Works by
Mircea Eliade
(Writer)
[February or March 1907 – April 22, 1986]

Biography/Memoirs

1. Journal I, 1945-1955 (1990), Mac Linscott Ricketts, translator
   Journal I is a story of revewal—of the new life that began for Mircea Eliade in the fall of 1945 when he became an expatriate. Eliade came to Paris virtually empty-handed, following the death of his first wife and the Soviet takeover of Romania, which made him a persona non grata there. He had left half a lifetime in Romania: his parents, whom he never saw again; his library; unpublished and unfinished manuscripts, including the journal notebooks prior to 1940; an academic career; and Zalmoxis, the journal of religious studies he founded.
   
   During the lean years in Paris Eliade lived and worked in small, cold rooms; prepared meals on a Primus stove; pawned his valuables; and asked friends for loans. Eventually he secured a research stipend from the Bollingen Foundation. His ten years in Paris were among his most productive; the books he wrote during this period brought him worldwide acclaim as a historian of religions. He records his first meetings with Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Gershom Scholem, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Raffaele Pettazzoni, and many other scholars and writers.
   
   Eliade also continued to write literary works. Numerous entries describe his five-year struggle with his novel The Forbidden Forest. Spanning the twelve fateful years from 1936 to 1948, it expresses within a fictional framework the central themes of Eliade's work on religions. Writing the novel was a Herculean task in which Eliade summarized and memorialized his old Romanian life.

2. Journal II, 1957-1969 (1989), Fred H. Johnson, Jr., translator
   Mircea Eliade's journal of the years 1957-1969, originally published in English under the title No Souvenirs, is the testimony of a "wandering scholar" caught between three worlds: his native Romania, the France he fled to, and his last homeland, the United States. The journal is filled with his work, dreams, memories of his youth, stories of his travels, the reflections of each day.

3. Journal III, 1970-1978 (1989), Teresa Lavender Fagan, translator
   More an eloquent chronicle of the mind's life than a recital of daily routine, this volume of Mircea Eliade's journal offers a remarkably candid portrait of a renowned scholar and his work. The entries—full of marvelous ideas, outlines for works never written, responses to the works of others, and much more—reveal many rarely glimpsed sides of the private, as well as public, man. What did he really think of the students who came to him for instruction in black magic? What were his private reflections on feminism, student drug use, the sexual revolution, the nature of American scholars and scholarship? Who were his best friends, why did he enjoy their company, and why did he shun the company of others?
   
   Quite apart from the personal, biographical interest the journal holds, it is a document of cultural and intellectual significance. Eliade remarks on such colleagues and friends as Jung, Dumézil, Ricoeur, Bellow, and Ionesco. Moreover, the period covered encompasses Eliade's most active years as a teacher, and the journal beautifully reflects his developing views on religion, history, and the nature of academic culture. Bits and pieces of Eliade's past life are juxtaposed with thoughts about ongoing projects and work yet to be undertaken as well as with anecdotes of his travels and comments on world events.
   
   A genuine treat for Eliade readers and those interested in history of religions, Journal III provides new perspectives on many of Eliade's other works—the History of Religious Ideas, Ordeal by Labyrinth, the Autobiography. At the same time the journal is a mature scholar's record of the aftermath of the 1960s, a turbulent period that profoundly affected American university life. As such, these writings hold valuable insights into not only the life and work of one man but also the cultural history of an entire era.

4. Journal IV, 1979-1985 (1989)
   Author: Mircea Eliade, Mac Linscott Ricketts, translator;
   Journal IV is the first publication, in a translation from the Romanian manuscript, of the journal that Mircea Eliade kept during the last seven years of his life. In this period, Eliade is ensconced as a famous scholar—his works are being translated into many languages and books about him arrive regularly in the mail. His encounters with scholars of like repute are recorded in the journal; after a party in Paris, Eliade shares a taxi with Clade Lévi-Strauss and inadvertently makes off with his raincoat.
   
   Running like a fault line through the peak of his success, however, is Eliade's painful awareness of his physical decline—failing vision, arthritic hands, and continual fatigue. Again and again he repeats how little time he has to finish the projects he is working on—his autobiography, the third and fourth volumes of his History of Religious Ideas, and the duties associated with his editorship of the Encyclopedia of Religion. He poignantly recounts the sharpest blow: the disorganization and eventual destruction by fire of his personal library.
   
   Within the scope of Journal IV Eliade and his world go to ruin. What does not decline is the vivid and persistent voice of Eliade the writer, an unbreaking voice that—with death only months away—plans a reply to critics, plots out an article, and ruminates on characters to people another novella.

• Autobiography, Volume 1: Journey East, Journey West, 1907-1937 (1983)

• Autobiography, Volume 2: 1937-1960, Exile's Odyssey (1981)

Children

• Tales of the Sacred and the Supernatural (1981)
  Ages 9-12

Fiction

• Youth Without Youth (2007), Matei Calinescu, ed. and Mac Linscott Ricketts, Translator
  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.
  Movie (2007), Francis Ford Coppola, director with Alexandra Maria Lara and Tim Roth  DVD
  Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature film in over ten years.

• Two Strange Tales (2001)
  "No event in our world is real, my friend. Everything that occurs in this universe is illusory... And in a world of appearances, in which no thing and no event has any permanence, any reality of its own—whoever is master of certain forces can do anything he wishes..." So speaks a character in Two Strange Tales, a pair of novellas in which Westerners are caught up in the uncanny realm of Eastern religion and magic. In "Nights at Serampore," three European scholars, traveling deep into the forests of Bengal, are inexplicably cast into another time and space where they witness the violent murder of a young Hindu wife. In "The Secret of Dr. Honingberger," a respectable Rumanian physician vanishes without a trace after experimenting with yogic techniques in his quest for the legendary invisible world called Shambhala. In Two Strange Tales, author Mircea Eliade combined yogic folklore with the literary genre of the supernatural suspense tale so as to reveal dimensions of experience that are inaccessible to other intellectual approaches. These well-crafted stories will appeal to both lovers of the supernatural and those fascinated by mysticism of the East.

• Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts (1985, 1992) with Diane Apostolos-Cappadona
  Major work is distinguished by an intensity of inspiration and an overwhelming sense of personal vision. This merging of inspiration and vision permits the creation of a classic oeuvre whose creator is deemed to be a 'master of his craft, ' or perhaps better, 'a seminal mind.' Such is the work of the historian of religious, Mirceas Eliade. In his lifelong quest to understand the presence of the Sacred throughout human history, Eliade has been fascinated by two central themes: Creation and Time.

• The Forbidden Forest: A Novel (1978), Mac Linscott Ricketts and Mary Park Stevenson, Translators

• The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954, 1971), Willard R. Trask, Translator
  This essay on humanity's experience of history and its interpretation begins with a study of the traditional or mythological view and concludes with a comparative estimate of modern historiological approaches.

• Bengal Nights: A Novel (1950, 1995), Catherine Spencer, Translator
  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.

Non-fiction

• The HarperCollins Concise Guide to World Religion: The A-to-Z Encyclopedia of All the Major Religious Traditions (1999) by Mircea Eliade and Ioan P. Couliano with Hillary S. Wessner
  This highly accessible resource distils Mircea Eliade's lifework of detailing and comparing humanity's entire religious heritage, providing fascinating insights into the character and worldview of the 33 principal religions. Including Buddhism, Christianity, Jainism, Judaism, Islam, Shinto, Shamanism, Taoism, South American religions, Baltic and Slavic religions, Confucianism, and the religions of Africa and Oceania, The HarperCollins Concise Guide to World Religions covers all kinds of religious figures, histories, sacred texts, mythologies, and mystical techniques.

• The Romanians (1992), Rodica Mihaela Scafes, translator

• Essential Sacred Writings From Around the World (1991)
  This comprehensive anthology contains writings vital to all the major non-Western religious traditions, arranged thematically. It includes colourful descriptions of deities, creation myths, depictions of death and the afterlife, teachings on the relationship between humanity and the sacred, religious rituals and practices, and prayers and hymns. Mircea Eliade, a recognized pioneer in the systematic study of the history of the world’s religions, includes excerpts from the Quran, the Book of the Dead, the Rig Veda, the Bhagavad Gita, the Homeric Hymns, and the Popol Vuh, to name just a few. Oral accounts from Native American, African, Maori, Australian Aborigine, and other people are also included.

• Images and Symbols (1991), Philip Mairet, Translator
  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.

• The Eliade Guide to World Religions (1991) by Mircea Eliade and Ioan P. Culianu, with Hillary S. Wessner
  This guide to the world's religions, past and present, distills Eliade's three-volume History of Religious Ideas and sixteen-volume Encyclopedia of Religion into one up-to-date and accessible volume.

• Patterns in Comparative Religion (1987, 1996), Rosemary Shead, Translator
  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.

• The Encyclopedia of Religion (1987, 1993)
  16 Volumes

• The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion (1983), Willard R. Trask, translator
  A noted historian of religion traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times, in terms of space, time, nature and the cosmos, and life itself.

• No Souvenirs (1982)

• Ordeal by Labyrinth (1982)

• Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1979, 1992)

• The Two and the One (1979)

• From Primitives to Zen; A Thematic Sourcebook of the History of Religions (1978)

• Man and the Sacred (1974)

• Australian Religions (1973)

• Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1970), Willard R. Trask, Translator
  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 foreshadowing's in the Vedas through the twentieth century. The subjects discussed include Patañjali, 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.

• Patanjali and Yoga (1969, 1975)

• The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (1969, 1984)
  In The Quest Mircea Eliade stresses the cultural function that a study of the history of religions can play in a secularized society. He writes for the intelligent general reader in the hope that what he calls a new humanism "will be engendered by a confrontation of modern Western man with unknown or less familiar worlds of meaning."

• Myth and Reality (1968, 1998)
  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."

• Patterns in Comparative Religion (1967)

• Mephistopheles and the Androgyne: Studies in Religious Myth and Symbol (1965)

• The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (1960)

• Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (1959)

• Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (1958, 1975, 1994), Willard R. Trask, Translator
  Organizing data from cultures the world over, Eliade lays out the basic patterns of initiation: group puberty rituals, entrance into secret cults, shamanic instruction, individual visions, and heroic rites of passage. The vast information, assembled so beautifully, transcends usual scholarship. Eliade affirms the greater experience in all initiations--the indissoluable ties between humans and the cosmos of gods, spirits, animals, ancestors, and nature.

• The Forge and the Crucible (1956, 1979)
  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.

• The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954, 2005),  Willard R. Trask, translator
  This founding work of the history of religions, first published in English in 1954, secured the North American reputation of the Romanian émigré-scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). Making reference to an astonishing number of cultures and drawing on scholarship published in no less than half a dozen European languages, Eliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return makes both intelligible and compelling the religious expressions and activities of a wide variety of archaic and "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. Jonathan Z. Smith's new introduction provides the contextual background to the book and presents a critical outline of Eliade's argument in a way that encourages readers to engage in an informed conversation with this classic text.

• Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951, 2004), Willard R. Trask, Translator
  First published in 1951, Shamanism soon became the standard work in the study of this mysterious and fascinating phenomenon. Writing as the founder of the modern study of the history of religion, Romanian émigré--scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) surveys the practice of Shamanism over two and a half millennia of human history, moving from the Shamanic traditions of Siberia and Central Asia--where Shamanism was first observed--to North and South America, Indonesia, Tibet, China, and 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 and medicine man, healer and miracle-doer, priest, mystic, and poet. Synthesizing the approaches of psychology, sociology, and ethnology, Shamanism will remain for years to come the reference book of choice for those intrigued by this practice.

A History of Religious Ideas

1. From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries (1975, 1981), Willard R. Trask, Translator

2. History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 2 From Gautama Budda to the Triumph of Christianity (1982)

3. From Muhammad to the Age of Reforms (1988), Alf Hiltebeitel and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, translators
   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.

Plays

Poetry

Young Adults

Cards

Movies

Music

Tapes

Video/DVD

Other

• Suitcase (1997) by Andrei Codrescu, Mircea Eliade, Salman Rushdie, Samuel Weber, Sebastiao Salgado, and Wislawa Szymborska

See also:

• The Inner Journey: Myth, Psyche, and Spirit (2008)
  With contributions by Joseph Campbell and  Mircea Eliade

• Mircea Eliade: A Critical Reader (2006), Bryan S. Rennie, ed.

• Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade (2002) by Douglas Allen

• Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade (2000) by Bryan S. Rennie

• Mircea Eliade (1999) by Eugen Simion

• The Politics of Myth: A Study of C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell (1999) by Robert S. Ellwood
  See also Joseph Campbell

• Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade (1998) by Douglas Allen

• Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion (1996) by Bryan S. Rennie

• Reading and Responding to Mircea Eliade's History of Religious Ideas: The Lure of the Late Eliade (1993) by John R. Mason

• Mircea Eliade's Vision for a New Humanism (1993) by David Cave

• Mircea Eliade (1988) by Mac Linscott Ricketts

• Waiting for the Dawn: Mircea Eliade in Perspective (1985), David Carrasco and Jane Marie Law, eds.

• Imagination and Meaning: The Scholarly and Literary Worlds of Mircea Eliade (1982) by Mac Linscott Ricketts with Norman J. Giradot, ed.

• Religion on Trial: Mircea Eliade & his Critics (1977) by Guilford Dudley

• Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred (1975) by Thomas J.J. Altizer

• The Future of Religions (1966) by Paul Tillich
  Contains four important essays by Paul Tillich, Including His Last Public Address; with tributes by Jerald C. Brauer, Wilhelm Pauck and Mircea Eliade