The controversy surrounding Mircea Eliade’s activities during the Romanian interwar period has been recently rekindled by the 2024 publication of Bruce Lincoln’s critical examination of his Doktorvater’s past, Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and his Protégé’s Unsolved Murder. Perhaps most notably, Lincoln’s book has prompted longtime Eliade scholar Bryan Rennie to publish an article this year in Religion to respond to what Rennie sees as harsh accusations on Lincoln’s part. One of the central issues in both Lincoln’s book and Rennie’s response is that of Eliade’s interwar Romanian political writings. This paper offers a focused analysis of two of these political writings—both of which appear prominently in Lincoln’s book and in Rennie’s Religion article—namely, Eliade’s 1937 commentaries on the deaths of Romanian fascist volunteers Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin in the Spanish Civil War. In particular, I analyze these two texts through Eliade’s own theories of religion from his later years: the roles played by myth, ritual, and the sacred in Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958) and the importance accorded to death and sacrifice in Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God (1972), a collection of previously published works which together represent Eliade’s view of the history of Romanian myth and folklore. My hope is that such an intervention would prove to be a limited yet meaningful contribution to the “continual interrogation of competing interpretations” that Rennie calls for in his article (Rennie 2025, 73).
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 indirectly led to one of the most critical episodes in the history of Romania’s interwar mystico-fascist movement, The Legion of the Archangel Michael. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the Legion’s charismatic founder and supreme Căpitan, saw in Franco’s war an unprecedented propagandizing opportunity, both for his own domestic audience and for the watching eyes of Hitler and other potential international allies. In November of 1936, Codreanu sent seven high-ranking Legionaries to the front in Spain, a group which included Ion Moţa, one of Codreanu’s most trusted lieutenants and the translator of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Romanian, and Vasile Marin, one of the Legion’s other leading intellectual figures (Sandu 2019, 136). The Legionaries had been initially sent with the limited objective of presenting one General Moscardó with a ceremonial sword on behalf of Gheorghe Cantacuzino-Grănicerul, a Romanian general and the president of the Legion’s political party, Totul Pentru Ţară (Everything for the Country) (Sandu 2019, 136). However, since “the Legion wanted to be a formation of men of concrete action,” Codreanu felt obligated to ask his Legionary delegation to join the actual fighting for around a month (Sandu 2019, 136). Moţa and Marin were slain in the fighting at Mahadajonda on January 13, 1937.
Three days after the deaths of Moţa and Marin, Codreanu and the Legion set to work organizing their funeral “as a religio-political ritual of unprecedented scale and spectacle” (Lincoln 2024, 28). A train transported the martyrs’ bodies across the country for several days, stopping at different cities and churches on its way to Bucharest, its final destination. At each stop, massive crowds gathered as Legionaries and priests presided over ritual ceremonies that would culminate in communal recitations of the “Moţa-Marin Oath.” In the words of Horia Sima, a high-ranking member of the Legion who would go on to controversially succeed Codreanu as Căpitan after the latter’s 1938 execution at the hands of royal gendarmes, “the loss of Moţa and Marin was irreparable […] yet Moţa and Marin did not need to die spiritually. The meaning of their sacrifice was fixed in the form of an oath and was passed down to future Legionary generations” (Sima 1967, 201). The fallen martyrs would continue to live spiritually through this oath and its ritual enactment: “I swear before God/ And before your holy sacrifices for/ Christ and for the Legion/ To banish all worldly pleasures/ To tear myself away from human love/ And, for the resurrection of my people/ To be ready for death/ I swear!” (Palaghiţă 1993, 91).
In 1937, Eliade wrote two articles for the Bucharest newspaper Vremea commenting on this oath and on the meaning of the two Legionaries’ deaths. The first of these articles, entitled simply “Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin,” was published on January 24th, 1937. This article sees Eliade wax poetic about what he calls the great symbolic significance of Moţa and Marin’s sacrifice, which he characterizes as “supreme evidence of faith and Christian heroism” and as a sacrifice that “verifies the heroism and faith of an entire generation” (Eliade Jan. 1937). In the second article, “Commentaries on an Oath” from February 21, Eliade uses the Moţa-Marin oath to valorize the role of death and sacrifice in the mystico-fascist framework of the Legionary movement. For example, as Eliade explains, “those who swore in front of the coffins of Moţa and Marin did not vow to avenge their deaths, but rather to be ready for death themselves at any moment” (Eliade Feb. 1937). Such articles represent a prime and understudied entry-point through which to investigate the theoretical substance of Eliade’s later, mature scholarship in terms of his actual experiences and political expressions during the Romanian interwar period.
References
Eliade, Mircea. “Ion Moţa şi Vasile Marin.” Vremea (Bucharest), Jan. 24, 1937.
———. “Comentarii la un jurământ.” Vremea (Bucharest), Feb. 21, 1937.
Lincoln, Bruce. Secrets, Lies and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and his Protégé’s Unsolved Murder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
Palaghiţă, Stefan. Istoria Mişcării Legionare: Scrisă de un Legionar. Bucureşti: Editura Roza Vînturilor, 1993.
Rennie, Bryan. “Alternative Interpretations of Manifold Texts: The Case of Mircea Eliade’s Political Writings.” Religion Vol. 55, no. 1 (2025): 67-88.
Sandu, Traian. Istoria Gărzii de Fier: Un fascism românesc. Bucureşti: Cartier. 2019.
Sima, Horia. Istoria Mişcării Legionare. Timişoara: Editura Gordian, 1994.
This paper analyzes two of Mircea Eliade's interwar Romanian political writings in light of Eliade's later theories of religion as put forward in Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958) and Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God (1972). In question are two articles that Eliade wrote in early 1937 for the Bucharest newspaper Vremea about the deaths of Legionary volunteers Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin in the Spanish Civil War and the Moţa-Marin oath that resulted from their deaths. These articles see Eliade praising Moţa and Marin's sacrifices as exemplary instances of "Christian heroism" while valorizing the role of death and sacrifice in the Legionary mystico-fascist framework through this new "Moţa-Marin" oath. By looking at these articles through the lens of Eliade's Patterns and Zalmoxis, particularly his theories of myth, ritual, the sacred, and sacrifice, this paper looks to contribute to the conversation around the relationship between Eliade's Romanian past and his mature scholarship.