Nineteen Roses

A Soteriology of the Future
The Dramatic Art in Mircea Eliade’s literature


For Mircea Eliade the modern world is definitely struck by amnesia. In such a world, the symbol can’t be properly perceived even if symbols are still present. But men aren’t able to decipher them anymore. Untouched by religious music or architecture, the modern men are subjected to the insurgence of the sacred disguised under the must banal (so to say “profane”) appearances.
The characters of the novel “Nineteen Roses” live in communist Romania in 1966. Eliade could have placed them 30 years earlier, but his intention was to prove that epiphanies can occur anytime, anywhere regardless of the political conditions.
In this novel epiphanies occur as theatrical performances. Such performances are in fact stages of an anamnesis. The theatrical space and time are entirely different from the profane space an time. The spectators - the famous writer Anghel D. Pandele and his private secretary Eusebiu Damian – have contradicting recollections about the gestures of the two young actors. These performances submit Pandele to a difficult anamnesis. So, he remembers about his only play, whose title “Orpheus and Eurydices” - is by no mean casual. Even if is the play has never been staged or published, Serdaru the young actor seems to know a lot about it. Furthermore, he claims to be the writers’ son – his mother being the actress who would have acted as Euridices, if the play hadn’t been put out of the schedule shortly before the opening night.
Pandele is reticent in assuming Serdaru’s paternity. Assuming this paternity is an important part of the anamnesis. Both the title of the play he wrote in his youth and the amnesia, which came upon him, are highly significant. Just by writing this play Pandele had started in himself an anamnesis which was suddenly and mysteriously interrupted on Christmas Eve in 1938.Alo significant is the writer’s age. In 1938 he was 33 years old. Serdaru pushes on the anamnesis telling how Pandele spoke to the actors – and especially to the young actress who was going to act as Eurydice – about the profound and significant resemblance between Orpheus and Jesus.
The 2 actors – Niculina and Laurian say they have been intending to meet Pandele for exactly 243 days. The number is highly symbolic. According to Cabala 243 (2+4+3) leads us to 9 which means the Perfection of Creations as Feminine Completion. This is Eurydice’s number.
Eusebiu Damian doesn’t succeed to arrive in time for two actors wedding and so, he can’t offer them Pandele’s gift – a bunch of 19 Roses. Nineteen signify Transfiguration (1+9=10), but in order to unify the Divine Creative Ego (1) with the Perfection of Creation as Feminine Completion (9), the anamnesis should be completed first. Pandele’s disappearance in the countryside does nothing else. He is invited to Ieronim Thanase’s experimental performance another theatrical epiphanies, of course).
Six of the 19 roses wither. The remaining 13 (1+3=4) symbolize an equivocal status because 4 means both a stopping a trial as well as a gate. Four is a uterus from which apparently you can’t get out, but any uterus has to have a gate. Transfiguration is possible only by passing through the equivocal status of number 4.
Pandele rings up Eusebiu Damian asking him to come to countryside. The driver who is sent to take Damian there submits himself to a ritual of silence and Damian falls asleep for a several times during the journey. These are first initiative trials. Damian also falls asleep during the theatrical performances where he is invited.


For Ieronim Thanase the anamnesis begins as a historical level, but integrates history by passing beyond it. The actors are staging a play based on a Byzantine chronicle where the old Romanian language is attested for the first time. The choir repeats obsessively “Torna, torna, retorna fratre” waking towards the audience. Thanase aims not to a mere historical recollection, but to an ontological anamnesis. “ Torna, torna, retorna fratre” urges the modern man to return to his original ways. That is to become once again Homo religious. Eusebiu Damian runs away horrified then falls asleep anamnesis is always terrifying for the profane man.
Beyond a certain stage of the anamnesis the myth of Orphans and Eurydices is transcended and any analogy is out of place. Pandele tells Eusebiu Damian that, from the writer’s point of view Eurydices died and can’t be brought back to life. So, in 1938 Pandele didn’t see Eurydice but somebody else. His attempts to remember whom did he see embodied in the young actress remain fruitless. Because “when Man wrapped up in Divine love experience the divine, if he want to understand it intellectually, to enclosed it in the image he hasn’t yet freed himself from – he crushes it” (Annick de Souzenelle) – the symbolism of the Human Body).
At this level even Pandele’s presumed paternity on Serdaru looses its importance. Pandele announces Damian that the 2 actors are orphan children.
Frightened of the anamnesis, which had started in him, Pandele gave up on writing plays after 1938. Now he writes dramatic works once again, aiming to create a soteriology inspired from Ieronim Thanase’s ideas on theater. The fact that Serdaru “Swims like a fish” is highly significant. Anamnesis belongs to the subconscious sphere deeply connected with water. Only such a man can put the new dramatic art into practice.
Eusebiu Damian returns to Bucharest to type Pandele’s new plays. Here he receives the mysterious visit of Emanoil Albini – perhaps a high official of the Securitate - who gives Damian some biographical details about Niculina: indeed the girl is orphan. Her father disappeared without a trace in Moldova a few days after he had been repatriated from Russia together with some other prisoners of war. Niculina has been desperately searching him for many years. Albini indulges himself into a digression comparing Niculina with Sophia of the Gnostics who also wants to know her transcendent father. By this reckless desire she causes all the evil in the world, because the concrete immediate knowledge of the Transcendent is impossible.
The visit ends with an ideologically justified warning: Ieronim Thanase’s troupe is politically uncertain. So it would be a shame if such people influenced a writer of Pandele’s importance.
A long side Pandele’s plays Damian has to type an Introduction written by Ieronim Thanase which has to be published under Pandele’s name for political reasons. The introduction has 99 pages (9+9=18; 1+8=9). As we have already found out the number signifies the Perfection of Creation as Feminine Completion.
The play entitled “ At the beginning was the end “ seems artificial and epigonic, resembling with the first sur-realistic experiences, but it has a beautiful Epilog which evokes the appearance of light above the Primordial ocean proclaiming Demiurge’s victory and exalting the majesty of creation. Pandele assumes the chaotic style of the play but he adds that it is a cosmogonic chaos from which and thank’ to which the new Creation may come into being.
Here Eliade is very careful to “save” even the most banal everyday events. Apparently insignificant - the so-called “ indistinct experiences” worth being reconsidered. Anamnesis may start anywhere. To complete the process the chaotic modern world should be gradually reintegrated. Nothing should be left aside. Chaos is only the promise of the new beginning, of a new cosmogony.
Any opportunity walk on the street or listening to Albinoni’s adagio could have an ephiphanic value. The reader of the play is advised to open at page 29 – the first book he lays
his eyes on. The modern man is taught to (re) discover his own receptivity (2+9=11, 1+1=2=Receptivity). If page 29 is white the experiment has failed. “ Obviously before the performance the stage manager will check all the books from the small bookcase in front of the stage removing the one in which page 29 is white” (“Nineteen roses” page 102 Rom. Ed.)
These shacking happenings are essential in order to reach the awakeness, the metanoia. Far from being illogical, they are meta – logical. Here, stepping beyond reason is a liberating act similar to the “Kuan” in Zen Buddhist tradition.
Due to the advance of the anamnesis, Pandele’s handwriting becomes more and more eligible and the style envolves towards a meta- language, which doesn’t fit in any aesthetic classification. One of the plays entitled ‘ The United Principalities” contains elements of an Indian mystical – erotical ritual. Beyond any historical and political hint the play talks about the mystical union of 1 and 9 (the Two Principalities)
Just by typing the text Eusebiu Damian starts an anamnesis. It is not meaningless that his fiancée notice him talking in his sleep to a certain Eurydices.
Damian’s trip to India is briefly described but it proves to be important in understanding the events, which follow.
At Pandele’s residence some mysterious characters, appear during Damian’s absence: an exotically dressed women of 50-55 years old introducing herself as Laurian Serdaru’s wife then “another” Laurian Serdaru who isn’t recognized by the “true” Niculina because Laurian is in the living room with all the others and they are all thirsty .
The unknown woman could be anyone of the 5 women from Ieronim’s troupe. In the Cabbala 5 signifies the Seed of Life”. Each of the 5 women is a hypostasis of Euridices. All of them fulfil our deeply rooted (but dangerous) appetite for the world of names and shapes (nama-rupa). This charade of “doubles” intends to uncover the ilusive nature of names and shapes. If it remained here, under Maya’s cosmic spell, the Seed of Life would be doomed never to bear any fruits. The thirst which affected everyone will be forever unsatisfied.
Eusebiu Damian and his fiancée are preparing for theire wedding – with Pandele as godfather, but the writer insist that Damian should join him to Sibiu from Christmas Eve until 2 or 3 days later. The circumstance is very much similar with scene in one of Pandele’s plays: somebody in a desperate situation seeks the help of a younger friend (apparently what he is asking for seems to be ridiculously, banal) promising in exchange a fairy tale wedding.
In Sibiu Ieronim Thanase - mysteriously healed by anamnesis – has begun shooting a movie. The political circumstances have suddenly turned for the worse; there are rumours of a fight for power at the highest level, which could affect Ieronim’s troupe. But, Pandele’s obsessions are of another nature: remembering the Christmas Eve of 1938 he brings back to memory that the next morning he was terribly thirsty. While he was trying – unsuccessfully – to relieve his thirst, he saw through the window a blonde girl.
The subconscious invents Eurydice’s spontaneously in order to block the anamnesis. She appears as a last subterfuge of a man who is still attached to the world of names and shapes. Form now on revelations can’t bear Euridice’s face. In fact they can’t bear any shape at all. At this level, any shape falsifies the truth – so, it perpetuates the thirst. The revelation experienced by Pandele is so strange in its nature. It is so different from our world, it is so frightening that amnesia occurs immediately – without any effort of the subconscious. This kind of rebirthing is always equivalent to a death, so amnesia is a reflex of a fear we experience in front of that ganz andere mentioned by Rudolf Otto.
On December 24th Pandele, together with Laurian, Niculina and Damian leave for the shootings, but – according to some eye witnesses accounts – their sleigh simply disappear. Next day Damian is found numbed on a stub. At the hospital, he must answer Albini’s questions.
As far as he remembers, they found the forest, then the woodsman’s chalet exactly as they had been in 1938. There Pandele realized that what he had seen in 1938 had no relation with the young girl’s face, but with the thirst that tormented him. So, Pandele Niculina and Laurian got on the sleigh and went to the place (very close as Pandele said) where the revelation could be known directly. Damian tells that – waiting for their return - he felt thirsty. This is a significant detail because thirst symbolizes here the tragically powerlessness of men to step beyond the cosmic illusion (Maya). Not yet ready to meet the ganz andere of the sacred, Damian is sent back to the” profane” world. Here the ‘ objective” evidences are against him. Both the chalet and the forest have disappeared since the beginning of the war.
Worried by Pandele’s disappearance authorities fear he has left the country. But this seems most unlikely once the sleigh and the horses are found.
For one more time reality is foreshadowed by one of Pandele’s plays. Damian remembers how to characters speak about the different stages Brancusi had left behind him before he went to Paris on foot to have a fresh start from the very beginning.
Damian meets Ieronim Thanase on March 6th. According to the Cabala, 6 is the number of Man, also symbolizing Union, Fecundation. March (3) signifies Motion, Dynamism. Only on such special day could Ieronim Thanase be able to explain his profound soteriological views about theatre. The 4 dramas written by Pandele tell everything if you know the way you decipher them. The author stimulates the reader to (re) discover absolute liberty. But this has nothing in common with the political freedom. More so, absolute liberty reveals its importance (and urgency) only when political freedom is impossible to achieve. In other words, men are free to win absolute liberty only when they don’t waste his energy in fighting for political freedom.
Thanase responds to the oppressive modern world by a therapy of gestures gilded under the most ‘inoffensive “ and ‘ profane’ appearances. So, Ieronim Thanase’s movie is claimed to be “ The best socialist movie of the century”. To the uninitiated audience it observes “ up to the letter socialist ethics and aesthetics”.
After many adjournments Damian’s wedding takes place. The guests are 16 in number (1+6=7= Disappearance, Death, Naught which entails Return, Rebirthing, Whole). During their wedding night married couple finds on the threshold a bunch of 19 roses and a note from the 3 “ missing persons. The same bunch and note appears at the first anniversary of their wedding (when 6 of the roses wither) - once again the symbolism of 13 (1+3=4) the uterus which leads to a gate. The roses and the note also come in the year when Damian becomes a father.
In Eliade’s literature hazard, accident and coincidence always have a symbolic meaning. They consign to us a coded message. The code (the disguisement) is vital because only in this gilded manner may Sacred enter our world.
Thinking he’s the one who is brought the roses Damian has a casual conversation with a strange young man. The schoolboy words mean much more that they seem. His fear is related not only to the French quotation, which he won’t be able to comment upon. Because the quotation is “Nous sommes condamnés a la liberte“. Anxiety belongs to everybody. The whole world doesn’t know yet (or perhaps doesn’t remember) the true meaning of liberty. Apparently lost because it has been misunderstood) liberty stays in our reach every passing moment. A bon entendeur, salut!



By Marian Stan
Version English by Marian Stan