Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade was Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, and one of the most excellent interpreters of world religion in this century. The influence of his thought, through these works and through thirty years as director of History of Religions department at the University of Chicago, is significant. Eliade studied philosophy at the University of Bucharest. Then, he had a scholarship and to studied in India for four years.
In 1928 he sailed for Calcutta to learn Sanskrit and philosophy under Surendranath Dasgupta a Bengali professor and author of a five volume History of Indian Philosophy. After the Second World War, Eliade was forbidden to return to the newly communist Romania.
In 1945 he moved to Paris where his colleague with George Dumézil, an important scholar of comparative mythology, secured a part-time post for him at the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne teaching comparative religion. From this time on almost all of Eliade's analyses were written in French. He published over 1.300 works in 60 years. Eliade was interested in the world of the unconscious.
Mircea Eliade became international known with “The Myth of the Eternal Return” (1949), an analysis of religious symbols and imagery. His explanation imagines the magic existence of the sacred in the profane as the object of veneration of religious humanity, which appears as the source of power, significance, eternity and value in the vanishing common world. Through myths and rituals which give access to this sacred time humanity protects itself against the “terror of history”, a condition of helplessness before the absolute data of historical time, a form of existential anxiety. Some of his most important books are: “Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return” (1954), “Yoga, Immortality and Freedom” (1958), “Rites and Symbols of Initiation” (Birth and Rebirth-1958), “Patterns in Comparative Religion” (1958), “The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion” (1959), “Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: the Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities” (1960), “Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism” (1961), “Myth and Reality” (1963), “Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy” (1964), “The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion” (1969) and “A History of Religious Ideas” (1978-1985). He died on the 22nd of April 1986

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