Embodied Levels of Participation in the Supernatural of Mircea Eliade’s Characters from his Fantastic Literature

Abstract

This article proposes a rereading of Mircea Eliade’s fantastic literature through the framework of embodied cognition. Existing approaches—symbolic-allegorical decoding or classical narratological analysis—fail to account for a defining structural feature: the dissociation between a character’s conscious intentionality and their participation in the supernatural phenomenon. Tracing the evolution of Eliade’s fantastic across its major stages—from the “magic” period, where sorcerer-type characters deliberately summon the supernatural, to the second stage, where naïve protagonists are passively drawn into hierophanic encounters—this study demonstrates an inverse relationship: as conscious agency diminishes, embodied participation deepens. Through close readings of Dumitru inA Fourteen-Year-Old Photograph, Iancu Gore inTwelve Thousand Head of Cattle, and Gavrilescu inAt the Gypsy Girls, the analysis reveals how Eliade’s characters become integrated into the very phenomenon they cannot consciously comprehend. The embodied framework clarifies the internal logic of the stories while establishing a coherent bridge between Eliade the phenomenologist and Eliade the fiction writer. Ultimately, the study argues that Eliade’s literary imagination gains depth when analyzed through the embodied framework.