Eliade, Mircea (1907-1986) Romanian scholar fluent in eight languages who authored seminal works on the history of world religions and mythology. He is perhaps best known for his studies on shamanism, yoga, and alchemy. Eliade also edited the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Religion. The Eliade Guide to World Religions (1991) offers a concise summary of his scholarly publications.
While Eliade’s work is sometimes criticized as being overly selective, one would be hard-pressed to find a researcher who doesn’t practice selectivity.
He is also criticized for superimposing ‘grand theory’ on research data but the apparent inevitability of subjectivity seems to lessen the impact of this criticism.
Eliade also wrote works of fiction, saying that he had no choice when the artistic muse struck him. He simply had to follow and thus alternate between the scholar and the fiction writer. With this kind of outlook it should be no surprise that he was on close terms with C. G. Jung, Joseph Campbell and others of like mind. Eliade’s scholarly views, however, sometimes differed from those of Jung and Campbell, a fact that he handled rather diplomatically in his work. » Abyss, Alchemy, Castanada (Carlos), Comparative Religion, Dyaus, Evil, Exodus, Numen, Numinous
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The story has it that Professor Eliade set his alarm clock every morning at 6 a.m. so he would have enough time to read during the daytime hours.
Comment by wgrant — December 9, 2007 @ 3:43 pm |