Secrets, Lies, and Consequences

Abstract

Abstract In May 1991, having received threats that terrified him, Ioan Petru Culianu (1950–91) entrusted a set of papers to a colleague a week before his killer made good on those threats. Some years later, those papers came into the author’s hands and prompted him to write this book. In brief, these were English translations of articles that Mircea Eliade (1907–86)—the world’s foremost historian of religions—had written in the 1930s. Some articles voiced his support for the Legion of the Archangel Michael, also known as the Iron Guard, Romania’s virulently anti-Semitic mystical fascist movement. Other were pieces that spoke warmly and generously about some of Eliade’s Jewish colleagues. At the time of his death, Culianu was struggling to publish these articles, which he—and others—saw as the most important evidence concerning Eliade’s politics. His attempt to do so, however, encountered fierce resistance from Professor Eliade’s widow, and most have never appeared in translation. This book explores what those articles reveal about Eliade’s past, his subsequent efforts to conceal that past, his complex relations with Culianu, whom he saw as his protégé and heir, and the possible motives for Culianu’s shocking murder, which remains unsolved to this day.