Mircea Eliade

Born in Romania in 1907, Eliade became a disciple of philosopher Nae Ionescu and moved between journalism, literature, and scholarship. In the late 1930s he publicly supported the Iron Guard, a Christian fascist movement — a fact that shadowed him for decades. He served as cultural attaché to the U.K. and Portugal in the 1940s before landing at the University of Chicago, where he built his paradigms: hierophanies as the basis of religion, the division of experience into sacred and profane, and eternal return as the engine of ritual. He wrote in five languages and produced fiction across genres…