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The foundational work on shamanism now available as a Princeton
Classics paperback Shamanism is an essential work on the study of
this mysterious and fascinating phenomenon. The founder of the
modern study of the history of religion, Mircea Eliade surveys the
tradition through two and a half millennia of human history, moving
from the shamanic traditions of Siberia and Central Asia-where
shamanism was first observed-to North and South America, Indonesia,
Tibet, China, and beyond. In this authoritative survey, Eliade
illuminates the magico-religious life of societies that give
primacy of place to the figure of the shaman-at once magician and
medicine man, healer and miracle-doer, priest, mystic, and poet.
Synthesizing the approaches of psychology, sociology, and
ethnology, Shamanism remains the reference book of choice for those
interested in this practice.
Set in 1930s Calcutta, this is a "roman a clef" of remarkable
intimacy. Originally published in Romanian in 1933, this
semiautobiographical novel by the world renowned scholar Mircea
Eliade details the passionate awakenings of Alain, an ambitious
young French engineer flush with colonial pride and prejudice and
full of a European fascination with the mysterious subcontinent.
Offered the hospitality of a senior Indian colleague, Alain grasps
at the chance to discover the authentic India firsthand. He soon
finds himself enchanted by his host's daughter, the lovely and
inscrutable Maitreyi, a precocious young poet and former student of
Tagore. What follows is a charming, tentative flirtation that soon,
against all the proprieties and precepts of Indian society,
blossoms into a love affair both impossible and ultimately tragic.
This erotic passion plays itself out in Alain's thoughts long after
its bitter conclusion. In hindsight he sets down the story, quoting
from the diaries of his disordered days, and trying to make sense
of the sad affair.
A vibrantly poetic love story, "Bengal Nights" is also a cruel
account of the wreckage left in the wake of a young man's self
discovery. At once horrifying and deeply moving, Eliade's story
repeats the patterns of European engagement with India even as it
exposes and condemns them. Invaluable for the insight it offers
into Eliade's life and thought, it is a work of great intellectual
and emotional power.
""Bengal Nights" is forceful and harshly poignant, written with a
great love of India informed by clear-eyed understanding. But do
not open it if you prefer to remain unmoved by your reading matter.
It is enough to make stones weep." -- "Literary Review"
Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished
Service Professor in the Divinity School and the Committee on
Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Many of his scholarly
works, as well as his two-volume autobiography and four-volume
journal, are published by the University of Chicago Press.
Translated into French in 1950, "Bengal Nights" was an immediate
critical success. The film, "Les Nuits Bengali," appeared in 1987.
In a book of great originality and scholarship, a noted historian
of religion traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to
modern times, in terms of space, time, nature and the cosmos, and
life itself. The Sacred and the Profane serves as an excellent
introduction to the history of religion, but its perspective also
encompasses philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and
psychology. It will be of concern to anyone seeking to discover the
potential dimensions of human existence.
This volume completes the immensely learned three-volume "A History
of Religious Ideas." Eliade examines the movement of Jewish thought
out of ancient Eurasia, the Christian transformation of the
Mediterranean area and Europe, and the rise and diffusion of Islam
from approximately the sixth through the seventeenth centuries.
Eliade's vast knowledge of past and present scholarship provides a
synthesis that is unparalleled. In addition to reviewing recent
interpretations of the individual traditions, he explores the
interactions of the three religions and shows their continuing
mutual influence to be subtle but unmistakable.
As in his previous work, Eliade pays particular attention to
heresies, folk beliefs, and cults of secret wisdom, such as alchemy
and sorcery, and continues the discussion, begun in earlier
volumes, of pre-Christian shamanistic practices in northern Europe
and the syncretistic tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. These
subcultures, he maintains, are as important as the better-known
orthodoxies to a full understanding of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam.
The short-sighted adolescent is a passionate reader who takes
various cultural figures as models, trying to emulate both their
lives or their works. The pupil protagonist is a poor student, who
likes science and reads a lot of books, sometimes staying up all
night to do so. At the age of 17, he decides to write a novel to
demonstrate to his teachers that he is not as mediocre as his other
classmates, and that he is prepared to give up everything he holds
dear in order to do so. The novel is written in a number of
notebooks - the 'diary' of the title - but our myopic hero
ultimately fails 3 subjects and has to repeat the school year. Set
in the Romanian capital in the early 20th century, from the
perspective of a schoolboy's diary of his daily life, - his
teachers, his classmates' academic and amorous rivalries, his first
sexual experiences - we are introduced to the themes of religion,
self-knowledge, erotic sensibility, artistic creation and
otherness, ideas which would preoccupy him until the end of his
life. Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent was written by the young
Mircea Eliade - one of Romania's greatest writers and
intellectuals. The book can be viewed as an early 20th century
'Catcher in the Rye', and allows us an intimate view of the
developing genius, whose literary output has been neglected in the
English language for too long.
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Gaudeamus (Paperback)
Mircea Eliade
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In this exuberant and touching portrait of youth, Eliade recounts
the fictional version of his university years in late 1920's
Bucharest. Marked by a burgeoning desire to "suck out all the
marrow of life," the protagonist throws himself into his studies;
engaging his professors and peers in philosophical discourse,
becoming one of the founding members of the Student's Union, and
opening-up the attic refuge of his isolated teenage years as a
hotspot for political debate and romantic exploration. Readers will
recognize in these pages the joy of a life about to blossom, of the
search for knowledge and the desire for true love. This follow-up
to Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent reveals a keen observer of
human behavior, a seeker of truth and spiritual fulfillment whose
path would eventually lead him to become the ultimate historian of
20th-century religions.
'A History of Religious Ideas, volume 1 will arouse the interest of
all historians of western religion, since it includes chapters on
the religions of Canaan and Israel. However, the book must be read
cover to cover if one wants to grasp the significance of its
gigantic historical scope...Not only has the work unity through
Eliade's authorship, but it lays the foundation of the history of
religious' edifice of which he has been one of the principal
architects.' -Kees W. Bolle, Church History.
First published in English in 1954, this founding work of the
history of religions secured the North American reputation of the
Romanian emigre-scholar Mircea Eliade. Making reference to an
astonishing number of cultures and drawing on scholarship published
in no fewer than half a dozen European languages, The Myth of the
Eternal Return illuminates the religious beliefs and rituals of a
wide variety of archaic religious cultures. While acknowledging
that a return to their practices is impossible, Eliade passionately
insists on the value of understanding their views to enrich the
contemporary imagination of what it is to be human. This book
includes an introduction from Jonathan Z. Smith that provides
essential context and encourages readers to engage in an informed
way with this classic text.
In volume 2 of this monumental work, Mircea Eliade continues his
magisterial progress through the history of religious ideas. The
religions of ancient China, Brahmanism and Hinduism, Buddha and his
contemporaries, Roman religion, Celtic and German religions,
Judaism, the Hellenistic period, the Iranian syntheses, and the
birth of Christianity--all are encompassed in this volume.
Mircea Eliade--one of the most renowned expositors of the
psychology of religion, mythology, and magic--shows that myth and
symbol constitute a mode of thought that not only came before that
of discursive and logical reasoning, but is still an essential
function of human consciousness. He describes and analyzes some of
the most powerful and ubiquitous symbols that have ruled the
mythological thinking of East and West in many times and at many
levels of cultural development.
In the period domoninated by the triumphs of scientific
rationalism, how do we account for the extraordinary success of
such occult movements as astrology or the revival of witchcraft?
From his perspective as a historian of religions, the eminent
scholar Mircea Eliade shows that such popular trends develop from
archaic roots and periodically resurface in certain myths, symbols,
and rituals. In six lucid essays collected for this volume, Eliade
reveals the profound religious significance that lies at the heart
of many contemporary cultural vogues.
Since all of the essays except the last were originally delivered
as lectures, their introductory character and lively oral style
make them particularly accessible to the intelligent nonspecialist.
Rather than a popularization, " Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural
Fashions" is the fulfillment of Eliade's conviction that the
history of religions should be read by the widest possible
audience.
Primitive man's discovery of the ability to change matter from one
state to another brought about a profound change in spiritual
behavior. In The Forge and the Crucible, Mircea Eliade follows the
ritualistic adventures of these ancient societies, adventures
rooted in the people's awareness of an awesome new power.
The new edition of "The Forge and the Crucible" contains an updated
appendix, in which Eliade lists works on Chinese alchemy published
in the past few years. He also discusses the importance of alchemy
in Newton's scientific evolution.
First published in 1951, "Shamanism" soon became the standard
work in the study of this mysterious and fascinating phenomenon.
Writing as the founder of the modern study of the history of
religion, Romanian emigre--scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)
surveys the practice of Shamanism over two and a half millennia of
human history, moving from the Shamanic traditions of Siberia and
Central Asia--where Shamanism was first observed--to North and
South America, Indonesia, Tibet, China, and beyond. In this
authoritative survey, Eliade illuminates the magico-religious life
of societies that give primacy of place to the figure of the
Shaman--at once magician and medicine man, healer and miracle-doer,
priest, mystic, and poet. Synthesizing the approaches of
psychology, sociology, and ethnology, "Shamanism" will remain for
years to come the reference book of choice for those intrigued by
this practice."
Bucharest, 1938: while Hitler gains power in Germany, the Romanian
police start arresting students they suspect of belonging to the
Iron Guard. Meanwhile, a man who has spent his life studying
languages, poetry, and history--a man who thought his life was
over--lies in a hospital bed, inexplicably alive and miraculously
healthy, trying to figure out how to conceal his identity.
At the intersection of the natural and supernatural, myth and
history, dream and science, lies Mircea Eliade's novella. Now in
its first paperback edition, the psychological thriller features
Dominic Matei, an elderly academic who experiences a cataclysmic
event that allows him to live a new life with startling
intellectual capacity. Sought by the Nazis for their medical
experiments on the potentially life-prolonging power of electric
shocks, Matei is helped to flee through Romania, Switzerland, Malta
and India. Newly endowed with prodigious powers of memory and
comprehension, he finds himself face to face with the glory and
terror of the supernatural. In this surreal, philosophy-driven
fantasy, Eliade tests the boundaries of literary genre as well as
the reader's imagination.
Suspenseful, witty, and poignant, "Youth Without Youth" illuminates
Eliade's longing for past loves and new texts, his erotic
imagination, and his love of a thrilling mystery. It will be
adapted for the screen in 2007 as Francis Ford Coppola's first
feature film in over ten years.
"A wonderful blend of realism, surrealism, and fantasy, [Eliade's
novellas] suggest the importance of the mythic and the supernatural
to finding meaning in the everyday. Highly recommended." --"Library
Journal"
"Youth Without Youth reads like asurreal collaboration by Jorge
Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Carl Jung. Mircea Eliade left
me with the rare sense that I had been entertained by a
genius."--William Allen, author of "Starkweather and The Fire in
the Birdbath and Other Disturbances"
This comprehensive anthology contains writings vital to all the major non-Western religious traditions, arranged thematically. It includes colourful descriptions of deities, creation myths, depictions of death and the afterlife, teachings on the relationship between humanity and the sacred, religious rituals and practices, and prayers and hymns.Mircea Eliade, a recognized pioneer in the systematic study of the history of the world’s religions, includes excerpts from the Quran, the Book of the Dead, the Rig Veda, the Bhagavad Gita, the Homeric Hymns, and the Popol Vuh, to name just a few. Oral accounts from Native American, African, Maori, Australian Aborigine, and other people are also included.
"No event in our world is "real, " my friend. Everything that
occurs in this universe is illusory... And in a world of
appearances, in which no thing and no event has any permanence, any
reality of its own--whoever is master of certain forces can do
anything he wishes..." So speaks a character in "Two Strange Tales,
" a pair of novellas in which Westerners are caught up in the
uncanny realm of Eastern religion and magic. In "Nights at
Serampore," three European scholars, traveling deep into the
forests of Bengal, are inexplicably cast into another time and
space where they witness the violent murder of a young Hindu wife.
In "The Secret of Dr. Honingberger," a respectable Rumanian
physician vanishes without a trace after experimenting with yogic
techniques in his quest for the legendary invisible world called
Shambhala. In "Two Strange Tales, " author Mircea Eliade combined
yogic folklore with the literary genre of the supernatural suspense
tale so as to reveal dimensions of experience that are inaccessible
to other intellectual approaches. These well-crafted stories will
appeal to both lovers of the supernatural and those fascinated by
mysticism of the East.
Sinceits founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and
Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories,
theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the
study of religion. Topics include (among others) category
formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology,
myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism,
structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the
series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the
history of the discipline.
In this era of increased knowledge the essence of religious
phenomena eludes the psychologists, sociologists, linguists, and
other specialists because they do not study it as religious.
According to Mircea Eliade, they miss the one irreducible element
in religious phenomena—the element of the sacred. Eliade
abundantly demonstrates universal religious experience and shows
how humanity’s effort to live within a sacred sphere has
manifested itself in myriad cultures from ancient to modern times;
how certain beliefs, rituals, symbols, and myths have, with
interesting variations, persisted.
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