Eliade’s Religious Beliefs

As Shown in the Portuguese Journal

A subject on which Eliade was always hesitant to speak in later life was his own
religion. Three times in the interviews with Claude-Henri Rocquet,1 Eliade turned aside
direct queries concerning his beliefs, with remarks such as: “I made the decision long ago
to maintain a kind of discreet silence as to what I personally believe or don’t believe.”2 In
contrast to this statement, the Portuguese Journal is replete with explicit comments and
affirmations that show Eliade to have been a man of definite convictions on many
religious points. Ordinarily, Eliade did not engage in conventional religious practices. But
during the critical stages of Nina’s illness and after her death, in his bereavement, he
prayed, read the Bible and other devotional writings, and offered up religious ceremonies
on his wife’s behalf. In the latter part of 1944 and in early 1945, Eliade was, in my
opinion, more actively and deeply “religious” than at any other time in his life.3 Most of
his personal religious statements and actions recorded in the journal come from this
period, but there are others from the earlier years that disclose that his teachings about the
history of religions were also his own religious beliefs. These we shall consider first.
The first relevant entry chronologically is this:
Basically, the tragedy of my life can be reduced to this formula: I am a
pagan — a perfect, classical pagan — trying to make a Christian out of myself.
For me, cosmic rhythms, symbols, signs, magic, sexuality — exist more largely
and more “immediately” than the problem of salvation.4

A year later he penned a longer notation, elaborating some the same points:

My religiosity:5

1
Eliade, L’épreuve du labyrinthe (Paris, 1978), and Ordeal by Labyrinth (Chicago and London, 1982). The
book is based on “conversations” that took place in 1997.
2
L’épreuve, p. 153; Ordeal, p. 132.
3
The second most religious period followed his banishment from the Dasgupta household, when having
lost Maitreyi, he sought to become a monk. Perhaps another major time of “religiosity” was that of his
confinement to the camp at Miercurea Ciuc, when he was involved in the devotional life of the Legionaries.
4
Journal, 5 September 1942. Translations are my own, based on a photocopy of the original manuscript.
 2

Very seldom do I feel a need for the presence of God. I don’t pray and
and I don’t know how to pray. When I enter a church, I try to pray, but I can’t tell
if I succeed or not.
But often I have religious “crises”: the desire for isolation, for
contemplation far from other people. Despair. The desire (and the hope) for
asceticism.
That which is constant: a passion for the objective forms of religion — for
symbol, rite, myth. I believe that my religious vocation is realized on these paths:
to show the experiential validity of things considered dead. For me, a spiral or a
“tree of life” is quite as full of sacrality as an icon. I have access, especially, to
metaphysical formulas of religiosity (“metaphysical” in the primordial, not the
modern sense). I “live” these formulas which in appearance are dry and rigid.6

In this entry, Eliade portrays himself a “non-mystical” person, who rarely feels
any need for direct contact with God. But he is subject to religious “crises” accompanied
by yearnings for ascetic withdrawal from society (such as he had known in India, at
Swarga ashram). Otherwise, his religion has little to do with churches and prayer, and
almost everything to do with the symbolic forms that he dealt with in his scholarly
writings. He feels his “religious vocation” is to show that these forms are still alive and
effective. Thus, he declares that his scholarly work has a “religious” purpose. The
reference to “primordial metaphysical formulas” probably alludes to the teachings of
René Guénon and other “Traditionalists” whom he much admired at the time.
Later that year, in the context of a discussion of his proposed major book on the
history of religions (which would become Traité d’histoire des religions, or in English,
Patterns in Comparative Religions) he made this important affirmation:
I am not a man of normal religious experiences; neither am I an agnostic
or an antireligious person. For me, as for an Indian, a primitive, a Greek, a
medieval man — religion is. I know the divine presence only in my moments of
great despair — but at all other times I ascertain this presence in any human act.
More clearly, religion for me is the thirst for and intuition of the real, the
absolute. I identify this thirst in any significant act of man, in all times.
That is why the introduction to the history of religions that I shall write
will have a revolutionary value — because I will show the permanence of
“metaphysics” so-called in ancient gestures and rites; I identify Socrates or Plato
at least ten times on the plane of religion.7
5
The Romanian religiositatea does not carry the negative connotation of excessive or exaggerated
religiousness that religiosity may have in English.
6
Journal, 26 September 1942.
7
Journal, 23 December 1942.
 3

Again, Eliade declares that his personal religion is not what is considered “normal” or
conventional, and although he believes in God, he knows the “divine presence” only in
times of deep despair. Ordinarily, his religion is that which is natural and common to
humankind, and because this is so, the book he is going to write will be “revolutionary.”
When Ortega y Gasset, speaking of Eliade, said that “only a Romanian could be a
philosopher, a mystic, and a man of science all at the same time,” Eliade responded that
he considered himself a “Trojan Horse in the scientific camp.” That is, he believed it was
his mission to end the war between science and philosophy and “validate scientifically
the metaphysical meaning of archaic life.” He wants to convince ethno-historical
scientists to “valorize rightly and understand properly the man of traditional cultures.”8
Thus, he does not hide the fact that Patterns is a book with a message, but not, certainly,
a theological one.

A Religious “Crisis”
These statements, although sincere, are relatively free from emotion. But in the
spring of 1941, when his wife Nina was on vacation in Romania, Eliade experienced one
of his religious “crises” or attacks. It seems to have grown out of frustrations he felt in
his current diplomatic post, which allowed him almost no time to write the books with
which his head was filled. He also missed his wife, who was on a visit to Bucharest, and
was annoyed at her failure to write to him every day. This crisis is known only from a
series of letters to Nina, published in the recently-released first volume of The
Portuguese
Journal and Other Writings.9
In a letter of 30 April, he warns his wife not to make plans for his continuing the
life he has been living for the past year and more. Four days later he wrote:
I am more and more depressed and disgusted by this sterile life […]. I’ve
decided that in a month or two I’ll end this idiotic life which I accepted in a
moment of enthusiasm. In the homeland, at least, I’d find a monastery to which

8
Journal, 2 February 1944.
9
Mircea Eliade, Jurnalul portughez şi alte scrieri, 1,edited by Sorin Alexandrescu, Florin Ţurcanu, and
Mihai Zamfir. Bucureşti: Editura Humanitas, 2006.
 4

to withdraw. […] The religious crisis which is coming, announces itself by a total
disgust and detachment.10

He says that he would go to a monastery in Portugal, except that he wouldn’t consider

entering a Catholic one. In still another letter he elaborates on his intense ennui and
craving for monastic peace:
I feel terribly sad, and, other than the peace of a monastery, I don’t know
what I could desire more intensely. This life I’m living now has no meaning, I
believe. All the sufferings and joys through which a man will pass, lead nowhere.
[…] If I had finished my life’s work — Viaţă Nouă and Istoria religioasă a
Dacia — I’d withdraw tomorrow to a monastery, the only place for those who
believe in the permanent values of the spirit […].11

There is nothing in the Journal of this period about a decision to withdraw to a

monastery, and this was the last letter to Nina in which he mentions it. It seems to have
been a passing “religious crisis,” the only one of which any record was left.12

Nina’s Last Illness and Death

However, when Nina’s illness grew critical in 1944, Eliade’s religious words and
actions become increasingly passionate. He considers writing a “life of the Mother of the
Lord” as a vow for Nina’s healing.13 Whereas formerly he had seldom prayed, now he
repeats the Lord’s Prayer as often as possible.14 As Nina’s life is ebbing away, there is
(coincidentally) a major service at the church dedicated to Our Lady of Fátima across the
street from their apartment. Eliade watches from his window and prays. “I pray
constantly, but never have I realized as I do now that my prayers come from a soul too

10
Eliade, Jurnalul portughez şi alte scriere, p. 430.
11
Ibid., p. 431.
12
In the Journal, 18 November 1948, recalling his departure for India twenty years earlier, Eliade asked
himself, “What would my life have been like without the Indian experience at the beginning of youth? And
the certainty I’ve maintained since then that there is always a cave in the Himalayas waiting for me….”
When asked by Rocquet if he still believed in the cave, Eliade enthusiastically answered, “O yes!”
13
Journal, 18 September 1944.
14
Journal, 1 October, 1944.
 5

sinful to allow them to rise as high as they must.”15 During the night of 20 November, as
Eliade read to her from the Bible, Nina passed away in her sleep.
After her death, Eliade, like any bereaved person, struggled to reconcile himself
to his loss and even to make some sense of it. Characteristically, he sought to interpret her
death as having to do with him and his life.
Did those sufferings atone for something? I can’t believe that. I’m sure
Nina had to endure them to detach herself from the earth. Her love for me was so
total that it wouldn’t let her go. And once gone, she would have wandered in my
world until my death, if those sufferings had not purified her. […] Nina was taken
for my sins and for her salvation. God willed to take her, in order to cast me into a
new life — of which, now, I still know nothing.16

Nina didn’t leave me of her own accord, but God took her to make me
think in a creative way, that is to facilitate my salvation. Nina’s departure will
have, for the life I have left to live, a soteriological meaning. My separation from
Maitreyi [fourteen]17 years ago also had a meaning: I left India, I abandoned Yoga
and Indian philosophy for Romanian culture and for my literature.18

At first, Eliade found himself unable to do anything but read from the Bible (Job,
Isaiah, Paul, and later the Gospels) and the writings of Leon Chestov.19 In January 1945
he was engrossed with Kierkegaard.20 “From reading these texts,” he wrote, “I return with
a great confidence in the creative powers of man, in the freedom of faith. Life is very
beautiful if you understand how much and how easily it can be changed. For this, nothing

15
Journal, 14 November 1944. This is one of a very few acknowledgements of sin or sinfulness in the
Journal.
16
Journal, 20 December 1944.
17
Correcting Eliade’s error (he wrote “nineteen” here, but elsewhere “fourteen”).
18
Journal, undated, December 1944.
19
Chestov, or Lev Shestov (1866-1938), was a Russian-born Jewish philosopher of existentialism. A
disciple of Kierkegaard, he enjoyed long-standing philosophical friendships with Martin Buber, Edmund
Husserl, and Nikolai Berdyaev.
20
Søren A. Kierkegaard (1813-1855), prolific Danish writer in the fields of theology, philosophy,
devotional literature, psychology, and literary criticism. His description of himself was as a “religious
poet.” Eliade disagreed with Kierkegaard at many points, but he found in him a kindred spirit at this time of
his mental and spiritual trials.
 6

is required of you except to rediscover the enormous creative freedom of man, which we
moderns lost from the moment we considered that faith means obedience.”21
I find it significant that Eliade, the learned historian of religions, who could read
Hindu scriptures in the original Sanskrit and was familiar with the religious texts of
Buddhism and other world religions, and who from adolescence had been versed in the
great Greek philosophers, turned in his grief to the Judeo-Christian Bible and to Christian
theologians. And even though no Orthodox churches were available, he engaged in
ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church that was at hand.
Eliade ordered requiems for Nina and made donations of soup for the poor at the
appropriate intervals, at the church across the street. “Both of us had a boundless faith in
the Lord’s Mother of Fátima,” he says.22 Nina, in her illness, had vowed to make a
pilgrimage to the shrine north of Lisbon where the Virgin was said to have appeared, but
she was unable to go. In March 1945, Eliade, accompanied by a friend from the Legation
(Leontin Constantinescu), made the pilgrimage on her behalf, as well as his own. They
intended to walk all the way (ca. 60 miles/ 95 km.), and Eliade nearly succeeded.
Arriving on the eve of Catholic Palm Sunday, they attended an early mass, and left
immediately thereafter — “Consoled, but without [feeling] a joyous uplift,”23 as Eliade
expressed it.
A number of entries in the Portuguese Journal in December 1944 and January
1945 dwell on the subject of life after death. For example:
For several years, my hope and my despair have had their sources in the
reality of the spirit and in life after death.24 The awful nihilism that sometimes
comes over me is unleashed in the moment when I doubt that there is anything
beyond. I feel so free then, and so indifferent, that I could commit any crime or
any deed outside the law. […] I sense that my childish, pagan hope — of meeting
Nina after my death — is terribly anemic…. With great, fiery, absurd certainty, I
must believe that we will both rise in our bodies. Only in this way can Nina’s

21
Journal, 22 December 1944.
22
Journal, 29 December 1944.
23
Journal, 25 March 1945. That is, it was not an intense religious experience for Eliade.
24
Cf. Journal, 30 Dec. 42; 28 May 1943.
 7

sufferings possibly be redeemed: physically, so we may experience the joys we

might have had and didn’t have.25

This belief in Nina’s and his own resurrection was quite consoling to Eliade, and he
reiterated it several times: “As often as I can, I pray — and I believe. I believe […] that I
will meet Nina again, that our love will begin anew, that our bodies will rise someday in
glory”.26 “When Nina’s departure overwhelms me, I still see a way out of the suffering:
my own death and our meeting again.”27 “The certainty that we will meet again sustains
me” (ibid).
He wanted very much to write a book on the “postmortem problem,” and he even
disclosed some of the main ideas it would contain. The first point would be that each
individual finds after death the world in which he has believed (as a Buddhist, a mystic,
Muslim, Jew, Christian, etc.), and the non-believer will find the void — that is, he will
perish, or be reintegrated into cosmic energy.28 “This is why,” Eliade writes,
Jesus says he has come to rescue people, to save them. Those who believe
in him will know a postmortem fate superior to those who practice only an Old
Testament devotion and ritualism. Dying with the thought, the knowledge, of this
celestial glory, the good Christian will find glory.29

This much seems to be essentially consistent with Orthodox theology.30 But

Eliade intended to venture beyond this.
The indispensable chapter in the treatise: the certainty of survival, the
uncertainty of immortality; survival — the stage of depersonalization: what dies
first in man, after he has died physically? How long (in historical, concrete time)

25
Journal, 23 December 1944.
26
Journal, 6 January 1945.
27
Journal, 3 February 1945.
28
It seems strange that reintegration into the Cosmos is the destiny of the unbeliever only. In his discussion
of Mioriţa, a poem he calls one of the two central myths of the Romanian people, Eliade says its point is to
show a “happy reintegration into Nature.” This was the hope held also by the great Romanian poet Mihai
Eminescu, greatly admired by Eliade. (Cf. articles first published in Portuguese, reproduced in Jurnal
portugheze et alte scrieri, 2, specifically pp. 307-308; 337-338; 341).
29
Journal, 21 February 1945.
30
Conversely, Eliade’s views as expressed here bear no relationship to the Legion’s peculiar teachings on
death.
 8

can the deceased person [continue to] “descend” to earth in some form or other (in
the dreams of those who loved him, as a presence at certain meetings, etc.)?

In his book, Eliade planned to treat also the question of how long the dead person
remained “linked” to this world, and the question of what happens after the “supreme
detachment” from earth, when no one remembers him or her any longer.31 In connection
with this matter, he did not go to pray at Nina’s crypt nine months after her death, when
he knew he would soon be leaving Portugal, lest he hinder her from separating from her
body and the grave site. Indeed, the only time he visited the cemetery was nine days after
her “departure,”32 he states.

Freedom from Time; Ultimate Freedom

But Eliade believed that something more than life after death was possible: he
believed that history itself could be annulled. Basing himself on readings from Chestov
and Kierkegaard, as well as his own theologizing, Eliade reasoned that if all things are
possible for God, then he (God) can even make not to be that which has happened.
Consider this astonishing affirmation:
If Jesus Christ, who was more than man, who was God, could sweat,
urinate, and defecate, then everything is possible for God, everything is possible
in the world. Therefore, when the moment comes that I can believe absolutely in
these things — everything will be possible for me too. Then I shall be free. I shall
be able to make Nina not to have suffered, not to have left my side. I will be able
to abolish the past, obtaining a present of bliss and a life of eternity.
I can think of Jesus only as seated on the wine — and defecating. And in
that moment I know that he is God. I don’t see him as a rabbi; I don’t see him as a
man — however perfect a man he might be. But God — urinating by a fence or
wiping his sweat. Is this blasphemy? I can’t believe it is. God can do this, and not
give a damn, because he is not bound by anything. […] Christianity fulfills to the
highest degree the paradox that has obsessed humanity since prehistory —
of the coincidence of the All with the fragment. Therefore: God walks among men as a
man, and he suffers the same humiliations — not the moral or the social, but the
physiological ones. If this thing is true — then everything is possible.33

31
Journal, 21 February 1945.
32
Journal, 20 August 1945.
33
Journal, 23 December 1944.
 9

A little farther on, Eliade says he envisioned this possibility as early as the time he
began to study Indian mysticism and magic, and he recalls the novella Nopţii la
Serampore.34 He continues ruminating on this idea in the first few journal notes for 1945.
For instance, on 3 January he mentions a book he’d like to write, “challenging the
modern world, an invitation to the absolute freedom I decipher in certain myths and
discover still in certain persons, even in our age (yogins, mystics: the phenomenon of
levitation, the incombustibility of the body, clairvoyance, prophecy, etc.).” Eliade had
written about these things before, in “Folklore as a Means of Gaining Knowledge”35 and
elsewhere, where he had made no secret of the fact that he believed in the possibility, at
least, of these “supernormal” phenomena. In another journal entry he explains his
position on this matter more clearly:
My passion for the history of religions, folklore, ethnography betray
primarily an interest in a world of freedom that modern man lost long ago. The
same interest explains my inclination (since lycée) for the occult sciences and
magic: the freedom which man obtains through such techniques. I’m not sure
now if the occult sciences are “real.” But at least their world is invigorating:
a world where man is free, powerful, and the spirit is creative.36

Thus, from adolescence, religion and the world of the supernatural (the occult) were
interrelated in Eliade’s thought and perhaps also his experience. Even though he is
uncertain if the occult sciences are real, he still finds them “invigorating.” It is within
this attitude, I believe, that we should look for the source of Eliade’s fictional writings in
the fantastic genre, two of which he had already published.37 He was delighted to
discover in 1943 what an Italian scholar, Ernesto de Martino, had said recently in a
review of a book on primitives and the supernormal. In his article, de Martino suggested
that it would be “opportune to put in relief the connections between cryptesthesia

34
Journal, 31 December 1944.
35
“Folclorul ca instrument de cunoaştere,” in Revista Fundaţiilor Regale, IV, 3, April 1937. Cf. very early
articles: “Science and Occultism,” in Vlăstarul, May 1925; Magic and Metapychical Research,” in Foaia
tinerimii, 15 February 1926; and “Magic and Metaphsics,” in Cuvântul, 17 June 1927.
36
Journal, 5 January; cf. 6 January 1945.
37
In Eliade, Secretul Doctorului Honigberger, Bucharest, Ed. Socec, 1940. Contains “The Secret of Dr.
Honigberger” and “Nights at Seranpore.”
 10

pragmatica (or psychometria) and sympathetic magic…,” which the author of the book
had not done.38 Eliade knows that he had already done it in articles of 1926 and 1937!

“Superstions”
The Portuguese Journal records several instances of “superstitious” beliefs or
behavior on Eliade’s part. Some of the above-mentioned religious notions and actions
could be classed superstitious by persons not sharing his beliefs, but there are others that
have no relation to religion or folklore. He wonders (on 29 January 1943) why it always
happens, that when his right palm itches, he hears “disastrous news” from the front or
from home soon afterward.
Can this solidarity be the result of the state of anxiety in which I live? Can
it be that I’m so prepared by all my thoughts about the Russian or African fronts
that any change is communicated to me though a kind of “sympathy”? Maybe
I’ve become so sensitive as a result of my uninterrupted meditation on the fate of
European culture that I constitute an excellent reception post, and all that’s
happening to this Europe that obsesses me I receive before the newspapers or
radio report it.39

Thus, Eliade muses on the possibility of a connection of “sympathetic magic” between

himself and the bad news happening in places of his greatest concern.
While Nina was suffering in the final weeks of her illness (26 September), Eliade
attended a dinner party at an expensive restaurant given by one Jules Sauerwein, a man of
strong occultist beliefs. Eliade had come to know him due to the fact that the latter had
studied under Rudolph Steiner, while Eliade had been to India and had written a book on
Yoga.40 The chapter on tantric yoga had most interested Sauerwein. At the dinner,
Sauerwein asked Eliade for a “consultation” in his capacity as an occultist (how did
Eliade obtain that reputation?!). Eliade agreed to see him the next afternoon, in his
crowded apartment. The man claimed he was, until recently, able to send messages
through British and American ambassadors to the New York Times, but since returning to

38
Journal, 22 January 1943.
39
Journal, 29 January 1943.
40
Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925), occultist, who, after following Theosophy for a time, rejected it and
developed his own school, Anthroposophy. Eliade had been attracted to Steiner in 1926-27. Steiner was
known also for having edited Goethe’s works.
 11

Lisbon in August after five months in Paris, all doors have been closed to him, because
some mysterious “powers” deem him a dangerous person. He wants Eliade’s advice on
what spiritual exercises he can do in order to “conjure away” the spiritual conspiracy that
is oppressing him. As Eliade describes the man’s problem in his journal, he seems a little
off balance mentally. Nevertheless, Eliade answered him politely:
I reply that he has chosen a completely unsuitable moment to ask me for
an occult consultation. I myself have fallen very low in recent months, precisely
from the abandonment of spiritual exercises. I have been living almost entirely in
history; the tragedy of Romania and Nina’s illness have consumed me to the
marrow…. Sensing myself corrupted even physically, I have been compelled, in
order to defend myself, to recreate my spiritual equilibrium. And I show him
what he can learn by going to a zoo.41

This is a baffling incident. Why did Sauerwein consider Eliade a spiritual advisor in
occult matters? And why, if Eliade knew he was in a spiritually depleted state, did he
even agree to a “consultation”? (Politeness? Curiosity?) And most puzzling of all is the
advice given. What can the man learn at a zoo? Is it a matter of talking with the animals?
This possibility is suggested by a note of 8 March 1945:
In the course of my readings I’m continually coming across reports and
observations of explorers, missionaries, travelers, etc., relative to the unnatural
ability of certain natives to talk with animals, predict the future, etc.[...] Actually,
they are “impossible” for us, because they don’t conform to the current stage of
scientific knowledge. But can this be an absolute criterion?42

Eliade placed great importance on dreams, and made a practice of recording as

many of them as he could remember upon awakening.43 One of the most complex in the
journal is about Nina, which he dreamed forty days after her death. In brief, Eliade and
Nina are in a park, and she is young and beautiful. She promises him that after a time
they will be married again, but he protests that they are married now. She gives him an
envelope of currency from many countries. A handsome Don Juan, appears, whom Eliade
41
Journal, 26 September 1944.
42
Cf. a journal notation of Summer 1957, where he describes his emotions while feeding a tame squirrel
on the University of Chicago campus. “As if the present condition of the world and man were annulled and
we found ourselves again in that blessed, paradisal epoch, in the myths of the primitives. Then, in illo
tempore […], man lived in peace with the wild animals, understood their language, and talked with them as
friends.”
43
Journal, 30 December 1944.
 12

cannot drive away, even with force. Eliade and Nina set off arm and arm, but the stranger
takes her other arm and they climb an ascending path. Eliade’s interpretation:
Forty days have passed since Nina’s departure from us; she meets me in
order to tell me that now she is going farther away (a new postmortem stage
begins after forty days, according to all traditions), but when I die we will be
married again. […] She gives me a packet of banknotes to hold: our wealth, that
is, our common past (the pesetas equal our trips to Spain, etc.).[…] Nina entrusts
me with our common past, to preserve it, to keep it alive, until the moment when
we will meet again. But this gesture of hers, the happiness of these reaffirmations
of our enduring love have given her, move her, and she attaches herself anew to
the earth.
Then the conqueror appears, the angel of death, the true owner of the park
where we are (the other realm). In vain do I strike him, in vain do I threaten him
[…]. Nina dares only to gaze at us. No longer can she choose between us.
However, it is plain to see that she is beginning to sense the enchantment, the
magic of the other realm. […] Nina’s separation from the earth is difficult. That
does not rule out the possibility that this is a prophecy of my approaching death.44

In his grief, he remembered Nina’s premonitions of death, which predated by

years her illness and became more frequent during her last weeks. Some of them were in
the form of dreams. She spoke of a “little doggie” that followed her in the train station
(on the trip to Paris). For Eliade, it was her psychopomp. He himself dreamed of a dog,
and he had other dreams containing bad omens.45
Eliade was inclined to believe in “signs” and “omens,” not only in dreams but
also in everyday happenings. For example, almost every time he went to see Nina at the
rest home in Lousã, he would encounter a funeral coach or procession, and when he
brought her home, there was a hearse at the Fátima Church.46 On the positive side, in the
spring of 1945, he was sitting one evening on the terrace of his cottage on the beach,
thinking about Nina. Involuntarily, his thoughts turned to the chapter he intended to write
next in Prolegomene.

44
Journal, 29 December 1944. Cf. 30 December. Eliade did not resort to spiritualism, as did his admired
predecessor, B. P. Hasdeu, when his brilliant daughter and only Julia died. But he seems to have believed
the dead continue to contact the living for a time in dreams.
45
Journal, 30 and 31 December 1944. Cf. Nina’s dreams (18 September) and Eliade’s (17 May 1945 and
18 April 1945).
46
Journal, 30 December 1944.
 13

Nina liked that book tremendously. I’m sure that my neurasthenia is due,
in large part, to her sufferings, and that she is suffering, primarily, from my
sterility and failure. When I begin working again on Prolegomene, she will be at
peace. A calm happiness descends upon my soul tonight: it is a sign — a sign,
certainly, for me who has experienced it, though not for a skeptic who would
know how to explain this happening as a very complex and delicate psychological
process. But I must learn to have courage, even at the risk of seeming
superstitious.47

Philosophia Perennis
To complete this sketch of Eliade’s ensemble of beliefs, we must add his strong
interest in “Traditionalism” (philosophia perennis) of the school of René Guénon.
Guénon was a point of discussion when Eliade met with Carl Schmitt in 1942 in
Dalhelm, and as well as with Dr. Mário, the German correspondent, in 1943 in Lisbon. In
phrases crossed out in the Journal manuscript, Eliade indicated that he believed Guénon
was the most interesting mind in the world today — or at least, he did sometimes! In
1942 he characterized himself as a person who wanted to “reconcile the philosophia
perennis with the ‘experientalism’ of the most luxuriant individualism.” From this, he
continued, comes “my bizarre passion for symbol, traditionalist metaphysics, occultism,
and ethnography….”48 On another occasion, when he was conversing with a visiting
member of the Romanian Foreign Ministry (Picky Pogoneanu) about occultism, India,
Guénon, and the like, Brutus Coste, a member of the Legation who was present related a
story about a “curious American who has traveled in strange places, knows secret things,
etc.” Eliade’s comment: “Once again I verify an old observation of mine: that interest in
the occult is more widespread, even among more lucid people, than is commonly
believed. It’s just that they’re all afraid or embarrassed to talk about it.”49
Did Eliade consider himself one of the “more lucid people”? He found Guénon
interesting at this time, but it is clear that he never seriously “bought into” his way of
thinking. When Claude-Henri Rocquet asked him (in 1977) if he felt akin to men like
Guénon, Eliade responded at some length. He said he liked his book on Vedanta, but that

47
Journal, 20 April 1945.
48
Journal, undated September 1942
49
Journal, undated October 1942.
 14

he was irritated by his “extremist, polemical side” — his wholesale dismissal of modern
Western culture. Eliade refused to accept Guénon’s idea of “Tradition” as an unbroken
chain of arcane knowledge, and that its possessor is an “initiate.”50 Thus, whatever he
may have thought of Traditionalism in his Portuguese years, he never tried to incorporate
it into his history of religions.

Conclusion

In the Portuguese Journal Eliade speaks more frankly about his religious beliefs
than in any other document we possess. Although he states once that he feels it is his
“religious vocation” to make known his insights into the meaning of ancient and
universal symbols, and although he indicates that these insights will form the basis of his
major work (Patterns/Traité), it was not his nature to be an evangelist.51 Therefore, to the
charge that he was a crypto-theologian, I would reply negatively. The History of
Religions which he taught was a universal one, and despite the fact that Eliade was (or
considered himself to be) an Orthodox Christian, giving allegiance as a Romanian to his
national church, his true religion was too complex and generalized to be confined to any
such limits. Although he was not a mystic, he sought divine consolation in his time of
grief through prayer and acts of devotion, readings from the Bible and selected Christian
inspirational works. But for the most part, his personal religion appears to have been at
one with his history of religions teachings, his insights into the meaning of myths and
symbols — the sacred revealed in the profane. He cultivated a strong interest in death and
what lay beyond. Marginally, there were tentative excursions into “Guénonism,” the
occult, and “superstition.” Negatively, Eliade’s religion had little or nothing to do with his
erotic life (about which he wrote rather frankly in the Portuguese Journal) and it owed
nothing to Legionary teachings.

Mac Linscott Ricketts, Professor Emeritus, Louisburg College, USA

50
Eliade, L’Épreuve du labyrinthe, pp. 170-171; Ordeal by Labyrinth, pp. 149-159. But he was not entirely
forthright when he told Rocquet that he did not discover Guénon until “rather late.”
51
In the Rocquet interviews, Eliade stated that he did not consider himself a spiritual teacher or guru, or
even a religious guide, but “only a companion.” I believe this was his position always.