Travel Literature. Mircea Eliade’s Occidental View in the Himalayan Journal and the Portugal Journal

Authors

Irina Armianu, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

This article retraces Mircea Eliade’s mystical travel through the Himalayas as shown in his Himalayan Journal and his struggle to survive as a writer under the weight of brutal historical events in his Portugal Journal. The two travel journals reveal the influence of geographical and historical elements on Eliade's mystical writing. A deeper analysis of these journals is necessary to link travel genre to mystical thought. The next pages will show (1) how these journals fit into the category of existential travel, as theorized by Erik Cohen in "The Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences" (179-201), (2) Eliade’s own transcendence of his identity in two key moments of his creative path, and (3) that the latter creative crisis in Portugal is also the time when Eliade embarked on a transcendence towards the history of the religious thought, his most important philosophical and literary contribution. His accomplishments in the history of philosophy in the 1930s, his contribution to the aesthetics of myth, and his fantastic short stories, inspired him to travel to the ends of the world at the bottom of Himalayas to seek out Eastern philosophies and yogis engaged like him in the same quest for the absolute. By doing so, Eliade pioneered the genre of travel literature even before travel became a literary theme.

Comments

© 2025 by the author(s). Licensee HyperCultura, “Hyperion” University, Bucharest, Romania. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Recommended Citation

Armianu, Irina. "Travel Literature. Mircea Eliade’s Occidental View in the Himalayan Journal and the Portugal Journal." HyperCultura 13 (2024): 1-15.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Publication Title

HyperCultura