Toxic scholars and how (not) to find them
It’s quite mind-boggling how the most toxic scholars of the past in the academic study of religion(s) have escaped unscathed the BLM movement’s criticism or the fury of cancel culture. How come statues like those dedicated to Churchill, Washington, Columbus, Confederates, slave traders, and racists all the world over were defaced or toppled down last year while the busts of Mircea Eliade are still standing? How is it possible that a chair at the University of Chicago is still entitled to Eliade while cancel culture is reclaiming so many academic and intellectual victims almost on a daily basis?
The protests that we saw over the course of the summer of 2020 were the expression of a popular uprising against white suprematist police violence, a radical-right U.S. presidency that doubled as a religious cult (cf. Colasacco 2018), and the post-war institutional connivance of the Western world with regards to its racist and colonial past. The goals of the protesters were clear – equality and justice. Thus, to notice that some of the maîtres à penser of the religious radical right were almost left untouched by the protests and by the cultural commentators is all the more disturbing.
The lack of critical attention towards the figure and the legacy of Mircea Eliade ranks amongst the most glaring missed opportunities to kickstart a wider ethical discussion. Mircea Eliade, who taught at the University of Chicago from the mid-1950s until 1986 after brief stints at the University of Bucharest and La Sorbonne, Paris, is widely recognised as the most important historian of religions of the past century. His views cemented the institutional History of Religions as we know it today. His books were best-sellers, his charismatic figure hailed as a New Age guru. However, Eliade’s postwar views were imbued with ethically questionable and epistemically appalling ideas inherited from Interwar Romanian culture – there’s no way to sugar this pill.
During the Interwar period, Eliade fanatically supported the legionary movement and took active part in its political campaign, advocated for a radical-right Christian revolution able to engender a “new man”, celebrated the submission of the People to the will of the Leader, justified tyranny and oppression, presumed esoteric ideologies to be true and oscillated between creationism and Intelligent Design, endorsed all sorts of radical-right conspiracies and pseudoscience, misunderstood the scientific process behind academic research and apologetically justified straight-up copying from others, repeatedly expressed his aversion towards democracy and science, believed that human races had different historical and theological destinies, openly shared racist prejudices against neighbouring peoples and minorities (Bulgarians, Magyars, Jews, etc.), commented emphatically on racial issues declaring that he was against miscegenation because of spiritual and artistic reasons, wrote antisemitic tabloid articles, edited sympathetically a volume of collected writings by his mentor, Metaphysics professor, creationist, Orthodoxist, radical-right pundit Nae Ionescu, was employed as a diplomat for an ultranationalist dictatorship that killed hundreds of thousands Jews and other minorities, published a celebratory pamphlet on Portuguese dictator Salazar, and engaged in the fantasy rewriting of Romania’s past almost as the nec plus ultra of ancient human civilisation. After the war, like many other scholars in his field, Eliade engaged in what Comparative Fascist Studies call radical-right metapolitics, inserting racial underpinnings and anti-scientific topics, borderline antisemitic subtexts, and colonial views in his writings (cf. Arendt 1963; Manea 1994; Ţurcanu 2007; Alexandrescu 2007; Junginger 2008; Idel 2014; Schmitt 2018; texts and discussions collected in Ambasciano 2014, Ambasciano 2018, and Ambasciano 2019).
Africa, for instance, was never at the centre of his interests – which, as a self-avowed general comparativist, had to include everything – because Africa was reputed a static dead end (for his teleological, theological, and orthogenetic approach to culture see Ambasciano 2014 and 2018). According to Pascal Boyer, Eliade’s religious analyses of the African continent were characterized by “a caricatural comparativism” (Boyer 1983: 44). In the summer of 1969, when he was already a celebrated professor at the University of Chicago, Eliade made sure to ask two Ugandan children hosted at that time by prof. Martin Marty about their dreams in Africa and if their dreams changed once arrived in America. We don’t know their answers or how Eliade interpreted them, but it is beyond question that Eliade wanted to access their primitive unconscious expressed symbolically and archetypically in its purer form (Ţurcanu 2007: 41; see Marty 1986; for a comparison of Eliade’s views with Jung’s archetypes and collective unconscious cf. Ambasciano 2014).
A Wunderkammer full of superhuman “living fossils”
Eliade always nurtured a profound belief in the religious survival of autochtonous substrata nested into what he called the human transconscious, that is, the unconscious receptacle resulting from the primeval direct link with the divinity or the godhead – a link that’s been mostly lost or silenced in desacralised modern Western nation states. Eliade, influenced by esotericists and other pseudoscientific sources, also believed that Africa was the last continent to be colonized by humankind, for man was reputed to be divinely born somewhere between Australasia and Melanesia. Basically, he got the entire Out-of-Africa process backwards (Ambasciano 2019: 106).
Strongly influenced by both Interwar Romanian culture and the theocentric and creationist diffusionism heralded by Pater Schmidt,
in From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, Eliade cites [Romanian speleologist Emil] Racoviţă as an authority and recalls the equivalence between troglobites, i.e. animals that, quoting Eliade, ‘inhabit caves [and] belong to a fauna that has long since been transcended’, and current ‘archaic civilizations’ that have ‘survived until recent times on the margin of the ecumene (in Tierra del Fuego, in Africa among the Hottentots and the Bushmen, in the Arctic, in Australia, etc.) or in the great tropical forests (the Bambuti Pygmies, etc.)’. All of these ‘civilizations, arrested at a stage similar to the Upper Paleolithic, thus constitut[e] a sort of living fossils’ (Eliade 1978: 24 and n. 36).
Australia was considered a clear example of the existence of such primitive living fossils and in 1949 Eliade wrote:
Neandertal man survives today, even somatically (especially concerning the face, the part of the body whose evolution is the lowest) in Australia, where we find the Mousterian industry typical of prehistoric Neandertals, dating back as far as 100,000 years ago. But true progress, as well as the almost integral transmission of the cultural heritage, began with Upper Palaeolithic men, that is 40,000 years ago. (Eliade 1949: iv; seventeen years later, Eliade published a series of articles on Native Australian religions starting with Eliade 1966).
Therefore, Native Australians, like all the other primitive “living fossil” populations scattered around the globe, were denied “true progress” while simultaneously being hailed as glorious remnants of our divine past worthy of religious and academic attention (see Ambasciano 2014 for a scientific rebuttal of such pseudoscientific ideas).
There’s a reason behind this ambiguous, almost Wunderkammer-like vision of coeval “living fossil” populations. Eliade believed that all these “living fossils” were closer to the divine and primordial stage of the original superhuman era – a time when he thought human beings had real superpowers – and thus he strove to study them to obtain practical knowledge about the paranormal and the hereafter. To cut a long story short, the History of Religions as originally envisaged by Eliade - that is, as the intellectual longa manus of Interwar ultranational regimes – was tasked with the study of the beliefs, the dreams, the art, and the rituals of those peoples (plus levitating saints and European peasants and their folklore) to gather paranormal knowledge that could be somehow used to the benefit of modern ultranational states (Ambasciano 2014, 2018, 2019). A religionist René Emile Belloq, as it were.
Eliade never renounced such ideas, he just camouflaged them and adapted metapolitically to the new cultural environment. The ultranational “new man” of the Interwar period became the “new man” forged by a new form of postwar mystical conspirituality. However, all of this was delusional. A delusion with dire political implications and deep roots in Interwar ultranationalism, colonialism, pseudoscience, and racism. A delusion that Eliade never truly recanted (Ambasciano 2018 for an overview; Ambasciano 2014 for all the refs. on Eliade’s cultural, political, and diplomatic activities and ideas before, during, and after the Second World War; cf. Griffin 2018).
Celebrating Eliade in 2015. The recent bust is located at the junction between Bulevard Mircea Eliade and strada Aviator R. Beller, in Bucharest. Source: Wikipedia. Other celebratory busts are found in Chișinău, Moldova, and Hamilton, Ontario.
A postmodern rehabilitation
When I touched upon this delicate topic on social media, some respected U.S. Religious Studies scholars objected that Eliade is not that “influential” any more and that people no longer read his work. That's absolutely not the case, unfortunately.
First, in Continental Europe, phenomenology lato sensu has never really gone anywhere, and Eliadologists are found among the institutional powers that be. Believing otherwise is provincial. Second, Eliade is more alive today than ever. We are experiencing a rampant metamodernist turn in which postmodern anti-science and an emboldened neo-phenomenology (such as that exemplified in the works by Kocku von Stuckrad; see Ambasciano 2016) converge to assert de novo that the paranormal and the supernatural are real (which is as bonkers as it sounds). Just have a look at all the prestigious blurbs, citations, and condescending reviews glossing J. J. Kripal's books on his “New Sacred” vision and all the glowing blurbs and reviews by Bron Taylor, Tanya Luhrmann, Sarah Iles-Johnston, von Stuckrad, or Ann Taves (cf. Ambasciano 2020: 39; Ambasciano 2021).
Then, we have the postmodern rehabilitation of Eliade himself as an enlightened forerunner of, like, Jackie Derrida - see B. S. Rennie (e.g., from Reconstructing Eliade, 1996, onwards) or Victor E. Taylor (2008: 95) - which is beyond insulting, if you ask me. According to Derrida, justice and democracy were to be considered the indeconstructible engines of deconstruction, the conditio sine qua non of poststructural critique (Derrida’s references in Ambasciano 2019: 142). Eliade was a radical-right pundit who exalted dictatorship and the “unconditioned submission to the political Leader,” and who reputed “science and democracy […] fifth columns of the Western powers which had weakened the Romanian population” (Ambasciano 2019: 186, note no. 5; original Romanian references, bibliography, and comments in Ambasciano 2014: 277–80). To compare favourably Derrida and Eliade is to make a mockery of academic research.
Now, Rennie, who acknowledges the help of Taves and Kripal, is trying to push another epistemically unwarranted idea - Eliade as a precursor of the Cognitive Science of Religion (Rennie 2017; Rennie 2020). Considering that the CSR and its institutions have been unfortunately infiltrated by pro-religious, JTF-funded crypto-theologians and other pro-religious scholars eager to jump on the cognitive bandwagon, I simply do not expect any critical reply or refutation from their members any time soon (cf. Ambasciano and Coleman 2019).
Swift Hall, University of Chicago Divinity School. Source: Wikipedia.
Where’s #EliadeMustFall?
As far as I can say, the silence of Religious Studies (RS) in general on these matters means that Eliade and his alt-right vision have ultimately won. If Religious Studies isn’t able to ‘dislodge’ the reputation of Eliade - and RS was born as an anti-Eliadean, critical, and poststructural branch of the History of Religions – then what are RS for? What is the epistemic justification for its existence as a discipline today?
Eliade is only a part of a bigger problem, sure. Pro-religious and pro-paranormal perspectives are seductively intuitive and ever-recurring at each generation if scientific, public education is not provided (Ambasciano 2019). But Eliade per se is a symbol, a powerful one at that, a synecdoche for the entire modern discipline thanks to his best-selling works, his lasting impact on the 1960s counterculture and the New Age movement, and his indefatigable academic shenanigans to publicly – and, alas, successfully – rebuild (or, better, camouflage) his Interwar identity (Ambasciano 2018).
Now, all the urgent and desperately needed discussions revolving around, for instance, the monuments dedicated to and the works of ethically questionable or morally despicable men from the past (e.g., statues commemorating Civil War protagonists in the US, racist colonialists in the UK, royal pro-slavery enablers in Belgium, right-wing pro-colonialism and misogynistic journalists in Italy, etc.) are focused on the management of societal symbols worthy of collective remembrance or admiration. Even those previously accepted as ‘neutral’ institutional father figures are now being scrutinized, criticized, and rejected because of their moral flaws or connivance with the violent power dynamics of their day.
And yet, Eliade is still there, intact and proud, from the streets of Bucharest to French bookshops, his name unscathed, alive and well in the showcases of a museum exhibition in Oxford, in London, or in Switzerland to the Mircea Eliade chair of a great American university, from the the references in a textbook by some UK neo-creationist theologians to the silver screen. Come to think of it, Eliade has always enjoyed an unrivaled pop culture status. Eliade ranked seventh in a 2006 Romanian television show on the greatest Romanian historical figures of all times (Televiziunea Română, Mari Români). More than three decades ago, Hugh Grant played a role in one of the cinematic renditions of his novels (The Bengali Night, 1988). Almost fifteen years ago now, Francis Ford Coppola directed a movie based on another Eliadean novel following a suggestion by Wendy Doniger herself, the historian of religions and Eliade’s successor on his own Chicago chair (Youth Without Youth, 2007). This paradoxical situation of a radical-right figure celebrated everywhere on the political and cultural spectrum has had bewildering consequences. A few years ago, an Oxford don would celebrate Eliade as a noteworthy theologian while the first-ever seven Native Australian students admitted to the very same university were “battling a postcolonial present, rewriting a brutal past, and [being] derided by a conservative minority” (resp., McGrath 2011; Laughland 2013). Is this cognitive dissonance, cultural amnesia, naivety, bad faith, or what? Shouldn’t Religious Studies scholars do something about this? Organize some demonstrations? Write something? #RhodesMustFall, sure, but I haven’t heard a single #EliadeMustFall, and I am still quite in disbelief.
Towards an Eliadaissance
How did RS scholars come to this sheer disinterest? How did we get to this point? In 2020 we saw months and months of international protests – and yet, there's been nothing but a defeaning silence on this matter. Now, I probably wouldn’t go so far as to saying that we’re living through a sort of Eliadaissance, but the fact that Eliade’s rehabilitation and the inclusion of the paranormal in the field from the likes of Taves, Luhrmann, Kripal, von Stuckrad, and others have managed to fly under the radar is quite mind-boggling. (But then again, the US have seen the institutionalisation of both the populist radical right and the alt right under the watch of those who should have prevented this from happening, so I guess this shouldn’t really surprise anyone). Despite some lip service paid to his problematic political baggage, Eliade – remember, both an author of and a symbol for crypto-theological, pro-paranormal phenomenology rooted in Interwar ultranationalism and racist examinations of religions sub specie psychologica – is taken seriously again, and there’s no need to criticize his interpretive system openly because his framework is taken for granted now. From the field of Gnosticism to paranormal-friendly anthropology, from the European History of Religions to RS (cf. Sidky 2020; Robertson 2021) – how could we say that Eliade is not alive and well today?
As Carlo Ginzburg predicted way back in the early 2010s, Eliade has even managed to become the new herald for an anti-globalisation, green, anti-capitalistic, and spiritual ‘revolt against the modern world’ (a typical radical-right concept, and it's disturbing to see it widespread in the left) (Ginzburg 2010). In the meantime, the slow but ongoing spread of metamodernism signals that postmodern relativistic cynicism and critique has been replaced by a sort of utopian rebuilding that has adopted or piggybacked modernist, scientific tools and approaches to exploit or evoke phenomenological structures of feeling (which in turn are prone to the percolation of post-truth – see Kripal’s agenda and Taves’ admiration) (Ambasciano 2021).
Now, if Religious Studies is not willing to do this job, to act as the immune system or early warning system for the field as a whole, am I wrong in thinking that RS has failed its primary academic mission?
Notes
A draft of this post was originally completed in December 2020.
Please note that this post has been updated on 9 and 10 February 2021.
Refs.
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