The sacred from the Stone Age to the present and back again

With such a cultural background, it is no wonder that Eliade was a staunch advocate of human discontinuity and human exceptionalism in evolution and, due to the influence of lonescu’s philosophical works, he apparently struggled to find a balance between his fascination with natural history and the outright rejection of evolution for all things concerning humankind, a conflict that ultimately led to his ambiguous and quasi- theological view of an orthogenetic, non-Darwinian evolutionary path.

First of all, in such an academic work dating from the late 1970s and whose title indicates the Palaeolithic date of religious beginnings, Eliade’s treatment of evolution is nothing short of perplexing. Except for a couple of introductory pages where evolution’s role is downplayed, where monkeys are pithecophobically depicted as very cognitively limited animals, nonhuman apes are never cited, and human beings as ‘prehominians’ or ‘Paleanthropians’ appear on the scene fully formed and practically limited to H. sapiens itself, no updated scientific explanation is provided for the readers.⁹ After an anti-evolutionary rant about the attribution of ‘the theory of the nonreligiosity of the Paleanthropians’ to the ‘heyday of evolutionism, when similarities to the primates had just been discovered’ (Eliade 1978a: 5) - a theory which is thought by the author to be just a ‘misconception’ - Eliade admits that ‘it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine what [the primordial religious content] was’.

if the Paleanthropians are regarded as complete men, it follows that they also possessed a certain number of beliefs and practiced certain rites. For, as we stated before, the experience of the sacred constitutes an element in the structure of consciousness. In other words, if the question of the religiosity or nonreligiosity of prehistoric men is raised, it falls to the defenders of nonreligiosity to adduce proofs in support of their hypothesis.

Eliade 1978a: 5; my emphasis

While Eliade’s justification here amounts to a reversal of the burden of proof, and a rejection of the null hypothesis, and thus falls within the range of immunizing logical fallacies (cf. Shermer 2013: 218; Pigliucci and Boudry 2014), his peculiar idea of the sacred deserves a brief explanation. Since the 1930s, Eliade envisaged the sacred as the result of deep, symbolic contents settled and deposited in the human subconscious. This content is encased within archetypes, in turn transmitted through a ‘transconscious’, which is a transcendent vertical link that connects the human conscience with an unspecified otherworldy and divine reality through the virtual mediation of the subconscious as receptacle and ‘apish’ imitator.¹⁰ Therefore, every activity is ipso facto religious and derived from a divine source nested in human conscience, and archetypes contain the instructions, so to say, for every folkloric, fantastic, religious and non­religious action, belief or symbol. All hark back to prehistory, and archetypes are thought to be (also) the remnants of long-lost truths now encoded in myths, dreams, visions, imagination and desires.¹¹ Finally, such archetypical contents are expressed differently in ‘traditional’ and modern Western societies, for the latter merely experience a degraded, degenerated, secularized and profane version of such themes. The fideistic hermeneutics promoted by Eliade’s comparative study of ‘living fossils’ and contemporary Western vestiges is thought to help in recovering and re-establishing a new transconsciously reinvigorated religiosity (e.g.

Now, according to Eliade, the scientific underpinnings of these subconscious structures are to be found in the works of Romanian, anti-Darwinist biospeleologist Emil Racovita (1868-1947), and they represent the link between psychoanalytical and palaeoanthropological explanations.¹³ Eliade had been trying to translate Racovita’s ideas from cave biology to racial ethnohistory since the 1930s, justifying each nation’s own eschatology and mythical arc, the historical resilience of certain archaic practices (such as yoga), and the persistence of some populations apparently stuck in time,

within an evolutionary, but not Darwinian, process (Eliade 1991: 113-16; cf. Ellwood 2001: 682). All of these were reputed ‘living fossils', and Eliade applied this definition indiscriminately to both cultural and social items.

And yet, Racovita's ideas have long been shown to be false. Troglobites are not living fossils, the fauna they were a part of has not been ‘transcended' and, moreover, the concept itself of ‘living fossils' has been disproved (Ambasciano 2014: 89-98; cf. Gould 2002: 937; Switek 2012; on cave biology and troglobites, see Romero 2009 and Culver and Pipan 2009). The level of technological knowledge exhibited by the cited populations is different and does not reflect a single historical cause.¹⁴ And this is without even mentioning the fact that no human population has ever remained stuck in an ahistorical void capable of preserving it as a social, cultural, religious and technological ‘living fossil' - whatever that may mean.¹⁵ More worryingly still, Eliade kept on using such dated terms in an academic publication in the late 1970s to combine the ideas of a scala naturae with a scala religionum, to showcase ‘primitive' human populations as an open-air museum for Westerners' past,¹⁶ in a way not dissimilar to Schmidt's own approach (Schmidt's works are actually referenced in From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries).