Journal I: 1945-1955 by Mircea Eliade; Mac Linscott Ricketts; Journal II: 1957-1969 by

Mircea Eliade; Fred H. Johnson,; Journal III: 1970-1978 by Mircea Eliade; Teresa Lavender
Fagan; Journal IV: 1979-1985 by Mircea Eliade; Mac Linscott Ricketts; Wendy Doniger;
Autobiography. Vol. 1: 1907-1937: Journey East, Journey West by Mircea Eliade; Mac
Linscott Ricketts; Autobiography. Vol. 2: 1937-1960: Exile's Odyssey ...
Review by: Ioan P. Culianu
The Journal of Religion, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 157-161
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 Book Reviews
ELIADE,MIRCEA.Journal I: 1945-1955. Translated from the Romanian by MAC
LINSCOTTRICKETTS.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 219 pp.
$24.95 (cloth).Journal II: 1957-1969. Translated from the French by FREDH.
JOHNSON,JR. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 343
pp. $12.95 (paper). Journal III: 1970-1978. Translated from the French by
TERESALAVENDER FAGAN.Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1989. 370 pp. $24.95 (cloth). Journal IV: 1979-1985. Translated from the
Romanian by MAC LINSCOTTRICKETTS.Epilogue by WENDYDONIGER.Chi-
cago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 167 pp. $19.95 (cloth).
Autobiography.Vol. 1: 1907-1937: Journey East, Journey West. Translated from
the Romanian by MAC LINSCOTTRICKETTS.Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981. 335 pp. $15.95 (paper). Autobiography.Vol. 2: 1937-1960: Exile's
Odyssey.Translated from the Romanian by MAC LINSCOTT RICKETTS. Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988. xxi+224 pp. $19.95 (cloth).
RICKETTS, MAC LINSCOTT.Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907-1945. East
European Monographs, Boulder, no. 248. 2 volumes. New York: Distributed
by Columbia University Press, 1988. 1,453 pp. $207.00 (cloth).
Before the publication in English translation of all of Mircea Eliade's autobio-
graphical works (the diaries and the autobiography) was concluded, Mac Linscott
Ricketts, Eliade's translator from Romanian, has written the definitive work on
Eliade's Romanian past, based not only on commonly accessible sources, but on
over 1,000 newspaper articles published by Eliade between 1921 and 1937, of
which many had never been collected in a volume. Ricketts's 1,500 page mono-
graph sheds light on the many events Eliade himself omits from his autobiogra-
phy and is therefore a necessary complement to understand a complex period in
Romanian history, a period in which Eliade seemed to be more involved than his
own recollections would let us suspect. The diaries, first published in French,
begin in 1945 and end in 1985, a few months before Eliade's death, on April 22,
1986. For Eliade, 1945 did not mark an end only-the end of the war (which he
spent mostly in Lisbon, miraculously sheltered from the evil that involved most
of his fellow Europeans)-but a beginning as well: the beginning of his exile,
which he repeatedly compares with the adventures of Odysseus. And, indeed, far
from his Ithaca, the beloved city of Bucharest that he would never see again,
Eliade undergoes many ordeals but, like the character of the Homeric epics, tri-
umphs and reaches international recognition. For thirty years (1956-86), he and
his devoted wife Christinel enjoy the quiet of the campus of the University of
Chicago, moving onto Woodlawn between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-seventh Streets,
spending all summers in Paris and elsewhere, attending innumerable confer-
ences, during which time Eliade becomes the most popular historian of religions
ever, with the exception of Sir J. G. Frazer. His work is imposing and may even,
all things considered, exceed Frazer's in length and certainly in depth. As a nov-
elist, Eliade is productive, but his fiction does not catch on in the United States.
Altogether we can count over fifty volumes between history of religions, essays,
autobiographical works, and fiction. Eliade wrote in two languages and only
occasionally in English. The language of his scholarly work is French, whereas
the language of his journals, autobiographies, and fiction is Romanian. This
keeps him closer to his roots than emigrant writers who adopt another language
than their native one. On the one hand, this poses a riddle: Eliade's Romanian

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past remains enigmatic, no matter how many efforts to explain it; and, on the
other, this makes the writer's reception by a Western audience more difficult.
Eliade's diaries are fresh and charming as you suspect that they come directly
from slips of paper forgotten in ajacket pocket, on which, one senses, the author
wrote down something that appeared to him as a crucial thought while the Paris
Metro was driving from Abbesses to Chitelet; or from his desk, where he contin-
ues to read with relentless enthusiasm for over seventy years all sorts of books-
thousands of them-by preference, on religion. In his scholarly work, as well as
in his diaries, Eliade insists on the process of inner transformation undergone by
the scholar of religion while being exposed to mentalities that are far from his
own. Even if such formative hermeneutics does not seem to work with most histo-
rians of religions, it certainly worked with Eliade himself. Besides religion, Eliade
read journals and fiction. He liked to be in the company of the greatest and had
chosen Goethe as his model. Both of them had been enfantsprodige, both of them
had reached success later, both of them had gone through a turbulent youth to
emerge later to the shore of a balanced and controlled maturity. Perhaps more
than Goethe himself, Eliade loves what is natural, hates what is contrived, and
does not understand those writers like Joyce who live and act like pawns in their
own long-term strategy for the conquest of glory. To understand this one should
again go back to his "Romanian roots."
Eliade is a living illustration for at least two of the most disputed questions of
literary history and criticism: To what extent are we the product of a certain his-
torical setting? And to what extent is any reading of any literary product just a
"mistake" or, to put it in Harold Bloom's terms, the result of "creative mispri-
sion" on the reader's part? Whoever makes the effort of reading in parallel
Eliade's own autobiographical material with Ricketts's monograph, projecting
Eliade's Romanian existence against the backround of history, realizes that
Eliade is undisputably the child of his zeitgeist. With this discovery goes another
one: that, by ignoring how much Eliade was immersed in the Romanian climate
between the two World Wars, one inevitably misses the contextual meaning and
significance of his work, reading it from new perspectives.
Is it possible to revert to the original setting and restore to one's work lost con-
textual meanings? Whereas the literary critic may deny such possibility, it is the
historian's claim that "misprision," no matter how creative, is always foggy and
often inaccurate. While it is certainly possible to read Shakespeare from an exis-
tentialist and/or political perspective, it is not possible to read him at all without
knowing the meaning of many words since disappeared from the English lan-
guage or semantically modified. And, if one may claim that Spenser's Faerie
Queene has a meaning of its own out of any cultural context, its reading can only
gain considerably from the knowledge of the existence of a society that adulated
Queen Elizabeth I into worship and beyond.
Eliade's autobiographical work also illustrates a third vexed point in literary
history: that the historian is at a certain advantage to understand the dependence
of an author on his or her zeitgeist; what the author may totally ignore, the histo-
rian sees emerging from endless parallel series of documents that give expression
to the overt and covert assumptions of a certain cultural period. While the critic
uses "creative misprision" to universalize a serial occurrence, the historian per-
forms the opposite, by integrating into recurrent series cases with a strong indi-
vidual flavor. Goethe's involvement with the Enlightenment was quite different
from ours: to him, the Enlightenment was a set of true statements; to us, it is just
a set of statements characterizing a certain period of the past. Reading Goethe as

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 Book Reviews
a representative of the Enlightenment (or of Sturm und Drang, or again early
Romanticism) may be an uncreative operation, providing less excitement than
any intelligent "misprision." Yet it is the only kind of operation whose legitimacy
is recognized by the historian.
To revert to Eliade, we can follow him through the early stages of his exis-
tence, when no doubt much of the patriotic rhetoric that followed the
euphoria of the unification of Romania in 1918 found way into his family's
house. His father was a career army officer; a successful and supportive uncle was
a career army general. Some of the personal myths that occur in both the Autobi-
ography and the Journals have to do with pieces of rhetoric whose source has
eluded the threshold of the adolescent's consciousness and is experienced as
being "personal." Yet Eliade had just internalized a political debate of the early
1920s, concerning some claims that the Romanian capital should be moved away
from Bucharest, now that the country (called "Great Romania") had three prov-
inces (Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania) with three capitals (Iasi,
Bucharest, and Cluj). Innumerable articles and even books appeared trying to
exalt the "dynamicity" of Bucharest and the Wallachians in general as against the
weakness and dreamy character of the Moldavians. No wonder that Eliade,
whose mother was a "dynamic" Wallachian and whose father was a "dreamy"
Moldavian, felt torn between two tendencies: self-affirmation and self-
deprecation. What is interesting here is that the Eliadean exegesis of this com-
mon puberal crisis depends on internalized sources that the historian can easily
trace back to 1919-21 newspapers.
Eliade's golden period follows, 1921-34, when the dynamic youngster starts
writing innumerable articles, first on entomology and then on religion and any-
thing else, enters the Faculty of Philosophy and is noticed and helped by a pecu-
liar man, Nae Ionescu (1890-1940), associate professor of philosophy. We will
never know to what extent Ionescu's rhetoric influenced Eliade because not
much of the activity of this person with a disdain for writing is known. In the
journals, Eliade hesitatingly depicts his mentor as a womanizer and an intrigant;
in the autobiographies and some articles he insists on Ionescu's vast knowledge
and humaneness, despite an episode, in 1934, on which the two of them have an
argument. An argument that, despite its seriousness, does not lead to a break, for
in 1936 Eliade edits Ionescu's only published volume of essays. Yet class notes of
Ionescu circulated, and one of his courses (on metaphysics) has been recently
published in Paris. Ionescu's rhetoric is appalling for a present-day reader but is
exceedingly interesting for an assessment of Eliade's nationalist beliefs in 1934-
38. The roots of the self-termed "Christian" policy pursued by Ionescu have to
be sought in two articles published in 1913-14 by the Romanian historian
Nicolae Iorga. Called Byzantiumafter Byzantium, the articles showed that the two
Romanian principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia, held imperial claims in the six-
teenth and especially seventeenth centuries, when the patriarch of
Constantinople often sought refuge in one of them. After the 1917 Russian revo-
lution, this glorious episode of Romanian history was repeatedly used toward the
following contrived reasoning: when Rome fell to the barbarians in 476 c.E., the
role of capital of Christendom or "Second Rome" befell Byzantium; when
Byzantium fell to the Turks in 1453, many were the contenders for the title of
"Third Rome:" the Turks themselves, the Russians certainly, and the Romani-
ans. It is, however, obvious that Moscow's claims carried a little more weight
than the Romanians'. Therefore, Romanian ideologists like Ionescu or Nichifor
Crainic do not contend the legitimacy of Moscow's title of "Third Rome" after

159
The Journal of Religion
1453. What they ascertain, starting in the early 1920s, is that the orthodox Rus-
sian empire, after 1917, has been conquered by the red Antichrist. Conse-
quently, a new theory of translatio imperii, passage of the Christian imperial
power, is elaborated by both Ionescu and Crainic in magazines for which Eliade
would later on write dozens of articles. They claim that "Great Romania" is now
ripe to defend Eastern Christendom (which, obviously, is the best and the only
legitimate form of Christianity) from Communism and that Bucharest is ready to
assume the title of "Fourth Rome." Without the knowledge of this astonishing
ideological background, one would be at pains to understand certain debatable
options made by Eliade in 1937, about which more details are offered by Ricketts
than by Eliade's own Autobiography.
Eliade as known by us, the Eliade of the 1960s and 1970s, is one of the most
influential scholars in the fight against racism and ethnocentrism. To find out
that, even if for a short time, his language was that of a lesser known but no less
virulent ethnocentrism, Romanian ethnocentrism, comes as a shock to most of
us. We have to call to our rescue young Eliade, the Eliade of the 1920s and early
1930s, who always made the right choices, spoke up in favor of democracy,
against Italian fascism, against Hitler, and in favor of the Jews attacked by his
anti-Semitic compatriots. Yet his own voice tells us that, especially in 1937, he
got carried away for a while by Ionescu's contagious delirium.
Eliade had spent three years, between fall 1928 and spring 1932, in India, writ-
ing a study on yoga published as a dissertation (in French) in 1936. To this day it
still is a reference work on yoga, which tells a lot about his creativity during that
period, but also about the lack of creativity of both Western and Indian histori-
ans of religions ever since. In India, Eliade had ideally sided with Gandhi's non-
violent independence movement. As Ricketts shows, Eliade superimposed the
image of this movement over the image of the Romanian fascists, the absolute
losers of history, who-incredibly enough-managed even to spend World War
II in Nazi concentration camps together with those they hated most: Jews, Gyp-
sies, and homosexuals. Ricketts believes that Eliade took side with the fascist
movement of the Iron Guard because and only because it was a persecuted move-
ment and claimed to be nonviolent. (The Iron Guard was a terrorist movement
with a strange ritual: as soon as a terror squad had killed a political enemy, they
would surrender themselves to the police.) In 1937, the leader of the Iron
Guard-"Captain" Corneliu Codreanu, according to some a charismatic, accord-
ing to many a mad character-was arrested by King Carol II and later on he was
shot from the back and buried under thirty tons of cement in a forlorn prison
courtyard. This, and the killing without trial of thousands of followers of the
Iron Guard, ensured the movement many supporters among intellectuals with a
democratic past, among whom Eliade himself. Did Eliade ever embrace the
antisemitic tenets of the movement? According to both himself and Ricketts, he
never did.
Why insist at such length on a relatively short episode in a long life? Because
the rest of that life is relatively well known and transparent, whereas it is pre-
cisely this episode that the second volume of the Autobiographyreveals in a
detached tone and without disclosing as much as Ricketts does in a long chapter
of his book (pp. 881-930). A penetrating reader of the Autobiography,Seymour
Cain, remarks: "Eliade never directly forswears his ideological association with
the Legionary movement, and sees its decline and fall as a Romanian tragedy, the
inevitable result of its political naivete, rather than a good thing. He is more like
the fellow-travelers of Soviet Communism who gave up their association but

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 Book Reviews
never repudiated the ideology to which they had given their youthful devotion"
("Mircea Eliade, the Iron Guard, and Romanian Anti-Semitism," Midstream 25
[November 1989]: 27-31, at 29). Cain explains Eliade's condition as being
caused by the ivory tower that surrounded a lifelong "abstracted scholar in-
tent only on his research." And Cain concludes that, from his fascist sympathies,
it does not follow that "Eliade himself was anti-Semitic, in the sense of being a
Jew-hater and seeing in Jews the source of all evil. That was completely alien to
his mind and his character" (Cain, p. 31).
So much for Eliade's political naivete. After the painful slip in youth, Eliade
seems to lose any interest in politics, and the journals enforce the image of a
detached scholar, whose encounters take place in the realm of either ideal or
sheerly mundane interaction, without much political involvement. However, his
abundant production of novellas in Romanian, written in the 1970s and early
1980s, shows that Eliade kept an alert eye on Romanian politics, the only one in
which he took a keen interest to the end of his life. Strangely enough, Eliade
wished to remain a Romanian to the end, although he ended up spending only
one-third of his life in Romania. The most fervid pages of his autobiography con-
cern the characters-colleagues and professors, friends more than foes-who
populated his youth, and especially those early loves that were not denied the tal-
ented, intelligent, and charismatic young and successful writer. Behind Eliade's
entire work looms the nostalgia for Romania, an amniotic Paradise of indistinct
adventure, pleasure, and freedom, from which he was brutally snatched in 1934,
when he realized that polarities were present in that blessed state, and he could
no longer avoid them. He had to take a stand, and there is a point where he rea-
lizes that, because of his allegiance to Ionescu, he took a dangerous one (how
much we wished he said: a wrong one!). But, he adds, this was afelix culpa: for, had
he not been regarded as a fascist sympathizer, he might well have returned to
Romania in 1945, facing an almost certain Stalinist execution. His particularly
keen feeling for the sufferings of the Romanian people might have occasionally
blinded him to the sufferings of others. Yet Eliade was a particularly generous
person, and his journal contains a moving antiracist manifesto in the episode in
which Eliade is at peace with himself, when he realizes that the cat screaming in
the night and prolonging his insomnia would not scream if he did not suffer. The
moral is that, if you can even understand the language of a suffering cat, you can
certainly understand the pain and anguish of a fellow human being. Notwith-
standing the 1937 episode, Eliade as a scholar still remains one of the most lucid
fighters for the cause of the Other, those many who were neglected, oppressed
and misunderstood during the long history of Western civilization. The array of
books of Eliade and about Eliade published by the University of Chicago Press
and other university presses shows that the issues raised by Eliade's work and life
still matter today.
IOAN P. CULIANU, University of Chicago.

TAMBIAH,STANLEYJEYARAJA. Magic, Science,Religion, and theScopeofRationality.

Originally the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, the book retains the style and
pleasing informality of its presentation at the University of Rochester in 1984. In
his first two chapters, Tambiah's topics include the place of magic in the early

161