The equivalence of religious facts. Transferring meanings from Eliade to Culianu

Abstract

In the early ’90s, after the fall of the Communist regime, Ioan Petru Culianu was received as a disciple of Mircea Eliade. Readers saw Culianu only as a follower of Eliade, especially in Romania, where Eliade became very famous, with almost nothing new to say. When things settled down after the shock of his death, analysts and exegetes revised his oeuvre, more or less critically. Most of these specialists agreed that far from being merely an adherent, Culianu is the author of a significant oeuvre; and his approach is completely different from Eliade’s. In any case, there is one important point where their visions converge: this article calls it “the equivalence of religious facts”. The present study delimits and analyzes this idea from Eliade’s texts and its meaning, it examines the way it is transferred in Culianu’s viewpoint, and what are (or could be) the consequences of such a view.