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Mircea Eliade, Zalmoxis, the Vanishing God: Comparative Studies in the Religions and Folklore of and Eastern Europe, Translated by William R. Trask, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972. x, 260 pp. $9.50.

This is the first collection of Romanian studies to appear in English by the foremost living authority on the history of religions, . Ranging in date from 1938 to 1969, the eight essays were published previously in book form as De Zalmoxis Z Gengis-Khan(Paris: Payot, 1970). A new preface has been added to the Englishedition, and some slight editing is evident. Like his fiction, Eliade's work in this field has been virtually unknown to English readers. ' Admittedly, some of it, especially the earlier writings, would be of interest only to specialists in Romanian folklore. The present collection, however, holds wider interest. Despite the suggestions of the subtitle, the book is not a history, a folklore or a into ancient and explicitly religious study, foray . medieval Romanian history, whatever contributions it may incidentally make to these subjects. It is written instead from the perspective of the history of religions and, within that framework, from Eliade's own unique angle of vision. His purpose is to decipher the underlying meaning of "archaic and folk religious universes" through the comparative structural study of folk motifs and "mythico- religious scenarios," a procedure which is not essentially concerned with history and chronology but which does present problems, he notes, similar to those encountered in the study of so-calledprimitive religions. Eliade begins typically with a significant feature of Dacian or Romanian cultural history, such as the ethnic name of the ("The Dacians and Wolves"), the folk ballad "Miorita" ("The Clairvoyant Lamb"), or the legendary founding of the Moldavian Principality ("Prince Dragos and the 'Ritual Hunt' "). Following a careful survey of the primary sources and standard interpretations, he marshals an imposing array of variants and parallels from Balkan, Central Asian, Indo-European, and other provenances. The structural patterns which he elicits from his data permit him to probe or reconstruct the mental universe, often prehistoric in its beginnings, in which they first took shape. In the light of this analysis, Eliade proceeds to interpret the spiritual and even cosmic significanceof the Daco-Romanian cultural tradition with which be began his discussion, and to comment on its implications for the appreciation of Romanian history and national character. At its best, Eliade's procedure is breath-taking in its range, its sensitivity, and its reflection of his personal vision which is never far removed from his scholarship. In the essay "Zalmoxis," for example, he traces the transformation of the god of the Thracian from the deity of a Pythagorean- influenced Mystery cult into a culture hero who did not survive-even in folklore-the Romanization and Christianization of Dacia, but who was revived as a prophet and symbol of national genius by modern Romanian writers in the excitement of rediscoveringtheir Dacian background. Significantly, the first journal Eliade founded was called Zaimoxis (Paris, 1938-1942), an item he perhaps modestly omits prom his discussion. In "The Clairvoyant Lamb," to take another example, Eliade confirms the general opinion that the ballad "Miorija" is the pre-eminent creation of the Romanian folk genius, but he does so in his own terms, rejecting both the commonplace view that it expresses resignation and pessimismand the more contrived optimistic interpretation as well. Seen in the comparative context of beliefs concerning life after death and posthumous betrothals, Eliade contends that the young shepherd who neither falls into despair nor vainly seeks to escape his impending doom in reality triumphs over his fate through an act will his death into a cosmic This act of of by which he transforms own majestic marriage. ' revalorization and transfiguration, rather than resignation, exemplifies for Eliade the characteristic Romanian response to the "terror of history," in this case the vulnerability of Romania to innumerable invasions, and explains why the ballad has been so extraordinarily popular among both the folk and the educated, to the point that new versions are constantly being recorded. "The Devil and God" discussesthe only known Romanian folk cosmogony, that of the Devil's dive into the primordial waters for the "seed of Earth," from which God, almost in a fit of absent-mindedness, contrives the world and then, exhausted, falls into a deep sleep. The myth is widely known in several variants throughout Eastern Europe. It has been commonly explained as a product of Slavic and especially Bogomil dualism. But Eliade's vast repertoire of myths quickly disposes of that thesis. The cosmogonic dive is not found in the dualistic mythology of Iran, while dualistic versions are found in Russia and Central Asia and non-dualistic forms in India, North America, and Malaya, in all of which the diver may be variously a bird, a boar, an amphibious animal, or a god in such disguise. Eliade conjectures that the original form of the myth is very old and 214

non-dualistic, but that through a long process of development, including syncretistic interaction with Iranian dualism, it took on its more familiar aspect. To Eliade the original form was indigenous to Southeast Europe. The fact that it is the only known folk cosmogony in the area and that it has survived to modern times, while undergoing a continuous process of reinterpretation, points to its role in satisfying a basic need to explain the imperfection of the world, the existence of evil, and in later, quasi-Christianterms, God's withdrawal from his creation and his relationship with Satan. No summaries can do justice to the detailed complexity of Eliade's visionary scholarship and the massive dccumentation which he cites. But it in the on "Prince " occasionally happens, notably essays Drago§ and the 'Ritual Hunt' and "Master Manole and the Monastery of Arge§" (a preview of a forthcoming book), that Eliade's themes are somewhat obscured and overwhelmed by the seemingly unending forays into comparative materials. Conversely, one essay-the earliest-on "The Cult of the Mandragora in Romania" is simply a collection of mandrake lore with virtually no comparative analysis at all. The one essay not mentioned so far, "Romanian 'Shamanism'?" is also relatively minor, but its negative conclusion should be heeded. Occasionally, for all his concern to emphasize that he is not writing history, Eliade is led astray into sheer historical speculation on the basis of inadequate or unconvincing evidence. He cites, for example, material evidence to prove the prehistoric migration of the myth of the cosmogonic dive from northern Asia to North America in the third millennium B.C. Yet the association of belief with material evidence in prehistoric studies is extremely hypothetical at best. As evidence for the religious role of the stag in Paleolithic times, he refers to the famous figure of the homed or antlered "sorcerer" from the Trois Fr?res cave, without apparently being aware that more recent drawings and color photographs of the figure throw grave doubts on the validity of the magicalinterpretation. These are minor blemishes, however, and if one reads Eliade for his formidable strengths and in the context of his earlier noteworthy studies of the cosmogonic myth, shamanism, and comparative studies, one cannot fail to be moved by the unexpected and often dramatic vistas which Eliade's vision affords of the universe of archaic man.

Robert Galbreath Universityof Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Evangheliarul slavo-român de la Sibiu 1551-1553, edited by Emil Petrovici and Ludovic Demény Bucuresti: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1971. 419 pp. 48 lei. This book of the Gospels, as Ludovic Demény demonstrates so convincingly in his splendid introductory essay, is the oldest printed text in Romanian. The fragment that has come down to us and is reproduced in facsimile in the present volume consists of 117 pages of nearly all the Gospel of Matthew in both Slavic and Romanian versions set side-by-side.The editors' establishment of the approximate date and the place of publication and their tentative conclusions concerning the language . of the Romanian translation elucidate a number of controversial questions concerning the early cultural and intellectual history of the Romanians of Transylvania. Demeny engages in some fascinating scholarly detective work in order to prove his hypotheses. He first sets the problcm by reviewing the literature that has appeared on the Evangheliar since the first mention of it in 1858 in the annual report of the Public Library of St. Petersburg, where it is still preserved. Of all those Romanian and foreign scholars who concerned themselves with it in the past, loan Bogdan, the great Romanian Slavist, made the most substantial contribution to the study of its origins and importance. His essay, published in 1891, remained authoritative until the appearance of Demeny's own articles on the subject in 1965. Demeny next undertakes an exhaustive analysis of the text itself. By comparing the type used in the Evangheliar with that of the Slavic Tetraevanghelulof 1546, especially the distinctive initial "M", which is not found in any other sixteenth-century Cyrillic printing either Romanian or Slavic, he concludes that both volumes were printed by the same person, Philip the Moldavian,and in the same place, Sibiu. This identity of type, he maintains, removes any possibility that the Evangheliar was ' printed in Ttrgoviste by Dimitrie Liubavici or in Bra§ov or anywhere else by the Deacon Coresi. Dcmény arrives at an approximate date of the printing of the Evangheliarby determining the origin of the paper upon which it was printed and the date of its manufacture. Employing new techniques of _ analyzing watermarks and drawing upon a thorough knowledge of paper-makingin Transylvania as well as his own extensive archival researches, he concludes that the Evangheliarmust have been printed on paper produced at a mill in Brasovbetween 1551 and 1553. The brief notes on the language of the Romanian text by the late Emil Petrovici corroborate Dcm6ny's findings. He points out that the translation differs from all other sixteenth-century Romanian translations of Matthew either printed or in manuscript. The translator, he demonstrates,