Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu »

On May 21, 1991, popular University of Chicago Divinity School Professor Ioan Culianu was murdered execution-style on campus. The crime stunned the school, terrified students, and mystified the FBI. The case remains unsolved. In Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu, Ted Anton pieces together the evidence and shows that the murder is in fact what Culianu's friends suspected all along: the first political assassination of a professor on American soil. This book traces Culianu's life from his privileged childhood in Romania, through his days at the University of Bucharest, where he first encountered the methods of Securitate surveillance, to his time at the University of Chicago, where, as a handpicked successor to Mircea Eliade, he was becoming a renowned scholar in his own right. Anton shows how Culianu - an expert on magic and the occult whose predications were often remarkabley accurate - began toying with a new far-right coalition in Romania, taunting them from the presumed safety of his American base with the content and tone of his articles, goading them into believing him dangerous. Besides shedding new light on the murder, this book offers a fascinating introduction to Romanian politics in the aftermath of the 1989 revolution and to the relation of ideas to power in current history, as well as to the exotic and mystical ideas of a brilliant man.

Publishers Weekly

In 1991, a 41-year-old Romanian professor, Ioan Culianu, was killed on the University of Chicago campus where he taught. The case is still a mystery, although DePaul University English professor Anton does his best here to explain the exceedingly murky details of Culianu's life, work and deathand their relationship to even murkier events in the Balkansin clear journalistic prose. The problem is that neither the victim's life nor death lend themselves to clarity. Much of Culianu's political activity remains vague, such as why he phoned someone in Medelln, Colombia, the capital of the world cocaine cartel, shortly before he died. Also unclear is the nature of his relationship with Mircea Eliade, whom he knew to have been an active supporter of the Romanian fascist Iron Guard movement. Some of Anton's descriptions of Culianu's academic achievements are narrated in a gee-whiz style that suggests that were it not for Culianu, well-known thinkers like Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico would have been forgotten. Nor does the author seem to take into account the abundant literature in France that proves Eliade's fascist ties. Detailed biographical material on Culianu leaves the reader convinced that the most remarkable thing about his life was its grotesque ending in a university toilet stall. Odds are it was the work of the Romanian Securitate secret police, and Anton's cautious ambiguity is at times uncalled-for. However, the book serves to keep this victim of skullduggery from being yet another forgotten statistic. (Oct.)