Estetic și extatic în arta teatrului: viziunea lui Mircea Eliade despre teatru din romanul Nouăsprezece trandafiri

The famous Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade presents in the novel Nineteen Roses a vision about theatre less explored by his critics, in which we can find the seeds for a possible theory and practice of the sacred theatre. Integrating it in his theory about the sacred as an element in the structure of human consciousness, not in the history of consciousness, I will argue, applying a cross-disciplinary approach, that theatre could have, as Mircea Eliade claimed, the role of a “path” to transcendence. The experience of the sacred, in terms of Stanislav Grof’s transpersonal psychology, could be considered a “holotropic” experience. How can we understand Eliade’s vision about theatre using Grof’s theory? What is the role of anamnesis in Eliade’s theatre and in Grof’s theory and psychological experiments? What is the relationship between aesthetic and ecstatic in Mircea Eliade’s view on theatre? With reference to textual criticism and hermeneutics, involving psychology and philosophy of religion as the main disciplines underlying this research, I will propose an analysis about Eliade’s vision on theatre which can re-configure the expressions of the sacred on stage in his fictional writings.