The double vocation of Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade is universally known as one of the greatest specialists in comparative religion of the twentieth century. Less known is the fact that he wrote many novels and short tales throughout his fairly long and quite eventful life.

Over the years I have read three of his literary works in translation: Şarpele (The serpent), Nuntă în cer (Wedding in Heaven), and, more recently, Secretul doctorului Honigberger (The Secret of Dr. Honigberger. The english version is available in the booklet Two Strange Tales).

The last one seems to me the least worthy of them, but it is still a valuable quarry of information for everyone curious enough about the practical knowledge of Yoga gathered by Eliade during his early stay in the Himalayas.

From time to time, I entertain the slightly reckless idea of learning Romanian, to read his works (but also the poetry of Mikhai Eminescu and Tudor Arghezi) in the original tongue.

-After all-, whispers a malin génie inside of my head:-you know well that he studied italian to taste the explosive prose of Papini, so why can't you do the same with his books?- Thus far the little devil has not prevailed....

A few weeks ago, while I was scouring my favorite library, yet another novel of Eliade cropped up on the shelves after mysteriously disappearing for a good year, the English translation of Noaptea de Sânziene (The Forbidden Forest), published by Chicago University Press (Eliade helped create the world-famous Chicago School of Comparative Religions). I definitely plan to read it, as The Forbidden Forest was, in the great romanian's eyes, his Opus Majus, and also because its main theme is the escape from time and history (thus, good raw material for my work-in-progress on Time). In the meantime, I have skimmed through the preface written by the author, and here is what I found: it looks and feels like a confession of sorts. Mircea Eliade tells us how two souls have inhabited him since his childhood, a solar one, that prompted him to become a rigorous and encyclopedic scholar, and a lunar soul, that from time to time erupts like a volcano and forces him to abandon all his projects to write stories.

It is, with his vast production, a bit like the chicken and the egg: his scholarship provided a wealth of data and cues for his literary production, but, equally true, his systematic interest for myths was driven and nourished by the recurrent forays in the magic world of story-telling. Indeed, in the preface Eliade avows that some themes of The Forbidden Forest emerged to his lucid conscience only several years after the book was completed.

I find all of the above fascinating and oddly familiar: Eliade was unquestionably a prototypical polymath. Something in him violently rejected, even against his conscious will and well concocted plans, any form of compartmentalization of learning. There is, deep down in every polymath, a voraciously curious infant, that knows no boundaries.

A word of advice: let him play, from time to time....