"In May 1991, having received threats that terrified him, Ioan Petru Culianu (1950-91) entrusted a set of papers to a colleague a week before his killer made good on those threats. Some years later, those papers came into the author's hands and prompted him to write this book. In brief, these were English translations of articles that Mircea Eliade (1907-86) - the world's foremost historian of religions - had written in the 1930s. Some articles voiced...