Could you unironically cite this as a source for an essay?

Tge paper was on technological progress. I cited Ted for his call of revolution, violent or otherwise, but disagreed with him by saying it unfortunately can't be stopped.

I cited Brett Stevens (NRX guy, heavy metal critic & earlier adopter of the tag "alt-right") and Pentti Linkola in a paper I wrote freshman year (2008) about nihilism and environmentalism. My teacher was a schizo postmodern intersectional feminist half italian-half mexican woman, who to her credit was very open-minded. My paper was basically making an argument for systematic depopulation of the planet. I remained one of her favorite students after this.
Dunno what academia is like now, although it seems like since you're even asking it's probably not a great idea if you value your reputation.

No, you shouldn't. It's not even that it's controversial. It's that it's outdated and (more importantly, because much more damning in an academic context) quaint and unscholarly methodology, by AAR standards.

If you cite Evola in an essay in any Divinity School or History of Religions department, outside of specific reasons for doing so (to which the charge of quaintness of methodology doesn't apply), you will just be considered a quack or a perennialist weirdo student. Most professors have dealt with perennialist or wannabe perennialist students just discovering Guenon for the first time, as well as diehard Islamist Guenonians who probably studied with Nasr directly, so you won't even be a cool rebel. You'll just be that year's Guenonian student who got a B- because he wouldn't stop citing Guenon as gospel despite being told repeatedly that appealing to "Tradition" as an authority does not constitute scholarly analysis. There are still a few lingering Guenonians in the academy too, so again, they're not new. They show up to the AAR conferences and push for perennialist perspectives and just get ignored.

You can gauge the reaction you'd get for citing Evola/Guenon by citing Eliade. Much of Evola's perennialist views are virtually identical to Eliade's at least in their basic form, the two knew each other well, and Evola even accused Eliade (in a letter) of copying his + Guenon's whole system and simply repackaging it for his own career in American academia. So Eliade is like an "academic Evola," and you STILL can't cite Eliade except for specific reasons - like his empirical work, usually while noting that you aren't an Elaidean - or you'll be considered a quack these days. (Those Guenonians at the AAR are usually Eliadeans.)

Also consider Dumezil. Dumezil is controversial too - he was a fascist and theorist of Aryanism etc. But you can't cite Dumezil. Why? Not even because he was a fascist. Just because his tripartite hypothesis is considered heavy-handed, unscholarly and "quaint." It seems like someone trying too hard to force the history of religion into a metanarrative for his own mystical/ethnonationalist preconceptions. It's the "forcing to fit his preconceptions" part that makes them quaint and will make you look bad for appealing to them as authorities - not the ethnonationalist part. Professors who privately suspect you're a fascist/Ariosophist and dislike you for it will take great pleasure in laughing at you for being a quaint outmoded perennialist, discrediting you and marking you down that way, while claiming publically and plausibly that their dislike of you was never even a matter of your controversial admiration of fascists.

implying any uni teachers are actually this thoughtful

I would be careful about citing Godwin. Godwin can do his own thing but he's clearly himself an esoteric. Versluis is someone similar. Both can be cited obviously, both have perfectly plausible scholarly books, but if you cite certain things of theirs as scholarly AUTHORITIES when they are clearly statements of religious/esoteric belief, or grounded in such beliefs, you are just going to make it easy for professors who dislike you to handwave you away.

Citing Hanegraaff, Faivre, etc., no problem. But if you cite this shit, you will give your snooty professor every opportunity to handwave you away (and shit on your grade) as a token perennialist wannabe.

Better to be a really good scholar, and fight your battles at a higher level than provoking some guy who just wants to grade your papers and move on. If you want to be a perennialist, then rehabilitate its respectability in a way that is academically respectable, later in your career, or use all the knowledge the academy is paying you to acquire to defend it in another forum. For better or worse, your undergraduate essays are a number toward your GPA.

I'm not saying they're thoughtful. I'm saying they're reading your paper as quickly as humanly possible in order to judge whether they are plausible within a cultural anthropology of religion context, because that's roughly the dominant paradigm in academia. If you have even a whiff of perennialism, you'll just look stupid and tone deaf.

Look at it this way. It's like studying the anthropology of some Christian denomination in an academic anthropology department, and repeatedly showcasing that you believe some denominations or interpretations of gospel to be "true" and others not. You wouldn't be challenging anybody, you would just be told, this isn't anthropology, this is theology, get out.

Evola isn't a respected scholar with regards to ancient religion. He gets lots of things about Indian culture (like the elevation of warriors above Brahmin) wrong. Same with Nietzsche. Anthropology, archaeology, and history aren't like math or chemistry - they're constantly in the process of being revised as we learn more.

Smart man.

You sound like you've done this before. What's the prevailing opinion if not Eliade? Reading Eliade I felt even he was too much a modernist for my liking, none of what he offered fit with colloquial conceptions of religion, as far as I could tell.

You can try Huston Smith. He was influenced by the Traditionalists and Eliade, but keep in mind that he is a Schuonite.

To be specific, I said the revolution wouldn't happen because the Faustian spirit/Technique (I also cited Ellul) couldn't be suppressed. My professor was also a textbook liberal and he gave no fucks about it.

I'd say the standard opinion of Eliade is
>did a lot for the field, many people holding major positions are still his students or students of his students
>was a big fascist and lied about it for years and can't be unproblematically admired anymore
>associated with the "phenomenology" (basically, studying what religion is like subjectively for its believers) side of studying religions, but considered an old and outdated version of this line of thought (alongside durkheim's collective representations for example)
>was definitely pushing his own mysticism and theory of universal religiosity on the discipline, and this was already considered quaint by the '80s
>also sometimes considered just a "synthesizer" of other people's work
>still, important to know and you don't have to hate him
>also, still did a lot of work that people use (like editing the encylopaedia of religion)

Mizzou's library won't even stock this. checked last year before the transfer

I take it back, you're just memeing from posts you've seen here. It's a selection problem, nothing else.

What I mean is, was there ever a refutation? What is the goody-two-shoes author that is considered authoritative on the topic?

I wouldn't call them goody two shoes. Eliade was a strange person and most of the people who "refute" him are his former friends and students.

You could try McCutcheon's Manufacturing Religion, which is a polemic against the tendency that McCutcheon believes Eliade represents/represented in the study of religions, what he calls the "sui generis" approach. Jonathan Z. Smith was a disciple of Eliade's who deeply challenged the Eliadean approach, and his most famous article on the comparative Eliadean approach is "In Comparison a Magic Dwells," in Imagining Religions (1982). Another two books of his, Relating Religion and Map is Not Territory, have a bunch of stuff attacking the Eliade approach. I think the most important ones in those are the essays on Eliade's "morphological" (comparative) method and "The Wobbling Pivot," but I can't remember. Some of the essays are available on JSTOR and other places too.

I think McCutcheon was a student or friend of Smith's. Another former student who has written on Eliade is Bruce Lincoln. You can probably start to see how small this world is here.

After Eliade died in '85 there was a whole upset as his pre-1945 fascist sympathies (already starting to be whispered about before he died) became a big cause of discussion. One of Eliade's students and successor to his position was assassinated on campus in 1991, probably by remnants of the fascist movement Eliade was once part of.

There was a more recent conference on Eliade and Joachim Wach, and its papers are collected in: amazon.com/Hermeneutics-Politics-History-Religions-Contested/dp/0195394348
^ Several articles in this will give you pretty much the final consensus on Eliade.

Eliade still has defenders re: his past though. Here's a recent exchange:
lareviewofbooks.org/article/mircea-eliade-and-antisemitism-an-exchange/#!
This guy was one of Eliade's key defenders during the uproar in the late '80s and '90s over increased knowledge of and controversy regarding his former fascism, too. Again, it's a small world.

For the methodological refutation of Eliade's method, focus on McCutcheon and Smith's essays.

Addendum: The Lincoln thing I was thinking of is in Theorizing Myth, but you could probably find other things by just searching "lincoln eliade."

I think I remember a book by Wasserstrom with a good chapter on Eliade too.

This is a very good point and quite true, but it's worth keeping in mind most academics are terribly boring nerds with a bookkeeper mentality and little interest in the actual ideas being discussed by the authors that the academy is constantly forced to attach themselves too for prestige.

Probably Borges is right to just consider everything as having aesthetic value, and truth being a tired excuse for it's appreciation.