to their value, with Christianity as the standard-to the greater glory of liberal Protestantism, as it usually turned out!

In Great Britain there were, in the early twentieth century among the ‘comparativists’, several prominent diffusionists : G. Elliot Smith, E. J. Perry and A. E. Crawley ; later, the Myth and Ritual school appeared. All of these centred their studies in the ancient Near East, although the religions of primitives were of interest to them also. Of British comparative religionists, Prof. E. 0. James has been most concerned with primitives- although one looks in vain for a well-developed methodology in the many writings of this scholar. Quite recently the name ‘history of religions’ has begun to gain currency in the United Kingdom, as in the Department of Religious Studies at Lancaster, headed by Prof. Ninian Smart.

Joachim Wach, a transplanted German scholar and pupil of Rudolf Otto who taught at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago from 1945 to 1955, did more than any other individual to bring intellectual respect and scholarly standards to the comparative study of religions in America. It was his view that Religionswissenschaft lies somewhere between a purely empirical or descriptive study and a normative one.6 Thus, while he favoured the old German name for the discipline, he hesitated to translate it literally into English as ‘Science of Religion’, lest it be con- strued to be a social science. Due largely to his efforts, the ‘history of religions’ was introduced, both as a name and as a discipline with a self- conscious methodology, into American studies of religion.

Wach was followed at Chicago by Mircea Eliade, by birth a Rumanian, whose reputation as an historian of religions was already an international one before his coming to this country. Under the influence of Eliade and his colleagues, ,Joseph M. Kitagawa and Charles H. Long, the history of religions as a distinct discipline is becoming widely recognized in colleges and universities of North America. For more than a decade now the University of Chicago has been sending out graduates in history of religions who are more or less ‘disciples’ of Eliade, and among them are a small percentage, including myself, whose speciality is in the field of primitive forms of religion.

To date, only a few of these last persons has published anything, and their efforts have attracted scarcely any attention from anthropologists. Charles Long (a graduate as well as a faculty member) has written Alpha: The Myths of Creation7 which was reviewed rather critically by the

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Journal of American Folklore.8 I have published an article on the trickster figure of North American Indian mythology0 which Weston La Barre, an American anthropologist, found interesting but not wholly convincing.1° George Weckman has recently brought out two articles: ‘Understanding Initiation’ll and ‘Primitive Secret Societies as Religious Organizations’.

Inasmuch as Eliade’s pupils have to date made scarcely a ripple on the waters of anthropology, when I speak of anthropological responses to the history of religions I am, for all practical purposes, talking about reactions to the works of Mircea Eliade.

Mircea Eliade Eliade’s writings which should be of interest to anthropologists include

his monographs on initiation, Birth and Rebirth,13 and shamanism, Shaman- ism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, l4 his essays on symbolism and myth, Images and Symbols; I6 Myths, Dreams and Mysteries;ls Myth and Reality;17 The Quest;18 and The Two and the One;lg his early morphological study of religious phenomena, Patterns in Comparative Religions;ao and his ‘popular’ introduction to the history of religions, The Sacred and the Profane,a1 in which he contrasts the traditional-religious ‘mode of being’ in the world with that assumed by the modern man (existentialist, historicist). In recent issues of the journal, History of Religions, Eliade has published studies of Australian religionsza and South American High Gods.a3 These latter articles foreshadow his forthcoming major work on primitive religions in the Wiedenfeld and Nicolson History of Religions series.

Eliade is not, nor does he claim to be, an anthropologist. He has written:

. . . I have never felt myself capable of drafting a ‘purely scientific’ work of ethnography or folklore. I am interested only in the spiritual documents which lie buried in those reams of books published by ethnologists, folklorists, and sociologists. In those hundreds of thousands of pages it seems to me that there survives a world of myths and symbolism which we must learn to understand, in order to be able to understand the situation of man in the Cosmos . . . The effort to know and understand is associated more properly with ‘philosophy’ than with ‘science’ . . .24

His education at the Universities of Bucharest and Rome was in philosophy, especially the philosophy of history. He studied Indian philosophy under Surendranath Dasgupta at the University of Calcutta for three years and observed yoga at first hand in Himalayan ashrams before writing a dis- sertation on the subject of yoga in 1932.

His interest in primitive religions dates from at least 1924 when, at the age of seventeen, he discovered Frazer in French translation.25 Later, this interest was stimulated by his encounter with yoga, which Eliade regards as a pre-Aryan technique of spirituality of great antiquity, and therefore truly ‘primitive’. While teaching philosophy and the history of religions at the University of Bucharest between 1933 and 1940 Eliade,

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among other things, read widely in the older anthropological works of such writers as Frazer, Levy-Bruhl, Mannhardt, Marett, W. Schmidt, Pettazzoni and others. He was fascinated also by the ancient heritage of Rumanian folklore and pre-Roman religion of his homeland.

In 1946 he published his first article on shamanism, ‘Le probleme du chamanismeyas and his Pattern.? followed soon after. Since this date the bulk of his writings have centred upon, or at least have included, data from ‘primitives’, though his interests know no bounds and he writes concerning the entire history of religions.

Thus, although Eliade has not undergone the essential rite de passage required of an anthropologist in this post-Malinowskian era (I mean a period of ‘field work’), he is well qualified to write about primitive religions through many years of study of them. (Increasingly, as time has passed, Eliade has made a point of reading extensively in the primary sources, as a perusal of his recent bibliographies will disclose.) Further- more, as one who knows much about all religions, he is able to see the religious practices and beliefs of primitives in a larger context and from a perspective not available to one whose studies have been more specialized. Indeed, Eliade believes that the historian of religions, because he is familiar with a myriad of forms which religion may take and can see meaningful ‘patterns’ in religious symbols, is able to elucidate the religious meaning of religious data better than any other type of scholar:

The work of deciphering the deep meaning of religious phenomena rightfully falls to the historian of religions. Certainly, the psychologist, the sociologist, the ethnologist, and even the philosopher and the theologian will have their comment to make, each from the viewpoint and in the perspective that are properly his. But it is the historian of religions who will make the greatest number of valid statements on a religious phenomenon a-s a religious phenomenon-and not as a psychological, social, ethnic, philosophical, or even theological phenomenon.2*

Eliade here is alluding to the bed-rock assumption of the history of religions methodology, which is that a religious phenomenon is not to be explained by importing into the interpretation the apriori assumption that religions data have to be ‘translated’ into other terms before they may be studied. To do otherwise, Eliade says, is to miss ‘the one unique and irreducible element in it-the element of the sacred’.2g Just as a study of music seems beside the point if it deals only with the psychological, sociological, physical and historical aspects of the subject, so also the study of religion which never attempts to interpret the religious phenomenon as religious appears to him misdirected. What this special interpreta- tive technique (hermeneutics) is, will, I trust, become more evident in the course of this article.

Anthropological Views of Eliade

Eliade’s publications have not gone completely unnoticed by anthropologists in Britain and America, although they have not received the

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attention they deserve. The American Anthropologist published reviews of Patterns, Sacred and Profane, and Birth and Rebirth,30 and of Sharnanim~.~~ The reviewers were all American anthropologists: William Lessa (the first two books), Dorothy Libby (Birth and Rebirth), and Willard Z. Park (Shaman- ism). The impression I gain from reading these reviews is that the writers are somewhat awed by the range of Eliade’s learning, but that they are vexed by his approach and perplexed about his purposes.

The reviewers say : ‘There were many provocative ideas in this book . . .’ (Lessa on Patterns). 32 ‘He has made what appears to be a brilliant and insightful synthesis . . . A concise work, based on great erudition and a daring translation of varied religious phenomena’ (Lessa on Sacred and Profane). 33 ‘With great skill and learning he summarizes shamanism . . .’ (Park on Shamanism).34 Yet they add: ‘. . . the study has a limited use- fulness’ (Lessa on Patterns),36 ‘. . . beneath a fagade of skilful writing and brilliant speculation one cannot help feeling that it is something of an anachronism. . . A literary effort rather than a work of science or history’ (Lessa on Sacred and Profane). 3E ‘The data are too eclectic and sparse . . .’ and Eliade is guilty of ‘anthropological naivete’ (Libby on Birth and Rebirth). 37 Both Lessa and Park are puzzled as to how to evaluate Eliade’s writings: Lessa calls The Sacred and the Profane, ‘for the anthropologist. . . a strange book’ ;38 of Patterns, he finds it ‘hard to say what the author’s purpose is ‘.30 Park admits his difficulties with Shaminism may be due to his own ‘failure to grasp his (Eliade’s) theoretical framework’, despite the fact that the Foreword to this book contains one of Eliade’s best summations of his methodology; and Park speaks of the book as one ‘unusually oriented toward anthropological materials’.4 O

The first French edition of Shamanism and the English edition of Patterns were reviewed in Man, the former by Brenda Z. Seligman41 and the latter by Lord Raglan. 42 These seem to be the only books of Eliade’s to have been reviewed by this distinguished British journal. Mrs. Selig- man’s essay is a careful summary of the contents of the book and shows a good comprehension of Eliade’s ideas. She offers no criticism of the book’s theses. Lord Raglan’s brief remarks are in an entirely different tone. Raglan refutes Eliade’s belief in the occurrence of High Gods among very simple peoples and accuses Eliade of inconsistency in that he seems both to support and to oppose diffusionism at different points in Patterns. Raglan’s last sentences seem to echo American anthropological opinion : ‘The author is widely read, though chiefly in the older writers, and the book contains many interesting ideas. These are, however, in general presented in such a way as to puzzle rather than enlighten the reader’.43

Most recent textbooks on primitive religions written by American and British anthropologists make no mention of Eliade or of any historian of religions or phenomenologist of religions, but there are three exceptions which I have discovered. Anthony F. C. Wallace in Religion: An Anthro- pological View44 refers briefly to Eliade on page 252, citing a passage from Patterns quite out of context; the citation is contained, surprisingly, in a


paragraph that began as a description of the ‘German historical school’ (sic!). The author also links Eliade with Jung, using his few sentences about Eliade as a transition to a paragraph on the Jungian approach to religion. He also mentions Eliade parenthetically in connection with shamanism.4s The reader of this book learns nothing and gains only false impressions about the history of religions school and Eliade.

Annemarie de Waal Malefijt in her Religion and Culture46 devotes some two pages to Rudolf Otto (an important pioneer in the historical- phenomenological study of religion), whom she thinks had some good ideas, but was not attentive enough to anthropological data; she cites a work by Joachim Wach without comment,47 but seems to know nothing of G. van der Leeuw. Eliade is treated in her chapter on Myth and Ritual.48 The only book of Eliade’s she seems to have utilized here is Birth and Rebirth, and she reiterates the criticisms Libby made in her review in the American Anthropologist, adding only her stock condemnation for all generalizing, theoretical works: it is ‘speculative’. She thinks such comparative treatments ignore ‘ethnographic reality’. One could not have expected much sympathy for the history of religions from this lady!

Most recently, Weston La Barre has made reference to Eliade’s work on shamanism in The Ghost Dance, The Origins qf Religion.40 This anthropologist, who has the commendable habit, evidently, of reading History of Religions (he cites a number of articles published therein), unfortunately and incredibly has misunderstood one of Eliade’s fundamental points about the phenomenology of the shaman, namely, that he is one who has experienced ‘ecstasy’, i.e., the separation of his soul from his body. La Barre confuses this with ‘possession’, which Eliade clearly distinguishes as another phenomenon. While La Barre calls Eliade’s Shamanism ‘the best general source in English’, his own interpretation of shamanism diverges widely from Eliade’s and owes nothing to it.

The American anthropologist Frank W. Young of Cornell University briefly refers to Eliade’s views on initiation expressed in Birth and Rebirth in his cross-cultural study, Initiation Ceremonials.60 Young rightly points to Eliade’s emphasis on the motif of death and rebirth-this is, indeed, one of Eliade’s major points-but he observes that this feature is not one of universal occurrence in initiation rites. He implies, further, that Eliade has stressed this element because he has a Christian apologetic purpose, saying that ‘he is interested in relating the native view to Christian thinking about baptism’. Young’s own approach to the subject is quite different from that of Eliade, and his book is an excellent illustration of the methodological gulf that divides anthropology from the history of religions.

The folklorist Wilson M. Hudson has published a lengthy essay called ‘Eliade’s Contribution to the Study of Myth’, in the book which he edited for the Texas Folklore Society with the incredible title: From Tire- Shrinker to Dragster.61 Hudson used all of Eliade’s books available to him in English-some twelve of them-in preparing his essay. His article, with the exception of the few concluding sentences, consists of a summary of Eliade’s thought given in paraphrastic form. His own remarks at the


end are wholly laudatory, and there is no attempt to evaluate Eliade’s position critically. Hudson’s exposition resembles Mrs. Seligman’s review, and these two are in marked contrast to other anthropological notices taken of Eliade.

I know of no British anthropological books which mention Eliade or owe anything to the history of religions approach. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, in his Theories of Primitive Religions2 missed a good opportunity to discuss the history of religions and Eliade, it seems to me. I. C. Jarvie, who waxes ecstatic over Frazer in The Revolution in Anthropology,53 appears to be a man who would appreciate Eliade, but apparently he knows him not (see below for further remarks on Jarvie). Even scholars of comparative religion, such as E. 0. James, do not appear to be familiar with (or sympathetic to) Eliade and his school. One British anthropologist, however, has focused his attention on Eliade and it is to Edmund Leach that we now propose to turn.

Edmund Leach’s Review

I have held until last in my survey of anthropological comments on the history of religions the review of Leach’s called ‘Sermons by a Man on a Ladder’.64 Ostensibly a review of The Two and the One,55 the article deals also with nine other books by Eliade. Leach’s essay is a bellicose, vicious, ad hominen attack on Eliade and is shot through with errors and half- truths. Nevertheless, I feel I must take this article seriously, inasmuch as Leach is a prominent figure on the British anthropological scene. While Leach has a reputation for biting sarcasm and verbal assassination which his informed readers would take into account in the case of this review, anyone not familiar with Eliade’s writings at first hand would be led by Leach’s review to dismiss Eliade as a dilettante and poseur. Eliade deserves a better reputation than this!

In the course of his tirade, Leach makes about four serious criticisms with which I shall deal shortly. But first I wish to answer several untrue and unjustified charges brought by the reviewer. Leach thinks that Eliade ‘takes for granted the Levy-Bruhl fashions of his youth’, while the truth is that Eliade consistently has set himself in opposition to Levy-Bruhl’s thesis (about a ‘pre-logical mentality’), holding rather that the mind of man has been always the same in its capacity for logical thought and religious experience. 66 In 1963 Eliade had made explicit his views on Levy-Bruhl in his essay, ‘History of Religions in Retrospect: rgr2-6z’,57 but Leach, evidently, was not familiar with this essay. Still, the fact that Eliade takes with seriousness the religious expressions of primitives, and speaks often of the ‘logic of symbols ‘5s should have been sufficient evidence to inform Leach of Eliade’s true position on the question of ‘primitive mentality’. Eliade emphasizes the creativity of primitive man, especially in spiritual or religious beliefs, myths, rituals, etc., in the essay, ‘On Under- standing Primitive Religions’.5e

Leach quips that Eliade’s recent English language books, translated from the French, are ‘revamped versions’ of earlier works written in

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Rumanian or bad French. Leach could not have said this, had he known the real content of the earlier versions: he is just guessing on the basis of similarity of titles. Eliade has been interested in yoga and alchemy since the 1930’s, but the books he published on these topics in those years differ substantially in content and viewpoint from the more recent pro- ducts of his mature years. The new books are considerably more than ‘revamped versions’.

Among his numerous personal innuendos, Leach accuses Eliade of deliberately changing the titles of his books in different editions in order to boost sales by ‘selling the same pup twice’. The different titles, in fact, are due in some instances to the wishes of the publishers or to the circum- stance that the work is a new book, not just a new edition. A unique situation occurred when Harper published a Torchbook edition of the Pantheon book, The Myth of the Eternal Retum.60 Eliade explains in the new Preface that he has chosen to restore the title he originally intended for the book, Cosmos and History, but which the first publisher did not approve. Leach must have read this, and he might have given Eliade the benefit of the doubt in other instances. His charges that Eliade has attempted to defraud the book-buying public amount, it seems to me, to libel.

Unimpressed by Eliade’s extensive bibliographies, Leach concludes from them rather that Eliade is ‘probably learned in only a rather super- ficial sense’, and he accuses him of ‘scrabbling through indices’ to find usable references. He implies that Eliade is trying deceptively to impress people by pretending to an ‘enormous erudition’ which he does not possess. How anyone who has read as many of Eliade’s books as Leach professes to have done could think Eliade not a widely and deeply read man, I do not know. There is no doubt that he is well-informed on a vast number of subjects-far more, I dare say, than is his illustrious critic!

Leach thinks he has caught Eliade in an act of self-contradiction, but instead it is Leach who has made the faux pas. He cites Eliade’s rejection of the ‘Robertson-Smith (sic!) totemic communion theory of sacrifice’, and then quotes Eliade’s acceptance of Volhardt’s and Jensen’s theory of cannibalism as a ritual re-enactment of a myth of primeval murder. (Actually, Eliade’s point in the first instance was to refute Freud’s ‘primeval patricide’ theory which was based in part on W. R. Smith.) The two theories (W. R. Smith’s and Freud’s on the one hand, and Volhardt’s and Jensen’s on the other) have to do with quite different matters. There is no inconsistency whatsoever in rejecting the ‘totemic sacrifice’ theory and accepting the thesis that the practice of cannibalism and sacrifice by root-crop cultivators are ritual reinactments of a myth of a murdered divinity.

The other objections Leach raises against Eliade’s work may be reduced to four items, which include also the criticisms heard in American anthropologists’ reviews of Eliade’s books, and that of Lord Raglan. All of them have some basis in fact and therefore deserve discussion. Some of them pertain to the history of religions in general. These objections have to do with:


I. Eliade’s basic methodology : what he means by ‘history’, ‘structure’, ‘phenomenology’; and how he combines them and for what purpose.

2. Eliade’s alleged ‘Jungianism’. 3. Eliade’s alleged religious prejudice. 4. The scientific value of Eliade’s theories for modern anthropology.

Let us look at each of these in turn.

Eliade’s Basic Methodological Principles Over the years Eliade has been striving to evolve and refine his methodo-

logy which he calls the ‘history of religions’. The main principles upon which he operates already were established by the time of the writing of his Trait4 d’histoire des religions (first published I 949). In this work we find Eliade discussing religious phenomena typologically under headings such as: ‘The Sky and Sky Gods’, ‘The Moon and its Mystique’, ‘The Waters and Water Symbolism’, ‘Earth, Woman, Fertility’, and the like. Eliade calls this a morphological approach in which he delineates the ‘structures’ of the essential symbolisms or systems underlying the various actual symbols. This approach also is known as phenomenological, although strict phenomenologists are not, as Eliade is, interested also in the ‘history’ and existential particularities of the ‘types’. Because Eliade is concerned with more than morphology or phenomenology, he has spoken of his method as ‘history of religions’ : this was, as we note, the term used in the original title of Patterns in Comjarative Religion.

The reference to history has confused more than one anthropological reviewer of Eliade’s work. Lessa, for example, says of The &wed and the Profane: ‘While claiming to be an introduction to the history of religions, there is no history in this work except some dubious assumptions regarding the sequences through which man and religion have passed’.61 The author has not understood Eliade when he says: ‘This little book, then may serve as a general introduction to the history of religions . . . But it is not a study in the history of religions in the strict sense, for the writer, in citing examples, has not undertaken to indicate their historico- cultural contexts’. 6a Such misunderstanding is not surprising; sometimes Eliade uses the expression ‘history of religions’ to mean his total methodology, and at other times he uses it ‘in the strict sense’ meaning historiography or culture history. ‘History of religions’ is really quite inadequate as a title for what might, more precisely and descriptively, be termed the ‘comparative hermeneutical phenomenology and morphology of historical religious phenomena’ ( !). A methodology as complex as that of Eliade’s is not easily subsumed under any rubric, and if a simple expression is desired, ‘history of religions’ will serve-though I myself should prefer something more descriptive, such as ‘hermeneutics of religions’.

What Eliade wishes to emphasize in his chosen nomenclature is that he deals with historical (or empirical) facts, i.e., with existential realities. Religion has to do with the manifestation of Being, but no religious datum is a pure one (a Platonic Idea) ; it is of necessity historically expressed and therefore historically conditioned. 63 Eliade wants it understood that he is


not a philosopher dealing in abstractions, but that he is, in part, an historian concerned with the actual manifestations of the sacred in ‘history’.

His interest in the history of religious forms (their chronological developments) has led Eliade to study closely the German-language culture-history researches of the Graebner-Schmidt and Frobenius- Jensen schools. These schools never have enjoyed much prestige in English-speaking lands, and British and American anthropologists are quickly ‘turned off’ when they find Eliade putting considerable trust in these theorists. In the interest of better relations with anthropologists where they teach, British and American historians of religions would be well advised to show less interest in the Germans and Austrians than has Eliade !

Nevertheless, it is easy to exaggerate Eliade’s reliance upon theories of the ethno-historians. Like them, Eliade believes that the pre-history of mankind’s religion ought to be, and can to some extent be recovered through the study of contemporary primitive peoples. He recognizes the hazards of this undertaking, but he thinks it is a task well worth attempt- ing-even though historical scholarship can never uncover the origin of religion as it once hoped to do. 64 But even though Eliade has devoted considerable effort to questions of historical phases of religious phenomena, historiography is not his chief objective. His views are clearly set forth in his Foreword to Shamanism. The entire essay ought to be consulted, but the following extract will give the gist of his position on ‘history’ in the ‘history of religions’ :

Though a history of religion exists, it is not, like all other kinds of history, irreversible . . . No ‘form’ is exempt from degradation and decomposition, no ‘history’ is final . . . (Likewise) any cultural moment whatsoever can provide the fullest revelation of the sacred to which the human condition is capable of acceding. . . The very fact of this reversibility is important, for it is not to be found elsewhere. This is why we tend to remain uninfluenced by certain results attained by historico-cultural ethnology. The various types of civilization are, of course, originally connected with certain religious forms; but this in no sense excludes the spontaneity, and in the last analysis, the ahistori- city of religious life. For all history is in some measure a fall of the sacred, a limitation and diminution. 65

Eliade, then, is interested in whatever light the Kulturkreiselehre can shed on the history of religious forms, but he will not accept the proposition that the essential forms qf the sacred are a product of history. The sacred, for Eliade, manifests itself in innumerable symbolic forms in history, but the ‘archetypal’ forms to which they point are a part of the nature of things; the human condition as such and reality as such. And religion, for Eliade, always has to do with fundamental life situations- though, of course, these are modified to some extent by ‘history’.

The necessity of the ‘historical’ study of religion is stressed by Eliade as


the only means to the end of discovering the ‘trans-historical’ meanings of religious phenomena. ‘The historian of religions does not reach a comprehension of a phenomenon until after he has compared it with thousands of similar and dissimilar phenomena . . .‘66 It is this Herculean task that Eliade has set for himself and other historians of religion which, he thinks, makes historians of religions better interpreters of religious phenomena than any other kind of scholar. Their familiarity with a vast ocean of religious symbols enables historians of religions to recognize significant configurations of form and meaning which in turn shed light on the individual symbolic expressions.

Raglan and others have been confused by Eliade’s combination of historical and phenomenological method, and this is understandable. One usually meets with these methodologies separately, but in my opinion it is the glory of Eliade to have been able to make a synthesis of them. Eliade’s critics wish him to be one or the other; phenomenologist or historian; but Eliade insists on being both because (I believe) he sees his methodology as paralleling the paradox of the hierophany : the sacred (ahistorical, eternal) which manifests itself always through the profane (historical, temporal).

Leach’s remarks about confusion in Eliade’s methodology touch on the above issue (which has been a problem for others), but Leach’s main contention has to do with Eliade’s concept of ‘structure’ in religious symbolism. When Eliade speaks of ‘structures’ he is using the term as a phenomenologist to refer to the essential form (archetype) or ‘shape’ which he professes to discover underlying a group of symbolic expressions. Leach, following the ‘structuralism’ of Levi-Strauss, understands structure as having to do with functional relations among symbols, not with their form or content. Thus he thinks that Eliade has confused content with structural analysis, particularly in his treatment of the ‘coincideruia oibpositorum’ and other pairs of opposites. Eliade looks for meaning in the content of the symbols; Leach this the only meaning is in their binary relationship. Leach believes we should ‘attach importance to structural relations rather than to symbols as such; the ladder, the boat, the bridge are all ‘the same’ because they do the same thing, they link two worlds. But in Eliade’s Jungian scheme it is the symbol per se that matters . . .’

There would seem to be no way to settle this difference of opinion about the meaning of symbols except by an examination of the evidence: that is, by a study of the symbols themselves, as interpreted by the history of religions and by structuralism. One will then have to decide for himself which approach yields a more convincing analysis. My vote goes to the history of religions, since I find the content of human activities to be meaningful in itself.

Eliade and Jung

Eliade’s methodology is seen by many to be strongly influenced by Jungian ideas, especially to Jung’s concept of the archetypes of the col- lective unconscious. Leach repeatedly calls Eliade a Jungian, pointing

IN DEFENCE OF ELIADE 2.5

to Eliade’s association with the Eranos circle at Ascona (since 1950) and the publication of several of his books by the Bollingen Foundation as external proofs of what Leach thinks is obvious in Eliade’s views themselves.

Unquestionably, Eliade is more sympathetic toward the psychology of Jung than to that of Freud, but, as Eliade has tried to make clear on several occasions, he is not a disciple of the Swiss depth psychologist. He has stated:

It is useful and fruitful to draw comparisons between the two uni- verses of the historian of religions and of the depth psychologist res- pectively. But there can be no question of confusing their frames of reference, nor their scales of value, nor, above all, their methods. e7

That is, Jung has a sphere in which he, as a psychologist, operates, and Eliade has another as an historian of religions. But whereas most psychologists have reduced religion to something else, Eliade believes Jung has not. ‘Jung was convinced that religious experience has a meaning and a goal, and, accordingly, that it must not be “explained away” by reduction- ism’. 6* Eliade can say, therefore: ‘The greatest merit of C. G. Jung is that he has gone further than Freudian psychoanalysis on the plane of p~chology itself, and has thus restored the spiritual significance of the Image’.6g

In his new preface to Cosmos and History Eliade explains that his concept of the ‘archetype’ owes nothing to Jung, but that he uses the term in the older, more general sense of ‘exemplary model’, as first employed by Augustine (pp. vii-ix). This statement holds true for all Eliade’s writings in which he has used the term as his own, with the exception of the essay, ‘Symbolism and History’ (published as the fifth chapter of Images and Symbols) in which the Jungian sense seems meant at least in some instances. The problem is that in many cases Eliade’s usage of ‘archetype’ will bear a Jungian interpretation, although Eliade did not intend it when he wrote. In the past ten years or so the term archetype occurs only rarely in Eliade’s writings, and we find instead ‘paradigm’, ‘model’, or ‘examplary pattern’. Presumably, Eliade has abandoned the other term to avoid its confusion with Jung’s concept.

However, despite Eliade’s disclaimers to a Jungian label, there is no doubt that his thought closely parallels Jung’s at a number of points. Eliade’s morphology, as we have seen, calls for the classifying of symbols into ‘systems’ which express ‘archetypes’. Jung says the same thing, except that he also explains how these archetypes arose and where they ‘reside’, whereas Eliade, in Patterns at least, does not. But in later writings Eliade sounds even more Jungian. In the Foreword to Images and Symbok we read:

. . . Myths decay and symbols become secularized, but they never disappear, even in the most positivist of civilizations, that of the nineteenth century. Symbols and myths come from such depths: they are


part and parcel of the human being, and it is impossible that they should not be found again in any and every existential situation of man in the Cosmos. TO

Similarly, in Sacred and Profane: ‘Profane man is the descendent of homo religiosus and he cannot wipe out his history-that is, the behaviour of his religious ancestors which has made him what he is today . . .“I And in Birth and Rebirth he states that the symbolic forms through which the sacred manifests itself are buried today in the unconscious of modern ‘profane’ man. 72

The evidence is that Eliade has turned more and more since 1950 toward Jungian psychology for backing of his theories about the persis- tence of symbols through time. His morphology, elaborated in Patterns, lacked an explanation as to why symbol patterns should recur the world over and throughout history with similar meanings. Diffusion alone, he saw, could not account for this, for one still has to say why a symbol or myth should find acceptance in a new culture.73 In Jung’s psychology Eliade found the support he needed: a ‘scientific’ theory and evidence for the universality of fundamental symbols or images. Addressing the Eranos Conference for the first time in 1950 Eliade said:

By directing attention to the survival of symbols and mythical themes in the psyche of modern man, by showing that the spontaneous rediscovery of the archetypes of archaic symbolism is a common occurrence in all human beings, . . . depth psychology has freed the historian of religions from his last hesitations.74

From what hesitations? Obviously, hesitations about speaking of universal patterns of symbolism-hesitations which, I believe, Eliade had felt up to that time about his earlier theories.

Yet, Eliade has hardly accepted Jungianism whole. Despite the seriousness with which Jung takes religion, Eliade is not ready to give over the interpretation of religion even to Jungian psychologists ! Writing of the ‘fallacy of demystification’, Eliade says:

It would be useless, because ineffectual, to appeal to some reductionist principle and to demystify the behaviour and ideologies of homo religiosus by showing, for example, that it is a matter of projections of the unconscious . . .75

He still believes that the historian of religions is better situated for inter- preting religious symbols than the psychologist or anyone else, for ‘it is in the history of religions that we meet with the ‘archetypes’, of which only approximate variants are dealt with by psychologists and literary critics’. 74

The process of healing accomplished through depth psychology is one which lies parallel to religious experience, but the two are not to be identi- fied, in Eliade’s view. In the case of a tree, for example, Eliade says:

By emerging into his dreams, the image of the Tree has ‘saved’ the man only in part from his individual predicament . . . (It) has not

IN DEFENCE OF ELIADE 27 succeeded in revealing the universal, and therefore has not lifted the man up to the plane of the Spirit, as religion, however rudimentary, always does.71

(Whether or not this statement actually says anything about the religious experience that Jung does not claim for the individuation process is, I think, debatable; but for Eliade, there is a difference).

Eliade has postulated above the unconscious and conscious levels of the psyche a higher, ‘transconscious’ plane (sometimes called the ‘super- conscious’, a term used also by certain Vedantins-people whom Eliade does not ordinarily seem to follow). What Eliade means by this term, which he used as early as Patterns,18 is by no means certain. It appears to designate a special zone of the psyche in which the highest types of religious experiences occur. Eliade may have postulated this ‘region’ to avoid locating the religious life in the unconscious-where it would of necessity have to be totally irrational. He discusses the transconscious, at any rate, in conjunction with the ‘logic of symbols’, arguing that if symbols were simply of the unconscious they would not agree so closely as they do with the creations of the rational religious genius. Jung’s concept of the Spirit, or that of the ‘transcending function’, would probably correspond to this idea, but Eliade has not made the equation and he seems rather to regard this concept as one which separates his views from those of all psychologists.

I conclude, then, that those who say Eliade is a Jungian are at least partially right, though Eliade himself disclaims it and seems to have worked out his theories prior to about 1950 without reference to Jung. In fact, however, Eliade probably is closer to Jung in his theories than he realizes. Nevertheless, a simple Jungian Eliade definitely is not !

Eliade’s Religious Bias Leach is the only critic to charge Eliade specifically with religious

bias, although it is safe to assume that others think as does he. (Frank Young comes close to doing so.) The fact that Eliade uses obviously ‘religious language’ and refuses to ‘demystify’ the religious life of man, makes him very suspect in the eyes of the social scientists. To Leach, he talks like an ‘enlightened prophet’, and he calls him (metaphorically) a Jesuit-a very damning label in England!-because ‘he is a scholar and a believer at the same time’. That he teaches in a ‘theological faculty’, that among his publishers are Roman Catholic presses (Sheed and Ward; Harcourt, Brace and World; Herder and Herder), that he does not deny truth in religious phenomena, are facts which seem to confirm the suspicion that, as Leach puts it: ‘harsh objectivity is not one of Eliade’s outstanding virtues’.

What Eliade’s personal religious beliefs may be is a carefully kept secret. At least, Eliade has never expressed himself in writing, nor to my knowledge in public orally, concerning his inner faith or philosophy. As an historian of religions, Eliade scrupulously avoids (insofar as it


is humanly possible) interjecting his religious beliefs into his ‘scientific’ works. 7e As a scholar, he employs the epochs of phenomenology, sus- pending judgement upon the data. A Rumanian intellectual who has known Eliade since the mid-thirties, Emile Cioran, says:

. . . Eliade stands, from all evidence, on the periphery of this religion (Christianity). But perhaps on the periphery of euery religion . . . It is impossible to imagine a specialist in the history of religions praying. Or indeed if he does pray, he thus betrays his teaching. . .s”

These are very provocative words, but evidently even Cioran does not know what Eliade believes !

Eliade has, indeed, a bias against certain non-religious philosophical positions which he tends to lump together, ignoring their differences: positivism, historicism, existentialism, and materialism. All of these, Eliade believes, are reductionistic in their image of man, limiting man to a single mode of existence-the physical or the historical-and ignoring or denying other planes such as mysticism and aesthetics on which man traditionally has lived his most meaningful existence. Eliade believes that existentialism and historicism are inadequate philosophies, leading only to despair and nihilism. He is fond of drawing a parallel between our time and that of ancient India (from the Upanisadic era onward), when thinkers became aware of the futility of life seen as mere existence in time-the endless round of birth, death and rebirth. As Eliade points out, Indian thinking did not stop there, but went on to ask, what more is there to man than his historical existence? They found the answer in an identification of their essential being with a transcendent reality: Brahman, Atman, Nirvana, or God. Similarly, primitive peoples refuse to define themselves by their personal histories, but they conform themselves to transcendent, mythical models and engage in recreating, renewing rituals in order to participate in the eternal, unchanging Real.

Eliade has misled some readers by his definition of the sacred as the ‘real’.sl Some have thought that this means that Eliade himself regards the sacred as Reality: that is, that he is making a theological statement. Eliade would deny this. All he means here is that for the belieuer, that which is sacred for him is the Real, the True, the meaningful in an ulti- mate sense. As to what the Real ‘really’ is, Eliade never ventures an answer: such a question lies beyond the methodology of the history of religions. To answer that question one must go beyond the limits of the history of religions-and speak as philosopher, theologian or perhaps psychologist.

Western philosophy, in Eliade’s view, has become provincial and in existentialism has reached a dead end; it needs enrichment and revitaliza- tion from the storehouse of world religions which will make possible again an interpretation of man as more than a historical being. The history of religions should and must play the key role in this new Renais- sance, if it is to occur. However, Eliade does not specify what the content of the new philosophy or ‘new humanism’ will be or ought to be. Neither does


he advocate any religion, old or new, as the answer to Western man’s spiritual problems, despite his obvious sympathy for a ‘religious’ out- look on life. He seems drawn toward mysticism: he has devoted much attention to the history and meaning of shamanism, yoga, tantrism and alchemy-all of which have in common a goal of conquest of temporality and the ‘human condition’ as such. He insists, however, that these spiritual systems belong to the past and other cultures, and are not suitable for men of today.8a

Anthropologists who fault Eliade for his religiosity (but do not con- sider that their own atheism may be even more prejudicial!) would be surprised to learn that to the conservative Christian mind, Eliade’s work is a real threat, since he seems to see all religious expressions as equally worthy of serious examination. His refusal to put his scholarship in the service of Christian theology, his refusal to make negative judgements against ‘pagan religions’, makes Eliade unreligious in the eyes of many Christians. The uniqueness of Christianity (that God was incarnate in history) is not an absolute thing for Eliade, as we have seen: structurally, it is just another hierophany, an irruption of the sacred into the profane. The novelty of God’s acting in history began with the Israelites.83 Christian liturgical time and Biblical eschatology largely vitiate any claim to uniqueness Christianity might have claimed.** Even Eliade’s declaration that ‘Christianity incontestably proves to be the religion of fallen man . . .‘86 is only an historian-of-religions’ observation, not an evangelical witness.

Eliade’s insistence that religion be treated as religion is perhaps the heart of the offence which Eliade commits in the eyes of social scientists. But to take this position is not to assume a faith-stance! This is only a methodological, hermeneutical principle, as explained above, and should not be misconstrued as a pro-religious prejudice.

Eliade and Modern Anthropological Theory

A recurring criticism of Eliade’s approach is that he does not pay sufficient attention to detail, but engages only in sweeping unproven generalizations. Leach calls Eliade a ‘library scholar’ and says of The Forge and the Crucible that it exhibits in ‘purest form . . . every methodological error of which Sir James Frazer and his contemporaries have ever been accused’. Lessa, too, states that Eliade writes in a ‘Frazerian manner’,*% while Raglan describes chapters of Patterns as ‘collections of facts in the Frazerian tradition’. De Waal Malefijt thinks she has disposed of Eliade by calling him a ‘generalist’; while Libby sees him as a social revolu- tionist who lumps together all non-modern and non-Western cultures into ‘an entity called variously, “archaic”, “primitive”, or “traditional” ‘.*”

There is no denying that Eliade is a generalist-he not only admits to it, but urges other historians of religions to emulate this model**- or that he brings together data from wide-ranging times and places into groups which he regards as having in common an essential ‘structure’ of meaning. To the casual reader the result may seem to resemble the style


of Frazer; but if one looks below the surface and takes the trouble to learn Eliade’s methodological principles, he will see that something greater than Frazer is here !

It cannot be said too often to anthropologists that Eliade is not trying to be one of them. Unless anthropologists assume that theirs are the only possible ways for handling the data drawn from primitive cultures, then I think they have no right to fault Eliade (as Leach does) for using only information acquired from books. If one is going to write general theories, how else can one proceed? (Anthropologists have at times criticized one another for generalizing too much from the one or two tribes which they knew from intimate association.) And why have anthropologists written the books (which Eliade uses) if it is not possible to communicate knowledge through the written word!

Leach objects also that Eliade has not employed the best sources, either through not knowing them or through preference for sources that support his theories. He claims that for Eliade it is enough that ‘what he says should be based on what someone else has put in a book’. Such a statement is quite untrue. Eliade endeavours always to locate the most authoritative sources of information. He usually has a surprisingly good knowledge of the critical problems and disputed issues with respect to whatever he is writing about.

In fact, Eliade has had a life-long horror of dilettantism, having been deceived while still in his teens by a book by Schure, Les Grands In&s, which Eliade took to be a scholarly work and later learned was largely fanciful. Ever since, he has been at pains to go to the primary sources, if possible, or at least to recognized authorities.*0 If sometimes Eliade should not be aware of the latest report on a particular people, or if, on occasion, Eliade may be caught in an error due to his having trusted an untrustworthy source, this should cause no surprise or alarm. Such errors may be made by anyone who writes, and they are especially expected in the kind of ‘generalist’ writing which Eliade does. The amazing thing is that Eliade is so seldom wrong about his facts ! Leach is hard put, I think, to find examples of error in Eliade’s books, and he can come up with only one genuine mistake: Eliade’s citation of Horst Kirchner concerning the relief at Lascaux, where there are, in fact, only paintings.

Leach himself has made one error after another in his review. He is wrong in saying that Eliade ignores the important older writers, van Gennep, Mauss, and Hertz (all of them are cited in his works, the first two quite often), and he most certainly knows about functionalism (Leach has said he does not), and about L&i-Strauss on whom he has some very definite opinions.00

Many of the criticisms of Eliade’s style pertain to his earlier work, Patterns, in which Eliade was, I think, in a way trying to write in the manner of Frazer, Levy-Bruhl, Andrew Lang and others whose works were still popular in the 1930’s. Eliade cites these authors quite often in this book, and it is obvious that he has had his introduction to primitive religion and folklore via these ‘secondary’, popular sources. Subsequently,

IN DEFENCE OF ELIADE 3’ however, in his monographs on shamanism and initiation rites, and in his articles on Australian religions and South American high gods, for example, Eliade utilizes many primary documents of unquestioned worth. Although primitives are by no means Eliade’s only field of study, I believe it would be hard to find anthropologists who are better read, and in more languages, on the subject of primitive religions than is Eliade.

Eliade has expressed a certain regard for Frazer who was able, for several decades, to capture the imagination of the reading public- something which Eliade himself should like to do (notice how many times he says of his books that they are intended for the ‘non-specialist’ or the ‘ho&e homme’) and which he urges other historians of religions to try to do. g1 More often, however, Eliade speaks of the weaknesses of the approach of Frazer and his like, which he thinks he has transcended: ‘. . . We have now gone beyond the “confusionist” position of a Tylor or a Frazer . . .‘g2 Superficially Eliade’s style may resemble Sir James’s: in the same paragraph we may find references to myths and rites from widely different centuries, continents and cultures. The difference lies in the bases on which such comparisons are attempted.

Frazer often was guided only by a (rather fallible) instinct for homo- geneity, it would seem, and at times he must have been led to write by pure verbal association (catch-words). Franz Steiner in Taboos3 cites a classic example of Frazer’s associative method :

Burial grounds were taboo; and in New Zealand a canoe which had carried a corpse was never afterwards used, but was drawn up on shore and painted red. Red was the taboo colour in New Zealand; in Hawaii, Tahiti, Tonga and Samoa it was white. In the Marquesas a man who had slain an enemy was taboo for ten days; he might have no inter- course with his wife and might not meddle with fire; he had to get someone to cook for him. A woman engaged in the preparation of cocoa-nut oil was taboo for five days or more . . .gp

Frazer did not, of course, write always in successive non-sequiturs, but this passage is all too typical. Eliade’s books contain no such strings of unrelated curiosities; on the contrary, illustrations are selected to build up what Eliade calls a ‘symbol system’. A deal of subjective judgement obviously goes into the process; but Eliade thinks that his prolonged association with the data has enabled him to recognize expressions of a basic ‘image’ no matter how far it has diverged from the original, ‘archetypal’ form.

One takes great risks when he attempts to develop general theories as Eliade does. Eliade, however, seemingly must generalize! He generalizes about shamanism, initiation rites, earth-water-moon-woman-plants symbolism, and agricultural religion. His most audacious generalization is his bracketing together of all religious people of all times into one group, and setting over against them ‘modern man’ (the existentialist or historicist), in order to contrast their respective ‘modes of being’ which he sees as diametrically opposed (Sacred and Profane, Cosmos and History).


Such theorizing is, of course, a tour de force-but certainly not to be despised simply because it is an effort to make a synthesis of a vast amount of material.

Conclusion This paper is offered in the hope of stimulating interdisciplinary

dialogue. In conclusion, let me outline a few consequences that I forsee might result from the collaboration of anthropologists and historians of religions. First, what might historians of religions learn from anthropologists? We should learn, at least, to be certain of our facts rather than rushing to generalize and spin beautiful theories largely in abstrac- tion. We should be kept aware of the fact that religion is only, after all, a part of culture, not the whole of it, and that there are other ways of looking at man than as homo religiousus (even if that is the most significant angle !). And we should be kept from becoming provincial (a danger Eliade frequently cites for others!) by being exposed to the searching questions of persons who have some views of their own on religion. What other benefits might accrue can scarcely be conceived.

What, on the other hand, can the history of religions offer to anthropology? Approaching humbly, and in gratitude for the data concerning primitive religions, much of which was gathered by ‘field workers’, I believe that historians of religions could give to anthropologists a new principle that might revolutionize anthropological studies of religion: the idea that religion does not have to be explained away before it can be discussed; that, in fact, it is best understood when treated as a phenomenon set apart (despite its involvement of all of life). We can pass on the insights into religious ‘forms’ and ‘structures’ gained by men such as Eliade; we can bring the ‘religious dimension’ into studies of mythology and folklore. We can, perhaps, teach anthropologists to ask larger questions about their data, and discover more relevance for life in their researches.

I. C. Jarvie, a British philosopher, not long ago wrote about the lack of general theories and ‘ideas’ in anthropology, and he advocated taking a second look at Frazer, saying that he has found him ‘glorious and thrilling reading’. ‘He was a great man with lots of ideas, (and) even his errors were interesting and could be checked by others.‘g6 I cannot share Jarvie’s enthusiasm for Frazer: I believe Frazer had very few ideas and a great many faults; but I think I see Jarvie’s point. I hope that Jarvie has, or will soon, discover Eliade’s writings, and will learn of the history of religions and its ‘ideas’ on the subject of primitive man. Perhaps the rebirth of culture in the West of which Eliade dreams could begin in this encounter of anthropology and the history of religions.

NOTES

I. ‘Anthropological Approaches to Religion’, History of Religions, g, p. 338. 2. As an American I am not well acquainted with the scholarly situation in the British

Isles, but from my reading and a few conversations with Britons, I have come to the above conclusion.


3. 4. 5.

6.

i: 9.

IO. II. 12.

‘3. ‘4. ‘5. 16. '7. 18.

'9. 20. 21. 22.

New York, Evanston and London: Harper and Row. 2nd ed. x965. Ibid. p. 4, note. Eliade’s name is mentioned in a piece by Robert Bellah, a sociologist who is more knowledgeable in the humanities than most of this colleagues. See ibid. p. 74. J. Wach, The Comparative Study of Religion, New York, Columbia University Press, 1958, PP. ‘4 A: New York, Braziller Company, 1963. 78, No. 310, Oct.-Dec. 1965, pp. 352f. History of &Zigions 5, 1966, pp. 327-350. La Barre, The Ghost Dance, New York, Doubleday and Co. 1970 pp. rg5 f., 224. History qf Religions IO, 1970. pp. 62-79. Numen XVII 1o70 pp. 84-w New York, H&per; ig68. - - New York, Pantheon, 1964. London, Harvill, I g6 I. London, Harvill, I 960. New York, Harper, 1963. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, I 969. London, Harvill, I 965.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30, 3’. 32. 33B 34.

;z.

London and New York, Sheed and Ward, x958. New York, Harcourt Brace and Co. 1959. Vols. 6 and 7, 1966-68, published in 1973 as a book, Australian Religions, by Cornell University Press (Ithaca and London). Vol. 8. ‘Fragment Autobiografic’, Caete de Do); No. 7, July 1953, pp. I f. See his autobiography: Amintiri I: Mumurda, Madrid, Colectia Destin, 1966, p. 139. Revue de L’Histoire &s Religions I 31, 1946, pp. 5-52. Originally in French 3s Traiti d’Hi.stoire des Religions, Paris, Payot, 1949, Shamanism, p. xv. Patterns in Comparative Religion p. xi. 1959, Vol. 61. 1965, Vol. 67. American Anthropologist, 61, p. I 23. Ibid., 61, p. I 147. Ibid., 67, p. 1305. Ibid., 61, p. 123.

37. 38. 39. 40. 4’. 42 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Ibid., 6 I, p. I I 47. Actually, this is a very perceptive observation, inasmuch as Eliade is a recognized literary figure among Rumanians and to a lesser extent in France and Germany, having written a considerable number of novels, short stories, and plays in Rumanian, a few of which exist also in French, German and English translations. He has, however, deliberately sought to avoid a literary style in his writings in the field of history of religions (Cf. ‘Fragment Autobiografic’, p. 3). American Anthropologist, 61, p. 689. Ibid., 61, p. I 147. Ibid., 61, p. 122. Ibid., 67, p. 1305. Man, May 1952, pp. 74 f., review of L.e Chamnnismc, Paris, Payot 1951. Ibid., March 1959, pp. 53 f. Ibid., March 1959, p. 54. New York, Random House, 1966. A. F. C. Wallace, op. cit. p. 151. New York, Macmillan Co. 1968. A. de Waal Malefijt, op. cit. p. 244. Ibid., see pp. tg2 ff.

49. New York, Doubleday 1970; see pp. 177, 185-8 esp. 186, etc. 50. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1965 p. 4. 51. Austin, 1968. See pp. 21g-241.

IN DEFENCE OF ELIADE 34 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59,

Oxford, Clarendon Press 1965. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1964. The New York Review of Books, Oct. 20, 1966: VII, No. 6.

London, Harvill 1965. This also appeared under the title: Mephistojheks and the Andrope, New York, Sheed and Ward 1965. Cf. Shamanism p. xvii. Journal of Bible and Religion XXX1 1963; reprinted in Quest (see p. 16). Cf. Patterns pp. 453 ff. In Glaube, Gist, Geschichte ed. G. Miiller and W. Zeller, Leiden, Brill 1967 pp. 4g8- 505.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

1955, Pantheon; 1959, Harper. American Anthropologist, 61, p. 1147. Sacred and Profane p. I 8. Cf. Images and Symbols p. 31; Shamanism, pp. xvi ff. Quest, p. 52. Shamanism pp. xvii f. Ibid., p. xv.-

68. 69. 70. 7’. 72. 73. 74. 75,

Myths, Dreams and Mysteries p. 20; cf. Images and Symbols, pp. 20 f, Myth and Real@, p. 198, and The Forge and the Crutibk, New York, Harper and London, Rider, pp. 192 ff. Quest, p. 22. Images and Symbols p. 14 note. P. 25. P. 209.

P. 138. Cf. Images and Symbols p. 34. Ibid., pp. 34 f. Quest p. 68.

76. Images and Symbols p. 2 I. 77. Myths, Dreams and Mysteries pp. Ig f.; cf. Sacred and Profane, p. 2 I 2.

78. PP. 4509 454. 79. See M. Eliade, ‘Notes for a Dialogue’ in John B. Cobb ed. : The Theology of Altizer,

Cri’tique and Responses, Philadelphia, Westminster 1970 pp. 234-241. 80. ‘Beginnings of a Friendship’ in J. M. Kitagawa and C. H. Long (eds.), Myths and

Symbols; Studies in Honour of Mircca Eliade, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969, PP. 4’3 f.

81. Cf. Sacred and Profane p. I 2, etc. 82. Cf. Yoga p. xvii; Forge and Crucible p. 144. 83. Cosmos and History p. 160. 84. Cf. Images and Symbols p. I 72. 85. Cosmos and History p. 162. 86. American Anthropologist 61, 122. p. 87. Ibid., 61, p. 189. 88. Cf. Quest 58. p. 89. Cf. Amintiri I p. 79; and ‘Fragment Autobiografic’ p. 2. go. See Quest pp. 17, 73, 76 and 132. 91. Cf. Quest pp. 14, 58-61. 92. Images and Symbols p. 175. 93. New York, Philosophical Library, 1956. 94. Op. cit. p. 92. 95. The Revolution in Philosophy, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967, p. 33.

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