Dismantling phenomenological morphology: Ioan P. Culianu

In the winter of 1988, Ricketts received a telephone call from a young Romanian professor, and he wrote down this note: ‘Culianu called Nov[ember] 6 about plans for a book in defense of Eliade, to include all allegedly incriminating articles of 1937-38.

Ioan Petru Culianu (1950-1991) entered the Faculty of Romanian Language and Literature at the University of Bucharest in 1967 (Anton 2005: 65). In June 1972, after a change of heart and faculty, Culianu graduated almost magna cum laude with a dissertation on Italian Renaissance philosophy of religion entitled ‘Marsilio Ficino and Platonism during the Renaissance' under Italian literature scholar Nina Facon (1909­1974) (Anton 2005: 86-7). Culianu's refusal to comply with the plan devised by the Romanian secret security police, the Securitate, which wished to recruit him as an informant, began to affect his career, leading to editorial opportunities inexplicably refused and scholarship applications denied. In the same year, Culianu, already acquainted with Eliade's works, started a life-long correspondence with Eliade in which the Chicago Professor suggested that the young student should leave Romania and ask for political asylum in Italy or France (Anton 2005: 75-91; see the correspondence between Eliade and Culianu in Culianu-Petrescu and Petrescu 2004).

A scholarship from the Italian Foreign Ministry allowed him to bypass temporarily the many institutional hindrances in Romania and study ancient culture at the Università per Stranieri of Perugia.

Coming from a family steeped in science and technology (Anton 2005), and exasperated by HoR’s indeterminacy (e.g. Culianu 1978: 17-18), Culianu tried to justify the autonomy of the morphological and phenomenological HoR while expanding its scientific borders by appealing, in various forms and different times, to the following dimensions:

1. Ethology and primatology: Inspired by Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression (1966), and a plethora of other sources ranging from mass psychology and Edgar Morin’s essay on homo demens (1973) to the study of social hierarchies in chimpanzees, Culianu suggests a biological relationship between aggressivity, dominance, and religious power, and argues that such ‘phylogenetic roots even predate the evolution of hominins’ (Culianu 1981: 182). In his attempt to update Eliade’s morphological phenomenology and naturalize the human sciences, Culianu investigates magic as mental manipulation and religious rituals as human ethology in a way somewhat similar to sexual selection theory (Culianu 1987; cf.

2. Morphology and cognition: Eager to systematize further his interdisciplinary synthesis, Culianu translates Scottish mathematical biologist D’Arcy W Thompson’s (1860-1948) morphometrics and Polish-born, French-educated, American mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot’s (1924-2010) fractals into the study of culture and religion. Morphometrics was the study of functional constraints on the shape of organisms, according to which ‘various types of biological “form” can potentially be explained by various types of physical forces’ identified through the application of geometrical grids superimposed on physiological structures, such as bones, within a saltationist mindset, a thesis later disconfirmed by evolutionary developmental biology (Horder 2009: 768; see Gould 2002: 1181). A fractal, instead, is a ‘curve or a surface generated by a process involving successive subdivision’; within a mathematical pattern known as the Mandelbrot set, a fractal becomes able to ‘produce complex self-similar patterns’ (Daintith and Martin 2010: 332, 503). Culianu thus arrived at the following morphodynamic concept of religion: a self-replicating, fractal system which consists of diachronic actualizations of ever-existing synchronic possibilities, and which develops following an ever­expanding digital ramification (Culianu 2002; Culianu 2005b).

The ultimate aim was to update previous phenomenological classifications, while maintaining a non-historical, morphological approach to systemic analysis (Culianu 1990b). For instance, the ‘real-because-mythical’ explorations of otherworldly dimensions that characterized Eliade’s descriptions of shamanism were reframed as explorations of inward, infinite, mental spaces, elaborated historically by local cultures according to some contextual and cognitive rules (such as mind-body dualism) and reflecting cognitive limitations to describe what Culianu referred to as a four­dimensional space. Also, Culianu stressed the role of panhuman mental processes as the source of cultural similarities while discarding historical descent and development (Culianu 1991b). Despite this quite exceptional open-mindedness, Culianu’s model suffered from several shortcomings, which I will come back to later.