Eliade on Myth and Science

In contrast to nineteenth-century theorists, who set myth against science, Mircea Eliade, like other twentieth-century theorists, sought to reconcile myth with science. For both Bronislaw Malinowski and Eliade myth is, to be sure, an explanation in part, but the explanation is only a means to a nonscientific end rather than the end itself. By contrast to Malinowski, Eliade, like Edward B. Tylor and James George Frazer, assumes that primitive peoples have just myth and not also science, so that the issue of the compatibility of myth with primitive science does not arise. Eliade ventures far beyond Malinowski, not to say Tylor and Frazer, in making myth universal and, as presumably is the case for Malinowski, not merely primitive. Neither Malinowski nor Eliade challenges Frazer’s and especially Tylor’s literal reading of myth. By contrast, Malinowski and Eliade reconcile myth with science by recharacterizing the function of myth.