Mircea Eliade

 

April 30, 1997

Mircea Eliade said to Claude-Henri Rocquet:

(Cannibalism in religions)

"Set in the whole of which they are a part, these terrible, grotesque, revolting things recover their original significance, which was to provide a meaning for life that would incorporate the unavoidable fact that any life necessarily implies the death of others --- that one is doomed to kill in order to live.

They express the condition imposed on the human mind and spirit by history, a tragic condition, true, but very creative, too!

Confrontation with the void, with nothingness, with the demonic, the inhuman, the temptation to regress into the animal world --- all those extreme and dramatic experiences are the source of man's greatest spiritual creations.

Because, given those terrifying conditions, man was still able to say yes to life and find a meaning in his existence."

And:

"We don't live in a world of angels or spirits or in a purely animal world, either.  We are "between".

And I believe that confronting the revelation of this mystery always leads to an act of creation.  I believe that the human spirit is at its most creative when faced with great ordeals."

Ordeal by Labyrinth, 124-5.