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Mircea Eliade

His theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

In the history of religion during the mid-20th century, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was one of the main academics. He was born in Romania, commencing philosophy studies in 1925 at the University of Bucharest, specializing on Renaissance humanism. In 1928 he went to India to study Sanskrit and Indian philosophy for four years. Back at Bucharest, he received his PhD in 1933 with a dissertation on yoga and the origins of Indian mysticism.

Archetypes of Mythology by Stefan Stenudd This book examines Jungian theories on myth and religion, from Carl G. Jung to Jordan B. Peterson. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link). Psychoanalysis of Mythology by Stefan Stenudd This book examines Freudian theories on myth and religion, from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

       In 1945 he moved to Paris, where he got acquainted with comparative mythology scholar George Dumézil, and started teaching comparative religion at the Sorbonne. His first meeting with Jung was in 1950, as Eliade started to attend the annual Eranos conferences in Switzerland. He gave lectures there regularly until 1967.[1] In 1958 he was appointed to head the University of Chicago History of Religions department, where he remained until his death in 1986.

       In addition to his teaching and extensive writing (mainly in the 1950s and 60s), he started the journals History of Religions and The Journal of Religion. His extensive work Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses in three volumes was published between 1976 and 1983. An English translation, A History of Religious Ideas, followed shortly. He was the editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of Religion in 17 volumes, published in 1987, the year after his death. Eliade also wrote a number of novels, often with erotic and mythological components.

Other Archetypes

In 1949, while still in Paris, Mircea Eliade published Le mythe de l’éternel retour: Archétypes et répétition (The Myth of the Eternal Return: Archetypes and Repetition), which was widely spread and appreciated. The English edition was published in 1954, without the subtitle.[2] Its slightly revised 1959 edition was titled Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, and the 1965 edition The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History. In the preface of the 1959 edition, Eliade writes that he considers it “the most significant of my books.”[3]

       Although the term archetype disappeared in the English title, it is prominently used in the text. But Eliade points out in the 1959 preface that he is not referring to the Jung archetypes. Instead, he compares his use of the term to that of the Spanish essayist Eugenio d’Ors, as a synonym for “exemplary model” or “paradigm,” which he means is the Augustinian sense of the term. He notices that Jung’s use of the term has become so established, other uses of it need to be explained or even avoided:

But in our day the word has been rehabilitated by Professor Jung, who has given it a new meaning; and it is certainly desirable that the term “archetype” should no longer be used in its pre-Jungian sense unless the fact is distinctly stated.[4]

       The archetypes Eliade discusses are symbols given an elevated value in archaic societies, which traced them back to a primordial time. They refused to accept time as linear. Instead, they saw it as cyclic, which was “their revolt against concrete, historical time, their nostalgia for a periodical return to the mythical time of the beginning of things.”[5]

       Accordingly, archaic man linked things and events to their archetypes in order to make them “real” in the sense of having a lasting significance, since “for archaic man, reality is a function of the imitation of a celestial archetype.”[6] In other words, the archetypes were deemed sacred, a concept Eliade was to explore more in later books. By regarding them as sacred, archaic man could trust their endurance:

Hence the outstanding reality is the sacred; for only the sacred is in an absolute fashion, acts effectively, creates things and makes them endure.[7]

       Eliade gives several examples of such archetypes and argues for their function by referring to a number of myths and rituals. There is no shortage of those, so it would be surprising if he found no confirmation of his theory, especially since his definitions of the archetypes include more than they exclude.

       For example, when discussing the archetype of the center of the world, such as the sacred mountain where heaven and earth meet, he states: “Every temple or palace and, by extension, every sacred city or royal residence is a Sacred Mountain, thus becoming a Center.” Also, it is regarded as “the meeting point of heaven, earth, and hell.”[8]

       Places given this significance can be found, but so can numerous temples and palaces that are not. Eliade is applying his own symbolism, not necessarily that of the people who built and inhabited those places. He speaks of the center of the world as “the earth’s navel, the point at which the Creation began,”[9] which leads him to this questionable reasoning:

1. Every creation repeats the pre-eminent cosmogonic act, the Creation of the world.

2. Consequently, whatever is founded has its foundation at the center of the world (since, as we know, the Creation itself took place from a center).[10]

       Eliade hurries to generalize. There are indeed creation myths that more or less specify a center for the creation, which in itself has little symbolic value. A creation begins somewhere, which does not mean it begins from a center. There could not have been a center before the creation.

       Not only that, but so many creation myths lack a central point for the beginning of creation, and simply could not have one. There is often a primordial sea, in which a center is hard to find, and then there is heaven, also lacking a center. The earth is rarely described as created from a central point. Usually, the whole of it appears at once. It is definitely more common that no specific place for the beginning of creation is pinpointed.

       It is not even the case in Genesis of the Bible. God begins by creating light in the primordial darkness, then day and night, then the firmament, and so on. No center, no certain spot from which the world grows. Nor can the Garden of Eden be called a center from which creation took place, since its appearance is late in the process.

       Eliade includes rituals in the pattern he proposes. They all have a divine model, an archetype, and “all religious acts are held to have been founded by gods, civilizing heroes, or mythical ancestors.”[11] Again, that is far from certain about them all, even considering the very broad definition of who would have done it. Many rituals around the world have no fixed origin, but are performed because of tradition.

       He includes dance in the same reasoning: “All dances were originally sacred; in other words, they had an extrahuman model.” By extrahuman he means they were presumed to have been created “in the mythical period, by an ancestor, a totemic animal, a god, or a hero.”[12] But every dance is not a sacred ritual, just as every song is not a hymn — nor is there reason to assume that archaic man believed so. People must have danced and sung before they started using such expressions in religious acts justified by mythical explanations. Claiming that it was all sacred ritual to archaic man makes no more sense than saying the same about the dancing and singing of modern man.

       Eliade takes his theory into the absurd, making our ancestors unable to relate to their world in any other way than religiously:

We must add that, for the traditional societies, all the important acts of life were revealed ab origine by gods or heroes. Men only repeat these exemplary and paradigmatic gestures ad infinitum.[13]

       That can only be true if by “important” acts he solely mean those that fit his criterion.

       Still, there is truth to his model. We do tend to sort of glorify aspects of our lives as well as ourselves. Life and its components are given theatrical effects that make us appreciate and remember them. History is made up of extraordinary events and people, whereas the everyday things in between have faded away, as did the vast majority of anonymous persons never mentioned in history books. We do the same thing today, paying attention to places and persons we regard as remarkable, while the rest is little more than a blur.

       So, it can be said that we make some types into archetypes, ascribing particular importance to them. It is a completely conscious process, and it does not signify a longing back to some legendary primordial time. Nor does it mean that those archetypes are more real than other types — just fancier. It is questionable to assume that archaic societies were different from ours in this sense. They just had other explanations for it.

       It can be compared to how the word idol changes meaning when used for the present instead of the past. Traditionally it represented the worship of a deity, whereas today’s idols are worshipped but still regarded as human. The common denominator is the worship. It doesn’t need to be based on a religious belief, so we should not take for granted that it was to archaic man.

       The same can be said for rituals. We uphold many of them, even when they have no religious significance to us. They are, and were also for archaic man, first of all celebrations.

       To Eliade, rituals connected to the new year were expressions of the eternal return to the time of creation, whereby the world was created anew. But the cyclic behavior of nature was as evident to archaic man as it is to us. It happened with or without a ritual. Yet, it was something to celebrate, especially when taking place at the spring equinox, as it did in many cultures. Eliade’s explanation is more elaborate:

What is important is that man has felt the need to reproduce the cosmogony in his constructions, whatever be their nature; that this reproduction made him contemporary with the mythical moment of the beginning of the world and that he felt the need of returning to that moment, as often as possible, in order to regenerate himself.[14]

       Our New Year is in the dark of the winter, soon after the winter solstice, when the days start getting longer again. That, too, is a reason to celebrate, and we do, without thinking that it would help the daylight to return. We fondle the idea that it will regenerate us, in some small way, but enjoy the festivity even if we discard that possibility. Archaic man might very well have had the same sentiment about it.

       What Eliade’s theory implies is that archaic man was an unknowing victim of superstition and in need of religious comfort, which formed his perception of the world. Eliade is far from alone in assuming this. Most texts about ancient religion and mythology have expressed similar views.

       They are not without reason. There are many examples that indicate such beliefs and customs in the distant past. But the texts describing them tend to take it too far. The mind of archaic man was not unable to think rationally.

       Returning to the subject of archetypes, Eliade’s conception of them is not that far from Jung. To both, the archetypes are archaic mental objects by which to reach an improved state of mind, be it Jung’s individuation or Eliade’s cyclic renewal. Also, both work symbolically, through myths and rituals, and both are shared collectively as well as experienced individually.

       Without a microscopic perspective, Eliade’s and Jung’s archetypes are not easy to tell apart.

The Sacred

In the preface to his book The Quest from 1969, as well as in that of A History of Religious Ideas, Eliade describes religion as closely connected to the experience of the sacred. This is a consequence of the conscious mind: “In short, the ‘sacred’ is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness.”[15] He continues:

On the most archaic levels of culture, living, considered as being human, is in itself a religious act, for food-getting, sexual life, and work have a sacramental value. In other words, to be — or, rather, to become — a man signifies being "religious."

       To Eliade, the sacred is not something that has evolved through history, but it is a trait of the human consciousness. It is by the sense of the sacred that man experiences what is real and significant in the turmoil of existence. What is religious, then, is to be human, with all that it entails. It is simply how we relate to our world.

       Already in the 1950s, Eliade wrote a book specifically on the subject of the sacred: The Sacred and the Profane, which repeats several of the ideas from The Myth of the Eternal Return. As the title reveals, he describes a polarity between the sacred and the profane, where he sees the latter gaining influence in modern society at the cost of the former.

       He regards this as unfortunate, robbing modern man of a sense of meaning of life and a place in the world. He explains it through the cyclic work of agriculture:

Emptied of religious symbolism, agricultural work becomes at once opaque and exhausting; it reveals no meaning, it makes possible no opening toward the universal, toward the world of spirit.[16]

       In the introduction, Eliade refers the idea of the sacred to the German theologist Rudolf Otto and his 1917 book Das Heilige (The Holy), presenting the holy as an essential component in religion.

       Otto focused on it as an experience of the divine, going beyond reason. It is a mental state:

This mental state is perfectly sui generis[17] and irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined.[18]

       Eliade’s view of the sacred does not involve any divine influence, and he makes no claim of either gods or the sacred existing outside of human minds. But he does stress the religious nature of man in archaic societies, calling him homo religiosus, and points out the benefits the religious experience brings. The modern profane worldview, on the other hand, leaves man unfulfilled. This is something new:

It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit.[19]

       This profane world modern man finds himself in, lacks any comforting quality, such as purpose and a designated place in it:

Properly speaking, there is no longer any world, there are only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligations of an existence incorporated into an industrial society.[20]

       That could not suffice for those of a religious mindset. Instead, “religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real existence.”[21]

       The consecration of the world is done through myth and ritual, so that the world creation described in the myth is symbolically repeated in the ritual. Since the religious perspective of time is cyclic, such rituals are performed annually, for “each year the world must be created anew.”[22] Religious man makes his world sacred by ritually recreating it.

       This ritual recreation is done for the whole world, but also for cities, temples, even single abodes. Thereby, they all become symbolical centers of the world, which causes no problem: “The multiplicity, or even the infinity, of centers of the world raises no difficulty for religious thought.”[23]

       Eliade applies a narrow definition of myth, which he seems to claim is the only proper one:

The myth relates a sacred history, that is, a primordial event that took place at the beginning of time, ab initio.[24]

       He calls myth a paradigmatic model, peopled by gods or culture heroes, and it is “always the recital of a creation; it tells how something was accomplished, began to be.” That would exclude a number of traditional tales usually regarded as myths, for example many of those so popular among Jungians — the hero myths. They do far from always tell how things began to be.

       That is a minor issue regarding Eliade’s theory. He is free to use the definition of his choice in order to fit his approach to myth, although he goes too far by claiming it to be true for all myths.

       What is more disturbing is that he applies this kind of generalization to several components in his theory. He assumes homogeneity in archaic societies, among religious people, among those who are non-religious, regarding the meanings of rituals, and so on, presenting no other evidence than chosen examples from the very vast source of myths and rites around the world. He even confesses to his bias in choosing them, such as here, when discussing sacred space:

From the thousands of examples available to the historian of religions, we have cited only a small number but enough to show the varieties of the religious experience of space.[25]

       But it is not the variety he wishes to demonstrate with the examples. It is the very opposite. He aims to show their similarities, which he declares on the following page:

But for our purpose it is not the infinite variety of the religious experiences of space that concerns us but, on the contrary, their elements of unity.

       Hence, it comes as no surprise that he neglects discussing examples that contradict his theory, although they are certainly easy to find. He searches for a distinct pattern and chooses examples accordingly. That is not a proper scientific procedure. But in this approach he is in good company with both Freudians and Jungians.

       To what extent is Mircea Eliade a Jungian? He definitely does not stick to Jung’s dogma so to speak religiously. In this book, Jung is not mentioned even once, and the only book of his listed in the bibliography is the one co-written with Kerényi.[26] As for the term archetype, it is used much less than in the previously discussed book, solely in the sense of a paradigmatic model, without the expanded unconscious dynamics proposed by Jung.

       He denies the idea that mythology would be the product of the unconscious, but still sees a link between them:

Yet the contents and structures of the unconscious are the result of immemorial existential situations, especially of critical situations, and this is why the unconscious has a religious aura.[27]

       Any existential crisis, he explains on the same page, leads to religion: “For religion is the paradigmatic solution for every existential crisis.” That means the non-religious are in a dilemma, since they do not have access to this outlet. But their profane mentality is not solid. Their capacity to be religious is hidden in the depth of their unconscious:

From one point of view it could almost be said that in the case of those moderns who proclaim that they are nonreligious, religion and mythology are "eclipsed" in the darkness of their unconscious — which means too that in such men the possibility of reintegrating a religious vision of life lies at a great depth.[28]

       Eliade is clearly distancing himself from the Jungian theories about religion and myth. He has his own gospel to preach and it is not that close to Jung’s — though also not totally different. His theory is based on what he perceives as mankind’s emotional urges and needs, as opposed to rational thinking. In other words, he regards myth and ritual as stemming from what Jungians would call the unconscious instead of the conscious, although he is reluctant to apply those words to his theory.

       Eliade refers to religious man, but makes no clear definition of what it is to be religious. The only attribute he describes is the experience of the sacred, which can glorify even something as simple as a stone, and just about everything else:

In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality.[29]

       So, the religious experience is identical with the experience of the sacred. But what makes something sacred is the religious doctrine, such as its myths and deities. Without that, there would be no method by which to consecrate anything. Eliade points out the creation myth as the core model for making things sacred, so that must have been present beforehand. But then it is odd to present it as a means to fulfill a need. The means can hardly have appeared before the need.

       What Eliade’s theory implies is that mythology emerged to fulfill the urge to make the world sacred, although before a mythology the concept of the sacred would have no meaning. So, mythology cannot have risen out of that need, as Eliade describes it. Either mythology existed beforehand and led to the experience of the sacred, or that experience was originally something different from what mythology later came to confirm.

       The sense of wonder and awe, which the sacred is set to induce, is likely to have been with us for very long before we formulated explanations for it. In spite of Eliade’s statements to the contrary, we still feel it, no matter how profane we might be. The sensation does not need an elaborate religious confirmation. It is much more likely that religion incorporated it, than that it is something unique to those who have faith in a religion.

Jungians on Myth and Religion

1. Introduction

2. Erich Neumann

3. Károly Kerényi

4. Joseph L. Henderson

5. Joseph Campbell

6. Mircea Eliade

7. Marie-Louise von Franz

8. Charles H. Long

9. James Hillman

10. Anthony Stevens

11. David Adams Leeming

12. Jordan B. Peterson

13. Literature

This text is an excerpt from my book Archetypes of Mythology: Jungian Theories on Myth and Religion Examined from 2022. The excerpt was published on this website in January, 2023.

© Stefan Stenudd 2022, 2023

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Stefan Stenudd

About me
I'm a Swedish author of fiction and non-fiction books in both English and Swedish. I'm also an artist, a historian of ideas, and a 7 dan Aikikai Shihan aikido instructor. Click the header to read my full bio.