Sul fantastico iniziatico di Ioan Petru Culianu
On Ioan Petru Culianu’s Initiatory Fantastic

Summary/Abstract: With the aim to highlight the innovative perspectives traced by the mythanalyse, Culianu believed that the literary text – in particular, the fantastic one – included latent myths, or, more precisely, that the text itself might be contemplated as a myth. The purpose of this article – which will follow the methodological approach established by the Romanian historian of religions himself – is to investigate one of his own short stories, Jocul de smarald, following a thorough mythoanalytical reading. After identifying myth as a “mind game” – a fortunate formula which Culianu frequently employs in his philosophical-scientific writings – the article will illustrate how the emerald “game” consists of an initiatory itinerary which takes place in the imaginary world contained in a tiny green stone, with a meandric structure akin to a mandala. This itinerary, presenting a circular temporality, aims at reaching the sacred centre of the stone, which manifests itself in the form of a feminine divinity – the Emerald Goddess – which indeed represents the centre of one’s own being. Such an interpretation harmonizes with the mental nature of the otherworldly journey as theorized by the Culianian epistemology. Subsequently, the article will demonstrate that the initiatory journey in Jocul the smarald is a Descent to the Netherworld. The first justification of this classification is the presence of the “River of the Dead” cosmologem – which is omnipresent in funerary geographies – yet euphemized by Culianu in a calm water course that has to be waded. The second justification – which establishes a far more profound niveau isotopique – is the hypothesis that the initiatory itinerary of Jocul de smarald pursues the alchemical motto Vitriol, substituting the Interior of Terra Mater with that of the gemstone, where the supreme Goddess dwells. This reading is grounded in the identification of alchemy with the regressus ad uterum: the Emerald Goddess would thus coincide with the alchemical vas, that is to say the central life-giving vessel from which the miraculous stone – i.e. the regenerated neophyte – will be born.

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