Mircea Eliade split human experience into sacred and profane
Mircea Eliade argued that religion begins with hierophanies, moments when the sacred breaks into ordinary life, dividing space and time into sacred and profane. The Romanian scholar became one of the century's most influential interpreters of religion, and also a novelist, though his support for a fascist movement in the 1930s still clouds his name.
Eliade was born in Bucharest in 1907, the son of an army officer who registered the birth four days early so it would fall on the feast of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste. As a boy of about ten he watched German zeppelins bomb the city. He later described entering a drawing room transformed by a strange iridescent light, a moment outside time that he spent years trying to recapture; his student Robert Ellwood saw this kind of nostalgia as a defining theme of his work.
A restless teenager, he sailed a homemade boat down the Danube to the Black Sea, swallowed insects to toughen his will and slept only four or five hours a night, while failing school subjects including Romanian. He taught himself Italian and English to read Giovanni Papini and James George Frazer, and began Persian and Hebrew. He eventually commanded five languages fluently and could read Sanskrit. After studying at the University of Bucharest from 1925 to 1928, he sailed for Calcutta in autumn 1928 to study Sanskrit and philosophy under Surendranath Dasgupta, funded by the Maharaja of Kassimbazar.
In India he fell for Dasgupta's daughter, Maitreyi Devi, and turned the episode into the thinly veiled novel Bengal Nights. His 1933 doctoral thesis on yoga made a strong impression in Romania and abroad. His most influential idea, the eternal return, holds that for religious people myths and rituals do not merely remember sacred events but actually take part in them again.
Back home he followed the philosopher Nae Ionescu and joined the Criterion literary society, whose meetings were attacked by antisemitic nationalists. In 1933 he signed a manifesto against Nazi racism, yet later in the 1930s he repeatedly voiced public support for the Iron Guard, a Christian fascist organisation, which drew criticism after the war. He served as a Romanian cultural attaché in Britain and Portugal, later taught at the University of Chicago, and died on April 22, 1986.
Source: Mircea Eliade
