MIrcea Eliade

         Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest, Romania on 13 March 1907. Although Romanian records give his date of birth as 28 February, this is according to the Julian calendar, since the Gregorian calendar was not adopted in Romania until 1924. Eliade’s Orthodox Christian family celebrated his birthday on the Day of the Forty Martyrs, which is 9 March by the Julian calendar, and Eliade himself gave that date as his birthday. Despite a childhood interest in entomology and botany (which doubtless first attracted his attention to Goethe, a lifelong role model and inspiration), he developed an interest in world literature and was led from there to philology, philosophy, and comparative religion. As a youth he read extensively in Romanian, French, and German, and around 1924-25 he learned Italian and English to read Raffaele Pettazzoni and James George Frazer in the original.Between 1925 and 1928, he attended the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in 1928, earning his diploma with a study on Early Modern Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella. In 1927, Eliade traveled to Italy, where he met Papini and collaborated with the scholar Giuseppe Tucci.

It was during his student years that Eliade met Nae Ionescu, who lectured in Logic, becoming one of his disciples and friends. He was especially attracted to Ionescu's radical ideas and his interest in religion, which signified a break with the rationalist tradition represented by senior academics such as Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, Dimitrie Gusti, and Tudor Vianu (all of whom owed inspiration to the defunct literary society Junimea, albeit in varying degrees).

         In 1925 Eliade enrolled at the University of Bucharest where he studied in the department of philosophy. The influence of Nae Ionescu (b.1890), then an assistant professor of logic and metaphysics and an active journalist, was keenly felt by the young Eliade and the shadow which fell on the older scholar because of his involvement with the extreme right in inter-war Romania has darkened Eliade's reputation.

Eliade's scholarly works began after a long period of study in British India, at the University of Calcutta. Finding that the Maharaja of Kassimbazar sponsored European scholars to study in India, Eliade applied and was granted an allowance for four years, which was later doubled by a Romanian scholarship. In autumn 1928, he sailed for Calcutta to study Sanskrit and philosophy underSurendranath Dasgupta, a Bengali Cambridge alumnus and professor at Calcutta University, the author of a five volume History of Indian Philosophy. Before reaching the Indian subcontinent, Eliade also made a brief visit to Egypt. Once there, he visited large areas of the region, and spent a short period at a Himalayan ashram.

    Eliade's Master's thesis examined Italian Renaissance Philosophers from Marcilio Ficino to Giordano Bruno, and Renaissance Humanism was one of his major influences when he turned to India in order to "universalize" the "provincial" philosophy he had inherited from his European education. Finding that the Maharaja of Kassimbazar sponsored European scholars to study in India Eliade applied and was granted an allowance for four years. In 1928 he sailed for Calcutta to study Sanskrit and philosophy under Surendranath Dasgupta (1885-1952), a Cambridge educated Bengali, professor at the University of Calcutta, and author of a 5 volume,History of Indian Philosophy(Motilal Banarsidass 1922-55).

He returned to Bucharest in 1932 and successfully submitted his analysis of Yoga as his doctoral thesis at the Philosophy department in 1933. Published in French as Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique Indienne this was extensively revised and republished as Yoga, Immortality, and Freedom. As Ionescu's assistant Eliade lectured on, among other things, Aristotle's Metaphysicsand Nicholas of Cusa's Docta Ignorantia. From 1933 to 1939 he was active with the Criterion group who gave public seminars on wide-ranging topics. They were strongly influenced by the philosophy of "trairism," the search for the "authentic" in and through lived experience (Romanian,traire) seen as the only source of "authenticity."

      Shortly after his return from India, in the midst of a busy schedule that included university teaching and many commitments to write and lecture, Eliade's novel, Maitreyi, was released to great critical and popular acclaim. Born into a tradition which saw no incompatibility between scientific and literary occupations, Eliade, the historian of religions, continued to produce novels, stories, essays, and a travel book. Today, especially in Rumania and Germany, he is known primarily as a writer of fiction; and his popularity continues to grow as more and more of his works appear in translation.

During World War II Eliade served as cultural attaché to the Rumanian legations in London and Lisbon. After the war he elected to remain in exile in Paris where he could complete work on a number of manuscripts which had taken shape during the war years, notably Patterns in Comparative Religion and The Myth of the Eternal Return, both of which came to print in 1949. The years 1951 to 1955 saw the publication of several more volumes for which Eliade is well known: Shamanism, Images and Symbols, Yoga, The Forge and the Crucible, and The Forbidden Forest. Many regard the last title as his most important work of fiction.

      Initially, Eliade was attacked with virulence by the Romanian Communist Party press, chiefly by România Liberă—which described him as "the Iron Guard's ideologue, enemy of the working class, apologist of Salazar's dictatorship". However, the regime also made secretive attempts to enlist his and Cioran's support: Haig Acterian's widow, theater director Marietta Sadova, was sent to Paris in order to re-establish contacts with the two. Although the move was planned by Romanian officials, her encounters were to be used as evidence incriminating her at a February 1960 trial for treason (where Constantin Noica and Dinu Pillat were the main defendants).Romania's secret police, the Securitate, also portrayed Eliade as a spy for the British Secret Intelligence Service and a former agent of the Gestapo.

      Eliade travelled to the United States to deliver the 1956 Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago, and a year later he was offered the post of professor and chairman of the History of Religions Department and professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the university. Almost 30 years later, he was professor emeritus at this same institution with the title Sewell Avery Distinguished Service Professor.

      Eliade's scholarly output continued unabated. Volume I of A History of Religious Ideas appeared in 1974, and three of its four projected volumes had been published by 1985. A History of Religious Ideas marked something of a departure from his previous theoretical work. As in his sourcebook, From Primitives to Zen, Eliade presented the "creative moments" of the world's religious traditions in more or less chronological order, treating them in a way one might call more historical and less thematic. In addition to his scholarly writing, Eliade served as editor-in-chief of a massive encyclopedia of religion until his death in 1986. the youth of Eastern Europe is clearly superior to that of Western Europe. [...] I am convinced that, within ten years, the young revolutionary generation shan't be behaving as does today the noisy minority of Western contesters. [...] Eastern youth have seen the abolition of traditional institutions, have accepted it [...] and are not yet content with the structures enforced, but rather seek to improve them.

       He was slowly rehabilitated at home beginning in the early 1960s, under the rule of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. In the 1970s, Eliade was approached by the Nicolae Ceauşescu regime in several ways, in order to have him return. The move was prompted by the officially sanctioned nationalism and Romania's claim to independence from the Eastern Bloc, as both phenomena came to see Eliade's prestige as an asset. An unprecedented event occurred with the interview that was granted by Mircea Eliade to poet Adrian Păunescu, during the latter's 1970 visit to Chicago; Eliade complimented both Păunescu's activism and his support for official tenets. 

       Biography

1936	Between July and August he travells to London, Oxford, Berlin
1940	He leaves for London as a cultural attaché
1941	From 10 February till 1944 he is cultural advisor in Lisabon.
1945	16 September, he moves to Paris with Giza, his daughter.
1907	Mircea Eliade is born on the 9th of Marchin Bucharest Romania, as the second son to captain Gheorghe Eliade and to Ioana Eliade. Initially, his father's name wasIeremia, and he originated from Tecuci.		1948	He starts his collaboration with the magazine Critique, under the command of Georges Bataille.
			1949	15 July Mircea Eliade makes a trip to Italy, where he writes 300 pages of his novel Forêt Interdite.
1914	He moves to Bucharest, where he attends the school in Mântuleasa street.		1950	He takes part in The International Congress of the History of Religions from Amsterdam.
1917	He is admited to Spiru Haret high school.
1921	12 May, Mircea Eliade makes his debut with The Enemy of the Silk Worm. It was signed Eliade Gh. MIrcea.		1952	In May he travells to Italy again.
			1956	On 1 October he goes to Chicago.
1923	He learns Italian so as to read Papini in the original and English so as to read Frazer. He starts learning Hebrew and Persian.		1957	He moves to Chicago as a professor of history of religions at the University of Chicago.
1925	Eliade is a student in philosophy at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy from Bucharest.		1960	In September Mircea Eliade takes part in The Congress of the History of Religions from Marburg.
1927	His first trip to Italy. He visits Papini, who had a great influence on the young Eliade.		1964	He is given the title Sewele L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor.
1928	In October he graduates the University of Bucharest with a paper on Campanella.		1966	11 May he becomes a member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
1928	20 November he leaves for India.
1928	25 November - 5 December he makes a trip to Egypt. On 26 December he arrives to Calcutta.		1970	August - September he travells to Sweden and Norway and takes part in the Congress of the History of Religions.
1930	From January till September he lives in Calcutta where he meets Maitreyi.		1977	Mircea Eliade is given the Bordin award by the French Academy.
1931	December, he leaves India and returns to Romania.		1985	He becomes Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Washington.
1933	Mircea Eliade gets his PhD in philosophy with The Compared History of the Yoga Techniques.		1986	22 April, at 9 am, Mircea Eliade dies and he is incinerated the next day in Capela Rockfeller from Hyde Park.