Mircea Eliade, although he was a brilliant scholar of comparative religion, was quite an odious individual in his private life. People like to present him as some kind of revolutionary right wing thinker, either to claim him as ‘one of ours’ or to denounce him as a fascist, as though any kind of involvement in right wing European circles during the 1930s or 1940s is tantamount to someone personally going round gassing six million Jews or something.
Yes, Eliade did have well known links to the Iron Guard both through his personal connections and political pragmatism but he was never a hardcore rightist or a great political thinker, and much his genuine thought was actually contrary to a lot of what the mainstream Romanian nationalist movements were saying at the time. People nowadays look back at Eliade with rose tinted spectacles to reclaim him as a nice respectable nationalist they can show to people, but because those rose tinted spectacles are unreliable lenses they form the subject of this piece.
In truthfulness, the source of Eliade’s borderline acceptability as a thinker is that he denounced racism and anti-Semitism, and was also a huge fan of Mohandas Gandhi, to whom we shall return later. Outside the political sphere, Eliade collaborated with known Marxist figures only to be accused and mauled by them later on as you might expect – they only sought to use him for entryism, you see. There is a lesson in here somewhere, but its only one we’re already familiar with a million times over. Politically, far from being a great thinker, Eliade was pretty damned naive and clues explaining Eliade’s present semi-respectability relative to well known but demonised figures (such as Devi or Evola) have to be found elsewhere than within his political insights.
Despite preaching Orthodox Christianity and all of its mores to he Kingdom of Romania, Saint Mircea knocked up his future wife Nina whilst they were still courting and he suggested that she ‘get rid of it’, which she did, following his advice – later causing her to die of uterine cancer as she deserved. In case anyone is wondering why Eliade suggested such a thing to a woman he would later marry, the pregnancy was actually inconvenient to him because he was fucking someone better looking at the same time. Would you want your own daughter to be dating a good Christian patriot like Mircea?
Of course its because Eliade talked a lot about ‘love’ that no one ever dwells upon what a jerk he actually was, it is simply acknowledged as a matter of mere biographical trivia that his selfishness and immaturity actually caused his own wife’s death. Such handwavium is quite unlike the readiness of people to judge his unsentimental friend Julius Evola who is merely alleged to have refused to support an illegitimate boy who was born to an Argentinian woman he once knew, and who was possibly his (but, the story goes, possibly not), this being purely on the allegations of Gelli’s very dubious biography that no one takes seriously as a source on Evola’s life regarding anything else.
Actually this brings up the subject of ‘Great Soul’ Gandhi again, because when Gandhi’s own wife was dying he refused on religious grounds to let her take the medicine that could have saved her life. Yet years later when it was Gandhi’s own turn to lie dying, he quaffed some quinine himself on the reasoning of ‘that’s different’. This completely odious bit of hypocrisy usually gets send down into the memory hole to present Gandhi in the best possible light, and the reasoning behind such a selective cultural memory seems to be because he spoke about nonviolence a lot.
A similar interpretation would explain why Eliade has a semi-respectability today that many of his contemporaries on the political right aren’t allowed to share in. Mohandas Gandhi was lovable because he said nice things, but the non-pacifist revolutionary Sunhas Chandra Bose didn’t. Baron Julius Evola wasn’t very lovable either, unlike Mircea Eliade who did say the kind of things that can earn one a pass from our leftist masters. The rule is that whenever someone is weak and sentimental in character and says only unthreatening things, all the shit in their life is guaranteed to get whitewashed after their death should anyone remember them, not unlike the way piss might run from a duck’s back.
But the facts speak for themselves. At the risk of sounding like a feminist, both Eliade and Gandhi controlled the lives of the women round them in ways that quite literally left them dead. And this is not spirituality but evil. And, at at the risk of sounding callous or sociopathic, their self-righteous messages of ‘love’ were nothing but sentimental and disgusting tools created to achieve a selfish end, as is any other such message for all morality, whether we wish it to be so or not, is ultimately a means of control.
Apart from Mircea Eliade’s contribution to the study of religion, as a character he had very few redeeming characteristics, making him indeed the Gandhi of the right.
Skadhi the Raverner 2013 