An epistemic twilight: Pseudoscience and esotericism
Eliade had always entertained the possibility that major religious substrates from human protohistory might have outlived their primeval cultures, even before reading Schmidt. Eliade's entire career was obsessively focused on the uncovering of unconscious and religious survivals of religious elements from protohistoric or prehistoric ‘autochthonous substrata' in spite of successive cultural conquest, colonization or assimilation by foreign powers.
For the existence of such substrata would explain worldwide mythical and symbolic similarities whose veridicity was beyond question (thanks to the HoR axiom of myth as true story; e.g. Eliade 2000). According to Eliade, one of the main cultural substrata which gave rise to alchemy, yoga, folkloric beliefs and other religious or esoteric knowledge came from some unknown proto-historical Australasian or Melanesian culture, and he nurtured this belief by accumulating throughout his career increasingly contradictory examples of hypothetical colonization (concerning, for instance, ancient Phoenicia, ancient Romania, Europe, North America, Japan, Southern India and some African regions; Eliade 1936: 293-4; Eliade 1939 in Ciurtin 2000: 308; Eliade 1935 in Eliade 2001: 63). Once more, as shown elsewhere (Ambasciano 2014), such ideas were unsupported by any evidence, as Eliade got the entire process backwards. Human colonization of the world proceeded from Africa outwards, in multiple and complex migratory waves, potentially involving interbreeding, with Oceania being the latest area ever to be reached by human beings in historical times (Ambasciano 2014: 193; Bae, Douka and Petraglia 2017; Rabett 2018; cf. Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi and Piazza 1994 for an overview). One exception could be Australia. But even Australian colonization itself, one of the most ancient and successful intercontinental migrations, dates back to ca. 65,000 years ago, which is geologically quite recent if we think that the most ancient fossil remains of Homo sapiens, and related palaeogenetic analyses, currently push back the African origins of the taxon to more than 300,000 years ago (Clarkson et al. 2017; Stringer and Galway-Witham 2017). However, all of this does not take into account the extra-epistemic bases of Eliade's thesis. Also, Eliade's ideas showed a persistence of racial and cultural biases and a disinterest towards both evolutionary anthropology and Africa; consequently, his religious analyses of the African continent were characterized by what anthropologist Pascal Boyer called a ‘caricatural comparativism' (Boyer 1983: 44; cf. Ambasciano 2014: 136-7).Although Eliade found in Schmidt's proposal a more academically acceptable presentation, the ultimate origins of such a mindset came from Eliade's eclectic youth readings; indeed, his interest in prehistory and Asia was a direct consequence of his acquaintance with both historico-religious works and esoteric, occult literature (cf. Eliade 1991: 208; Spineto 2006). Disparate trends within esotericism had always been fascinated by lost, pseudo-mythical lands and kingdoms (such as Atlantis or Shambhala) to explain the origins, diffusion or degradation of human cultures by resorting to sci-fi-like mythical narratives, omnipotent invisible agents, paranormal abilities and supernatural causes. One of the most famous modern attempts in this sense was that devised by the Theosophical Society, an esoteric organization founded in 1875 by Russian spiritualist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891). Claiming to have received spiritual revelations from unknown masters eager to counteract modern spiritual depauperation via selected spokespersons, and able to perform magic tricks such as materializing objects, Blavatsky came up with a mix of Western esotericism, HoR, Eastern religions and, most of all, pseudoscience. In the wake of the cultural diffusionism that tried to explain every major religion's ancestry via a unique cradle, and eager to exploit the appeal of scientific jargon, Blavatsky chose the biogeographic
theory of lost land-bridges, which preceded plate tectonics, and focused on the hypothetical and submersed Pacific continent called Lemuria, recently hailed by German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) as a potential cradle of humanity (van Wyhe and Kjsrgaard 2015: 61).
In Blavatsky’s storytelling, Lemuria became one of the veritable crucibles of cosmic existence, and the pivot for a new eschatology. As writer Lyon Sprague de Camp recapped, according to the Theosophical mythography (later further embellished),life evolves through seven cycles or ‘Rounds’, during which humankind develops through seven Root Races, each comprising seven sub-races. The first Root Race, a kind of astral jellyfish, lived on an Imperishable Sacred Land. The Second, a little more substantial, dwelt in the former arctic continent of Hyperborea. The Third were the apelike hermaphroditic egg-laying Lemurians, some with four arms and some with an eye in the back of their heads, whose downfall was caused by their discovery of sex [...]. The Fourth Root Race were the quite human Atlanteans. We are the Fifth, and the Sixth will soon appear.
de Camp 1970: 56; cf. Nunn 2009: 118-29
Personal spiritual evolution was thought necessary to reverse this degrading process of incarnation into physical forms (Kripal 2014: 64). In 1927, Eliade rebuked Blavatsky not for such ideas as grotesquely fanciful, but for being too open to evolution and positivistic materialism, an opinion he reiterated in 1962 in his personal diaries (resp., Eliade 2003: 329, and Eliade 1989a: 176-7; see Ambasciano 2014: 191-8). When Eliade came back to this argument in the early 1970s, he claimed that ‘the most erudite and devastating critique’ of Blavatsky’s ideas and all the various more or less faithful followers came ‘not by a rationalist “outside” observer’, nor ‘from a skeptical or positivistic perspective, but from what [is known as] “traditional esotericism”’, that is French ‘learned and intransingent’ esotericist Rene Guenon’s (1886-1951) perennialist reinterpretation (Eliade 1976: 51). If that was a critique at all, it came emically from within the same ideological spectrum.
Perennialism, also known as Traditionalism, is a meta-religious esoteric doctrine which posits that ancient divine knowledge (also called philosophia perennis) and supernatural powers were granted to a privileged human race in primeval times and are now scattered or lost, substituted by a symbolic web of hidden meanings to be retrieved and decoded in sacred texts by privileged, enlightened individuals, heirs of that primeval race.
Perennialism also asserts the unavoidable crisis of Western society and culture and is characterized by recurrent historico-cosmological cycles and renewals which purify the moral decadence of the previous, final cyclical phase. In practice, Perennialism took to the extreme HoR’s fideistic parallelomania, disregarding science, historiography, philology and every Western academic endeavour, and resorting instead to anti-modernism, conspiracy thinking, appeal to a reinvented tradition, clustering illusion and confirmation bias (Eco 1989; Eco 2008: 301-6; cf. Spineto 2006: 133-63; Ambasciano 2014). These ideas, already tied to a reactionary and conservative cultural milieu, were to be explicitly elaborated within an extreme far-right worldview by Eliade’s acquaintance, Italian fascist intellectual and racist ideologue Julius Evola (1898-1974), who accentuated the political clash between modern and traditional worldviews. As a dialogue between HoR and perennialist esotericism began to take place in the early decades of the twentieth century, the works of Evola, Guenon and other perennialists were to leave a mark on Eliade’s works and strengthen his conservative, pseudoscientific and diffusionist ideas, although within a distinctively eclectic worldview (Spineto 2006: 133-63; Turcanu 2007: 491; Ambasciano 2014: 330-68; cf. also Eliade’s distaste for philology in Smith 2004: 367-8).21The Eliadean fusion of Interwar Romanian provincialism, anti-Enlightenment Romanticism, reactionary politics, esotericism and phenomenological HoR led to an anti-establishment stance: Eliade disregarded the scientific method, despised the reference system of citation, and constantly favoured authors and themes that were anti-scientific or critical towards mainstream science (Ambasciano 2014: 268-71; cf. Pernet 2012: 25 n. 21). In a sense, Eliade could not care less about epistemology: science meant almost nothing to him if it was not to conform to his a priori ideas and confirm his own ideas, just a bit more restrained than those of actual esotericists (Ambasciano 2014).
Eliade himself called his own academic strategy a ‘Trojan Horse’. On 2 February 1944, he wrote in one of his journals: ‘I consider myself a Trojan Horse in the scientific camp, and that my mission is to put an end once and for all to the “Trojan War” that has lasted too long between science and philosophy [i.e. metaphysics]. I want to validate scientifically the metaphysical meaning of archaic life’ (Eliade 2010: 104). To achieve this goal, a road map was implicitly followed, whose general points, with the benefit of hindsight, might be summarized as follows:1. Western science in its current form was to be delegitimized, and any pseudoscientific contender sufficiently imbued with religion or spirituality advertised as superior;
2. Western science in its current form was to be shown as incomplete and dogmatic;
3. research activity was to be tied to ethnic and spiritual roots to show its current limits and boost nationalistic fideism - thus, HoR was reputed able to explain the ultimate mechanism of scientific discovery itself;
4. HoR was to be demonstrated to be able to go beyond the limits of science within academia, as science was slowly discovering ‘truths’ already known in esoteric, mystical and folkloric notions;
5. finally, HoR was to supplement and help changing science in the quest for spiritual truth (e.g. Eliade 1985; Eliade 2000; Eliade 2006; Eliade 2008: 65-8; Ambasciano 2014: 105-9, 271-4, 291-6).
Paranormal abilities, the existence of supernatural powers and entities, the folk knowledge of the afterlife, the possibility to reach otherworldly dimensions; these and other sensational notions were chosen by Eliade to promote the superiority of his HoR. Considering the outstanding success of his proposal, and how Eliade’s HoR preceded current post-truth attacks on science as well as specific contemporary fields such as ‘Religion and Science’ (e.g. Kripal 2014; McGrath 2015; De Cruz 2017; cf. Coyne 2015), he did succeed admirably, and nowhere else was this success more tangible than in the study of shamanism.