20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

Shamanism in North Asia as a religious phenomenon. A brief note... 527or ‘fixed form’ helped Goethe ‘to show, insofar as it was possible thatvarious plant parts developed in sequence are intrinsically identical despitetheir manifold differences in outer form’; the notion of innere Identität –the internal same or similar – helped Goethe to explain his thesis on theMetamorphosis of Plants.Jonathan Smith 21 and Steven Wasserstrom 22 speculated onElaide’s friendship with Erich Heller, since both were interestedin the ‘archetype’, attended the Eranos meetings and were attractedby the ‘transcendental origins of myth’, a concept familiar in Germanromanticism. Smith mentions some of Eliade’s personal notes andbiographical considerations which direct the reader of Eliade's workto the lectures he held in the 40s-50s – for example his Goethe lectureswere connected with Shamanism, a detail mentioned several times in hisDiary 23 . Eliade, as Goethe did, visited Palermo and the botanicalgarden, recalled its Urpflanze and the wonderful booklet Versuch, dieMetamorphose der Pflanzen sur erklären, 1790, as well as the morphologymethod or the history of morphology from which the idea of ‘the initial/archetypal plant’ arose. From my point of view, Jonathan Smith wasright when he recalled such arguments in order to show that Eliadehas a strong affinity with Goethe, but I also think this is limited toan intensely shared idea – with Goethe’s metamorphosis or innereIdentität – but does not include the general epistemological option forhis Shamanism. In this latter respect, and following the description ofEliade’s secondary sources for his Shamanism – Wilhelm Radloff(1837-1918), Sergei M. Shirokoroff (1887-1939), Maria AntoinetteCzaplicka (1866-1921), Uno Holmberg-Harva (1882-1949)– one may consider that it was Eliade himself who clearly delineatedhis own epistemological background and his purposes: “…to cover theentire phenomenon of shamanism and at the same time to situate it in thegeneral history of religions”. 24 As he noted into his Traité d’histoire dereligions (1949) or Pattern in Comparative Religion (1958), the historicalconditions are extremely important in a religious phenomenon (for everyhuman datum is ultimately a historical datum), but they do not whollyexhaust it. This assertion, coupled with an analogous ‘Goethean’ interestin the Urphänomen (original phenomenon) and the morphology of plantshas nothing to do with the historical context or historical manifestations of21Idem: 327.22S. Wasserstrom 1999: 86.23M. Eliade 1993, 160: 184-185.24M. Eliade 1964: xi.