This paper offers an overview of the way in which Mircea Eliade used psychological language in his early work on religion, and places this early contribution in the context of the history of the psychology of religion. The first two sections comment on Eliade’s earliest mentions of psychological concepts, while the following two go into a more in-depth analysis of the history of the concept of higher consciousness in psychology and into the history of the psychology of yoga in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Building on these two
sections, I analyse the uses of psychology in an unpublished manuscript from 1929 and in Eliade’s Ph.D. thesis.