Folklore as an Instrument of Knowledge

Eliade’s perhaps surprisingly credulous position in respect of “parapsychological” phenomena can be seen as an early step in his undertaking to analyze “the sacred” as it has been apprehended and reported by human agents. Eliade’s publications in this volume span fifty years from this article until his death and it would be unreasonable to expect perfect consistency and to ignore development and change. That said, Eliade’s later position seems to have been broadly formed by this, his thirtieth year. The article re-affirms the position stated in “Magie §i metapsihicǎ” (Cuvântul , June 17, 1927) written before Eliade visited India. Both show his early tendency to a methodological openness, “to take all religious traditions seriously as authentic expressions of lived existential situations.” His later position, shown in the introduction to The Sacred and the Profane , obviously developed under the influence of this attitude. The later Eliade, however, cannot be entirely judged by the belief of the 20 and 30-year-old in, for example, the existence of a distinct “primitive mentality” and of human “mental evolution”—as is clear from “Notes on the Symbolism of the Arrow” (below, 141–52). However, the younger Eliade’s critique of “historicism” may go a great way to explaining his later antipathy to historicist positions in The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949). The question of the respective influences of his Eastern Orthodox background and his “Indian Experience” of 1928–32 have been much debated. I direct the reader to the writings of Sergiu Al-George, Douglas Allen, and Mac Ricketts in the bibliography, and to the articles by Ansgar Paus and A. F. C. Webster in this volume. Suffice it to say that by 1937 these various influences had done their work. This article first appeared as “Folklorul ca instrument de cunoaştere,” in Revista FundaŪilor Regale , IV, 4 (April 19, 1937): 137–52. It is here translated from the Romanian by Mac Linscott Ricketts and published with the kind permission of Professor Ricketts and the Eliade Literary Estate. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2005 by Equinox Publishing Ltd.