Eliade Mircea [hot] Review

Following WWII and the Communist takeover of Romania, Eliade fled to Paris. He largely avoided discussing his Legionary past, focusing instead on his academic work. After moving to Chicago, he rarely addressed the controversy publicly.

Eliade’s central thesis, and the pillar of his academic fame, is the concept of Homo Religiosus . He argued that religious behavior is not a symptom of neurosis or primitive ignorance (as Freud or Marx might argue), but an autonomous structure of the human spirit. eliade mircea

For archaic man, time was not a linear progression leading to an unknown future. Instead, time was cyclical. Rituals were not merely commemorations of past events; they were re-enactments. When a tribe performed a harvest ritual, they were not remembering the first harvest; they were returning to the moment of creation, the illo tempore (that time). They were participating in the original act of the gods. This allowed archaic man to escape the "terror of history"—the crushing weight of the present moment and the fear of death and meaninglessness. Following WWII and the Communist takeover of Romania,