...Laurie L. Patton This article discusses the work of Mircea Eliade, especially Patterns in Comparative Religion , as an “Undead text.” Beginning with an analysis of Eliade’s work as it was understood in the 1980s, the author moves on to discuss the role of Patterns in the context of Eliade’s life...

... on tuberculosis in India, he identifies the consequences of a widely shared investment in cure’s finality—what he calls, after Mircea Eliade, a vision of “radical cure.” Such an investment threatens to foreclose our recognition of the limits of cure, as well as curtail our willingness to conceive of other...

... of Undead mavericks initially inspired new areas of scholarly inquiry, as in the case of Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion (Patton), Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins of Nationalism (Goswami) and Beauvoir’s Second Sex (Marcus) — only to have scholars...

... of life, a difference whose significance, again, is not ethical or philosophical but political. The trenchant dichotomies operative here are reminiscent of figures like Mircea Eliade, who, ironically, sought to defend religion’s (rather...

... Patton selected Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949), a work about numinous experiences and the inexhaustible capacity of the sacred to restore the axis mundi, the high center around which all else is organized. Caitlin Zaloom takes up Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966...

... together; and various times of origins, in Mircea Eliade’s sense. Now, with advancing disenchantment (especially in Protestant societies), another model took shape, with relation to both the cosmos and the polity. In this, the notion of design was crucial. As this model manifested itself...

... Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969); Martha N. Fried and Morton H. Fried, Transitions: Four Rituals in Eight Cultures (New York, 1980); and Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (New York: Harper Torchbooks...

.... The force of the old represen- tative institutions helped to “interpret” the new concept in practical terms. Quite different was the case in the French Revolution, with fateful effects. The impossibility remarked by all historians of “bringing the Revolution to an 30. “Time of origins” is Mircea...