College Scholarships and Grants - Religious Symbolism

Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism

By Mircea Eliade, Philip Mairet; Sheed Andrews and McMeel

I Symbolism of the "Centre"
THE PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY OF RELIGIONS

Many laymen envy the vocation of the historian of religions. What nobler or more rewarding occupation could there be than to frequent the great mystics of all the religions, to live among symbols and mysteries, to read and understand the myths of all the nations? The layman imagines that a historian of religions must be equally at home with the Greek or the Egyptian mythology, with the authentic teaching of the Buddha, the Taoist mysteries or the secret rites of initiation in archaic societies. Perhaps laymen are not altogether wrong in thinking that the historian of religions is immersed in vast and genuine problems, engaged in the decipherment of the most impressive symbols and the most complex and lofty myths from the immense mass of material that offers itself to him. Yet in fact the situation is quite different. A good many historians of religions are so absorbed in their special studies that they know little more about the Greek or Egyptian mythologies, or the Buddha's teaching, or the Taoist or shamanic techniques, than any amateur who has known how to direct his reading. Most of them are really familiar with only one poor little sector of the immense domain of religious history. And, unhappily, even this modest sector is, more often than not, but superficially exploited by the decipherment, editing and translation of texts, historical monographs or the cataloguing of monuments, etc. Confined to an inevitably limited subject, the historian of religions often has a feeling that he has sacrificed the fine spiritual career of his youthful dreams to the dull duty of scientific probity.

But the excessive scientific probity of his output has ended by alienating him from the cultured public. Except for quite rare exceptions, the historians of religions are not read outside the restricted circles of their colleagues and disciples. The public no longer reads their books, either because they are too technical or too dull; in short because they awaken no spiritual interest. By force of hearing it repeated--as it was, for instance, by Sir James Frazer throughout some twenty thousand pages--that everything thought, imagined or desired by man in archaic societies, all his myths and rites, all his gods and religious experiences, are nothing but a monstrous accumulation of madnesses, cruelties and superstitions now happily abolished by the progress of mankind--by dint of listening almost always to the same thing, the public has at last let itself be convinced, and has ceased to take any interest in the objective study of religions. A portion, at least, of this public tries to satisfy its legitimate curiosity by reading very bad books--on the mysteries of the Pyramids, the miracles of Yoga, on the "primordial revelations", or Atlantis--in short, interests itself in the frightful literature of the dilettanti, the neospiritualists or pseudo-occultists.

To some degree, it is we, the historians of religions, who are responsible for this. We wanted at all costs to present an objective history of religions, but we failed to bear in mind that what we were christening objectivity followed the fashion of thinking in our times. For nearly a century we have been striving to set up the history of religions as an autonomous discipline, without success: the history of religions is still, as we all know, confused with anthropology, ethnology, sociology, religious psychology and even with orientalism. Desirous to achieve by all means the prestige of a "science", the history of religions has passed through all the crises of the modern scientific mind, one after another. Historians of religions have been successively--and some of them have not ceased to be--positivists, empiricists, rationalists or historicists. And what is more, none of the fashions which in succession have dominated this study of ours, not one of the global systems put forward in explanation of the religious phenomenon, has been the work of a historian of religions; they have all derived from hypotheses advanced by eminent linguists, anthropologists, sociologists or ethnologists, and have been accepted in their turn by everyone, including the historians of religions!

The situation that one finds today is as follows: a considerable improvement in information, paid for by excessive specialisation and even by sacrificing our own vocation (for the majority of historians of religions have become orientalists, classicists, ethnologists, etc.), and a dependence upon the methods elaborated by modern historiography or sociology (as though the historical study of a ritual or a myth were exactly the same thing as that of a country or of some primitive people). In short, we have neglected this essential fact: that in the title of the "history of religions" the accent ought not to be upon the word history, but upon the word religions. For although there are numerous ways of practising history--from the history of technics to that of human thought--there is only one way of approaching religion--namely, to deal with the religious facts. Before making the history of anything, one must have a proper understanding of what it is, in and for itself. In that connection, I would draw attention to the work of Professor Van der Leeuw, who has done so much for the phenomenology of religion, and whose many and brilliant publications have aroused the educated public to a renewal of interest in the history of religions in general.

In an indirect way, the same interest has been awakened by the discoveries of psychoanalysis and depth-psychology, in the first place by the work of Professor Jung. Indeed, it was soon recognised that the enormous domain of the history of religions provided an inexhaustible supply of terms of comparison with the behaviour of the individual or the collective psyche, as this was studied by psychologists or analysts. As we all know, the use that psychologists have made of such socio-religious documentation has not always obtained the approval of historians of religions. We shall be examining, in a moment, the objections raised against such comparisons, and indeed they have often been too daring. But it may be said at once that if the historians of religions had only approached the objects of their study from a more spiritual standpoint, if they had tried to gain a deeper insight into archaic religious symbolisms, many psychological or psychoanalytic interpretations, which look all too flimsy to a specialist's eye, would never have been suggested. The psychologists have found excellent materials in our books, but very few explanations of any depth--and they have been tempted to fill up these lacunae by taking over the work of the historians of religions by putting forward general--and too often rash--hypotheses.

In few words, the difficulties that have to be overcome today are these: (a) on the one hand, having decided to compete for the prestige of an objective "scientific" historiography, the history of religions is obliged to face the objections that can be raised against historicism as such; and (b) on the other hand, it is also obliged to take up the challenge lately presented to it by psychology in general--and particularly by depth-psychology, which, now that it is beginning to work directly upon the historicoreligious data, is putting forward working hypotheses more promising, more productive, or at any rate more sensational, than those that are current among historians of religion.

To understand these difficulties better, let us come now to the subject of the present study: the symbolism of the "Centre". A historian of religions has the right to ask us: What do you mean by these terms? What symbols are in question? Among which peoples and in what cultures? And he might add: You are not unaware that the epoch of Tylor, of Mannhardt and Frazer is over and done with; it is no longer allowable today to speak of myths and rites "in general", or of a uniformity in primitive man's reactions to Nature. Those generalisations are abstractions, like those of "primitive man" in general. What is concrete is the religious phenomenon manifested in history and through history. And, from the simple fact that it is manifested in history, it is limited, it is conditioned by history. What meaning, then, for the history of religions could there be in such a formula as, for instance, the ritual approach to immortality? We must first specify what kind of immortality is in question; for we cannot be sure, a priori, that humanity as a whole has had, spontaneously, the intuition of immortality or even the desire for it. You speak of the "symbolism of the Centre"--what right have you, as a historian of religions, to do so? Can one so lightly generalise? One ought rather to begin by asking oneself: in which culture, and following upon what historical events, did the religious notion of the "Centre", or that of immortality become crystallised? How are these notions integrated and justified, in the organic system of such and such a culture? How are they distributed, and among which peoples? Only after having answered all these preliminary questions will one have the right to generalise and systematise, to speak in general about the rites of immortality or symbols of the "Centre". If not, one may be contributing to psychology or philosophy, or even theology, but not to the history of religions.

I think all these objections are justified and, inasmuch as I am a historian of religions, I intend to take them into account. But I do not regard them as insurmountable. I know well enough that we are dealing here with religious phenomena and that, by the very fact that they are phenomena--that is, manifested or revealed to us--each one is struck, like a medal, by the historical moment in which it was born. There is no "purely" religious fact, outside history and outside time. The noblest religious message, the most universal of mystical experiences, the most universally human behaviour--such, for instance, as religious fear, or ritual, or prayer--is singularised and delimited as soon as it manifests itself. When the Son of God incarnated and became the Christ, he had to speak Aramaic; he could only conduct himself as a Hebrew of his times--and not as a yogi, a Taoist or a shaman. His religious message, however universal it might be, was conditioned by the past and present history of the Hebrew people. If the Son of God had been born in India, his spoken message would have had to conform itself to the structure of the Indian languages, and to the historic and prehistoric tradition of that mixture of peoples.

In the taking up of this position one can clearly recognise the speculative progress that has been made, from Kant--who may be regarded as a precursor of historicism--down to the latest historicist or existentialist philosophers. In so far as man is a historic, concrete, authentic being, he is "in situation". His authentic existence is realising itself in history, in time, in his time --which is not that of his father. Neither is it the time of his contemporaries in another continent, or even in another country. That being so, what business have we to be talking about the behaviour of man in general? This man in general is no more than an abstraction: he exists only on the strength of a misunderstanding due to the imperfection of language.

This is not the place to attempt a philosophical critique of historicism and historicist existentialism. That critique has been made, and by more competent authors. Let us remark, for the present, that the view of human spiritual life as historically conditioned resumes, upon another plane and using other dialectical methods, the now somewhat outmoded theories of environmental determinism, geographical, economic, social and even physiological. Everyone agrees that a spiritual fact, being a human fact, is necessarily conditioned by everything that works together to make a man, from his anatomy and physiology to language itself. In other words, a spiritual fact presupposes the whole human being --that is, the social man, the economic man, and so forth. But all these conditioning factors together do not, of themselves, add up to the life of the spirit.

What distinguishes the historian of religions from the historian as such is that he is dealing with facts which, although historical, reveal a behaviour that goes far beyond the historical involvements of the human being. Although it is true that man is always found "in situation", his situation is not, for all that, always a historical one in the sense of being conditioned solely by the contemporaneous historical moment. The man in his totality is aware of other situations over and above his historical condition; for example, he knows the state of dreaming, or of the waking dream, or of melancholy, or of detachment, or of œsthetic bliss, or of escape, etc.--and none of these states is historical, although they are as authentic and as important for human existence as man's historical existence is. Man is also aware of several temporal rhythms, and not only of historical time--his own time, his historical contemporancity. He has only to listen to good music, to fall in love, or to pray, and he is out of the historical present, he re-enters the eternal present of love and of religion. Even to open a novel, or attend a dramatic performance, may be enough to transport a man into another rhythm of time--what one might call "condensed time"--which is anyhow not historical time. It has been too lightly assumed that the authenticity of an existence depends solely upon the consciousness of its own historicity. Such historic awareness plays a relatively minor part in human consciousness, to say nothing of the zones of the unconscious which also belong to the make-up of the whole human being. The more a consciousness is awakened, the more it transcends its own historicity: we have only to remind ourselves of the mystics and sages of all times, and primarily those of the Orient.

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