Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade (March 9, 1907 – April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. Historian of religions and man of letters, distinguished for his researches in the symbolic language used by various religious traditions and for his attempt to reduce their meaning to underlying primordial myths that provide the basis for mystical phenomena.
Biography
Eliade took an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Bucharest in 1928. He studied Sanskrit and Indian philosophy at the University of Calcutta (1928-31) and then lived for six months in the Ashram (hermitage) of Rishikesh, Himalaya. Returning to Romania, he earned his Ph.D. in 1933 with the dissertation Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne ("Yoga: Essay on the Origins of Indian Mysticism") and was named assistant professor at Bucharest, where he taught the history of religions and Indian philosophy (1933-39). In 1945 he went to Paris as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études of the Sorbonne. In 1956 he became professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, where he remained. In 1961 he founded the journal History of Religions.
Fundamentally, Eliade considered religious experience in traditional and contemporary societies as credible phenomena that he termed hierophanies (i.e., manifestations of the sacred in the world). His researches traced the forms that these hierophanies have taken throughout the world and through time. [1]
Works
((in Romanian unless noted))
Literary works
- novels
- Maitreyi ("La Nuit Bengali" or "Bengal Nights")
- Noaptea de Sânziene ("The Forbidden Forest")
- Isabel și apele diavolului ("Isabel and the Devil's Waters")
- Romanul Adolescentului Miop ("Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent")
- novellas
- Domnișoara Christina ("Miss Christina")
- Tinereţe fără tinereţe ("Youth Without Youth"),
- short stories
- Secretul doctorului Honigberger ("The Secret of Dr. Honigberger"
- La ţigănci ("With the Gypsy Girls")
Academical works
- essays
- Das Heilige und das Profane, original publish in: Emesto Grassi, Rowohlts Deutsche Enzyklopädie, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, Reinbek, 1957. (in German)
- Sacrul şi profanul, trans. Brânduşa Prelipceanu, Bucureşti: Humanitas, 2000ş 3rd edition, 2005. (in Romanian)
- The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion, 1969
- Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashion: Essays in Comparative Religion, 1976
- books
- Traité d'histoire des religions (1949; Patterns of Comparative Religion)
- Le Mythe de l'éternel retour (1949; The Myth of the Eternal Return)
- Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaďques de l'extase (1951; Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy)
- A History of Religious Ideas (1978-85)
- Encyclopedia of Religion, 16 vols., MacMiliam
