After World War II, Eliade fled to France and eventually settled at the University of Chicago. In exile, he never explicitly repudiated his earlier views. Instead, he engaged in a systematic, successful campaign of erasure. He edited his own bibliography, removed compromising articles from his published list, and re-framed his past as a youthful, apolitical mysticism. Scholars who have examined the archives—most notably Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine in Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco —have shown that his post-war work is not a clean break from his past. Rather, the themes of regeneration through sacrifice, the horror of “linear” history (which he associated with modernity and, by implication, Jewish cosmopolitanism), and the longing for a sacred center can be read as a depoliticized, sanitized continuation of Legionnaire spiritual philosophy. How, then, should we read Eliade today? There are three camps.
In the late 1930s, Eliade wrote articles, gave lectures, and served as a cultural attaché in a pro-Legionnaire government. He praised the Legion’s “Christian” and “spiritual” revolution against a decaying, Westernized, liberal democracy. He wrote of a “national Roumanian Hymn” that demanded sacrifice and regeneration. While he later claimed he was never a formal member and that his support was “ethical” rather than political, the documentary evidence is damning. He justified the Legion’s violence as a necessary mithridatization (a hardening through poison) of the nation. He referred to the Legion’s leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, as a Christ-like figure, a sacrifice for the Romanian soul. Most gravely, his writings from the period are laced with anti-Semitic tropes, accusing Jews of being agents of a corrupt, cosmopolitan modernity that threatened the organic Romanian ethos . mircea eliade
The first, and most common in religious studies departments for decades, is to perform a This approach argues that Eliade’s fascist flirtation was a tragic error of youth, a product of a specific Romanian context, and ultimately irrelevant to his phenomenological analysis of shamanism, yoga, and alchemy. One can use the concepts of hierophany and eternal return without endorsing the man. After World War II, Eliade fled to France