ABSTRACT
In his monograph on Mircea Eliade, Ioan Petru Culianu points out that Rene Guenon and Julius Evola must be taken into account among those authors contributed to the development of his theories on religion. Some commentators are adepts or sympathizers of "Traditionalism" and, interested in laying claim to the work, ideas, and persona of an important historian of religions like Eliade. The discovery of authors like Evola and Guenon in 1926—at the age of nineteen in his first university year—comes as the continuation of a prior interest of Eliade's for parapsychology, occultism, spiritualism, theosophy, and for authors like Edouard Schure and Rudolf Steiner. Until 1925, Eliade's interests in the occult, "metapsychism", and theosophy were based upon a spiritual position close to the "magical pragmatism" of Giovanni Papini, one of his important influences at that time. The magic fact is a position characteristic of the West, while the Christian East has totalized all the components of religion in the mystic life.
