SPIRIT IN MIRCEA ELIADE’S ORDEAL BY LABYRINTH

Abstract

Ordeal by Labyrinth can serve as an apt introduction to the work of Mircea Eliade. However, and despite its dialogical structure, its direct style and its diversity of topics, still, by its very nature, that is, as a “later” book of interviews, it cannot capture the diachronic dimension that is constitutive of Eliade’s work. In this, it inherently distorts perspectives, alters nuances, resolves contradictions. Hence, my research hypothesis is that Ordeal by Labyrinth opens up a new vista on Eliade’s use of the concept of spirit. Indeed, “spirit” is often referenced, as is also “being”, in Ordeal by Labyrinth, although significantly not “the primacy of the spiritual”, that characteristic turn of phrase of the “early” Eliade. In this, Ordeal by Labyrinth, although discussing in detail the “early” Eliade with his intellectual trials and tribulations, remains firmly in its phrasing a “later” work, even as it subtly complicates this latter category. Applying Rita Sherma’s “hermeneutics of intersubjectivity” to a close reading of Ordeal by Labyrinth shows how and why “the historian of religions” (shorthand for Eliade and his orientation in the phenomenology of religion) embarks upon a voyage of discovery and selfdiscovery that, in a sense, dwarfs Hegel’s celebrated Phenomenology of Spirit, inasmuch as this voyage culminates in a truly universal history of spirit, starting with the Palaeolithic. Spirit is joined to being in this search (in this research; indeed, the kind of research in the history of religions that Eliade advocates is a spiritual search): they are best understood together.