#mircea eliade

[noosphe-re]

The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade

[nousrose]

Symbolic thinking is not the exclusive privilege of the child, of the poet or of the unbalanced mind: it is consubstantial with human existence, it comes before language and discursive reasoning. The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality the deepest aspects which defy any other means of knowledge. Images, symbols and myths are not irresponsible creations of the psyche; they respond to a need and fulfill a function, that of bringing to light the most hidden modalities of being.

Myths and Symbols

Mircea Eliade

[majestativa]

For Bataille, the uncanny aspect of the labyrinth is even more pronounced, and in some regards it directly contradicts Eliade’s understanding of the sacred, even while insisting on that concept’s profoundly ambivalent nature. For Eliade, sacred rites and sacred space lift the religious person out of the world of time and change and into a realm of eternity structured by timeless paradigms and populated by unchanging archetypes. For Bataille, on the contrary, the sacred releases excessive forces that open one to a dangerous temporal flow in a terrified and exhilarated experience of ‘‘horror-spreading time.’’

It is thus the sinister, or left-hand, aspect of the labyrinth that interests Bataille—the aspect of the labyrinth that presents danger, and emphasizes its close alliance with death.

JEREMY BILES — Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form, (2007)

[mioritic]

Writer Mihail Sebastian, ballerina Floria Capsali, Mary and Mihail Polihroniade, actress Marietta Sadova and director Haig Acterian, writer Mircea Eliade, and friends in the Bucegi Mountains, 1932.

Muzeul Național al Literaturii Române

[nosferatu-roberteggers]

“ecstasy being considered a temporary death, for the soul was believed to leave the body […] shamanic initiation includes dividing the body into fragments, renewal of the organs and viscera, and ritual death followed by resurrection, experienced by the future shaman as a descent to the Underworld (sometimes accompanied by an ascent to the sky). […] The shaman is above all an ecstatic. Now, on the plane of archaic and traditional religions, ecstasy signifies the flight of the soul to heaven, or its wandering over the earth, or, finally, its descent to the subterranean regions, among the dead.

The shaman undertakes such ecstatic journeys: (1) to meet the Celestial God face to face and present him with an offering on behalf of the community; (2) to seek the soul of a sick person, which is believed to have wandered from his body or to have been carried off by demons; (3) to accompany the soul of a dead person to its new abode; (4) finally, to enrich his knowledge by conversing with higher Beings […] of his ability to travel in supernatural worlds and see superhuman beings (gods, demons, spirits of the dead, etc,), the shaman has contributed decisively to the knowledge of death. […] we can detect an ancient Thracian ritual of ecstatic (“shamanic"?) ascent to heaven.”

— Mircea Eliade; “Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God” (1972)

“Your husband is lost to you.” // “I’m convinced only you have the faculty to redeem us.” // “In heathen times, you might have been a great priestess of Isis.”

[ur-folk]

Fighting madness is an ecstatic state of mind. Woden's name, which lives on in our "Wednesday," meant fury, but a fury that included a poet's ecstasy: Latin vates, "ecstatic poet," and Irish fáith, "seer, poet," come from the same root. In myths, Woden was the god of the poets. In Old Norse literature berserks spoke poems on the battlefield. These linguistic and mythological rapports give the berserk mind its place in Indo-European intellectual and cultural history.

The mind of berserk warriors in the second millennium BC may have been much the same as that of medieval berserk warriors two thousand years later. The English word "mind," related to "mania," comes from the same root as the Sanskrit manas and Greek menos, both meaning "spirit" as well as "fury." For Homeric warriors menos was "a temporary urge of one, many, or all bodily or mental organs to do something specific, an urge one can see but not influence." Menos came from the heavens; heroes owed their great deeds to it, and Indo-European heroic poetry sings its praise. From menos arose sundry forms of abandoning oneself to a new identity such as wolf- or bear-warrior, or berserk. As Mircea Eliade put it, "The frenzied berserkir, ferocious warriors realized precisely the state of the sacred fury (Wut, menos, furor) of the primordial world."

Above text from page 73 from book Ancient Germanic Warriors: Warrior Styles from Trajan's Column to Icelandic Sagas by Michael P. Speidel (Routledge, 2004)

[chantssecrets]

Emil M. Cioran, Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade. Paris, Furstenberg Square, 1977.

Photo: Louis Monier

[molly-bl00m]

Giovanni Papini. Un om sfârșit. Traducere de George Călinescu. Cultura Națională, 1923.

Aceasta este ediția princeps a primei traduceri în limba română a romanului lui Giovanni Papini, publicată în 1923 de celebra editură „Cultura Națională” din București. Eu l-am descoperit pe Papini după ce am citit Romanul adolescentului miop de Mircea Eliade.

Eliade a fost atât de fascinat de Un om sfârșit, încât a învățat singur limba italiană doar pentru a-l putea citi pe Papini in original. În 1927, pe când era student, Eliade a început să-i trimită scrisori pline de admirație lui Papini, exprimându-și dorința arzătoare de a-l cunoaște în persoană, iar în primăvara anului 1929 îl întâlnește la Florența și descrie întâlnirea undeva în „Memorii”. Rămâne de neuitat atmosfera acelei odăi minuscule din Florența, înțesată de cărți și îmbibată de fumul dens de tutun si privirea scriitorului italian, marcată de o miopie severă și ascunsă în spatele unor lentile groase in care Eliade își oglindea propriile neliniști.

Un alt lucru interesant este traducerea in limba romana de George Calinescu, care la momentul publicării cărții, în 1923, era un tânăr de doar 24 de ani, abia licențiat în litere și proaspăt întors din Italia, unde studiase la Școala Română din Roma (Accademia di Romania). Ulterior, în perioada postbelică, volumul a fost tradus și de Ștefan Augustin Doinaș în 1969.

Iar eu am gasit jurnalul meu de lecturi febrile din 2001.  #my book

#this book is 103 years old