Scientist of Symbols

To the tourist in India, the magician's rope trick is merely another clever demonstration that the hand is quicker than the eye. To Professor Mircea Eliade of the University of Chicago divinity school, the fakir's fakery is the vestige of an ancient religious rite with highly symbolic overtones: the rope is an image of the "astral cord," symbolizing the link between earth and sky, man and heaven. Originally, the trick was intended to prove to spectators the existence of an unknown and mysterious world; by climbing the rope and then temporarily disappearing, the conjurer revealed the possibility of man's transcending this world for the "real" but hidden world of the sacred.

In the subtle art of establishing the sacred origin of profane events, Rumanian-born Scholar Eliade has no peer. A pipe-smoking polymath who speaks six languages and writes fluently in three, Eliade, 58, is a prolific novelist as well as chairman of Chicago's history of religion department. His new book, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne: Studies in Religious Myth and Symbol (Sheed & Ward; $5), demonstrates why he is probably the world's foremost living interpreter of spiritual myths and symbolism. Jerald Brauer, dean of Chicago's divinity school, and other scholars compare Eliade's works to those of the modern pioneer of myth collection, Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough). Unlike Frazer, an agnostic who deplored the mindless cruelty and superstition of pagan legends, Eliade, a Greek Orthodox Christian, comprehends ancient mythology as religious man's existential effort to understand the mystery of the universe. Little known outside university circles, Eliade has had a profound influence on a number of younger theologians--notably Emory's Thomas J. J. Altizer, one of the leading "death of God" thinkers. Another Eliade enthusiast was the late Paul Tillich, who for three years ran a joint seminar with him at Chicago on theology and the history of religion.

Mystic Light. Mephistopheles, originally a series of lectures delivered to the Eranos circle of scholars and artists influenced by Psychologist C. G. Jung, is typical of Eliade's work: sweeping in scope, it minutely traces the origin and development of several spiritual concepts through a variety of cultures. One example is the widespread experience of the "mystic light," such as that of a sober-minded, 19th century New York City businessman who was ecstatically converted to Christ after a dream in which he was suffused with light. Eliade shows how many otherwise disparate faiths offer similar experiences of the "inner light." Although defined and explained differently by various religions, these experiences all represent radical breaks with normal existence, taking man out of his ordinary life and projecting him "into a universe different in quality, an entirely different world, transcendent and holy." Beginning with a quotation from Goethe's Faust, another essay in the book explores the widespread legend that God and the Devil were brothers, and relates it to the equally ancient conception of the androgyne (hermaphrodite) as a mystical symbol of wholeness; both stories, Eliade argues, represent man's prephilosophic attempt to reconcile the existence in the world of such opposites as good and evil.

Far from being exercises in antiquarianism, Eliade's analyses of myths and symbolism have a decidedly contemporary relevance. In an age of dialogue between East and West, he points out, a knowledge of the still living Oriental religions is essential to anyone who hopes to understand the mind of India or China. Eliade also believes that an awareness of mythology and legend is vital to understanding the history of nonreligious modern man. Only within the last few centuries has man emerged from a cosmos controlled by God and godlets into a desacralized universe. And even while consciously rejecting mythology, man is still subject to it: modern psychology has amply proved that the subconscious mind of man is an uncharted inner universe of symbols.

Marxism & Myth. Modern nonreligious man, says Eliade, "regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence." But this stance too is myth, since man today is surrounded by camouflaged spiritual symbols and corrupt rituals that faintly echo the sacred visions of his religious ancestors. Getting drunk on New Year's Eve, for example, is a secular vestige of a rite found in many ancient religions, in which an orgiastic pre-New Year festival re-enacted the chaos that existed before the divine creation of an ordered cosmos. Eliade argues that mythology is apparent even in sophisticated modern ideologies. Marxism's dictatorship of the proletariat is a secular parody of the widespread religious concept, the salvation of society by "the redeeming role of the Just." And the Communist dream of a "withering away of the state," after which each man shall give according to his abilities and receive according to his needs, echoes the ancient religious vision of an earthly paradise.

Eliade recognizes that modern man cannot return to the days in which God was seen in the moon and the stars, and concedes that the desacralization of the universe was necessary before its scientific conquest. But time and again Eliade warns that man must eventually discover new living symbols of the sacred, since "it is only in being open to the transcendent that he is fully human." Thus, for Eliade, modern man is following in the footsteps of the paradigmatic legendary Faust: he may have successfully stripped the world of its soul only to have lost his own.

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