Mircea Eliade

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Sacred and the Profane (1957) and The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949).

Hierophany

Mircea Eliade begins with a word of his own making, hierophany: the showing of the sacred. The sacred appears in something of this world, a stone, a tree, a spring, a mountain, a person, and that thing becomes wholly other while remaining what it was. A sacred stone is still a stone; for those to whom it is sacred, its reality has changed. The human being who lives this way he calls religious man, homo religiosus, and for him the sacred is the real, full of power and meaning, while the profane is the merely ordinary.

Sacred space and the centre

For religious man space is not all alike. There is sacred space, strong and significant, and round it the formless expanse of the profane; a threshold divides them, and the door of a temple is the boundary between two worlds. The sacred place is a centre, where heaven, earth and the underworld meet, joined by an axis of the world: a pillar, a mountain, a tree, a ladder. Every temple, every holy city and every house rightly founded stands at the centre of the world, and to settle a land is to turn chaos into cosmos, repeating the gods' creation.

He tells of the Achilpa of Australia, who carried a sacred pole with them on their wanderings, the axis of their world, and took their road from the way it leaned. When once it broke, he writes, the clan wandered without aim for a time, and at last lay down on the ground together to wait for death.

Sacred time

Time too is of two kinds. Profane time runs on and does not return. Sacred time is the time of the beginning, when the gods and the ancestors first did what is done, and it can be entered again: a festival does not remember the creation, it makes it present. Myth tells how something came to be, the world, a plant, a rite, a custom, and to tell the myth or perform the rite is to return to that first time and draw on its power. So the healers of some peoples recite the creation of the world over the sick, since every making repeats the first making.

The eternal return

In The Myth of the Eternal Return he teaches that for archaic peoples nothing is fully real unless it repeats a model given at the beginning. The meal, the marriage, the building of a house and the sowing of a field all imitate the deeds of gods or ancestors; the act that repeats the model is real, and the merely new act is empty. Each year, in the rites of the New Year, the old time is done away with: fires are put out and lit again, sins are driven out with a scapegoat, the dead come back, the combat of creation is played again, and the world begins afresh, as new as on the first day.

Against this he sets the modern sense of history, a line that does not return, in which each event happens once and is gone. That history, he holds, can become a terror: wars, deportations and disasters with no model and no meaning. The archaic peoples defended themselves against it by repetition; Judaism and Christianity gave history itself a meaning, as the field of God's acts; modern man, without either defence, bears it bare.

The technique of ecstasy

Eliade defines the shaman as the master of a technique of ecstasy: a trance in which the soul leaves the body to climb to the sky or go down to the underworld, to find a sick person's lost soul, to guide the dead or to speak with the gods. The shaman is called, often by an illness or by a dream in which the body is torn apart, the bones cleaned and counted and the flesh renewed; that death and remaking is the initiation. The climb goes by the world tree, often a birch notched with steps, and the drum is the mount that carries the journey. The shaman commands the spirits and is not possessed by them. The peoples' own account of the shaman is taught in the branch Shamans and spirit journeys.

He held that the classic trance needs no intoxicant, and that the use of narcotic plants was a later and lesser substitute for it. The house adds that the plants some peoples use are dangerous, are kept within their own rites by their own healers, and are not for imitation.

Enstasis

In Yoga: Immortality and Freedom he describes yoga as the opposite movement. The shaman goes out of himself; the yogin goes in, and the end of yoga, samadhi, Eliade calls enstasis, a standing within. Everything the yogin does runs against the current of ordinary life: the body kept still instead of restless, the breath slowed and held instead of free, the mind fixed on one point instead of wandering, the senses drawn back from their objects. The yogin dies to the life of the senses and is reborn into freedom. The breath practices he describes are traditionally learned slowly, beside a teacher, and never carried to strain.

The forge and the crucible

The smith and the alchemist, in The Forge and the Crucible, share one world of belief. Ores are embryos growing in the womb of the earth, and given time every metal would ripen into gold. The miner who takes them out and the smith who works them break into that slow gestation, and so mining and smithing were surrounded with rites, taboos and sacrifices. The alchemist takes this furthest: he speeds up nature's time in the furnace, doing in a short while what the earth would do in ages, and so takes on himself the work of Time. His operations, the blackening that dissolves the matter and the whitening and reddening that follow, are an initiatory death and resurrection, of the matter and of the alchemist together.

The hidden sacred

The sacred, he teaches, is not a stage in the history of human consciousness but part of its structure, and it does not vanish in a secular age. It hides. Modern people keep the old patterns in disguise: the party on New Year's Eve, the house-warming, the novel that carries its reader out of ordinary time, the hero of the screen, the longing for a lost paradise and a fresh start. Beneath many of them he finds the oldest longing of all, to return to the beginning, when the world was new and whole.