20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

526 Daniela Dumbravaunder the tutelage of Edward Westermarck and Kaarle Krohn.As Anttonen stated, hARVA employed the comparative method in aprecise cultural area, mostly with a synchronic approach. He described anddefined the basis of the ideological and symbolical shamanic techniquesand treated the shaman according to his anthropological specificities:initiation, habit, tambour, etc. Consequently, from hARVA's point of view,the shamanic world will be based on the special affinity with the spiritualworld, the world of animals and plants, with the whole cosmos (for examplethe shaman tree of life which represents the cosmic tree or axis mundi). Infact, ELIADE was greatly indebted to hARVA’s lexic – world mountain,world tree, axis mundi – all archetypes that he found in Eurasian indigenousreligions and myths 16 . He mentioned into his Diary: “I work with enthusiasmand sometimes with exasperation on Shamanism. In order to avoid gettinglost in the tens of files, comprising over 2000 pages of notes and extras, Idecide to destroy the documentation of each chapter after I have correctedand transcribed it”. 17Eliade’s sources and epistemological approaches to his Shamanismwere examined in detail by Jonathan Zittel Smith in 1999, when theDepartment of History of Religions at Chicago University, celebrated fiftyyears from the first edition of Traité d’histoire des religions. 18 FollowingEliade’s admiration for the materials considered by Goethe in TheMetamorphosis of Plants and the debut of the word ‘morphology’ which,in fact, appears in the title of the book, Jonathan Smith stresses theepisode in which Goethe, and later Eliade, have their first ‘vision’of the vegetative system and the extraordinary variation of plants.Goethe visited the botanical garden in Padua in September 26, 1786.His observations focus on what he is calling the ‘variation of plants’, its‘differentiation or internal dynamics’ and its ‘sequence of modifications’.From this observation Goethe deduced a set of consequences, mentionedby J. Smith 19 , most of which focused on Linnaeus' conception of the‘form of the whole’ organism. Goethe is extremely critic of Linnaeus“because he ignored the progressive, vegetative aspects of plants and, byfailing to place these tendencies – the aspects of regression, contraction andsimultaneity of vegetative metamorphosis – he failed to understand theseNature phenomena. 20 ‘Form-change’ or ‘formation’ opposed to Gestad16A. Znamenski 2007: 33.17M. Eliade 1993: 161.18Payot, Paris: 1949.19J. Smith 2000: 324.20J.Z. Smith 2000: 325.