Correspondence with Mircea Eliade - just the guru's folly!

Today we bring back to public attention another piece of information that was lying in the depths of the old ExMISA forum.

It concerns a myth that has been circulating for years within MISA, namely that Gregorian Bivolaru had a close correspondence with none other than Mircea Eliade in his youth, which made him a target of the Romanian secret service.
It is not clear when exactly this hoax was launched, but it has been fantasized about for years, not only among followers, but also in articles on official or movement-related websites, in books and MISA documentaries.  

In 2005, for example, the MISA website claimed 🔗🔗:

"In 1971, when he started teaching his first yoga classes, he was targeted by the State Security because of his correspondence with Mircea Eliade (considered an enemy of the people for his concern with the Yoga system and oriental mysticism). His home is raided on the pretext of alleged possession of weapons, but his books on oriental philosophy and esotericism, correspondence and notebooks are confiscated." 

In 2010 🔗🔗 new details were introduced into the equation, probably to increase credibility:

"In 1971, after graduating from high school, Gregorian Bivolaru began teaching YOGA at the Sanitary Union Club. Sonia Comișel, one of his students who was on friendly terms with Mircea Eliade, gave him the address of the great writer and historian of religions. Following an exchange of letters in which Gregorian Bivolaru expressed his interest in yoga, spirituality, the paranormal and related subjects, Mircea Eliade invited him to Paris to help him explore these areas."

The same nonsense was repeated in a 2016 article. 🔗🔗

 

The brave, old and new defenders who pose as "scholars", the so-called experts like Willy Fautré 🔗🔗, Massimo Introvigne 🔗🔗 or  Susan J. Palmer 🔗🔗 , with whom the sect brags, have swallowed these lies over the years, like pelicans (good thing they didn't choke), without checking.

Moreover, the legend of the correspondence with Eliade has been served up to the court 🔗🔗, even by the MISA dictator, a sui-generis Baron Münchhausen of Tărtășesti, who declared that the first search that targeted him was due to the letters from Mircea Eliade.
 "In the letters he wrote to me, he was very friendly and even invited me to Paris to help me to deepen the areas that were of interest to me and that had to do with spirituality". 🔗🔗
He was allegedly interviewed "seven times at the Securitate headquarters in Eforie Street, on which occasion he was told to cease all communication with Mircea Eliade, because the latter was considered an enemy of the state."

As Mircea Eliade was an international authority, the great thinker's correspondence was meticulously archived and published - for example in the three-volume collection of more than 1500 pages published by Humanitas.
So it was a piece of cake for journalist Emil Berdeli to prove that this is simply a "guru's folly", as Gelu Voican Voiculescu called it. 🔗🔗

In a telephone conversation in 2010, the regretted professor Mircea Handoca, an expert on Eliade's work and author of numerous books about him, told the columnist that there was no correspondence between Eliade and Bivolaru. 

 

It is truly embarrassing that not even MISA's defender, Gabriel Andreescu, who researched Magnus' Securitate file and published two books on MISA, could confirm the existence of Bivolaru's correspondence with Eliade.
In his book "MISA - radiography of a repression" ("MISA - radiografia unei represiuni"), on page 27, he writes that Bivolaru claimed he was targeted by the Securitate because of his correspondence with Eliade (which was confiscated).
However, in his footnote, Andreescu states that Bivolaru's file contains "no evidence of correspondence with Mircea Eliade and of the authorities' preoccupation with the subject". 

That Eliade was considered an enemy of the state during the period when Bivolaru was in the sights of the Securitate is also an ineptitude.
According to Wikipedia, the rehabilitation of the great writer in communist Romania began as early as the 1960s.
In the 1970s he was approached by Ceaușescu's regime in several ways to bring him back to the country. He was visited in Chicago by Adrian Păunescu (1970), who took an interview with him (published in truncated form in "Contemporanul") and Eugen Barbu, who promised him a "magnificent reception".  Constantin Noica (1972) asked him "to patronize an institute of oriental studies, made, of course, with the consent and financing of the communist authorities". 🔗🔗
Eliade even considered returning to Romania, but was eventually persuaded by fellow Romanian intellectuals in exile to reject the Communist proposals.

 

The lies told by Maestro Pinocchio from the top of MISA over the years have been discussed at length on this blog. 🔗🔗 
The episode "Mircea Eliade - Gregorian Bivolaru's "pen pal"" falls into the category of premeditated lies, concocted in advance, both to manipulate the pupils and the public opinion or the authorities.