Romanian Legionaries in Spain: Mircea Eliade on Christo-Fascist Martyrdom

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.