Eros, magic, & the murder of Professor Culianu

by Ted Anton

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 presum