A History Written Against the Manuals

The third volume of A History of Religious Ideas appeared in English in 1985, translated by Alf Hiltebeitel and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona from the French edition Payot had published two years earlier. The preface is unusually personal. Eliade reports that his vision continues to dwindle and that a stubborn arthritis makes writing difficult; he has modified the plan announced in volume 2, transferring the chapters on Hinduism’s expansion, medieval China, and Japanese religions to a projected final volume. What remains is a deliberate act of emphasis. Four chapters treat the religious history of Europe between the fourth and seventeenth centuries, and Eliade states plainly that he has concentrated less on the familiar creations of Occidental thought than on “heterodoxies, heresies, mythologies, and popular practices such as sorcery, alchemy, and esotericism” — phenomena the manuals had passed over in silence. Interpreted in their proper spiritual horizon, he writes, these creations have “their own special interest and occasionally their grandeur.” The volume is bracketed by two non-Abrahamic panels: it opens with the religions of ancient Eurasia (Tängri the celestial god, shamanic initiation among the Turko-Mongols and Finno-Ugrians) and closes with Tibet. The preface also announces a final volume on the archaic religions of the Americas, Africa, and Oceania and on the religious creativity of modern societies. That volume never appeared; Eliade died in 1986, and this book stands as the effective terminus of the history.

Muhammad and the Two Registers of Islam

The Islamic chapters proceed on two levels, prophetic and esoteric. Muhammad is, Eliade observes, “the only one of all the founders of universal religions for whom we have a detailed biography,” and the documentation, while it explains neither his personality nor his success, allows the historian to watch a religious genius use historical circumstance to change the course of history. The account runs from the pre-Islamic Allah, a remote celestial sovereign whom Eliade names the deus otiosus of the Arabs, through the spiritual retreats that preceded the first revelations around 610, the ecstatic voyage to Heaven, the emigration to Medina, and the message of the Quran, to the irruption of Islam into the Mediterranean world. Chapter 35 then turns to what official theology could not contain. Eliade acknowledges in the preface that his interpretation of Shî’ism and Muslim mysticism is grounded in the hermeneutic of Henry Corbin, and the chapter moves from the Shî’ite esoteric reading of scripture through the great Sufi masters. Al-Hallâj anchors the sequence: the mystic who declared “My spirit blends itself with His Spirit as musk with amber, as wine with pure water,” pronounced the ecstatic words “I am the Truth,” and was executed at Baghdad in 922 — a life Eliade presents through Louis Massignon’s monumental study. Al-Ghazzâlî’s reconciliation of Kalâm and Sufism, the Andalusian summits of Averroës and Ibn Arabî, Sohrawardî’s mysticism of Light, and Rûmî’s sacred music, poetry, and dance complete an arc that ends with the triumph of Sufism over the reaction of the theologians.

Kabbalah: The Exile of God within Himself

Chapter 36 carries Judaism from the compilation of the Mishnah through the Talmud, the medieval philosophers, and Maimonides, poised in Eliade’s section title between Aristotle and the Torah, into the mystical traditions, and here the volume’s debt to Gershom Scholem is explicit and repeated. The Zohar represents, following Scholem, a Jewish theosophy; the decisive novelty arrives with Isaac Luria of Safed, who left no writings and is known through his disciples. Luria’s doctrine of the Tsimtsum holds that the Infinite made the world possible by an act of contraction or withdrawal, abandoning a region within itself so that creation could occupy it. Eliade follows Scholem in reading the Tsimtsum as the deepest symbol of Exile: the Exile of God within himself. The Breaking of the Vessels scatters the divine light among the shells of evil, and the Tikkun, the restitution of the primordial order, becomes the secret goal of human existence, fusing the mystical and messianic elements into one program in which man himself participates in the restoration. From there the chapter descends into the strangest territory of Jewish messianism — Sabbatai Zevi the apostate redeemer, Jakob Frank, whom Eliade (again with Scholem) presents as the most sinister of the Sabbatians — before closing with Hasidism.

Heterodoxies, Popular Religion, and the Witch Hunts

The European chapters honor the preface’s promise. Alongside Augustine, the cult of the saints, and the iconoclastic crisis, Eliade dwells on what official history marginalized: sacred kingship and chivalry as Christianized survivals, the eschatology of the Crusades, the troubadours, the Fedeli d’Amore, and the Grail cycle as esotericism in literary form, and Joachim of Floris’s new theology of history, whose nostalgia for a radical renovatio would haunt Western Christianity down to the alchemists. The dualist chain from the Bogomils to the Cathars, Meister Eckhart, for Eliade “the most important theologian of Western mysticism,” and the Hesychast monks of Byzantium fill out the account. The analytical center, however, is section 306 on the witch hunts. Recent research had exposed the absurdity of the inquisitorial accusations, but Eliade refuses the conclusion that witchcraft was purely an invention of the theologians. Some of the accused practiced magico-religious ceremonies of genuinely pagan origin and structure: the Milan trials of 1384 and 1390 record a society of the goddess Diana, and the Friulian benandanti fought nocturnal battles for the fertility of the fields until torture taught them to confess themselves slaves of Satan. “In the last analysis,” Eliade concludes, “the witch hunts pursued the liquidation of the last survivals of ‘paganism’: that is, essentially, fertility cults and initiation scenarios.” What resulted was the impoverishment of popular religiosity and, in some regions, the decadence of rural societies.

Hermes, Paracelsus, and the Redemption of Nature

The Renaissance chapter opens with a telling scene: around 1460 Cosimo de’ Medici obtained a manuscript of the Corpus hermeticum and asked Marsilio Ficino to translate it at once; Ficino set Plato’s Dialogues aside, and the Hermetic treatises became the first Greek text he translated and published. The vogue of the prisca theologia, the ancient theology running from Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus through Orpheus to Plato, expressed a reaction against a “provincial” Christianity and an aspiration to a universal, transhistorical, primordial religion. Alchemy carried the same aspiration into the laboratory. The Tabula Smaragdina supplied the formula binding Hermeticism to alchemy: “All that is above is like all that is below, all that is below is like all that is above, in order that the miracle of Unity be accomplished.” The nigredo corresponds to the death of the alchemist himself; Paracelsus taught that “he who would enter the Kingdom of God must first enter with his body into his mother and there die” — and under the impact of Neoplatonism the medieval art acquired a christological meaning: the alchemists now affirmed that “just as Christ had redeemed humanity by his death and resurrection, so the opus alchymicum could assure the redemption of Nature.” Heinrich Khunrath identified the Stone with Christ; John Dee expected a worldwide spiritual reform from occult operations; Elias Ashmole saw in alchemy the Redeemer of the sciences. The arc Eliade traces runs, as his section title has it, from Paracelsus to Newton, and along the way he cites his own The Forge and the Crucible on the Stone’s central paradox — found everywhere, handled daily by rich and poor, and prized by no one.

The Tibetan chapter that ends the volume completes the design rather than interrupting it. Eliade reads the Lamaist synthesis of cosmic religion, Buddhism, and Tantric esoterism as structurally analogous to medieval Hinduism and to Latin Christendom itself, and he closes on the Bardo Thödol, which had become “a sort of bedside reading for numerous young people” in the West — a symptom, he judges, of “the almost total desacralization of death in contemporary Western societies.” Within Eliade’s own shelf, this volume continues the history begun in A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1 and Volume 2, while Patterns in Comparative Religion supplies its morphological companion; chapter 31 condenses the argument of Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, and section 311 extends The Forge and the Crucible into the Reformation era. Readers who know the alchemical and Hermetic material through von Franz’s Alchemy, or the monotheistic arc through Armstrong’s A History of God, will find here the historical register for traditions those books treat psychologically and theologically — the silenced currents restored to the history in which they actually occurred.