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Calinescu argues that Eliade saw himself as a Romanian scholar and writer in exile, in contrast with Ionesco, who adopted a French linguistic and literary identity. Ionesco, an adversary of the Romanian extreme right-wing movement of the Iron Guard, at first regarded Eliade as an ideological enemy, for Eliade had “serious and self-deluded” ties with the Iron Guard. The explicit published traces of this engagement are few, and they stopped in 1938 (in part with the aid of the censorship introduced by the dictatorship of King Carol II, an opponent of the Legionary movement), nor did Eliade ever talk about this connection. But when he later appeared to regret his political past (although not publicly), Ionesco “forgave” him, and the two became friends.

This chapter argues that Eliade’s diverse types of writings––religious, political, historical, literary, or personal––reveal the same underlying assumption: that the sacred camouflages itself within the profane and is therefore largely unrecognizable, and that, in order to reach a higher form of existence, one must be able to recognize its revelations, which are sometimes expressed by signs. The Romanian and Hindu experiences and the Florentine Renaissance were the determinant factors in his thought and literature, far more than his more formal adherence to the Iron Guard in 1937 and his prolonged participation in the Eranos encounters at Ascona from 1950.

This chapter argues that the political position evident in the work of Mircea Eliade is an opposition to Communism. The chapter utilizes a combination of Eliade’s academic, fictional, personal, and early political writings to trace out (1) an opposition to philosophical Marxism, (2) an opposition to invasive governments generally, and (3) an opposition to specific Communist and Fascist regimes. The chapter contends that the political sensibility available in Eliade’s writing is deeply conservative but not Fascist or paramilitary.

This chapter deals with the relationship between Eliade’s political commitment and Eliade’s work as a historian of religions, focusing on The Myth of the Eternal Return, probably his most interesting work. Eliade’s Lisbon Journal provides a context for the central theme of The Myth of the Eternal Return: the terror (or rejection) of history. The chapter argues that this theme and its implications throw much light on Eliade’s paradoxically ambivalent legacy.