Undoubtedly the experience only enhanced an inborn gnosticlike sense important to Eliade that exile is among the profoundest metaphors for all human life.
It is not the purpose of the present study to sort out Eliade's guilt or innocence, or combination of both, in respect to Romanian fascism, beyond what has already been said. He was a man of assorted secrets, and some of them probably he took with him in death. We must now turn to the larger question of the meaning of Eliade's past to the scholar's history of religions work—and to the implicit political themes therein.
In pursuance of these answers, we shall, I think, learn three things:
1. That the fundamental motif of Eliade's life, certainly after 1945, but really all the way through, was the theme of exile. He felt himself, after adolescence, an exile from his own childhood and youth. Before long that feeling was extrapolated into regarding himself as something of a gnostic exile from eternity. Even his passion for Romanianism was really the groping of a wandering soul for solid ground, more than the sort of gritty political commitment it may have been for others.
2. That there is reason to think the disastrous experience with Romanianism and the Legion led him to pluralize and universalize the experience of the Sacred, while at the same time bringing home forcefully the terror of history. As experiencer of totalitarianism and as exile, he could well have been led to perceive totalitarianism's opposite and exile's opportunity, radical pluralism, as a positive good. Bryan Rennie does not hesitate to say: ''I would suggest that Eliade's brush with totalitarian ideologies in the 30s influenced his theoretical position as expressed in his later books as a reaction against such tendencies; that his perilous attraction to the extreme right in his
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younger years led to a far more mature position; that, in its own way, his later works were a repudiation of the exlusivism and ethnic superiority of the later Iron Guard." 48 The most important question, however, is not whether Eliade made serious political misjudgments at particular times, which he certainly did, but—as in the case of Jung—what relation those judgments have to his lifework as mythologist and historian of religion.
3. That in all this he was not a traditionalist but a sometime political and then a scholarly modernist in the most rarefied sense of the word, who saw tradition as material to be studied, perhaps used for political or other ends, but not to be believed or personally adopted. For the essence of what informs sacred tradition is often under secular camouflage in a secular age, and if it is discovered at all will be found under new and often secular wrappings.
But first let us consider Eliade the exile.
Exile from Eternity
Mircea Eliade has recorded this striking memory from his early childhood:
I remember especially a summer afternoon when the whole household was sleeping. I left the room my brother and I shared, creeping so as not to make any noise, and headed toward the drawing room. . . . It was as if I had entered a fairytale palace. The roller blinds and the heavy curtains of green velvet were drawn. The room was pervaded by an eerie iridescent light. It was as though I were suddenly enclosed within a huge grape.
I never told anyone about this discovery. Actually, I think I should not have known what to tell. Had I been able to use adult vocabulary, I might have said that I had discovered a mystery. . . . I could later evoke at will that green fairyland. When I did so I would remain motionless, almost not daring to breathe, and I would rediscover that beatitude all over again; I would relive with the same intensity the moment when I had stumbled into that paradise of incomparable light. I practiced for many years this exercise of recapturing the epiphanic moment, and I would always find again the same plenitude. I would slip into it as into a fragment of time devoid of duration—without beginning and without end. During my last years of lycée, when I struggled with prolonged attacks of melancholy, I still succeeded at times in returning to the golden green light of that afternoon. . . . But even though the beatitude was the same, it was now impossible to bear because it aggravated my sadness too much. By this time I knew the world to which the drawing room
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belonged—with the green velvet curtain, the carpet on which I had crept on hands and knees, and the matchless light—was a world forever lost. 49
In a real sense, this scene as remembered struck the template of a life governed by nostalgia: for childhood, for historical times past, for cosmic religion, for paradise.
Like any real historian, he loved the past just because it was past, but he also saw in the gulf between the human present and its past an icon of the rupture between time and eternity. At the same time, he was aware also that the human condition is to live in tension between one's present state and the objects of nostalgia: they can never be fully recovered; perhaps they are always partly a dream. In Myths, Dreams and Mysteries he is careful to point out that primal peoples "were also aware of having lost a primitive paradise." 50 They did not believe they lived in mythological time; their myths too were set in an indeterminate past, severed from their present by a mythological "fall." For Eliade no more than for Jung was "the primitive'' idealized; it was merely different, in some ways embodying a consciousness better able to understand, and thereby to yearn for, the primal paradises of myth.
Eliade was fundamentally a structuralist who began with an ideal type, homo religiosus, religious man, and then analyzed the structures of the world as seen by this person. His religious cosmos is first of all not "homogeneous" but divided into the sacred and the profane, sacred space and time, like the green room, the space of temples and the like, the time of rite and festival, over against their "ordinary," nonsacred counterparts. The sacred ultimately cannot be contrived but only discovered through "hierophany," communicated by means of myth and preserved in rites whose "gestures" symbolically repeat those of the mythical time, illud tempus.
All this was best realized by archaic peoples who still lived in the world of "cosmic religion," in the "paradise of archetypes" before time has been "allowed to become
'history'" through discovery of the "irreversibility of events"; in those days of innocence its corrosive effects could be periodically reversed and evil expelled through rites of renewal. 51 Postarchaic man has fallen into historical time and hence into the dolorous "terror of history," a place of nightmares and ignes fatui in which
"Modern man's boasted freedom to make history is illusory for nearly the whole of the human race." 52 But shadowy relics of the old cosmic sacred still abide on the fringes of consciousness, and can
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be evoked. Why should one call them up? In a word, to be free. In contrast to the false freedom of which moderns boast, which is really slavery to history, and to
"leaders" who promise freedom only to take it away,
the man of the archaic civilizations can be proud of his mode of existence, which allows him to be free and to create. He is free to be no longer what he was, free to annul his own history through periodic abolition of time and collective regeneration. . . . [T]he archaic and traditional societies granted freedom each year to begin a new, a "pure" existence, with virgin possibilities. 53