Two Europeans, Mircea Eliade and Ake Hultkrantz, have inspired generation of academics and the public fascinated by the field of comparative religions. Intellectual brilliance, passion, vision-in short, charisma-mark these savants. So, too, does an arrogant cultural imperialism that denies full humanity to the first nations of the Americas. Eliade, and to much lesser extent Hultkrantz, have fed the romantic demiurge presenting American Indians as primal survivals husbanding an archaic ecstasy that may yet save the White millions who suffer, in Hultkrantz's words, an inability to lead authentic lives (quoted in Vecsey 1981:xii). Eliade created for these poor souls a humanism readily popularized into New Age neo-shamanism. His new humanism turns out to be very old primitivism (Lovejoy and Boas 1965[1935]) seducing transvestites in the cultural domain, to borrow Christian Feest's (1990:327) felicitous phrase for contemporary Europeans who dress in Indian costume.