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Mircea Eliade

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Title: Mircea Eliade


1
  • Mircea Eliade

2
Eliades Background
  • Eliade was born in Bucharest, Romania (1907)
  • In 1925, enrolled at the University of Bucharest
    where he studied philosophy
  • In 1928 he sailed for Calcutta to study Sanskrit
    and philosophy under Surendranath Dasgupta
    (1885-1952)
  • He returned to Bucharest in 1932 and successfully
    submitted his analysis of Yoga as his doctoral
    thesis

3
Eliades Background
  • In 1945 he moved to Paris where his acquaintance
    with George Dumézil, an important scholar of
    comparative mythology, secured a part-time post
    for him at the École des Hautes Études at the
    Sorbonne teaching comparative religion.
  • In 1958 he was invited to assume the chair of
    the History of Religions department in Chicago.
    There he stayed until his death in 1986

4
Thoughts
  • In Cosmos and History The Myth of the Eternal
    Return (1954), Eliade distinguishes between
  • Religious humanity, who perceives time as
    heterogeneous sacred and profane
  • Non-religious humanity, who perceives time as
    homogenous all the same time

5
Religious Humanity
  • Profane time experienced as linear
  • Sacred time experienced as cyclical and
    re-actualizable
  • By means of myths and rituals which give access
    to this sacred time, religious humanity protects
    itself against the terror of history, that
    human existence is a pointless exercise ending in
    oblivion.

6
Religious Humanity
  • In other words, Sacred time always involves a
    return to a paradigmatic mythic time in the past,
    the time of the creation, the Exodus, the Last
    Supper, etc
  • Yet Eliade contended that non-religious humanity
    in any pure sense is a very rare phenomenon.
  • Sacred time usually concealed in the world,
    hidden in myth and ritual

7
Religious Humanity
  • In the Sacred and Profane (1957), Eliade examines
    the Archaic Man, the tribal human who dwells
    continually in the two planes (the sacred and
    profane)
  • Archaic Man believed in the supernatural realm
  • This belief reflected through its actions in
    society

8
What is the Sacred?
  • A Transcendental deity? (Hegal)
  • A wholly other? (Rudolf Otto)
  • A social construction (Durkheim)?
  • Eliade himself repeatedly identifies the sacred
    as the real, yet he states clearly that "the
    sacred is a structure of human consciousness"
  • This would argue more for the third
    interpretation a social construction of both the
    sacred and of reality

9
What is the Sacred?
  • Yet he also defined the sacred as the source of
    significance, meaning, power and being,
    manifesting in three distinct forms
  • Hierophanies (physical representation of the
    holy)
  • Cratophanies (physical representation of power)
  • Ontophanies (physical representation of Being)

10
What is the Sacred?
  • This idea sounds more like Rudolf Otto
  • The Idea of the Holy (1916)
  • The subject experiences the mysterious, awesome
    and beautiful
  • Mysterium tremendum (a mystery that both
    frightens and fascinates
  • Leaves the individual feeling insignificant
  • This feeling the basis of all religions

11
What is the Sacred?
  • Eliade claimed that one of the most important
    senses of a hierophany, an appearance of the
    holy, was as an ontophany, an appearance of
    Being.
  • The location of the hierophany becomes the axis
    mundi.
  • Villagers then builds toward the axis mundi,
    giving order and form to the village

12
Sacred Space
  • "Religious man sought to live as near as possible
    to the Center of the World." (p. 43)
  • "To settle in a territory, to build a dwelling,
    demands a vital decision for both the whole
    community and the individual. For what is
    involved is undertaking the creation of the world
    that one has chosen to inhabit. Hence it is
    necessary to imitate the work of the gods, the
    cosmogony. (p. 51)

13
Imago Mundi
  • "The habitation always undergoes a process of
    sanctification, because it constitutes an imago
    mundi microcosm of the world and the world is a
    divine creation. (p. 52)
  • In this way the original appearance of the holy
    hierophany yields a order of social existence
    ontophany

14
Dwelling with the Holy
  • Why do human cultures engage in this behavior?
  • Eliade thought because Archaic Humanity wanted to
    dwell within the holyto become the holy itself.
  • Yet this behavior only made the separation
    between the holy and humans more profound.

15
Sacred and Profane
  • Eliade assumed that Archaic Humanity wished to
    return to the beginning of time and space to
    live in the world as it came for the Creators
    hands, fresh, pure, and strong. (Sacred and
    Profane, p. 91)
  • Key purpose of ritual to reenact the return to
    the primordialwhen all was sacred.
  • Mythic return rejected with the emergence of
    Judaism and Christianity, claims Eliade.

16
What is the Sacred?
  • So maybe the sacred is more than mere social
    construction?
  • Eliade never clarifies this conflict
  • Instead, suggests that some persons will
    encounter the sacred dimension of a phenomenon
    while others will not based on preparation for
    apprehension (trained to see an object as sacred)

17
From the Sacred to Religion
  • So, if one must be trained to apprehend the
    sacred, this must be the role of religion.
  • Religion is the apprehension of relative worth
    conferred through non-historical realities
    (including all abstract and imaginary entities)
  • Religion is the cause of human behaviors, not the
    effect.

18
From the Sacred to Religion
  • But religion must be revealed and confirmed
    through historical phenomena
  • This dual nature of religion, thought Eliade, was
    a universal dimension of humankind.
  • Myth becomes a paradigmatic model for all human
    activities.
  • From myth, Humans symbolically transform the
    world into a cosmos.
  • Humans desire to live in the sacred to transcend
    subjective experience

19
The Study of Religion
  • Eliade believed that while religions were
    historically bound phenomenon (like Zeus to
    Ancient Greece), all religions operate on general
    forms or archetypes (such as sky god)
  • Scholars can learn a great deal by looking for
    the archetypes or forms and how they change from
    one culture to the next.

20
What of Symbols?
  • Patterns of Comparative Religion (1949)
  • Almost anything can become a symbol when infused
    with the supernatural
  • Dialectic of the sacred
  • Symbols appeal to religious imagination, not
    reason
  • Hence an object can sacred and profane
    simultaneously.

21
Convergence Theory and Symbols
  • Different gods originated as symbolizations of
    different aspects of nature.
  • This resulted in the formation of departmental
    gods
  • sky gods
  • storm gods
  • moon gods.
  • These gods subsequently acquired characteristics
    from other spheres of nature symbolism, so that
    all sorts of blends between the various aspects
    of nature were formed.

22
Convergence Theory and Symbols
  • As tribal communities become agrarian, sky gods
    (distant, aloof, removed, mysterious) transformed
    into storm gods (entities responsible for rain,
    clouds, thunder, fertility, sexuality)
  • Sky gods also could transform to son gods, whose
    actions reflected the cyclic dynamics of life and
    death

23
Convergence Theory and Symbols
  • Water becomes the archetypical movement from
    chaos to order, from pollution to purity, from
    barrenness to renewal
  • Stone serves as the archetypical expression of
    the non-changing, impermeable nature of the sacred

24
Symbolic Thinking
  • Symbolic thinking must display two dimensions or
    features
  • Structural how a symbol organizes elements of
    reality into a system
  • Valuation how symbols are grant worth within
    reality not all symbols are equal

25
Structural Dimension of Symbols
  • No symbol exists in isolation
  • Symbol connect with other images to fashion and
    extend the idea of the sacred
  • Sun god yields symbol of solar disk
  • Symbol carved on walls, worn around neck, paraded
    on a certain day
  • In this manner, the sacred is extended from its
    initial appearance.

26
Valuation Dimension of Symbols
  • Eliade does believe some symbol systems (images,
    myths, structures) superior to others
  • Bigger is better the more complex the symbol
    system the more universal it must be.
  • For instance, Christian mythology incorporates
    numerous symbol systems cosmic tree, son god,
    water, wine, stone, etc.
  • The tendency of myth is to move toward complexity
    through associations with other symbol systems.
    These acquisitions occur in a universalizing
    manner.

27
The Future of Religion
  • Archaic Religion possessed the desire of mythic
    return going back to the beginning of creation
  • Judaism and Christianity move archaic religion
    from a de-evolutionary to an evolutionary view of
    history. Sacred now in history, not nature.
  • This idea of history yields Modern Historicism -
    philosophy replacing religion.
  • In other words, the sacred does not exist in
    either nature nor history. The sacred does not
    exist remember Marx?

28
The Future of Religion
  • But can such non-religious philosophies
    ultimately be satisfying, asked Eliade.
  • Athletics, television, movies, plays, games all
    reflect the concept of the Mythic Return. It
    never left after all!
  • Modern Historicism replaced with a return to
    Archaic Religion.
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