Ioan Petru Culianu

Ioan Petru Culianu or Couliano (January 5, 1950, Iaşi – May 21, 1991, Chicago) was a Romanian historian of religion, culture, and ideas, a philosopher and political essayist, and a short story writer, and an expert in gnosticism and Medieval magic. He long served as professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, and also taught the history of Romanian culture at the University of Groningen.

Culianu was born in Iaşi. He studied at the University of Bucharest, then traveled to Italy where he was granted political asylum while attending lectures in Perugia in July 1972. He later graduated from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. He lived briefly in France and the Netherlands, before leaving Europe for Chicago, in the United States. There, after a stint as visiting professor, he became a professor at the University of Chicago. He took a Ph.D. at the University of Paris IV in January 1987, with the thesis "Recherches sur les dualismes d'Occident. Analyse de leurs principaux mythes" ("Research into Western Dualisms. An Analysis of their Major Myths"), coordinated by Michel Meslin.

Having completed three doctorates and being proficient in six languages, Culianu specialized in Renaissance magic and mysticism. He became a friend, and later the literary executor, of Mircea Eliade, the famous historian of religions. He also wrote fiction and political articles.

Minutes after concluding a conversation with one of his doctoral students, at noon on a day when the building was teeming with visitors to a book sale, Culianu was murdered in the bathroom of the divinity school, Swift Hall, of the University of Chicago. He was shot once in the back of the head. The identity of the killer and the motive are still unknown. Speculation arose that he had been killed by former Securitate agents, due to political articles in which he attacked the Communist regime. The murder occurred a year and a half after the Romanian Revolution and Nicolae Ceauşescu's death. Ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist involvement, as part of an Iron Guard revival in connection on the nationalist discourse of the late years of Ceauşescu's rule and the rise of the Vatra Românească and România Mare parties, was not itself excluded from the scenario; according to Vladimir Tismăneanu: "[Culianu] gave the most devastating indictment of the new union of far left and far right in Romania". As part of his criticism of the Iron Guard, Culianu had come to expose Mircea Eliade's connections with the latter movement during the interwar years (because of this, relations between the two academics had soured for the final years of Eliade's life). The FBI also investigated the possibility of an occult group having been involved in the killing, owing to Culianu's work in that field.

An erudite with a special interest in the occult, parallel universes and the construction of the real, Professor Ioan Culianu shared with his mentor Mircea Eliade the capacity for overarching works in the history of religions. Unlike Eliade however, Culianu's love of academia combined with unrestrained political views about Romanians and their 20th century history. "He castigated not only Securitate but the Iron Guard, cultist nationalism, the Orthodox Church, and Romanian culture. He called for investigation of Romania's genocide of Jews. Any one of these could provoke reprisal in a country that has never confronted its recent past".

Adapted after Wikipedia and other minor sources.

Dimitrie Cantemir

Dimitrie Cantemir (October 26, 1673 – August 21, 1723) was twice ruling Prince of Moldavia (in March-April 1693 and in 1710–1711). He was also a prolific man of letters – philosopher, historian, composer, musicologist, linguist, ethnographer, and geographer. His name is spelled Dimitrie Cantemir in Romanian, Dmitri Konstantinovich Kantemir in Russian, Dimitri Kantemiroğlu in Turkish, Dymitr Kantemir in Polish and Demetre Cantemir in several other languages.


Born in Silişteni (renamed Dimitrie Cantemir and now located in Vaslui County, Romania), Dimitrie was the son of Moldavian Voivode Constantin Cantemir (and brother to Antioh Cantemir, himself Prince), of the low-ranking boyar Cantemireşti family. His mother, Ana Bantăş, was a learned woman of noble origins. (Cantemir never forgot his paternal ancestry, but while in Constantinople because of his name similarity locals inspired him to pretended to descend from Khan Temir, an early 17th century khan of the Budjak Tatars). His education began at home, where he learned Greek and Latin and acquired a profound knowledge of the classics. Between 1687 and 1710 he lived in forced exile in Istanbul, where he learned Turkish and studied the history of the Ottoman Empire at the Patriarchate's Greek Academy, where he also composed music.


In 1693, he succeeded his father as Prince of Moldavia – in name only, as the Ottomans appointed Constantin Duca, favoured by Wallachian Prince and, despite many shared goals, forever rival of the Cantemirs Constantin Brâncoveanu; his bid for the throne was successful only in 1710, after two rules by his brother (whom he represented as envoy in the Ottoman capital). He had ruled only for less than a year when he joined Peter the Great in his campaign against the Ottoman Empire and placed Moldavia under Russian suzerainty, after a secret agreement signed in Lutsk. Defeated by the Turks in the battle of Stănileşti (July 18–July 22, 1711), Cantemir sought refuge in Russia, where he and his family finally settled (he was accompanied by a sizeable boyar retinue, including the chronicler Ioan Neculce). There, he was awarded the title of Knyaz (Prince) of the Russian Empire by Peter the Great and received the title of Reichsfürst (Prince) of the Holy Roman Empire from Charles VI. He died at his Dmitrovka estate near Oryol in 1723 (on the very day he was awarded the Roman-German princely title). In 1935, his remains were carried to Iaşi.


In 1714 Cantemir became a member of the Royal Academy of Berlin. Between 1711 and 1719 he wrote his most important creations. Cantemir was known as one of the greatest linguists of his time, speaking and writing eleven languages, and being well versed in Oriental scholarship. His oeuvre is voluminous, diverse, and original; although some of his scientific writings contain unconfirmed theories and inaccuracies, his expertise, sagacity, and groundbreaking researches are widely acknowledged. The best known is his History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire. This volume circulated throughout Europe in manuscript for a number of years. It was finally printed in 1734 in London, and later it was translated and printed in Germany and France. It remained the seminal work on the Ottoman Empire up to the middle of the 19th century – notably, it was used as reference by Edward Gibbon for his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Afterwards, the work was largely contested, for some of its sources were doubtful.


In 1714, at the request of the Royal Academy in Berlin, Cantemir wrote the first geographical, ethnographical and economic description of Moldavia, Descriptio Moldaviae. As many of his books it circulated first in manuscript and was only later published in Germany (first in 1769 in a geographical magazine, and then in 1771 the first edition as a book). Around the same time he prepared a manuscript map of Moldavia, the first real map of the country. It contained a lot of geographical detail as well as administrative information. Printed in 1737 in the Netherlands, it has been used by all cartographers of the time as an inspiration for their own maps of Moldavia. Other writings: the first critical history of Romania as a whole, under the name of Hronicul vechimii a romano-moldo-valahilor – aprox. "Chronicle of the durability of Romans-Moldavians-Wallachians" (1719–1722); the first Romanian language novel, the cryptic Historia Hieroglyphica (1705), to which he furnished a key, and in which the principal persons are represented by mythological beasts; A philosophical treatise, written in Romanian and also in Greek, translated into Arabic, under the title Divanul sau Gâlceava Înţeleptului cu lumea sau Giudeţul sufletului cu trupul (Iaşi, 1698) ("The Divan or The Wise Man's Parley with the World or The Judgement of the Soul with the Body"); an introduction to Islam written for Europeans, and a biography of Jan Baptist van Helmont. Due to his many esteemed works he won great renown at the high courts of Europe. His name is among those who were considered to be the brightest minds of the world on a plaque at the Library of Sainte-Genevieve in Paris, next to those of Leibnitz, Newton, Piron, and other great thinkers.

Emil Cioran

Emil Mihai Cioran (April 8, 1911, Răşinari - June 20, 1995, Paris), one of the best minds of his generation, was the author of elegantly written philosophical essays in which he displayed a sense of alienation and pessimism that was, according to one critic, "so profound and ironic as to almost meet a serious optimism at the other end of its arc".


Emil Cioran was born in a small, idyllic Transilvanian village called Răşinari, near Sibiu. He had a happy childhood, as his family was one of the wealthiest and most respected due to the fact that his father - Emilian - was, after all, an Orthodox priest. Cioran's childhood ended abruptly, when, at the age of 10, he was sent to live with a German family in Sibiu, a thing that left the young boy traumatized for life. Within three years, the whole family had moved to Sibiu.

The turning point of the writer's life was when he entered the University in Bucharest, as a Philosophy student. Here, he met his lifelong friends, Mircea Eliade - who later became one of the most influential personalities of the 20th century - and Eugen Ionesco, the founder of the Theater of the Absurd. They all benefited from the teachings of the prestigious thinkers Tudor Vianu and Nae Ionescu. The young Cioran graduated with a thesis on Bergsonian intuitionism, which he later rejected, because, Bergson didn't truly understand the tragedy of life. Or, at least, that's what Cioran thought. In 1933, the philosopher obtained a scholarship to the University of Berlin. The sojourn there influenced Cioran and he became passionate about Totalitarianism. Some of his declarations dated from that period are very positive to Fascism and Nazism, and have attracted him a lot of criticism. Also, one fact that was particularly disturbing was that he wrote a lot of articles in support of the extremist Romanian party Iron Guard. This attracted a lot of criticism later on, despite the fact that Cioran repeatedly repented for this lapse into extremism.


His first book, published in 1934, On the Heights of Despair, was very well received by the Romanian critics, and it was awarded the Commission's Prize and the Young Writers Prize. Other books - highly acclaimed by the critics - were published in the following years: The Book of Delusions (1935), The Transfiguration of Romania (1936), and Tears and Saints (1937), before leaving for Paris on a scholarship.

As a side note, one thing that reportedly had a huge influence on Cioran's thinking is a conversation with his mother, dated from 1935. She told him that she wouldn't have had him had she known he was going to be so unhappy. This produced a great impact on his life and led him to the idea that life is futile and everything is without substance: I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

After he moved to France, all of his books were written in French, due to the fact that Cioran wanted to emphasize his detachment from the past. And, truth be told, his life in France was not bad at all, as he lived in the company of the finest minds in the world. In order to support himself, he worked there as a translator for a few publishing houses. However, the need to write was present again and the philosopher challenged himself by writing his next book completely in French, even though he worked hard to learn the language. The result was A Short History of Decay, which brought him the Rivarol Prize, in 1950, the only award he accepted in his entire life. He led a solitary existence in the Latin Quarter of Paris, surrounded by famous friends, such as Samuel Beckett, Mircea Eliade, Eugen Ionesco or Paul Celan. In the last years of his life he gave up writing completely, mostly because Alzheimer had deteriorated his mind. One of the most appreciated Romanian-born thinkers died on the 20th of June, 1995.


His body of work is quite impressive and its roots are deeply buried within the Transylvanian village. As a priest's son, Cioran was very preoccupied with religion. Later, this passion drove him to read the writings of saints and Christian mystics. But he realized he wasn't cut out to be an orthodox, so he turned to agnosticism and even nihilism. Unable to find answers in religion, Emil tried to find those answers in Philosophy. The one philosopher who had a huge influence on him was Nietzsche, the faithless German thinker. As for the religion, the only one that appealed to him was, by far, Buddhism. All these external influences turned Cioran in a pessimist, who found life painful. Throughout his works, he wrote a lot on the theme of suicide, as the only possible escape from an absurd universe. He once declared: 'I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. A recurrent theme in the works of writers of the first half of the 20th century is, undoubtedly, that of human alienation. The existence is, hence, absurd because 'by all evidence we are in the world to do nothing'. In the works of Emil Cioran, we run across a very solitary author, impregnated with the pain of living. Even so, one cannot help but be mesmerized by his lyricism and heart-felt convictions. He's a philosopher who belongs neither to the Romanians, nor to the French because his writings have a universal appeal.

Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade (March 13 1907 – April 22, 1986), Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most influential contributions to religious studies was his theory of Eternal Return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them. In academia, the Eternal Return has become one of the most widely accepted ways of understanding the purpose of myth and ritual.


Mircea Eliade began his life in Bucharest. While still studying in the lycée he wrote numerous articles in a popular vein on entomology, the history of alchemy, Orientalism, the history of religions, impressions of his travels, stories, and literary criticism. In 1925 he entered the University of Bucharest, where he pursued the study of Renaissance philosophy. Thus began a life-long preoccupation with the great creative epochs in Western history and with the puzzle of human, especially literary, creativity itself. Eliade had seen, for example, how the Rumanian poets, writers, and historians he admired had drawn material and inspiration from folk sources, and he was fascinated to see an analogous process at work in the Italian Renaissance.

In 1928, while in Rome to research his degree thesis on Italian Philosophy, from Marsilio Ficino to Giordano Bruno, Eliade wrote to Professor Surendranath Dasgupta expressing a desire to study under his direction at the University of Calcutta - which he did, thanks to a scholarship offered him by the Maharajah Manindra Chandra Mandy of Kassimbazar. Eliade's stay in India lasted three years. In 1933 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on yoga, later published in French under the title Yoga: Essai sur les origines de le mystique indienne (1936), and began teaching at the University of Bucharest that same year.


Eliade by Marcel Janco
Shortly after his return from India, in the midst of a busy schedule that included university teaching and many commitments to write and lecture, Eliade's novel, Maitreyi, was released to great critical and popular acclaim. Born into a tradition which saw no incompatibility between scientific and literary occupations, Eliade, the historian of religions, continued to produce novels, stories, essays, and a travel book. Today, especially in Romania and Germany, he is known primarily as a writer of fiction; and his popularity continues to grow as more and more of his works appear in translation.

During World War II Eliade served as cultural attaché to the Romanian legations in London and Lisbon. After the war he elected to remain in exile in Paris where he could complete work on a number of manuscripts which had taken shape during the war years, notably Patterns in Comparative Religion and The Myth of the Eternal Return, both of which came to print in 1949. The years 1951 to 1955 saw the publication of several more volumes for which Eliade is well known: Shamanism, Images and Symbols, Yoga, The Forge and the Crucible, and The Forbidden Forest. Many regard the last title as his most important work of fiction.


Eliade travelled to the United States to deliver the 1956 Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago, and a year later he was offered the post of professor and chairman of the History of Religions Department and professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the university. Almost 30 years later, he was professor emeritus at this same institution with the title Sewell Avery Distinguished Service Professor.

Eliade's scholarly output continued unabated. Volume I of A History of Religious Ideas appeared in 1974, and three of its four projected volumes had been published by 1985. A History of Religious Ideas marked something of a departure from his previous theoretical work. As in his sourcebook, From Primitives to Zen, Eliade presented the "creative moments" of the world's religious traditions in more or less chronological order, treating them in a way one might call more historical and less thematic. In addition to his scholarly writing, Eliade served as editor-in-chief of a massive encyclopedia of religion until his death in 1986.

His literary works belong to the fantasy and autobiographical genre; the best known are the novels Maitreyi (La Nuit Bengali or Bengal Nights), Noaptea de Sânziene (The Forbidden Forest) and his Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent, the novellas Domnişoara Christina (Miss Christina) and Tinereţe fără tinereţe (Youth Without Youth), and the short stories Secretul doctorului Honigberger (The Secret of Dr. Honigberger) and La Ţigănci (With the Gypsy Girls). Remarkable for his vast erudition, Eliade had fluent command of five languages (Romanian, French, German, Italian, and English) and a reading knowledge of three others (Hebrew, Persian, and Sanskrit). He was elected postmortem member of the Romanian Academy.