Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade (March 9 1907, Bucharest - April 22 1986, Chicago, Illinois) was a Romanian historian of religions and writer (fantasy and autobiographical). He commanded eight languages fluently (Romanian, French, German, Italian, English, Hebrew, Persian and Sanskrit).

Selected scholarly works

• Yoga, Immortality and Freedom. translated: W.R. Trask. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958. First published in French as Yoga: Essai sur l'origine de la mystique Indienne in 1933, this informative and scholarly work analyses yoga as a concrete search for freedom from human limitations.
• The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, translated from French: W.R. Trask, Harvest/HBJ Publishers, 1957 ISBN 015679201X. Building on Rudolf Otto's 1917 work, The Idea of the Holy, and his own previous work, Eliade shows how religion emerges from the experience of the sacred, and myths of time and nature.
• Cosmos and History:The Myth of the Eternal Return. translated: W.R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954. Perhaps Eliade's most crucial and approachable short work. Contains his analysis of time as heterogenous for the religious and homogenous for the non-religious and his conception of the 'terror of history' and the ability to 'reactualize' religious time. Originally published as Le Mythe de l'eternel retour: archétypes et répetition, 1949.
• Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Translated: W.R. Trask. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. Long a standard work in the study of Shamanism, a detailed and valuable source of information on the phenomenon. Originally published Le Chamanisme, 1951.
• From Primitives To Zen (full text)..

The History of Religions section of the University of Chicago bears Mircea Eliade's name in recognition of his wide contribution to the research on this subject.

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