Mircea Eliade’s Perennial Conceptual Placeholders : An Eranos Intellectual Itinerary

Abstract

The topic of this article, «Mircea Eliade, C. G. Jung, and the Eranos meetings » , recently received considerable attention and a good number of critical analyses. Steven M. Wasserstrom and Hans Thomas Hakl both provided excellent reconstructions, from different perspectives, of the Eranos circle, especially in the period this article deals with, the 1950s. Moshe Idel, Florin Turcanu, Dan Dana, and Natale Spineto contributed a great deal to cast a light on Eliade’s literary, personal, and academic outcome during the 1940s and 1950s. While the present text does not claim to have uncovered new historical data in the relationship between Eliade and Jung at Eranos, already magisterially probed by Turcanu, it pursues three new avenues of interpretation. It first mines Eliade’s 1950s diaries to analyze the role of personal dream interpretation as secondary data for Mircea Eliade’s history of religion. It turns next to Eliade’s correspondence with Jung to re-examine the historian of religions’ involvement with analytical psychology. It finally advances the proposal for a new trajectory of Eliade’s development of the set of perennial conceptual placeholders, such as «sacred/ profane » , «labyrinth/ center » , «axis mundi » , «initiation » , «trans-conscious » , and «cosmic Christianity » . We dubbed them perennial conceptual placeholders in virtue of the epistemic and ontological work, of universalizing bent, Eliade had asked them to carry out in his scholarship. This article suggests that Eliade forged some of them in his cultural journalism, written in Romanian, and fully developed them during the 1950s Eranos meetings, as a form of personalized history of religion and cure for the souls.