Schmidt's ‘stupendous learning and industry'
Interestingly, those Eliadean living fossils scattered all around the globe were the same ‘present-day primitives' Schmidt identified as the unmistakable proof of an Asian origin of humankind.17 In addition to the degree of geographical and environmental remoteness of certain refugia, the regions listed by Eliade answered neatly to Schmidt's following rule: ‘those who wandered farthest from the entrance place [i.e.
central Asia], or were forced by successive waves of people farthest from the point of entry, represent the oldest cultures, while those groups who are closest to the point of entry have to be more recent in time' (Schmidt 1926: n.p.; from Brandewie 1983: 145-6).Indeed, the similarities between Eliade's and Schmidt's works have already been noted, as has been the Eliadean debt towards the Kulturkreislehre (e.g. Saliba 1976: 109; Ambasciano 2014: 144 for a list of commentators). In this sense, one remarkable source was constituted by the diffusionist works of Italian archaeologist and palaethnologist Pia Laviosa Zambotti (1898-1965), who tried to fit more palaeoanthropological data and theories into the Kulturkreislehre (Ambasciano 2014: 179-242). In the ‘Introduction' written for Laviosa Zambotti's French translation of Origini e diffusione della civiltà (Les origines et la diffusion de la civilisation, 1949), Eliade adopted her modified Kulturkreise model (particularly evident in his Shamanism ; cf. Ambasciano 2014: 222), which retained Asia as the cradle of humanity, and elaborated further on her progressionist history of human populations. In Laviosa Zambotti's model, and in line with coeval palaeoanthropology, prehistoric Neandertals were thought of as beastly brutes, whose modern-day descendants were Schmidtian human vestiges immobilized in a perpetual past (see Ambasciano 2014: 212-13; on the falsification of Neandertal's brutal primitiveness, see Ambasciano 2014: 126-7).
As recapped and expanded by Eliade,Neandertal man survives today, even somatically (especially concerning the face, the part of the body whose evolution is the lowest) in Australia, where we find the Mousterian industry typical of prehistoric Neandertals, dating back as far as 100,000 years ago. But true progress, as well as the almost integral transmission of the cultural heritage, began with Upper Palaeolithic men, that is 40,000 years ago.
Eliade 1949: iv
Again, this reconstruction is unsupported by scientific evidence. Just to point out a few considerations: by the late 1940s, the proofs adduced to justify the Asian origin of humankind, already doubted on sound comparative and primatological grounds by Darwin himself in favour of Africa (Darwin 1871, 1: 199), were under critical scrutiny (and later proved false; Ambasciano 2014: 137-8, 212-13), while the alleged ‘brutal' similarities between Native Australians and Neandertals had been already disproved at the beginning of the twentieth century (Boule 1913; cit. in Sommer 2006: 214).18 Also, even though the differences between the two aforementioned lithic productions were noted in 1971 (Gould, Koster and Sontz 1971),19 Eliade managed to eschew every serious confrontation with (palaeo)anthropological research and never updated his viewpoints basically inherited from Schmidt's Kulturkreislehre, reproposing them unabashedly in the decades to come.
In the early 1960s, Eliade acknowledged the publication of the first volume of Schmidt's Ursprung der Gottesidee in 1912 as a landmark moment for the HoR, along with Freud, Jung and Durkheim's coeval works (Eliade 1984: 12-13). Later in the same venue, Eliade praised Schmidt's brave refusal to accept ‘Tylor's animism as well as preanimism, totemism, and vegetation gods' (Eliade 1984: 14), stating that
despite its polemical excesses (chiefly in the first volume) and apologetic tendencies, Ursprung der Gottesidee is a great work. Whatever one may think of Schmidt's theories on the origin and growth of religion, one must admire his stupendous learning and industry.
Wilhelm Schmidt was certainly one of the greatest linguists and ethnologists of this century.Eliade 1984: 24
Apparently, Eliade was displeased by the criticism reserved for Schmidt's works, and both Australia and Schmidt kept on occupying a position of utmost importance in Eliade's paradigm. The reason is simple: as seen in the previous paragraph, remoteness from Asia and geographical inaccessibility were reputed to be two of the most basic factors to determine the degree of primitiveness of a religion, and Australia ticked these and other boxes in the diffusionist form. Moreover, because of cultural, ethnological, theological, missiological, and political reasons and preconceptions, Australia was thought of as the classical hotspot in the history of HoR's living fossils (Lucas 2005; for Schmidt, see Brandewie 1990: 135). Eliade dedicated to Australia a series of articles published between 1966 and 1968, later collected in a book, in which he reported and commented upon past ethnographical works about Native Australian religions. What better occasion to come back to Schmidt's ideas?
In the first article in the series, Eliade recalled Schmidt's ‘prestige [as] a great linguist and ethnologist', he rehabilitated Schmidt's theses, commended Schmidt's working ability to ‘substantiate], correct, and systematiz[e] the ideas of Andrew Lang' (Eliade 1966: 118), remarked on Schmidt's critiques of Pettazzoni's rebuttal and highlighted Pettazzoni's late ‘partial agreement' with Schmidt on some specific points (Eliade 1966: 122-3). The only real weakness in Schmidt's interpretation was, according to Eliade, his idea of the ‘Supreme Being belong[ing] to a religious stage preceding any mythological formulation', which, according to Eliade, ran counter to ‘everything that we know of homo religiosus in general and of primitive man in particular' (Eliade 1966: 119). Thus, from Eliade's viewpoint, Lang's and Schmidt's interpretation based on (divinely granted) cognitive and logical faculties allowing for the primeval intuition of a god was not entirely wrong, but was only too ‘rational and even elevated' (Eliade 1966: 117; cf.
Brandewie 1990: 120-40). In line with an interpretation of religion that favoured the Romantic and anti-rational exaltation of myth as a true story replete with crude and savage beliefs and behaviours, as James Cox recapped, Eliade ‘was not challenging the theory promoted by Lang and Schmidt that a belief in a Supreme Being stood at the foundation of religion, but [he] rejected what they called their “rationalist” interpretation of myth as somehow representing a degenerated form for expressing the original idea of a High God' (Cox 2014a: 29-30). In other words, Schmidt's Uroffenbarung was safe.If this re-evaluation was not clear enough, Eliade also stated that Lang, Schmidt and the scholars that adopted their perspective,
have the merit of having studied an important aspect of primitive religions in general and of Australian religions in particular. The conception of a High Being - no matter how different this High Being might have been from the Supreme Beings attested in other, more complex cultures - was at least something which a great number of religions could be said to have in common.
Eliade 1966: 121; my emphasis
Downplaying the whole Urmonotheismus diatribe, the paradigmatic shift which led to the rebuttal of Schmidt's theses was merely due to an unspecified ‘change' in ‘the Western Zeitgeist that caused the interest in the problem of the High Gods to ‘fade out', merely suggesting a series of cyclical vogues (Eliade 1966: 121; Eliade 2000: xiii; see also Ambasciano 2014: 129-34). Leaving basically untouched Schmidt's hard core, Eliade focused on some trivial matters pertaining to the Kulturkreislehre external belt of additional ideas, such as the role of myth and irrationality, thus rescuing Schmidt's central and anachronistic ideas concerning diffusionism and divine revelation.
A few years earlier, in a commentary dedicated to Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane (1959), anthropologist William A. Lessa (1908-1997) noted something that could easily be extrapolated to describe Eliade's entire academic production:
there is no history in this work, except some dubious assumptions regarding the sequences through which man and religion have passed (the author at one point invokes Bachofen and Pater Schmidt as authorities for the matriarchate). What passes for history is a series of imaginative reconstructions on highly selected data and contradictory ethnographic and historical materials omitted.
Lessa 1959: 114720
Given the complicated history of cross-breeding between the Kulturkreislehre and historicism that we have seen in the previous chapter, Eliade's fallacy of archetypes was disciplinarily legitimated and, in some sense, justified.