My Eliade: Personal Reflections on the Splendor of the Strange, the Sacred, and the Sublime
My Eliade: Personal Reflections on the Splendor of the Strange, the Sacred, and the Sublime

Summary/Abstract: I begin with a confession. I must tell you that I am not an Eliade scholar or "Eliadeologist." I am not someone who spends considerable time and energy studying the dark secrets, suspicious scholarly contributions, or biographical banalities of Mircea Eliade's occulted life and vast written corpus. A second declaration is that I have not felt the need to keep up with all of the published commentary about the scandalously interlaced light and dark sides, the coincidentia oppositorum, of Eliade after the death of Eliade. To be honest I have only read bits and pieces of this often tedious posthumous criticism.1 What one finds is sometimes not a very pretty picture - and here I am referring both to certain sequestered aspects of the Eliadian record and to various panting critics displaying too much of their own blood lust and furtive raking of the biographical and textual coals. As a case in point, I refer you to the recent desultory collection of reflections on the "contested legacy" of Eliade growing out of a conference at Eliade's old axis mundi at the University of Chicago

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