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Background

Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1907. Attending the Spiru Haret National College, he subsequently studied at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Philosophy and Letters from 1925 through to 1928. Traveling to India to study the country's religions, in 1933 he received his PhD for a thesis devoted to a discussion of Yoga. Writing for the nationalist newspaper Cuvântul, he spoke out against antisemitism but became associated with the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascistgroup. Arrested for his involvement in the far right, following his release in 1940 he gained employment as a cultural attaché to both the United Kingdom and then Portugal. Following the Second World War, Eliade moved to Paris, France, fearing the rise of a communist government in Romania. Here, he married for a second time, to the Romanian exile Christinel Cotescu.

Together with Emil Cioran and other Romanian expatriates, Eliade rallied with the former diplomat Alexandru Busuioceanu, helping him publicize anti-communist opinion to the Western European public. In 1947, he was facing material constraints, and Ananda Coomaraswamy found him a job as a French-language teacher in the United States, at a school in Arizona; the arrangement ended upon Coomaraswamy's death in September. Beginning in 1948, he wrote for the journal Critique, edited by French thinker Georges Bataille.The following year, he went on a visit to Italy, where he wrote the first 300 pages of his novel Noaptea de Sânziene (he visited the country a third time in 1952). He collaborated with Carl Jung and the Eranos circle after Henry Corbin recommended him in 1949, and co-edited the Antaios magazine with Ernst Jünger. In 1950, Eliade began attending Eranosconferences, meeting Jung, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, Gershom Scholem and Paul Radin. He described Eranos as "one of the most creative cultural experiences of the modern Western world."

Working from France, Eliade had begun to study shamanism from a global perspective, publishing three papers on the subject: "Le Probléme du chamanisme" in the Revue de l'histoire des religions journal (1946), "Shamanism" in Forgotten Religions, an anthology edited by Vergilius Ferm (1949), and "Einführende Betrachtungen über den Schamanismus" in the Paideuma journal (1951). He had also lectured on the subject in March 1950 at both the University of Rome and the Instituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente.

Synopsis

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"To the best of our knowledge the present book is the first to cover the entire phenomenon of shamanism and at the same time to situate it in the general history of religion. To say this is to imply its liability to imperfection and approximation and the risks that it takes."

In his foreword, Eliade explains the approach that he has taken in the book, noting that his intention is to situate world shamanism within the larger history of religion. Disputing any claims that shamanism is a result of mental illness, he highlights the benefits that further sociological and ethnographic research could provide before explaining the role of a historian of religions. Describing shamanism as "precisely one of the archaic techniques of ecstasy", he proclaims that it is "at once mysticism, magic and "religion" in the broadest sense of the term."

Chapter one, "General Considerations. Recruiting Methods. Shamanism and Mystical Vocation", details Eliade's exploration of the etymology and terminological usage of the word "shamanism".

Arguments

Definition of "shamanism"

Within his study of the subject, Eliade proposed several different definitions of the word "shamanism". The first of these was that shamanism simply constituted a "technique of ecstasy", and in Eliade's opinion, this was the "least hazardous" definition.