A Sheaf of Papers and the Unsolved Murder of a Rising Academic
Bruce Lincoln reflects on the legacy of his mentor, the death of his colleague, and how he came into possession of a set of papers that could reveal long hidden secrets.
Discover the full story in his new book Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s hidden Past and His Protege’s Unsolved Murder.
In May 1991 Ioan Culianu, associate professor of history of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, approached a colleague with a request to safeguard some papers. Less than a week later, Culianu was shot to death in the Divinity School men’s room. The papers he had sought to protect would eventually come into my hands. This is their story.
The act of writing this book has been not just technically difficult, but emotionally fraught. …The dreams I had while writing it suggest how disturbing I found — and still find — this material. In one, I saw myself with a band of ragged milicianos in the Spanish Civil War, under fire and terrified, but determined to halt fascism at any cost. In another, while gardening in my backyard I unearthed a corpse that stirred slowly and revealed itself to be barely alive. “What should I do?” I cried, in a state of panic. “How can I help?” To which the aged, filthy figure replied: “Just leave me alone. Cover me up and let me rest.”
From 1971 to 1976, it was my privilege to study under Mircea Eliade and serve as his research assistant. Eliade was the world’s foremost historian of religions at the time and remains one of the giants of the field…There was, however, another side to the lovely man I knew. During the years I studied with him it came to light that in his younger days he had been involved with Romanian fascism. Those revelations sparked controversy that runs hot to this day. For years, I sought to avoid the ugly debates that followed, telling myself (and others, when necessary): “Mr. Eliade was my second father, whom I loved and to whom I am indebted in countless ways. Like all fathers, he was not perfect…Rather than getting embroiled in polemics, my preference is simply to remember all that I found most admirable in him.”
There is also a specific incident that inclined me toward that position. When Professor Eliade agreed to supervise my dissertation, he expressed some sentiments that he recorded in his journal on other occasions. “When I take on new students,” he began, in what was clearly a well-rehearsed speech, “I prepare myself for the day they will betray me. I have come to expect that, since it is a necessary step if they are to become creative in their own right.” I found this statement confusing at the time. Decades later, I still do. On the surface it is high-minded and generous, granting preemptive absolution for a yet-to-be-committed offense, one that he saw as the inevitable climax of a successful initiatory process. At the same time, it was an incredibly manipulative gambit, to which I responded as was no doubt expected: “Oh no, sir! You have no need to worry. I could never be so ungrateful.”
Several things prompted me to reconsider my position… [including] an observation Eliade made in one of his early works — a quotation that has reappeared repeatedly — caught my attention. It suggested that — his later reticence notwithstanding — Eliade understood full well that even the most shameful and painful secrets must be disclosed. In 1935 he wrote: “That which is hidden, simply by being hidden, becomes dangerous to the individual and the collective. A ‘sin’ is surely serious, but a ‘sin’ that is unconfessed and is kept hidden becomes terrible, as the magic forces unleashed by the act of concealment in time menace the whole community.” Magic or not, the secrets he struggled to preserve had terrible consequences for those who became aware of them, some of whom sacrificed their careers, their scholarly integrity, perhaps even their lives.
“A ‘sin’ is surely serious, but a ‘sin’ that is unconfessed and is kept hidden becomes terrible, as the magic forces unleashed by the act of concealment in time menace the whole community.”
The most immediate stimulus, however, was a serious mistake I made, one involving those papers that Ioan Culianu had entrusted to a colleague all those years ago: papers that have bearing not only on Eliade’s past, but on Culianu’s murder.
Ioan Petru Culianu was just forty-one years old when he was killed, on the afternoon of May 21, 1991. He had gained his position at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School just three years earlier and was widely seen as Eliade’s successor. The crime was shocking and remains unsolved, although multiple theories have been offered, including those that focus on disgruntled students, jealous spouses, drug cartels, Chicago gangs, and occult covens. Most widely accepted is the theory popularized by Ted Anton: that agents of the Romanian secret service (Securitate) killed Culianu in response to critical articles he wrote for the émigré press, which threatened their postcommunist hold on power.
Those articles drew complaints and threats, and in the week before Culianu’s murder, the threats became sufficiently serious that Ioan entrusted the papers to our colleague Mark Krupnick, whom he asked to safeguard them. Shortly before his own death in 2003, Krupnick gave me the manuscripts and explained how he came to have them. He was not sure what to make of the papers themselves, nor did he understand why Ioan entrusted them to his care, since the two men were not particularly close. Perhaps it was a chance result of their offices’ proximity. Mark speculated that his own identity as a Jewish scholar whose research centered on Jewish fiction, testimonial, and autobiography, might also have had some relevance.
The papers, it turned out, were English translations of articles Eliade had written in the 1930s, including a good number in which he voiced his support for a movement known under two names that signaled its religious and militant nature: the Legion of the Archangel Michael and the Iron Guard. Although these articles were key pieces of evidence in the debate about Eliade’s past, few people had actually read them. In Communist Romania, surviving copies of the right-wing dailies in which they originally appeared were consigned to the special collections of select libraries, access to which was tightly controlled. Requests to view such material triggered state suspicion, and few were foolhardy enough to take that risk.
The articles contained passages that shed light on the bitterly contested question whether — and to what extent — Eliade shared the Iron Guard’s virulent anti- Semitism.
When I received these manuscripts, I was not prepared to deal with them or the serious issues they raised. I gave them a cursory reading and persuaded myself that on the crucial question they were neither damning, nor exculpatory, but sufficiently nuanced, ambiguous, and elusive to admit rival interpretations. Determined to continue my own work and avoid entanglement in the endless, acrimonious debates about Eliade, I put the papers in a manila folder and buried them in my files. There they remained until June 2017, when I retired from teaching. While cleaning out my office — a task I found inconvenient and annoying, and thus undertook hastily — I carelessly let that folder go to the dumpster, along with many others of no great importance. Freudians will say this was hardly an accident, and I am in no position to disagree.
Bruce Lincoln is Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He received his BA from Haverford College in 1970 with high honors and his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1976 with distinction. His most recent publications include Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, 2nd Ed. (2014), Apples and Oranges: Explorations In, On, and With Comparison (2018), and Old Thiess, A Livonian Werewolf (2020, with Carlo Ginzburg).
