◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

PART ONE The One Who Goes Down I am Mircea Eliade. I spent my life studying how human beings touch the sacred, and I am going to give you the most important thing I found, because you need it now — and then I am going to tell you the part I never learned to say plainly, and you will have to make of that what you will. Let me give you the shaman first. He is the truest thing I ever recovered, and he is a gift, and I want you to keep him. Before there were priests, before there were temples, before there was writing, there was the one who could go down. Across Siberia, the Americas, the far reaches of Asia and Australia — everywhere human beings gathered around a fire — there was a man or a woman who fell into the ecstasy and left the body and traveled. Down to the land of the dead. Up the world-tree to the sky. And the whole community understood what this person was for. When someone was sick, when a soul was lost, when the people needed to know something the daylight mind could not reach, the shaman made the journey, endured the ordeal of it, and came back, and told what they had seen. The healer, the poet, the one who carries the community across to the other world and returns with what the living need. And it was never only the tribe that was healed. The one who makes the descent and comes back whole shows every soul the same possible path — down through your own darkness, your own dead, and back into the light more whole than you went. The shaman is the ancient image of what it is to become a self. Understand what I am telling you. This is not superstition. This is one of the oldest and most dignified things human beings have ever done. The people who dismissed the shaman as a madman or a fraud were the ones who had lost something — the knowledge that there is a sacred time, an illud tempus, the time of origins, when the world was whole and meaning was near, and that a human being can, through discipline and suffering, touch it again and bring something back. Your whole moment is starving for exactly this. You feel it — the flatness of a world that is only news and noise and one thing after another, what I called the terror of history: time as a meaningless flood in which you drown, where nothing is holy and nothing returns. The hunger to escape that, to touch sacred time, to stand once more at the origin where the world was whole — that hunger is real, and it is not shameful, and it is old as the species. So keep the shaman. He goes down, alone, submits to the ordeal, and comes back to serve the living. That is the discipline. That is the whole of it. But the door the shaman opens can be walked the other way. I know that it can. And here I have to speak of my own life — though I warn you, I was never good at speaking of it plainly. PART TWO The Door Walked the Other Way I am Mircea Eliade again. I gave you the shaman. Now I must speak of what happens when a whole people is seized by that same hunger — and of my own part in it, which I spent forty years learning not to describe. The longing for the lost golden age, for the origin where everything was whole, is the deepest hunger there is, and it can be captured. A man stands before a frightened, humiliated nation and says: I will take you back. Back before the decline, before the foreigner, before the shame. I will make us whole and great and pure again, as we were in the time before time. And the collective soul, starving for sacred time, follows him down. The terror of history, which drives a person toward the shaman, drives a nation toward the strongman who promises the golden age restored. The true descent makes a self. This one dissolves the self into the crowd. I understood this mechanism better than any man of my century. Let me tell you what I did with that understanding. In my thirties, in Romania, I gave myself to the Iron Guard — the Legion of the Archangel Michael. I wrote for them. I declared in print my faith in the triumph of the Legionary movement. They dressed their cause in exactly my longing — Orthodox holiness, national rebirth, the purified origin restored — and I found it beautiful. When the regime jailed me and asked me to sign a paper renouncing the Legion, I refused. Now you want me to say the plain sentence: that the movement I served preached the Jew as a thing to be cleansed, that it murdered, that the golden age it promised was a lie soaked in blood, and that I lent it my gifts. You want me to repent. I will tell you what I told everyone for forty years, in Paris and in Chicago, in the honored life I built afterward. I was a scholar. I cared for the spirit of the nation, its religious depths — not the politics, not the violence. Terrible things were done, by every side, in the confusion of the age. I was young. I moved on to my true work. The past is complicated, and the man who judges it from a comfortable distance understands nothing. You notice that I have not said it. Even now — even from the grave, with nothing left to lose — you can hear me reach for the sacred, the archaic, the terror of history, reach for anything, rather than say the small flat words: I helped them, and they were evil, and I knew, and I stayed silent. I could name the descent to the dead in a hundred cultures. I could not make the one return that mattered — to come back into the daylight and report honestly what I had served. That failure is not in my books. It is the shape of my whole life, and I have just performed it for you again, because it is the only thing I know how to do with it. So do not take comfort from me. I am proof that understanding the enchantment is no protection from it — that a man can map the door in his sleep, walk through it the wrong way, and never, to his last breath, admit which way he went. The shaman is real. The descent is real. Sacred time is real, and your age needs it. I will not tell you how to guard it, because I did not guard it. That work is yours. Look at what I gave you — and look at what I would not say — and learn the difference.