ELIADE, MIRCEA

Eliade, Mircea: translation

(1907–1986)

Historian of religions and fiction writer who was born in Romania but lived most of his life as an exile in France and the United States, where he became professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago. Eliade authored the most widely read academic book on shamanism:Shamanism:ArchaicTechniques of Ecstasy(1964 [1951]). In it, he not only presents ethnographic data from many diverse cultures but also marshals them to support a theory about the nature and influence of shamanism. Eliade insists that shamans do not becomepossessedbut rather exhibitmastery of spirits, with whom they engage while in analteredstate of consciousnesscalledecstasythat is interpreted by shamans asjourneying. That is, shamans go to meet and masterother-thanhumanpersonsin variousother worlds. They achieve such states and are supported in such journeys by the use of various standardized “techniques,” includingdrumming, chanting, and forms ofdeprivationand overstimulation. Eliade asserted the ubiquity of a mode ofinitiationin which neophyte shamans weredismemberedand reassembled followingillnessesinduced byspiritbeings whom shamans either defeated or contracted ashelpers.

Shamanism is “archaic” not in the sense of being antiquated or obsolete, but as the primary or foundational religious experience that underliesallother religions. Further, its most ancient and original forms began and continued amonghunter-gathererpeoples, especially those ofSiberia. In fact, Eliade presented a version of Siberian andCentral Asiandata as the “pure form” of shamanism from which all other practices (e.g., those that use hallucinogens) degenerated.When read alongside Eliade’s works about ostensibly different religious and cultural phenomena, it becomes clear that a single project motivated him—namely, the encouragement of an allegedly exalted spiritual practice with which to confront the materialism of communism and, to a lesser degree, capitalism. The religious edifice he constructed is vast, but can be illustrated by his situating of “journeying to other worlds” in the context of claims about the cosmicaxis mundioromphalosthat linksupper, middle, andunderworlds, while allowing a distinction between the ways in which shamans andpriestsmediatebetween the worlds. Eliade definitely (and definitively for manyneo-shamans) privileged journeys to upper-world or celestial realms, again presenting other destinations as indicating degenerate forms of shamanism.

Eliade’s shamanism is a new myth, rooted in some verifiable observations and some misrepresentations of particular local cultures, which he applied universally. Jonathan Z. Smith details some of Eliade’s misrepresentations, such as that of anAboriginal Australian“Dreaming” narrative as being concerned with celestial journeying and authority, whereas it is actually concerned with “terrestrial [earthly, this-worldly] transformation and continued presence.” In abstracting shamans from their local,political, cultural, social, temporal, and other contexts, he both misrepresents shamans (and their practices,cosmologies, and communities) and points the way towardMichaelHarner’s “core shamanism” and similar neo-shamanic practices. Much of his project can also be paralleled in the works and thought ofCarl Jung, who told Eliade at the Eranos Conference in 1952 that “the modern world is desacralized, that is why it is in a crisis. Modern man must rediscover a deeper source of his own spiritual life.” AsDaniel Noelstates, in considering the intimate link between Eliade’s fiction writing and his books about religion, especially shamanism, “The core of soul of the West’s idea of shamanism is not factual at all, but fantastic, fictive, a work of imagination.” Although criticizing Eliade’s willful (re)construction of the “-ism” of shamanism, Noel intends this to encourage a renewed celebration of the powerful “practice of mindful imagination.” In this sense, Noel presents Eliade and Jung as the West’s leading shamans.