Certainly there is an element of nostalgia in Eliade's treatment of cosmic religion times when the sacred was strong and the terror of history had barely raised its head.
But such rearviewmirror sentiments must come up against the phenomenologist and structuralist side of Eliade's work, in which sehnsuchtladen feelings are of little account and the observer's cold eye can see the forms, at least, of the sacred in the secular. Even whether or not a thing is called religion does not matter, so long as the structure and the forms that appear image the ancient guises of the sacred. Thus Superman is Indra or Hercules reborn, and Aphrodite enchants again as Marilyn Monroe.
Charming as these comparisons are, though, one may well ask if the hero or the goddess was really functionally the same in the two very different cultures. Where, for the modern deities, are the classic temples, the smoking altars, the paeans by civic leaders in what were community as well as private devotions? Can one find Eliadean sacred space on the silver screen or, more recently, the internet?
These are not frivolous questions; Catholic indulgences have been given via televised masses, and Neopagan rituals have been enacted in cyberspace. We cannot here sort out all the issues; suffice it to note that these developments only confirm the persistence of religion, its ability to take an astounding variety of forms, and to adapt to virtually any new worlds technology and social change may bring. This Eliade would hardly deny, and this openness to the flexibility of the
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sacred must be taken into account in any comprehensive view of the political implications of Eliade's mythology.
Nonhomogeneous Worlds
Indeed, something of the primal vision can be recovered, though perhaps only individually and vicariously, through the history of religions. Eliade was excited about the contemporary cultural importance of his discipline as "a new humanism," ultimately I believe because he saw it as offering the prospect of transcending the tyranny of history. Not only does modern history transcend the past, but the study of the history of religion can lead to selftranscendence. He wrote that "the history of religions is destined to play an important role in contemporary cultural life . . . especially because, by attempting to understand the existential situations expressed by the documents he is studying, the historian of religions will inevitably attain to a deeper knowledge of man . . . [because] by studying the religious expressions of a culture, the scholar approaches it from within." 62
But let us return to the observation that Eliade began with an ideal type, the concept of homo religiosus. What this ought to mean, of course, is not that all persons, or all conventionally religious persons, always think and act like homo religiosus. But when they are acting religiously they "become" homo religiosus, and the homo religiosus way of viewing and being in the world is what their ritual or other religious behavior says through its own language the world is like, regardless of the extent to which conscious belief is attuned to it. Like Jung speaking of mass man and collective unconsciousness, however, Eliade's phenomenology tends to slide over that last qualification, and to assume that subjectivity follows ritual action.
Being Eliadetrained, I am adamant myself that religion should not be reduced to inward belief—the Protestant temptation—and that it is very important to listen to the languages of the ritual, art, and other nonverbal signs of any religious community. But it is equally important not to presuppose that the subjectivity behind such
"gestures" is necessarily holistic and homogeneous throughout the community. To return to the political case and, for examples, to the National Socialist era, in the postwar interview published as Ordeal by Labyrinth Eliade responded to a question by the French journalist ClaudeHenri Rocquet about religious murder, such as that of the Aztec
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sacrifices. Rocquet had inquired, "What criterion enables us to decide that the Aztecs lived out a justified illusion whereas the Nazi storm troopers didn't? What is the difference between ordinary murder and sacred murder?"
In reply, Eliade said, "For the SS, the annihilation of millions of people in the concentration camps also had a meaning, and even an eschatological one. They believed that they represented Good versus Evil. . . . We know what Good was for Nazism: fairhaired, Nordic man, what they called the pure Aryan. And the rest were incarnations of Evil, of the devil. It was almost a form of Manicheanism: the struggle of Good against Evil." 63
The point is not that Eliade was justifying the Nazis. He was not. Later in the same discourse he spoke of them as "those sick men, or zealots, or fanatics—those modern Manicheans" who "saw Evil as being embodied in certain races: the Jews, the Gypsies," and so for them, "sacrificing them by the millions was thus not a crime.'' It is rather that, first, he never really answered Rocquet's question as to how one can tell the difference between Aztec ritual murder (if one make the questionable assumption that it was a "justified" religious "illusion") and the Nazi crimes; and second that, in a peculiar reflection of the Nazis' own mentality, he saw the Nazis themselves collectively rather than singly, an ideal type like the Aztecs performing roles (or rather one role) in their own myth.
In fact not all storm troopers liquidating their millions saw themselves consistently and homogeneously as acting out a "Manichean" Aryan myth of Good versus Evil.
Some were sickened but fearful of resisting orders, some were numbed, some were just ordinary sadists, a few did resist in various covert ways, some probably were True Believers. While Eliade's mythology may help us to understand the message of the grim overall pattern, it is these individual nuances that one misses: for him the individual becomes his/her role in myths and rituals that are essentially social. For Eliade the phenomenologist, unlike Jung the physician, there is not even talk of individuation out of those roles—unless through a stillmythologized transformative process like that of the shaman or the yogi, or unless that is attained in the privileged position of the "new humanist," the modern scholarly observer like Eliade himself!
The historian of religion was well aware of this tendency on the part of Marxists, as he made clear in a journal comment:
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I've extracted, somewhat haphazardly, from the vocabulary of Communist trials: Titoist, Trotskyite, assassin, agent of imperialism. These are categories, characters, archetypes which do not correspond to human, historical personalities, One has the impression that in Soviet trials it is not men, not individuals, who appear, but types, archetypes, characters. Exactly as in the ahistorical horizons of archaic societies. (cf. The Myth of the Eternal Return) And again:
Marxism doesn't reflect the objective, scientific sprit (not even the spirit of positivism)—but rather the tension and aggressivity of prophetic theologies. Marx and the Marxists write just as aggressively and polemically as the theologians of the Reformation and CounterReformation. 64
Eliade therefore went on to talk to Rocquet similarly of the "myth" then afflicting his homeland: Exactly the same can be said about the Gulags and the apocalyptic eschatology of the great Communist 'liberation': it sees itself as confronted by enemies that represent Evil, that constitute an obstacle to the triumph of Good, the triumph of liberty, of man, and so on. All this can be compared with the Aztecs. 65
Although after 1945 Eliade no longer much committed himself publicly to any political or other myths, there is a deeplevel continuity to his work. He saw the world as the arena of, in his term, the "dialectic of the sacred," or, to put it another way, as an arena of myth against myth and ritual against ritual, for in such a world even the profane is still part of the myth. This is a view that is reactionary, if the word may now be used in a neutral descriptive sense, because it implies that the archaic world is needed to interpret the modern. The modern world really acts out myths as much as ever, including those sodden with blood sacrifice, but knows not what it does. By returning to the archaic world, which lived much more consciously by myth and ritual, we can understand how we too are homo religiosus behind the secular masks. In doing so we may find the rather rarefied salvation offered by Eliade's New Humanism, and spice it with the humane excitement he found in scholarly exploration.