This is not, however, fully to agree with Ivan Strenski's contention the "the Romanian right, the 'new generation' and Ionescu's irratio
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nalist traditionalism provide the context essential to an 'external' understanding of Eliade's thought in general, and his thought about myth in particular." Strenski holds that Eliade's thinking about myth is a species of rightwing political thinking, "though for some time now it has been given to us in a universalised and at least avowedly apolitical form," but nonetheless offers a rightist sort of "sweeping ontological judgement upon the material, secular, modern world" based on a "volkish" sort of nostalgia for the "archaic, cosmic and telluric.'' 66 The Romanian right is certainly one context in which Eliade's thought emerged, but Strenski, writing before Mac Rickett's twovolume work on Eliade's Romanian roots or the published journals (apart from No Souvenirs) were available, was perhaps not fully able to take into account the diversity of the historian of religion's experiences and attitudes, which apart from one or two years have been more complex than anything that could simply be pigeonholed as "rightist" or "archaic" in either religion or politics. Most significant on the other side of the argument is the way Eliade does not fully embrace archaism or "cosmic religion" as a monolithic value, but portrays significant human life as in continuous dialectic between history, together with modernity, and the
"cosmic."
Strenski rightly criticizes Eliade's phenomenology and structuralism for its lack of "falsifiability," 67 and on the grounds of selective and apparently "essentialist"
categories. Like Jung and Campbell, or Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough, Eliade draws an overwhelming wealth of examples from a range of sources and cultural contexts, treating them all uncritically as equal. Obvious selectivity obtains in favor of the point to be made, and perhaps on the grounds of the great scholar's vast but ultimately finite learning. There is, for example, very little if any use in his phenomenological books of Protestant Christianity, of which he seems to have had little comprehension despite his many years on the faculty of a traditionally liberal Protestant divinity school. (Nevertheless, among earlier modern thinkers it is probably the father of liberal Protestantism, the romantic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who most closely resembles Eliade's approach to religion on a deep level. Eliade was indebted to the French school of Emile Durkheim, Roger Caillois, L. LéviBruhl, and their dialectic of the sacred and the profane, but in Scheiermacher and Eliade alike the fundamental means of access to religion is feeling, or homo religiosus' sense of the sacred, and without feeling,
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both the Romanian and the German concur, religion will never be understood aright.)
Eliade's accumulation of examples without full contextual analysis or admission of falsifiable evidence fails to prove that homo religiosus lurks behind every cult and culture. Yet in the end a valid aperture into the nature of religious experience and religious constructions of reality remains. What it does prove is that homo religiosus has left his mark on countless minds, from those of at least some archaic men and women to those of the travelers and anthropologists who recorded them, to those of the savants in their studies who theorized about them. They may not be everywhere, but the sacred and the profane, and cosmos and history, are out there, as categories of perception, whether one see them reflexively in one's own spiritual life or, as is more likely, impute them to someone else. Recall that, for Eliade too, the real sacred was always somewhere else, in some age already past or some fanciful land over the horizon; our own examples are but types and shadows.
These images, though they may have reality mainly in the mind, attain vividness as they are reinforced over and over. Thus the Indian sovereign attempts to reconstruct in his capital the mythical cities of the Age of Gold; the palacefortress of Sirigiya in Ceylon, for example, being modeled after the celestial city Alakananda, though that made it "hard of ascent for human beings." 68 Or, in an unforgettable but apparently now discredited story—one of a number of instances in which detailed knowledge reveals weak links in Eliade's superficially imposing marshaling of examples in support of his theories—the sad case of the Australian Achilpa tribe who constantly carried a sacred pole with them which represented the cosmic axis, and who determined the direction they would move by the way the pole bent after they had set it up in the center of their camp. It was a splendid example of the Eliadean Axis Mundi. But on one occasion the pole broke; the devastated people then wandered around aimless until finally they lay down and waited for death to overtake them. 69
On attaining vividness, the examples then serve as catalysts for further thoughts, insights, into the realm of the sacred; these are more on the level of metaphor, poetic conceit, or philosophical fancy than of "hard" facticity. One might muse that psychoanalysis is the modern shaman's initiation, or that Mount Rushmore is American sacred space. One may see ways in which even the most unprepossessing Protestant
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churches have their sacred space and time, the open Bible on the altar, the moment of a preacher's call for converts. Eliade would not at all have been displeased by these cultural hermeneutics. He was really far more modern than reactionary and traditional, and he knew it. As a cultural critic, and to be that was his only real reason to be a historian of religion, he was most interested in new vestments for old gods. In "A New Humanism" he states that the history of religion will play an important role in contemporary cultural life, not only because of the cultural dialogue it facilitates, not only because of what it teaches about human nature generally by revealing it in all its varieties and extremes, but even more through the powerful stimulus to new and unexpected cultural creativity that "meeting with the 'others'—with human beings belonging to various types of archaic and exotic societies" inevitably brings. 70
To say Eliade was an "essentialist," who believed that the sacred has a special objective ontological status or even special status as a heuristic or empirical category, is a misunderstanding. He knew well enough that the sacred was in the eye of the beholder: "an element in the structure of consciousness." 71 Why otherwise pile up so many examples of its thousand different forms? He did believe that the sacred was a category of perception common to the minds of many, ''indissolubly linked to the effort made by man to construct a meaningful world," 72 and this was worth noting. But to him the sacred was really a phenomenological entity; calling something like the Achilpa's pole sacred was shorthand for saying they regarded it as sacred, in broadly the same way other poles, in other times and places, have been regarded as sacred elsewhere. That presupposes, of course, that the similarities of such objects, times, and places across time and space exceeds their specific differences. That is probably an intuitive matter, and can be debated endlessly. I can only say that I find it more useful than not, with certain cautions suggested by, among other things, a religion like Protestantism, but this matter is not really germane to the present argument.