
Shortly after 1 p.m. on May 21, 1991, a secretary working on the third floor of Swift Hall at the University of Chicago heard a faint “pop,” as she described it. The sound came from the men’s restroom next to her office. It was produced by a .25-caliber (6.35 mm) pistol that had fired one round into the head of Prof. Ioan Culianu, a rising scholar of esotericism and Gnosticism and a protegé of the famous historian of religion Mircea Eliade1 (1907–1986).

The killer was never caught. He did stalk Culianu during a book-sale event, which brought numerous outsiders into the building, but he also had to be someone who would not look out of place in an academic setting.
Bruce Lincoln’s Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and His Protegé’s Unsolved Murder is not a whodunit. More of a “why was it done-it.” Lincoln is a well-recognized name in religious studies and teaches at Chicago’s Divinity School, as did Eliade and Culianu.2
My review of Secrets, Lies, and Consequences was just published in the American Academy of Religion’s free Reading Religion site, and you can read it here.
I sweat bullets over that review, because its length was limited, and yet I was trying to fit in bits of Romanian history, Eliade’s life story, as well as Lincoln’s conjectures about the killer’s motive—which might have been a certain person saying, in effect, “Who will rid me of this troublesome scholar?”
I have defended Eliade here before against accusations about what he wrote or did in the 1930s. See, for instance, “Mircea Eliade, Witches, and Fascists” from 2020, where I did have room to go into the history more than I could do in a book review.
I always took Eliade at his word (in his published journals ) that when he left Romania to serve as a diplomat in Lisbon, he left all his previous associations behind. One thing that Lincoln’s book does is make me wonder, was I right or was I too naive?