The budding historian of religion kept busy in several spheres. He did research that laid the foundation for his 1933 Bucharest Ph.D. thesis on Yoga. 8 He sent letters and articles back to Romania excoriating the brutality of British rule in India and expressing his admiration for Gandhi's nonviolent, spiritual revolution against it. He also found time for an indiscreet romantic relationship with Dasgupta's young daughter, Maitreyi, which led to his being abruptly expelled from the home—but which also provided grist for his ultraromantic short novel of intercultural love, Maitreyi (1933). 9 Exile from Calcutta enabled him to spend several months at the famous city of yogis, Rishikesh, so the disgrace was not a complete loss. He was compelled to return to Romania in 1931 for army service, but the duty was not arduous, affording him time to complete his doctorate and establish himself anew as a journalist and writer. He also quickly became a dynamic young lecturer at the university as assistant to his mentor, the existentialist philosopher and later extreme nationalist Nae Ionescu.
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Like Ionescu, Eliade, for all his worldspanning intellectual interests, was intensely conscious of being a Romanian at a critical moment in his country's cultural history.
Long provincialized but now much enlarged territorially by its World War I victory, Romania was wondering if it was ready to find a place on the world stage. Some young Romanians, including the playwright Eugene Ionesco and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, had migrated to Paris to become major figures in the European avant garde of the 1920s and 1930s. They had already became role models for young Romanians. Eliade now saw himself in a position to do the same at home in Bucharest, assuring his nation's intellectual youth that their country had an important role in addressing both Eastern mysticism and Western rationalism. Romania was, he and others believed, in a unique situation between East and West, on the traditional frontier between Latin civilization and the Byzantine, Islamic, or "mystical" East.
Ted Anton has commented of those days that "Of all the radicals of that generation, though, it was the young, handsome, adventurous, bearded Mircea Eliade who captivated them most." 10
However, his sort of cultural cosmopolitanism was not the only enthusiasm of Romanian youth between the wars. A more nationalistic army of the spirit was also marching in the streets under the aegis of an archangel, and Eliade after some resistance was caught up in that iron enchantment. This brings us to the problematic story of Eliade's relationship to the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a political/spiritual movement with fascist and antiSemitic leanings powerful in Romania during the thirties. The Legion came to be better known as the proNazi and virulently antiSemitic Iron Guard influential in Romania's tilt toward the Axis powers in 1940 to 1941, and associated with numerous atrocities of that period. (Technically, the Iron Guard was originally the military arm of the Legion, consisting of all male members between eighteen and thirty). Eliade suffered four months imprisonment for his alleged connection with the Legion when the royal dictatorship of King Carol II turned against it in 1938. He was then enabled to escape the worst of the disasters that swept through his country by serving as its cultural attaché in London and Lisbon. In 1945 he began a new life as a scholar in exile in Paris and finally Chicago, but the shadow of his frenetic and passionate youth must have continually haunted him from within, even if the world sometimes forgot.
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It was difficult to associate the graying and rather detached scholar living near the shores of Lake Michigan after 1955 with the tumultuous youth of the Romanian thirties, sleepless, wanting to know and experience everything, willing to undertake political adventure even in perverse form, somehow naive and pure in the midst of it all. However, the record is there. But once burned, twice cautious; when I knew him in the sixties he had nothing to do with the passionate politics of that era in the United States apart from a few caustic comments; reportedly he never read newspapers and was not always even aware of what was transpiring outside his study.
Messianic Nationalism
The Legion of the Archangel Michael with which Eliade has been linked was founded in 1927 by Corneliu Z. Codreanu, as a movement dedicated to the cultural and national renewal of the Romanian people by appeal to their spiritual roots. 11 Deeply concerned about the endemic poverty and demoralization of the Romanian countryside, young legionnaires went out to share the life of peasants and help them in practical ways, while Legion literature unsparingly denounced the corruption and complacency of the ruling class. Romanian youth who came of age after World War I—Eliade's generation—like their counterparts elsewhere, were eager to lay the foundations of a new and better world. They were also likely to be deeply nationalistic, partly in response to the benediction the course of that conflict had seemingly given to affirmations of national identity. In the twenties, after selfdetermination had been much publicized as a part of Woodrow Wilson's hopeful Fourteen Points, and after so many peoples, including the Romanians of Transylvania, had been released from bondage to dying empires, nationalism had all the appearance of a pure, innocent, and idealistic commitment. Out of combined passions for uplift, nation, and spiritual renewal, together with the natural yearning of the young for commitment and solidarity, many Romanian youths of the twenties and thirties were drawn to Legionary dreams. Young people like a living ideal, and in Codreanu they had a leader widely regarded as heroic and saintly. For Eliade, the rich spirituality the Legion espoused, encapsulated in Condreau's talk of "national resurrection" and the creation of a "new man," was an added lure. Unlike comparable fascisttype movements in Italy
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and Germany, the Legion was explicitly Christian, linked to Romania's Eastern Orthodox religious tradition.
But the Legion was also capable of violence and raw antiSemitism. In 1933 three Legionnaires, who claimed to be acting independently, assassinated the prime minister, I. G. Duca; Codreanu was arrested but later released. The latter, together with promising redistribution of land to the peasants, pledged also that he would solve the "problem of the yids." Legionary rhetoric continually identified Jews with godless Bolsheviks as well as with unpopular financiers and foreign intruders; the movement circulated such hoary antiSemitic texts as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and worked for restrictions on Jewish admission to universities and participation in government. 12 The roots and ongoing enthusiasm of the Legionary movement for violence and antiSemitism is well documented and beyond question. 13
This side of the movement obviously gave pause to Eliade as the young journalist and intellectual took up his Romanian career after returning from India in 1931.
Although Eliade had always been a cultural nationalist who liked to speak of Romanian "messianism," meaning that the country had a cultural heritage to redeem and a special destiny to fulfill, these views usually were relatively nonpolitical at first. They constituted "Romanianism"; Eliade wrote columns of a "Romania for the Romanians" sort, suggesting that the influence of the country's numerous minorities—Jews, Hungarians, and others—was excessive and needed to be curbed. 14 In the context of the times he was not the most chauvinistic of his countrymen. His memoirs, as well as articles and correspondence, indicate that despite the notorious anti