The deep No. 2 self cared nothing for politics at all, unless they could be experienced as some high wind of a rushing overwhelming force, powerful and blind, inevitable and final as birth or death. No. 1, though he might be awkward and ill at ease, knew he had to function somehow in the regular world, and as he did so No.
2 had to be kept discretely out of sight—and that applied to the politics of nations too, if they were to be run in such a way that No. 1 could find livelihood.
Page 77
Then there was the strange, only halfexplored terrain between 1 and 2, where the latter broke into the consciousness of 1 in the form of dream and inner adventure.
This self was quite at odds with the social order, for it wanted nothing but freedom to explore its own realm. The requirements of the unconscious and preconscious
"middle" self must take priority over those of the social order, religious or otherwise, for the fused 1 and 2 is the most authentic self known to us; on the spiritual scale its needs must be met first.
Ordinarily this self also would be most content with the politics of a minimalist state where it would be left alone. Yet the Burkean ideals of "prescription" or acceptance of traditions from the past, and the suspicion of excessive political rationalism, suit it, for these would best link it to what is left of "rootedness" and medieval glory. Moreover, once in a while, in the heat of a psychic epidemic, the middle realm might be fired by a tremendous Wotanlike archetype that called for political expression, or seemed to. But increasingly, after 1936, Jung recognized the inauthenticity of archetypal expression on that level. Instead myth must be the way out of political entrapment rather into it, and the Burkean kind of state ought to assure the context for such a move.
Though capable of adapting the volkish language of some of his fellow German speakers, in the end Jung possessed a sort of selfcorrecting pragmatism and decent respect for human values that put him, like many Swiss, more in the world of Burke than of Hitler. At the same time the covenant across the generations had to be kept alive for the sake of access to the outer forms of the archetypes encrypted in all the world's ancient myths and religions.
Page 79
3—
Mircea Eliade and Nostalgia for the Sacred
A Life in Two Parts
Mircea Eliade's life (1907–1986) divides neatly into two parts. The years until 1945 were lived in, or in relation to, his native Romania, where he emerged in the years between the wars as probably the bestknown and most controversial of the passionate young Romanian intellectuals of his generation: a prolific and provocative newspaper columnist whose political and cultural views kindled fiery debate; a novelist whose works were praised extravagantly and denounced as pornographic; a dynamic lecturer at the University of Bucharest who virtually established history of religions and Indology as disciplines there; a political activist who was to be accused of fascism, and who suffered imprisonment for his loyalties under the royal dictatorship of King Carol II.
Then there was the second "life," when, in exile from his homeland after it fell behind the Iron Curtain, Eliade—now apparently nonpolitical 1 and noncontroversial unless on arcane scholarly levels—became the preeminent historian of religion of his time, widely known
Page 80
through such classics of that field as The Sacred and the Profane, The Myth of the Eternal Return, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, and Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, among many others. After 1945 he taught first at the Sorbonne in Paris, and then from 1956 at the University of Chicago.
Until recently little was widely known in the West about Eliade's prewar and wartime life. When I was a graduate student at Chicago, only a few rumors—some of them wildly inaccurate, it turned out—floated about among his docents. The professor himself talked about his past very little, and though kindness and graciousness itself in his relationship to students, he was not the sort of person into whose life one pried freely. But now it has been reconstructed, first through Eliade's own twovolume Autobiography, 2 supplemented by postwar journals. 3 Second, Mac Linscott Ricketts, the splendid translator of the autobiographies and other Romanian works of Eliade, has compiled a massive and definitive documentary portrait of the years up to 1945, based on countless hours of digging in Romanian archives and libraries, and with the help of Professor Eliade himself up until his death. 4 On top of this, a controversial literature about Eliade in the thirties and forties has emerged in several languages and several countries. 5
The son of a career officer in the Romanian army, Eliade spent his childhood in various towns where his father was stationed before retiring to Bucharest. In that capital city Eliade emerged in his lycée years as something of a teenage prodigy, reading assiduously, learning languages, writing articles for popular young people's magazines. He kept wellpacked journals and even penned an autobiographical novel, Romanul adolescentului miop [The Novel of a NearSighted Adolescent;
composed 1924]. 6 Eliade thought that it was the first novel about adolescence by an adolescent. He had more than a hundred published articles to his credit by his eighteenth birthday. Commencing a struggle against time, a battle which came to have metaphysical as well as psychological dimensions, the nearsighted student systematically reduced his hours of sleep to allow time for reading and writing, as well as socializing and Boy Scout activities. Mac Ricketts remarks: "And about all these things—his readings, his intellectual discoveries, his friends, his scouting adventures, his biological field trips, his recurring bouts of melancholy, his running battles with his lycée teachers, and even his innermost thoughts, struggles and ambitions—he wrote. Prob
Page 81
ably there are few adolescences so thoroughly documented as that of Mircea Eliade." 7
Beginning studies at the University of Bucharest in 1925, he kept up the frenetic pace, attending lectures less often than educating himself, trying to do everything all at once under the compulsion of an overwhelming sense that there was not and would never be enough time. He received his degree in philosophy only three years later.
During those undergraduate days he had become a regular columnist for a daily newspaper, and was recognized as the "leader" of the younger generation, full of bold and provocative thoughts on literature and the regeneration of Romanian culture.
Mircea Eliade emerged from the university with two great interests for continuing study—Renaissance thought and Indian philosophy. He was able to spend three months in Rome in 1928 pursuing the former. At the same time he noted, in a book by the distinguished historian of Indian philosophy Surendranath Dasgupta, an acknowledgment of the patronage of the Maharaja of Kassimbazar, the tribute even giving that potentate's address. Impulsively, the young Eliade wrote the Maharaja, expressing his own interest in India. Three months later he received a reply inviting him to come and study at the ruler's expense. Arrangements were made for him to live in the Dasgupta home in Calcutta. In late November 1928 Eliade set sail for India, where he remained until 1931.