Mircea Eliade traces the modern West's obsession with origins. It runs from Ficino dropping Plato to translate the Corpus Hermeticum, through the positivist and evolutionist search for the beginnings of life, Spiritism and Theosophy, to the rival theories of the origin of religion: Müller, Tylor, Lang, Schmidt and mana. He reads the forgotten high god as a 'death of God' in archaic religion. He takes Jung's and Freud's descent into the primordial as symptoms of the same yearning, and he argues that historicism, though it frees the historian of religions, cannot by itself explain the sacred.
Mircea Eliade — 1 recording in the archive.
The book: The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion by Mircea Eliade.
A French proverb says that only the details are important, "Il n'y a que les détails qui comptent." I will not claim that this is always true, but there are instances in the history of culture when details are unexpectedly illuminating. Let us consider the beginnings of the Italian humanism in Florence. It is generally known that Marsilio Ficino founded the Platonic Academy and translated into Latin Plato's Dialogues, as well as some neo-Platonic works and commentaries, but there is a detail which usually escapes our attention. Cosimo de' Medici had entrusted Ficino with the translations of Plato and Plotinus, which is a statement had been collecting for many years. But about 1460, Cosimo bought the manuscript of what was later called Corpus Hermeticum, and asked Ficino to render it immediately into Latin. At that time, Ficino had not yet begun his translation of Plato. Nevertheless, he put aside the dialogues and hurriedly applied himself to the translation of Poimandres, one of these Corpus Hermeticum, and other Hermetical treatises, so that he could finish them in a few months. In 1463, a year before Cosimo's death, these translations were complete. Thus, Corpus Hermeticum was the first Greek text to be translated and published by Marsilio Ficino. Only afterwards did he start working on Plato. This detail is important. It sheds lights upon an aspect of the Italian Renaissance ignored, or at least neglected, by the historians of a generation ago. Both Cosimo and Ficino were thrilled by the discovery of a primordial revelation -- that is, the one disclosed in the Hermetical writings. And, of course, they had no reason to doubt that the Corpus Hermeticum represented the very words of Hermes the Egyptian -- that is to say the oldest revelation accessible, one which preceded that of Moses, and which inspired Pythagoras and Plato, as well as the Persian Magi. Though he exalted the holiness and the veracity of the Hermetic texts, Ficino did not and could not suspect himself of not being a good Christian. Already in the second century, the Christian apologist Lactantius considered Hermes Trismegistus a divinely-inspired sage, and interpreted some Hermetic prophesies as fulfilled in the birth of Jesus Chris. Marsilio Ficino reasserted this harmony between Hermetism and Hermetic magic on the one hand, and Christianity on the other. No less sincere was Pico della Mirandola, who considered that Magia and Kabbalah confirmed the divinity…