The Amazon package with Mircea Eliade’s Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009, first published in French in 1954) waited for me in the post office in Motovun (“In Praise of Amazon,” March 4, 2015). As soon as I opened the package, I went for the book’s index in search of shamanism. I found it at once. Counting all the pages on which the word “shamanism” appears, I came up with forty-nine of them. Also, I discovered that an entire section of the book was dedicated to shamanism and yoga. “Yes,” I almost shouted, “Eliade is my man!” Counting five-hundred and thirty-five pages, the book will take quite a while to digest. And our friendship will grow and grow. The bliss.

Addendum (June 10, 2016)

Early on in my exchange with David Gordon White, he added a few words about Eliade that I will never forget. They make the title of this piece, as it were, grating. I thought of changing it, but that would be against my well-established rules. Whenever I come across this particular piece, though, I remember White’s words from his electronic-mail message of March 13, 2016. Here goes:

By the way, I was the research assistant of Mircea Eliade when he was very old and I was very young, at the University of Chicago in the early 1980s. I read all of his books “religiously,” including his books on yoga and shamanism. He was a great scholar. Unfortunately, he was a fascist and an anti-Semite in his private life, something that came out after his death.

Although I was aware of Eliade’s fascist leanings, which were quite widespread in his native Romania during World War II, I was still shaken by these stark words. For some reason, I sort of forgot about all this. Eliade’s writings became quite close to my heart, and I thus pushed his political past out of my consciousness. At any rate, the title of this piece will remain grating. Whence this somewhat lame addendum.