Abstract:
Studying the formative period of the morphology of symbols in the work of Mircea Eliade, based on his works published between 1928 and 1949, this research seeks to understand what criteria Eliade would have used to classify and select the constituent elements of the morphology of symbols, formed by symbolisms and mythical patterns. The hypotheses raised are developed from a set of previous conceptual structures, from which Eliade would have gradually extracted elements for the morphology of symbols, the basis for his hermeneutic system. These conceptual structures, which form worldviews conditioned by a mythical-religious explanation of the origin of the cosmos, were called cosmological frames, representing specific cultures and eras as starting points for the discoveries that made him a name remembered in the 20th century as a historian, phenomenologist and a philosopher of the hermeneutics of religion. In view of this, the study was divided into three stages. The first describes Eliade's biographical and intellectual trajectory, presenting his process of assimilating information and his specialization in Hindu philosophy and metaphysics. The second identifies the conceptual structures or cosmological frameworks from which he begins to develop a broad and comprehensive system. And the third stage raises hypotheses about the selection criteria that would form his hermeneutic system. In conclusion, his main selective criteria serve as filters selected from a concentric logic. The most general or distant elements are elements of unity, common to the most diverse forms of religion. To organize them, new degrees of specificity are added through the criteria of organic universality (intercultural filter), openness (phenomenological filter), archetype (mythical-archetypal filter), finally giving shape to the Symbolisms and Mythical Patterns highlighted especially in 1949, with the classics The Myth of the Eternal Return and Patterns in Comparative Religion.
