Abstract
This paper includes an extended review of Moshe Idel’s Mircea Eliade: From Magic to Myth (New York: Peter Lang, 2014) through a triple analysis of Eliade’s early literary, epistolary, and academic texts. The paper examines Idel’s analysis of some important themes in Eliade’s research, such as his shift from understanding religion as magic to its interpretation as myth; the conception of the camouflage of sacred; the notions of androgyny and restoration; and also young Eliade’s theories of death.The paper also discusses Idel’s evaluation of Eliade’s programatic misunderstanding of Judaism and Kabbalah, and also of Eliade’s moral and professional abdication regarding the political and religious aspect of the Iron Guard, a Romanian nationalist extremist and anti-Semitic group he was affiliated with in 1930s.
Highlights
This paper includes an extended review of Moshe Idel’s Mircea Eliade: From Magic to Myth (New York: Peter Lang, 2014) through a triple analysis of Eliade’s early literary, epistolary, and academic texts
A few years earlier, Scholem, a specialist in Kabbalah, contributed with a piece “On Sin and Punishment: Some Remarks concerning Biblical and Rabbinical Ethics,” to one of the earliest volumes dedicated to Eliade and edited by two of his colleagues at the University of Chicago Divinity School. (Kitagawa and Long 1969) On June 6, 1972, Gershom Scholem wrote to Eliade a letter from Jerusalem, asking him details about his involvement with the Iron Guard and his alleged anti-Semitism, detailed by Theodor Lowënstein, a Jewish historian from Romania, in the sole issue of the journal Toladot
I consider you a sincere and upright man whom I regard with great respect. [...] When we first met I regarded you as a close colleague and later even as a friend to whom I could speak unreservedly. (Gershom Scholem 1971-1982, 301)
Summary
This paper includes an extended review of Moshe Idel’s Mircea Eliade: From Magic to Myth (New York: Peter Lang, 2014) through a triple analysis of Eliade’s early literary, epistolary, and academic texts. Over the past few decades, scholars of religion and historians dedicated a great deal of books to the life and work of Mircea Eliade.
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