Counter-Currents
Mircea Eliade & the Rediscovery of the Sacred
Guillaume Durocher
1,409 words
Mircea Eliade et la Redécouverte du Sacré (YouTube, Romanian subtitles)
Mircea Eliade was a traditionalist Romanian novelist and philosopher. Following the disaster of the Second World War, he moved to Paris and Chicago, becoming a respected and influential historian of religions. He acquired something of the status of a guru, as poignantly told in the 1987 documentary Mircea Eliade et la Redécouverte du Sacré. The film features interviews with Eliade at the end of his life, artfully spliced with cuts to religious imagery on a background of moving spiritual music. It was released in 1987, the year after his death.
The more scientistic Westerner is likely to be annoyed at Eliade’s rather New-Age vibe. Eliade had an enormous erudition and knowledge of history, reading half a dozen languages. But he is not really interested in explicating the details of this or that religious tradition, but in finding the unity from Australian Aborigines “to the latest Western mystics.” The sacred, we are told, is the foundation of human life and once pervaded all of his actions. Western culture “suffered from a certain provincialism” but now is open to the spirituality of others. We’re all just one world, man!
This is asserted without evolutionary or traditional psychological explanation. The “skeptical” and “atheist” types, seeing this bearded man very profoundly smoking his pipe behind his large glasses, will cry: “This is an Eastern mystic masquerading as an academic historian.”
And that is surely true. Eliade’s postwar appeal appears similar to Alan Watts’. Besides the powerful religiosity of the Romania of Eliade’s youth, he also spent three years studying yoga in India. Before the Second World War, Eliade publicly supported the Romanian Legionary Movement and the Portuguese dictator Salazar, citing their nationalist and spiritual approach to politics.
Eliade’s support for the Far Right, though admittedly preferring traditionalist forms to the more modernist fascism of Italy and Germany, has obviously been a source of controversy ever since. But he was nonetheless able to reinvent himself at the University of Chicago and one is left with an unmistakable impression: this man dedicated the rest of his life promoting the history of religions as an apology for spirituality, in effect a crypto-Right-wing traditionalism. (Eliade’s peers were largely in the same boat, being people who either died or could not ostentatiously and/or overtly express their Right-wing convictions in the new world of “freedom of thought and tolerance” ushered in by the egalitarian Allies: René Guénon, Nae Ionescu, Emil Cioran, Carl Schmitt, Georges Dumézil . . .)
There are clues along the way that Eliade comes from a very, very different culture and intellectual sphere than that of postwar Western demoliberalism. In India, Eliade was fascinated by popular myths “which were the expression of archaic societies which had preceded the Aryans, the Indo-Europeans in India.” Upon returning to Romania, he could better appreciate the rural culture of the Balkans, where unlike Western Europe spirituality was still lively. The roots of popular myths in the Balkans went deeper, Eliade claims, than Roman, Greek, or Mediterranean culture, but reflected “Paleo-Indo-European” (i.e. Aryan) sacred tradition. (Rather incongruously, the camera then cuts to dancing Gypsies, who are about as Aryan as Ashkenazim.)
Eliade notes that virtually all human activities — painting, dancing, sculpture — began as religious activities in primitive and prehistoric societies. A sense of the sacred gave significance to every action, integrating man’s impossibly fleeting existence into an eternal, transcendental whole. “The sacred is at the basis of his existence in the world,” he says. “The sacred is . . . an element of the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of this consciousness. To live as a human being is in itself a religious act.”
Modern secularism has, according to Eliade, destroyed man’s faith in the divine meaning of existence. Homo religiosus is dead, or at least sleeping. This was achieved first “especially by the revolution accomplished by Jewish monotheism, by the action of the prophets, which desacralized the cosmos.” This fracture was then spread among the gentiles “by Judeo-Christianity,” which led to “evacuating the gods” and reducing the universe to “dead matter.” Whereas early Western scientists believed faith and science could be conciliated, this was eventually lost. Particularly guilty were the reductionists who developed “the theology of the death of God,” “beginning with Karl Marx” (reducing all to economics) and “especially with Freud” (reducing all to biology, in particular the sex drive), but also “the great Nietzsche.”
You can buy Julius Evola’s East & West here.
This is a disaster, for man becomes an agnostic atom in an existence reduced to meaningless chaos: “Human existence is without meaning, man lives in a nature without a model, without a Creator, without an objective, and we have then arrived to this type of nihilism which Nietzsche had announced, speaking of the ‘death of God.’” For: “Man cannot live in chaos.”
Eliade makes a fine prophecy: “The sacred is saturated with being. Incidentally an a-religious society does not exist yet and cannot exist. If it were to be realized, it would perish after a few generations from neurasthenia, by a collective suicide. If God does not exist, all is ash.” Who dares contradiction? Is this not the fate of the West?
This tragic narrative, of the rise of nihilism, is told with powerful, angsty music, some also used in 2001: Space Odyssey. (I find something rather disgusting in Albert Camus and especially André Malraux, disserting on nihilism, which they call l’absurde, but doing nothing about it.)
Unlike Nicholas Wade (The Faith Instinct), Eliade does not attempt an evolutionary interpretation, which would dare to perform a sacrilegious autopsy and dissection of the sacred. But I will say to the scientists: religiosity appears to be a compensatory psychological mechanism which, by brute force, forces a sense of meaning in one’s life, regardless of one’s limited reason, one’s very partial (minuscule, really) view of the world, and one’s objective living conditions (an often “nasty, brutish and short” life, full of suffering). Why? Because optimistic believers always defeat depressed agnostics. Hence the universal pervasiveness of religion (it obviously, contra the probably criminal Richard Dawkins, reflects a biological predisposition and not merely superstition). The evolutionary adaptiveness of a good religion is also obvious in the social unity and “social programming” (by defining taboos and goals) it enables, and in the well-documented higher birth rates of the religious.
All militant atheists should be given Darwin Awards.
Logically, all this ends in either World-Judaism and/or Islam or esoteric Hitlerism.
The advent of agriculture led to a spiritual crisis and religious change, as must the advent of modern technology. We need a new religion. Fascism was an attempt, smothered with hate-filled fanaticism. Late liberalism is a half-orgiastic/half-life-fearing effeminate death cult.
But one should not limit oneself to a profane scientific approach. The historian’s study of religions has “existential consequences” on him, Eliade says, convincing him of the unity, nobility, and value of mankind’s sacred tradition. Hermeneutics “transforms the researcher.”
Eliade is astonishingly optimistic in the film. I guess those 1980s New Age movements and Westerners’ dabbling in Buddhism were hopeful signs? Eliade is convinced that a return to sacred convictions would lead to great existential improvement and to cultural creativity, from poetry to the sciences. I think he is absolutely right. “Sterility, nihilism, decadence” would be done away with.
Women have a much stronger intuitive sense of health and the good life than men (mostly unconsciously, easily overridden by misguided piety/conformism). Hence, your modern yuppie gal — though raised on Sex and the City — will go to yoga and earnestly chant an “ohm!” of surprising power. Health and spirit are calling her. And yet she’d be disgusted at the thought of doing this somewhere unfashionable, like a church.
Obviously men should be coming forward to found a new faith.
Eliade tells us that when man opens himself to the sacred:
Life becomes infinitely richer, more exciting. It really is worth living because the world which opens up . . . full of messages, full of hopes, which is no longer opaque . . . everything is word, everything is symbol, and everything is openness to something which is certainly positive. . . . It is no longer the opaque world, without significance, purely tragic, in which tragedy has no more meaning. The world of certain philosophers and writers.
Death too becomes a passionate mystery: “Death is a second birth, the supreme initiation. One must die to be reborn in eternity.”
We salute you Mircea Eliade, Aryan mystic, loyal in a dark age to the faith of your forefathers.
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11 comments
I heard insiders recognize themselves by the correct pronunciation of his name.
I just looked it up myself because it’s always bothered me as well…
Apparently it’s like Meer-cha Ay-lee-ah-duh.
I think that the Catholic Church when pervaded with Nordic thought and symbolism represented much of what Mr. Durocher says in this essay about Eliade. It is now definitely leaving the forests and foggy valleys of the North to return to the sterility of a flat, endlessly stretching and monotonously hot and empty desert, its origin, no more suitable for people who have to endure dark and cold nights.
Julius Evola described himself as a Catholic Pagan. Both Wagner and Tolkien were also in practice Christian Pagans who had a deep respect for the Sacred found in Norse mythology and traditional Catholicism. I also believe that a fusion of paganism and christianity (along with white identity) will be the religion that restores the Sacred to the West.
The desire for the Sacred can already be seen in the Alt-Right through the religion of Kek, an ironic reverence for the Sacred that mirrors the irony of the pepe memes used to spread our ideas and ridicule neoliberalism. As Andrew Anglin states: “in an age of nihilism, absolute idealism must be couched in irony in order to be taken seriously. This is because anyone who attempts to present himself as serious will immediately be viewed as the opposite through the jaded lens of our post-modern milieu.”
Similarly, in an age where we’ve lost all reverence for the Sacred, any attempts at the Sacred must be couched in irony and humor like the religion of Kek. As the white nationalist movement grows and gains power, however, the real desire for the sacred (currently manifesting itself in the irony of esoteric kekism) will give way to something deeper, older, but at the same time new. I believe this will be a religion of Christian infused paganism and white identity.
I agree. I call your attention to the writers at westcoastrxers.com, many of whom deal with similar ideas. In an article titled “Choosing Christianity’s Fate,” the author Hotherus writes, ” the truth of christianity in no way depends on the literal bodily resurrection of Christ nor even that a flesh and blood Jesus even existed.”
Will Windsor:
These are interesting thoughts. I think I would not even attempt to make reference to the sacred with irony; those at whom it might be directed don’t deserve the effort, those who feel that not everything may be dissolved into skepticism and irony don’t deserve the irony, so it it best to act without regard of either one.
I am not familiar with kek and kekism and will have to inform myself about it.
Whatever bloodless systems will be created by our liberal age on the way to self-immolation will be inconsequential for whatever new religion will eventually emerge. The only product modernity will leave behind is chaos, destruction and regression, and I assume death on a massive scale. The new religion that will emerge, I think as well, might be a fusion of Catholic earnestness, Nordic mythology, nature religion and racial self-awareness, but not a mixture but something quite new. The process of splintering into sects and heedless belief will not last. Religion is a communal collection of metaphysical certainty and it can only be effective if one such certainty is held by a multitude; hence, the body of that new religion will grow.
“Fusion of paganism and christianity” : there are quite some indications that “Christianity” is way older than “Jesus”, that it has simply been the religion of Whites, there are e.g. archeological findings of christian symbols (some kind of cross) in Italy some 800 BC, and reports of Whites and christian symbols in Middle-South-America from the time before Columbus (sorry can´t easily find sources right now, the latter from e.g. M. Serrano I think). So IMO, “Christianity” is simply the religious expression of Whites (the main elements being “love” and “light”, IMO). How do people find their cultural expression anyways? They do something, then modify it until it fits them; a process of self-imitation, to find the eigen oscillation. So Whites come up with “Christianity” as expression of what fits them best. So there is no contradiction between Christianity and Paganism, and Christianity contains a vast number of pagan elements.
Regarding that Kek-stuff, I used to think that it´s only ironic, something like the spaghetti monster, but I came across this link: https://pepethefrogfaith.wordpress.com and it turns out that there´s a bit more to it, it seems that there´s a quite serious number of synchronicities that in itself is possibly an expression of the Sacred even if such was never intended 😉 .
Oh man, so who’s gonna translate the French/Romanian in that Youtube video into English?
Eliade’s book, Australian Religions: An Introduction, is the definitive introduction to the source material on Aboriginal religion.
However, as we would expect of a perennialist, Eliade’s hermeneutic veers into noble-savage LARP territory with his romanticisation of their degenerate religions, which generally amount to nothing more than your bog standard fertility cult.
This is an interesting piece.
As far as I’m aware all peoples throughout time had a spirituality and origin story. Modern day Whites seem to be the only group who’s rejected that.
I believe a healthy people needs some things : a land of their own, gender norms, strong in group preference, no guilt or self loathing, and a religion.
Atheism is overwhelmingly White. Whites are the race suffering the most dispossession. There’s a link there. We can argue the White Man lost his faith after the Great White Civil War (ww1 and ww2), but there is ongoing an attack on Christianity, and only Christianity.
Atheism has a “race problem” (why is it a “problem”?) 82% of U.S. Atheists are White. Is that a coincidence?
https://www.denverpost.com/2015/03/30/carter-atheism-has-some-race-and-gender-problems/
Christianity is effectively the White man’s creed. Islam is the Arab’s creed. Buddhism the Yellow Man’s. Hinduism the Dravidian’s. And the Red man of the Americas had his aztec or inca gods.
The black , or Latino Christians or black Muslims are basically subjects of Empires. Those religions remain a representation of the political will of the White and Arab races respectively. Christianity is centralised in Europe. Islam in Arabia. Islam talks of a colorblind global ummah. Does anyone really think that if the world were to “submit” to Islam that the Arab man would not reign supreme over the rest? The Quaran must be read in his language of Arabic. In a way it is Arab Supremacist. In a similar way Christianity is White Supremacist.
Therefore, an attack on Christianity is an attack on the White Man. And ONLY Christianity comes under heavy fire from the usual suspects. While White Leftists aren’t Jewish, they are Jew-ish, and will happily give Christianity the worst reputation While glowingly welcoming huge numbers of Muslims into their lands, despite the clash of civilizations and the crime. In fact they’re Muslim apologists.
Why is that? All things being equal, Islam is “worse” from a Leftist point of view than Christianity. However, all things aren’t equal. The leftist intuits that Islam is effectively the Brown Man’s Creed – and since he is Brown he wins the Top Trumps game of oppression.
Christianity is fine to target since it is the creed of the White Man and nothing else. In that sense attacks on Christianity by Atheists are effectively attacks on White people.
Denying a people a spirituality is a way of destroying them. All peoples have and need an origin story and God or Gods. Only Whites are to be denied this.
I am not a Christian. I believe the White Man should reclaim his natural religion whatever that may be in his own land. The Greek, Norse and Roman gods, who are representations of awesome natural phenomena or human emotions, are a healthy kind of spirituality and I’d like to see that grow among Whites. That is our creed. Those are our stories. We are justified in affirming our existence in the world, our continued existence, and having a story behind that existence that justifies it and explains it. In our pagan religion, our people are the ones represented in the stories and by the Gods. They are exclusive to us and do not seek to proselytise to nonwhites.
The idea of the personal God seems to me to speak volumes about emotional needs. Why would God care about YOU? The Christian urge to convert every single Black, Red, Brown or Yellow human on earth to save them all also speaks to me about the White Saviour Complex, the White Man’s Burden, the White Knighting for the whole world. Well, we’re long finished with that rubbish. It’s time to embrace spirituality- but on our terms.
I read the books ARTISTS OF THE RIGHT/THINKERS OF THE RIGHT by Kerry Bolton with big interests, and the books are really good. But I do not understand why the author did not mention at all anybody of Right thinkers and artists from the Central and Eastern Europe, like Rumanians Codreanu, Eliade and Coran, Ukrainians Dontsov and Olzhych, Russians Soloniewicz, Ilyin, Shafarevich, Solzhenitsyn, Türk Nihal Atsiz, and many others. He still had written one chapter about Mishima, a Japanese, there, so the Middle and Eastern Europeans would fit good in the whole picture. The world of right thinkers and artists is not limited to the Anglosphere.
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