In May 1991, having received threats that terrified him, rising academic star Ioan Culianu entrusted a colleague with a mysterious set of papers. A week later, Culianu was murdered. What was in those mysterious papers? And what connection might they have to Culianu's death? The papers eventually passed into the hands of Bruce Lincoln, and their story is at the heart of this book.

Chapter 1. A Sheaf of Papers (1991-2017) Chapter 2. A Hidden Past: Part One (1927-37) Chapter 3. A Hidden Past: Part Two (1938-79) Chapter 4. A Hidden Past: Part Three (1972-85) Chapter 5. An Unsolved Murder: Part One (1986-91) Chapter 6. An Unsolved Murder: Part Two (1991- ) Index

"[A] tantalizing whodunit... This thrilling saga sheds new light on a decades-old mystery." -- Publishers Weekly "A brilliant scholar of ancient myth discovers that he was surrounded by hidden aspects of his mentor's life and revisits the enigma of a colleague's murder, still unsolved after 30 years. Bruce Lincoln has undertaken a huge intellectual effort to unearth lies of the past and the conspiracies of the present, conspiracies he witnessed without knowing it, and evidence of which he even mistakenly destroyed. This is a detective enterprise, a deep mystery for which he suggests a novel solution, showing that sometimes reality can surpass fiction." -- Moshe Idel, author of Mircea Eliade, from Magic to Myth "Bruce Lincoln's approach to Mircea Eliade's youthful relationship with the radical right-wing, anti-Semitic Iron Guard, to his later attempts to conceal it, and to its consequences, is a model of historical analysis. Lincoln offers a close, in-depth reading of a series of documents from a tragic chapter in European history that throws an unexpected light on a case that has been at the center of a heated debate for decades. A page-turner of a book." -- Carlo Ginzburg, Professor Emeritus, UCLA "Bruce Lincoln's Secrets, Lies, and Consequences provides a unique and microscopic portrait of the intellectual Mircea Eliade's degree of involvement in the Romanian fascist movement of the 1930s. Thus, it brings a very dark period in modern Eastern European history to new light." -- Robert D. Kaplan, author of In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond "Lincoln offers an artful dissection of the possibilities, conducted with the objectivity of a historian and the subjectivity of someone who was there." -- Harper's Magazine

Bruce Lincoln is Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He received his BA from Haverford College in 1970 with high honors and his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1976 with distinction. His most recent publications include Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, 2nd Ed. (2014), Apples and Oranges: Explorations In, On, and With Comparison (2018), and Old Thiess, A Livonian Werewolf (2020, with Carlo Ginzburg).

Selling point: Analyzes the last events leading up to Ioan Culianu's murder, and reveals that he was trying to publish politically charged articles by Mircea Eliade, encountered resistance, and sought to protect them when his life was in danger Selling point: Provides those interested in Eliade's life and work with a much clearer sense of his involvement in interwar Romanian politics and the Iron Guard Selling point: Supplies a novel explanation for the motives behind Culianu's unsolved murder