THE SECRET OF DR. HONIGBERGER: FROM YOUTHFUL WRITINGS TO POST-SCRIPTUM (1947)
THE SECRET OF DR. HONIGBERGER: FROM YOUTHFUL WRITINGS TO POST-SCRIPTUM (1947)

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this article is to make public a text that Mircea Eliade never published during his lifetime and which remained practically unknown for seventy -eight years. This text is a continuation of the novella The Secret of Dr. Honigberger, written during his Parisian exile, when Eliade hoped to establish himself both as a historian of religions and as a writer. The text offers some solutions to unravel the oriental mysteries from the novella published seven years earlier, but at the same time, it opens up new ones, thus increasing the complexity of the narrative, in a manner specific to his style. We set out to establish a kind of genealogy of the writing as well, starting from the premise that the two novellas published in the volume in 1940 had a longer development over time: starting from the early articles dedicated to magic, occultism, and magical powers, then passing through the experience of India, until the publication of The Invisible Land (Tărâmul nevăzut) in periodicals and finally, the writing of this Post-scriptum. From another perspective, the theme of magical powers is also found in some of Eliade's scientific works, especially those dedicated to yoga and shamanism, making the entire issue much more complex than a simple detective or rationalist resolution of the mysteries in the novella. In the second part, we described the manuscript and detailed the rules for editing it, as it is one of the most difficult in Eliade's archive, primarily due to the handwriting, multiple abbreviations, and missing letters. Secondly, because the author did not revise it, as he usually did in other cases, and gave up on transcribing it in a form intended for publication. Despite these obstacles, we have the chance to get closer to Eliade's sources of inspiration by transcribing and editing this manuscript, which is preserved in a rough form in the archive located in Chicago, symbolically far from both Bucharest and the magical-religious universe of India.

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