Mircea Eliade

An informative guide to the modern mythologies! This classic study, translated from the original French, deals primarily with societies around the world in which myth is--or was until very recently-- "living," in the sense that it supplies models for human behavior and, by that very fact, gives meaning and value to life. The author believes that understanding the structure and function of myths in these traditional societies serves to clarify a stage in the history of human thought: "myths reveal that the World, man, and life have a supernatural origin and history, and that this history is significant, precious, and exemplary."

Analysis of the Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities

First published in 1951, "Shamanism" soon became the standard work in the study of this mysterious & fascinating phenomenon. Writing as the founder of the modern study of the history of religion, Romanian emigre--scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-86) surveys the practice of Shamanism over two & a half millennia of human history, moving from the Shamanic traditions of Siberia & Central Asia--where Shamanism was first observed--to North & South America, Indonesia, Tibet, China & beyond. In this authoritative survey, Eliade illuminates the magico-religious life of societies that give primacy of place to the figure of the Shaman--at once magician & medicine man, healer & miracle-doer, priest, mystic & poet. Synthesizing the approaches of psychology, sociology & ethnology, "Shamanism" will remain for years to come the reference book of choice for those intrigued by this practice.

Primitive man's discovery of the ability to change matter from one state to another brought about a profound change in spiritual behavior. In The Forge and the Crucible, Mircea Eliade follows the ritualistic adventures of these ancient societies, adventures rooted in the people's awareness of an awesome new power.The new edition of The Forge and the Crucible contains an updated appendix, in which Eliade lists works on Chinese alchemy published in the past few years. He also discusses the importance of alchemy in Newton's scientific evolution.

In the classic text The Sacred and the Profane, famed historian of religion Mircea Eliade observes that even moderns who proclaim themselves residents of a completely profane world are still unconsciously nourished by the memory of the sacred. Eliade traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times in terms of space, time, nature, and the cosmos. In doing so he shows how the total human experience of the religious man compares with that of the nonreligious. This book of great originality and scholarship serves as an excellent introduction to the history of religion, but its perspective also encompasses philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology. It will appeal to anyone seeking to discover the potential dimensions of human existence.

In volume 2 of this monumental work, Mircea Eliade continues his magisterial progress through the history of religious ideas. The religions of ancient China, Brahmanism and Hinduism, Buddha and his contemporaries, Roman religion, Celtic and German religions, Judaism, the Hellenistic period, the Iranian syntheses, and the birth of Christianity—all are encompassed in this volume.

This volume completes the immensely learned three-volume A History of Religious Ideas. Eliade examines the movement of Jewish thought out of ancient Eurasia, the Christian transformation of the Mediterranean area and Europe, and the rise and diffusion of Islam from approximately the sixth through the seventeenth centuries. Eliade's vast knowledge of past and present scholarship provides a synthesis that is unparalleled. In addition to reviewing recent interpretations of the individual traditions, he explores the interactions of the three religions and shows their continuing mutual influence to be subtle but unmistakable.As in his previous work, Eliade pays particular attention to heresies, folk beliefs, and cults of secret wisdom, such as alchemy and sorcery, and continues the discussion, begun in earlier volumes, of pre-Christian shamanistic practices in northern Europe and the syncretistic tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. These subcultures, he maintains, are as important as the better-known orthodoxies to a full understanding of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Set in 1930s Calcutta, this is a roman á clef of remarkable intimacy. Originally published in Romanian in 1933, this semiautobiographical novel by the world renowned scholar Mircea Eliade details the passionate awakenings of Alain, an ambitious young French engineer flush with colonial pride and prejudice and full of a European fascination with the mysterious subcontinent. Offered the hospitality of a senior Indian colleague, Alain grasps at the chance to discover the authentic India firsthand. He soon finds himself enchanted by his host's daughter, the lovely and inscrutable Maitreyi, a precocious young poet and former student of Tagore. What follows is a charming, tentative flirtation that soon, against all the proprieties and precepts of Indian society, blossoms into a love affair both impossible and ultimately tragic. This erotic passion plays itself out in Alain's thoughts long after its bitter conclusion. In hindsight he sets down the story, quoting from the diaries of his disordered days, and trying to make sense of the sad affair. A vibrantly poetic love story, Bengal Nights is also a cruel account of the wreckage left in the wake of a young man's self discovery. At once horrifying and deeply moving, Eliade's story repeats the patterns of European engagement with India even as it exposes and condemns them. Invaluable for the insight it offers into Eliade's life and thought, it is a work of great intellectual and emotional power. "Bengal Nights is forceful and harshly poignant, written with a great love of India informed by clear-eyed understanding. But do not open it if you prefer to remain unmoved by your reading matter.It is enough to make stones weep." — Literary ReviewMircea Eliade (1907-1986) was the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor in the Divinity School and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Many of his scholarly works, as well as his two-volume autobiography and four-volume journal, are published by the University of Chicago Press. Translated into French in 1950, Bengal Nights was an immediate critical success. The film, Les Nuits Bengali, appeared in 1987.

Neîndoielnic, scriind această carte, autorul ei evadează: în trecut, în imaginaţie, în mit. Nuntă în Cer nu este, desigur, un roman fantastic, deşi misterul nu lipseşte, dar este, cu siguranţă, un roman realist-simbolic, axat pe un mit al iubirii. Un roman de idei, mai puţin livresc decât celelalte, şi un roman liric.Cadrul întâmplărilor descrise rămâne unul modern, citadin, în vreme ce relatările lor au loc într-un cadru montan, izolat. Avem de-a face, aşadar, cu o perspectivă „de sus” asupra trecutului personajelor şi cu o transfigurare a acestuia prin iubire şi prin suferinţa despărţirii. Prin Nuntă în Cer, Eliade se reconciliază de fapt cu melancolica Belle Époque a copilăriei sale, vehement respinsă de „adolescentul miop” şi de tânărul macho „apologet al virilităţii”. Este însă ceva mai mult decât atât, căci dacă Mavrodin şi Hasnaş reprezintă două variante de om modern, îndrăgostit de necunoscut şi atras de schimbare, Ileana încarnează un principiu tradiţional de stabilitate.

"Puisque je suis resté seul, j'ai décidé de me mettre à écrire aujourd'hui même Le Roman de l'adolescent myope. J'y travaillerai chaque après-midi. Je n'ai pas besoin d'inspiration ; il faut que j'écrive ma vie, et ma vie, je la connais ; quant au roman, j'y pense depuis longtemps." Voici décrit dès les premières phrases le projet de ce livre, où le narrateur, un adolescent précoce et tourmenté dans la Bucarest du début du siècle, dévoile - avec précision et presque impudeur - son quotidien : les travers de ses profs, les complots des élèves, leurs convoitises sexuelles, les premiers exploits erotiques, la découverte de sa propre altérité... mais aussi la nécessité d'écrire, qui lui est chevillée au corps. Retrouvé voici peu dans un grenier de Bucarest, ce roman - écrit alors même que Mircea Eliade avait l'âge de son héros - est aussi un inestimable document sur le grand écrivain qui fut lui-même cet adolescent de génie qu'il nous révèle en faisant mine de le découvrir.

Odată cu primul său volum de nuvele, publicat la Madrid în 1963 și reluat după câţiva ani în România sub titlul celei mai fascinante dintre ele, Mircea Eliade pare să fi găsit tema de elecţie a “realismului magic“, inaugurat de el în literatură. Este o temă pe care o va explora neobosit de acum înainte; ea descinde parcă dintr-o idee recurentă a studiilor şi eseurilor sale de istorie a religiilor. Potrivit ei, omul modern este, chiar fără să o ştie, apăsat de o nemiloasă “tiranie a istoriei”, de care caută cu înfrigurare să se elibereze. Numai că soluţia izbăvirii de această tiranie trece printr-o abolire a timpului, care alcătuieşte miezul acelui vârtej capabil să-l soarbă şi să-l desfiinţeze.Eroul lui Eliade din La ţigănci, un om obişnuit prins în întâmplări oarecare, trăiește experienţa unei fisuri în fluxul timpului, prin care se află proiectat într-o altă lume, familiară şi stranie totodată, o lume ce îi dezvăluie existenţa sacrului camuflat în profan

Une famille isolée au bord du Danube subit l’influence maléfique d’une ancêtre disparue. Mademoiselle Christina hante les chambres des occupants, vampire à l’apparence séductrice, elle charme Egor et enlève petit à petit toute vie dans la demeure austère. Sous la lumière blafarde de la lune, les ombres trahissent la présence d’un autre monde, effrayant, celui des âmes damnées. Entre deux soupirs de Sanda, jeune fille exsangue, un silence de mort s’installe dans le récit.Egor trouvera-t-il la force de lutter contre l’enchanteresse Christina ? La jeune Simina, possédée par le mal, semble en douter.Mademoiselle Christina nous vient tout droit du folklore roumain. Une histoire de vampires dans un monde en proie au blasphème; pour l'exorciser, un jeune homme tue deux fois le vampire en lui transperçant le cœur. Le dialogue entre le monde des morts et celui des vivants n'est pas éphémère. Les deux camps se livrent un siège sans merci, à ceci près que les belligérants se disputent non des fortunes mais des âmes, et que leurs armes ne sont pas des armes classiques, mais des rituels magiques.

This founding work of the history of religions, first published in English in 1954, secured the North American reputation of the Romanian emigre-scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-86). Making reference to an astonishing number of cultures & drawing on scholarship published in no less than half a dozen European languages, Eliade's "The Myth of the Eternal Return makes both intelligible & compelling the religious expressions & activities of a wide variety of archaic & "primitive" religious cultures. While acknowledging that a return to the "archaic" is no longer possible, Eliade passionately insists on the value of understanding this view in order to enrich our contemporary imagination of what it is to be human.

Contine 2 romane:- Domnisoa Christina- Sarpele

Volumul 1 + 2 combinateAcest roman constituie poate proiectul cel mai ambiţios al lui Mircea Eliade, acela de a configura un Zeitgeist, plasându-se astfel alături de romancieri europeni redutabili. Romanul recapitulează toate temele esenţiale pentru opera lui Eliade, teme care-şi găsesc ecoul atât în proza şi dramaturgia sa cât şi în opera ştiinţifică sau în publicistică. În acelaşi timp, romanul reprezintă un mare semn de adio, este un roman al despărţirilor, al rupturilor, al unei lumi dispărute care va continua să-l obsedeze pe scriitor şi asupra căreia acesta va mai reveni, dar niciodată cu acest suflu, cu o astfel de anvergură. (ANGELO MITCHIEVICI)

Nuvela ilustrează o alegorie a morţii sau a drumului spre moarte.

Les trois tomes de l' "Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses" - "De l'âge de la pierre aux mystères d'Eleusis" (1975), "De Gautama Bouddha au triomphe du christianisme" (1978) et "De Mahomet à l'âge des Réformes" (1983) - représentent une œuvre irremplaçable. L'érudition et la puissance intellectuelle synthétique de Mircea Eliade apportent au lecteur une vision des religions qui fait apparaître à la fois "l'unité fondamentale des phénomènes religieux et l'inépuisable nouveauté de leurs expressions" selon sa formule. Le tome I nous conduit des premiers comportements magico-religieux des hommes préhistoriques à l'épanouissement du culte de Dionysos, à travers les religions mésopotamiennes et de l'Egypte ancienne, la religion d'Israël, la religion des Indos-Européens, les religions de l'Inde avant Bouddha, la religion grecque et la religion iranienne.

Editie de Eugen Simion

Nel 1935, quando "Gli Huligani" viene pubblicato in Romania, Mircea Eliade ha solo 28 anni, ma nel suo paese è già molto celebre. Il romanzo ottiene immediatamente un grande successo e diviene un caso editoriale. La critica reputa impudica l'intraprendenza delle ragazze di buona famiglia che animano il racconto, ma in realtà la ragione dello scandalo andrà ritrovata altrove. Attraverso la descrizione lucida e ironica della giovane borghesia romena affascinata dall'ideologia fascista e intossicata da un mito collettivo, Eliade dà un volto agli huligamn, quella generazione della barbarie nouvelle che vuole affermare se stessa costruendo l'uomo nuovo, l'unico - degno e coraggioso - del quale la Romania potrà andare fiera. L'accattivante impianto narrativo e le multiformi sfaccettature dei personaggi e dei loro sentimenti creano un'atmosfera che molto più di qualsiasi saggio prelude alle tragedie che incombono sull'Europa.

La plimbare, prin pădure, Andronic este surprins invocând un șarpe.

Romanian

Bucharest, 1938: while Hitler gains power in Germany, the Romanian police start arresting students they suspect of belonging to the Iron Guard. Meanwhile, a man who has spent his life studying languages, poetry, and history—a man who thought his life was over—lies in a hospital bed, inexplicably alive and miraculously healthy, trying to figure out how to conceal his identity. At the intersection of the natural and supernatural, myth and history, dream and science, lies Mircea Eliade’s novella. Now in its first paperback edition, the psychological thriller features Dominic Matei, an elderly academic who experiences a cataclysmic event that allows him to live a new life with startling intellectual capacity. Sought by the Nazis for their medical experiments on the potentially life-prolonging power of electric shocks, Matei is helped to flee through Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India. Newly endowed with prodigious powers of memory and comprehension, he finds himself face to face with the glory and terror of the supernatural. In this surreal, philosophy-driven fantasy, Eliade tests the boundaries of literary genre as well as the reader’s imagination.Suspenseful, witty, and poignant, Youth Without Youth illuminates Eliade’s longing for past loves and new texts, his erotic imagination, and his love of a thrilling mystery. It was adapted for the screen in 2007 as Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature film in over ten years. “A wonderful blend of realism, surrealism, and fantasy, [Eliade’s novellas] suggest the importance of the mythic and the supernatural to finding meaning in the everyday. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal “Youth Without Youth reads like a surreal collaboration by Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Carl Jung. Mircea Eliade left me with the rare sense that I had been entertained by a genius.”—William Allen, author of Starkweather and The Fire in the Birdbath and Other Disturbances

Prin tema care-i conferă şi titlul, romanul pare să-şi aibă sursa în perioada portugheză, aşa cum menţionează Eliade în Jurnal, în 21 iunie 1949: „Solstiţiul de vară şi noaptea de Sânziene îşi păstrează, pentru mine, toate farmecele şi toate prestigiile. Se întâmplă ceva şi ziua aceasta mi se pare nu numai cea mai lungă, ci, pur şi simplu, alta decât cea de ieri sau cea de mâine. Cândva, în Portugalia, imaginasem un fel de poveste cu miracolul regenerării şi tinereţii veşnice dobândite într-o noapte de Sânziene. Imaginasem e puţin spus. Multe zile de-a rândul am trăit parcă sub vraja acestui mister. Trăiam aşteptând: să mi se întâmple ceva, să mi se dezvăluie ceva.” Noaptea de Sânziene constituie pentru Eliade un alt moment privilegiat de revelare a numinosului, iar alături de sentimentul alterităţii se află şi cel al magicului.ANGELO MITCHIEVICI

In this era of increased knowledge the essence of religious phenomena eludes the psychologists, sociologists, linguists, and other specialists because they do not study it as religious. According to Mircea Eliade, they miss the one irreducible element in religious phenomena—the element of the sacred. Eliade abundantly demonstrates universal religious experience and shows how humanity’s effort to live within a sacred sphere has manifested itself in myriad cultures from ancient to modern times; how certain beliefs, rituals, symbols, and myths have, with interesting variations, persisted.

Mircea Eliade--one of the most renowned expositors of the psychology of religion, mythology, and magic--shows that myth and symbol constitute a mode of thought that not only came before that of discursive and logical reasoning, but is still an essential function of human consciousness. He describes and analyzes some of the most powerful and ubiquitous symbols that have ruled the mythological thinking of East and West in many times and at many levels of cultural development.

„Singura justificare a unei existenţe este viaţa din ea, intensitatea, fertilitatea, adâncimea ei. Bucuria, lumina, victoria, caritatea, depăşirea, continua depăşire, speranţa – toate acestea sunt semne că viaţa gâlgâie acolo plină şi organizată. Apreciez un om, o gândire, o operă după autenticitatea lor; adică după gradul de apropiere de coincidenţa existenţă = creaţie.“ (Mircea ELIADE)

Romanian

ultimul lui volum de povestiri, aparut in 1980, arta lui Mircea Eliade atinge o esentializare pe care prozatorul a cautat-o in scrierile sale literare dintotdeauna. Dincolo de intamplari, dincolo chiar de nostalgia evocarii, o tema prezenta in multe din prozele sale fantastice dobandeste acum o pondere covarsitoare: semnificatia actului creator.Personajele nu mai sunt oamenii obisnuiti de altadata, incercati de intamplari enigmatice si pline de semnificatii, ci scriitori, artisti sau matematicieni pe cale sa descopere o taina esentiala pentru ei si pentru omenire. Ele par sa nu mai cunoasca nici o alta framantare in afara de patrunderea misterului care se reveleaza prin intermediul destinului ce le-a fost rezervat.Discutiile lor pasionate revin obsedant asupra cate unui amanunt, banal in aparenta – o vorba auzita candva si apoi ingropata in uitare sau o intamplare fara nici un ecou in viata imediata –, care revine in miezul cel mai fierbinte al memoriei dovedindu-se inzestrat cu consecinte cosmice.

Acest roman a lui Mircea Eliade a fost traditional interpretat ca o povestire fantastica in care batranul Farama reanvie tot felul de mituri romanesti, intr-un decor fals modern, ca un fel de simbolistica revansa a acelui fond ancestral pe care comunistii, in acei ani, il denigrau. Fantasticul, cu alte cuvinte, se vadeste mai puternic decat realul, iar Eliade, atunci exilat in Occident, reuseste sa-si mentina solidaritatea cu spiritualitatea romaneasca in ciuda unei puteri totalitare care dorea sa distruga si spiritul si exilul. Sorin Alexandrescu

In this landmark book the renowned scholar of religion Mircea Eliade lays the groundwork for a Western understanding of Yoga, exploring how its guiding principle, that of freedom, involves remaining in the world without letting oneself be exhausted by such conditionings as time and history. Drawing on years of study and experience in India, Eliade provides a comprehensive survey of Yoga in theory and practice from its earliest foreshadowings in the Vedas through the twentieth century. The subjects discussed include Pata�jali, author of the Yoga-sutras; yogic techniques, such as concentration on a Single Point, postures, and respiratory discipline; and Yoga in relation to Brahmanism, Buddhism, Tantrism, Oriental alchemy, mystical erotism, and shamanism.

Romanian