Mircea Eliade Quotes (1907-1986)

“Yoga, is a ’science’ of achieving the transformation of finite man into the infinite One, has to be recognized as something intrinsically Indian or, as ’a specific dimension of the Indian mind.’”

“In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.”

“Whereas "false stories" can be told anywhere and at any time, myths must not be recited except during a period of sacred time (usually in autumn or winter, and only at night).... This custom has survived even among peoples who have passed beyond the archaic stage of culture.”

“Myths reveal that the World, man, and life have a supernatural origin and history, and that this history is significant, precious, and exemplary.”

“To believe that I could, at twenty-three, sacrifice history and culture for "the Absolute" was further proof that I had not understood India. My vocation was culture, not sainthood.”

“In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.”

“In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.”

“In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.”

“Psychoanalysis justifies its importance by asserting that it forces you to look to and accept reality. But what sort of reality? A reality conditioned by the materialistic and scientific ideology of psychoanalysis, that is, a historical product...”

“While a modern man, though regarding himself as the result of the course of Universal History, does not feel obliged to know the whole of it, the man of the archaic societies is not only obliged to remember mythical history but also to re-enact a large part of it periodically. It is here that we find the greatest difference between the man of the archaic societies and modern man: the irreversibility of events, which is the characteristic trait of History for the latter, is not a fact to the former.”

“In Dhaka, Muslims have started riots with the complicity of the police. They attacked the houses of the Hindus, raped the women and slaughtered all those who resisted. They burned down whole neighbourhoods under the eyes of the policemen. These only intervened when a Hindu grabbed a weapon to defend himself. In that case, they entered the house, seized the weapons and arrested the men. The Muslims were armed; they on their part did have that right. All attempts by Congress to brng them to peace have failed.”

“In Dhaka, Muslims have started riots with the complicity of the police. They attacked the houses of the Hindus, raped the women and slaughtered all those who resisted. They burned down whole neighbourhoods under the eyes of the policemen. These only intervened when a Hindu grabbed a weapon to defend himself. In that case, they entered the house, seized the weapons and arrested the men. The Muslims were armed; they on their part did have that right. All attempts by Congress to brng them to peace have failed.”

“In Dhaka, Muslims have started riots with the complicity of the police. They attacked the houses of the Hindus, raped the women and slaughtered all those who resisted. They burned down whole neighbourhoods under the eyes of the policemen. These only intervened when a Hindu grabbed a weapon to defend himself. In that case, they entered the house, seized the weapons and arrested the men. The Muslims were armed; they on their part did have that right. All attempts by Congress to bring them to peace have failed.”

““Marx enriched the venerable myth by a whole Judaeo-Christian messianic ideology: on the one hand, the prophetic role and soteriological function that he attributes to the proletariat; on the other, the final battle between Good and Evil, which is easily comparable to the apocalyptic battle between Christ and Antichrist, followed by the total victory of the former. It is even significant that Marx takes over for his own purpose the Judaeo-Christian eschatological hope of an absolute end to history;…”[38]”

“The worldly man lives in society, marries, establishes a family; Yoga prescribes absolute solitude and chastity. The worldly man is “possessed” by his own life; the yogin refuses to “let himself live”; to continual movement, he opposes his static posture, the immobility of āsana; to agitated, unrhythmical, changing respiration, he opposes prānāyāma, and even dreams of holding his breath indefinitely; to the chaotic flux of psychomental life, he replies by “fixing thought on a single point,” the first step to that final withdrawal from the phenomenal world which he will obtain through pratyāhāra. All of the yogic techniques invite to one and the same gesture—to do exactly the opposite of what human nature forces one to do. From solitude and chastity to samyama, there is no solution of continuity. The orientation always remains the same—to react against the “normal,” “secular,” and finally “human” inclination.”

“Carl Schmitt believes René Guénon is the most interesting person of our time. (I don’t believe this always, but often I do. Although I consider Aurobindo Ghose more “perfected.”)”

“Mircea Eliade is preeminent as the scholarly prophet of a "new humanism" that it is hoped will bring man back to the "sacred" Eliade believes pre-modern man to have discerned in "being." … Eliade in his many writings is reminding us of past man's vision of life amidst the sacred that present man must regain if there is to be future man... Eliade the novelist and man of letters and Eliade the scholar and writer of learned tomes are not two men, but one who through his combination of sensitive, empathetic scholarship, and aesthetic appreciation and insight recognized the ultimate nature of the sacrality of being, and the terror of man when the sense of that sacrality is lost.”

“The breadth and depth of Eliade's learning, which astonished all who met him, his reverence toward the tradition he studied, and his intense, infectious enthusiasm, were an assurance that, if anyone could find what was religious about religion(s), he could. I believe the record shows that he could not. As a result, we now know a great deal more about religion(s) and we can ask totally new questions about it/them.”

“Like Freud and Jung and Rudolf Otto, all of whom contributed deep strands to his work, Eliade argued boldly for universals where he might more safely have argued for widely prevalent patterns. Yet many of the patterns that he identified in religions that spanned the entire globe and the whole of human history — a span that no one has ever known as well as he did — inspired an entire generation of both scholars and amateurs of the study of religion, and they still prove useful as starting points for the comparative study of religion and still hold water even after the challenges posed by new data to which Eliade did not have access. His concept of hierophany, the sudden irruption of the sacred in the profane world, sacred time opening to the transcendent, resulting in radical discontinuities, has proved a far more widely applicable and heuristic term than the older, narrower term "theophany," denoting the manifestation of a god. And his argument that religious forms, particularly myths, are usefully studied in popular culture as well as in the great scriptures is a postmodern idea that he formulated long before postmodernism. He taught us that myths (and, to a great extent, rituals) retold and reenacted in the present transport the worshipper back to the world of origins, the world of events that took place in illo tempore, "in that time"; this basic idea of what he called (after Nietzsche) "the eternal return" has become a truism in the study of religion and does, I think, apply to many mythologies, though not, as Eliade claimed, to all. His ideas about the alternation and interaction of cosmos and chaos, and cyclical/mythical time and linear/historical time, the sacred and the profane, are similarly fruitful starting points for many, if not all, cultures. Above all, his insistence that it is possible to find meaningful synchronic patterns of symbolism in addition to the phenomena that are unique to each time and place — this is the foundation on which the entire field of comparative religion still stands, and Eliade laid the cornerstone.”

“Eliade's interest is neither in the concept of profane experience nor in the derived concept of the sacred, but rather in the way these two are actually experienced. It is the phenomenological method that claims to describe these experiences of the sacred and the profane... When Eliade defines myth as a "true story" he is giving us a phenomenological description. For the people for whom the myth is a true story, it is not a figment of the imagination or merely a subjective belief but the perceived reality in which they live out their lives. What constitute's one's life, is the world fraught with meaning and value. It is the living perception of people. That and that alone is what is meant by phenomena.”

“Mircea Eliade was motivated at all times by a deep concern for the future of Western civilisation, which he saw as threatened by possible extinction. He believed it essential that we recognise and acknowledge the archaic and the Eastern contributions to man's spiritual history while there is still time to do so with good grace. Otherwise, by maintaining an attitude of contempt or superiority towards the rest of the world — past and present — we would bring disaster on ourselves and the world as a whole. Eliade's whole life was devoted to trying to save the world's culture by introducing it to itself. … His disciples are legion, and to a large extent he actually created both the academic subject itself and the institutional movement which led to the founding of all the departments and professorships which now abound in the history of religions. But during his entire career one great mystery remained: what did Eliade himself believe? In Ordeal by Labyrinth he admits that he never wished to distract his readers or his students with his own personal opinions, despite his ability to appear to act as an advocate for each religion in turn as he surveyed it. Perhaps this was Eliade's finest and most fitting gift of all: the complete obliteration of his private self in the pursuit of his higher aims. How ironic it is, then, that as a result we will never be able to forget him.”