Friday, September 26, 2014

Eliade and Traditionalism

An interesting new article on Eliade and Traditionalism: Timotheus Lutz, "Mircea Eliade's 'Traditionalism': Appearance and Reality," Hyperion 2015. The article quotes several comments on Traditionalism and Traditionalists (Guénon and Coomaraswamy) by Eliade of which I was not previously aware. I am not sure I agree with the article's conclusions, but the research on which it is based is certainly valuable. Thanks to CG for drawing my attention to this article.

Traditionalist postage stamp

Only just found: the world's only known Traditionalist postage stamp.

Issued by the Moldovan Post Office (Posta Moldovei) in 2007, a series of three stamps featured the Romanian playwright Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912), the Moldovan opera singers Anastasia Dicescu (1887-1945) and Maria Bieșu (1935-2012), and Mircea Eliade (1907-1986).

Inset in the Eliade stamp, shown here, are two well-known photographs of Eliade, the covers of two of his better known books (The Myth of the Eternal Return and the History of Religious Ideas), and--less predictably--a photograph of Guénon and Schuon in Cairo.

The stamp was designed by Elena Karacenţev (b. 1960), a Moldovan artist who grew up in what was then Leningrad, and so perhaps discovered Eliade in a Russian version.