“Advice for someone who's going to war” – Mircea Eliade, 1936

A short article about the nature of the warrior-priest and the magical divinity of heroes.

Alexandru Hașdeu, in a letter dated 28th June 1854, advises his son, Bogdan-Petriceicu Hașdeu, as to how he should behave at war. The young Bogdan had recently enlisted in the Russian army and his parents were worried for him, sending him money, advice, and encouragement. But here is the fragment which seems to me truly significant:

“I found a notebook in the house of Vasile Crist (famous Moldavian noble), written in our language, entitled: Advice to the ones who are going to war. It must be a rather old text, from when Moldavians still used to wage war. Here is a remarkable passage: if you want for the bullet of your enemy to spare your life amid battle you should maintain the purity of your body, be chaste, not defile your body, and go to war with the same saintliness that you would go to receive the Holy Mysteries, to commune with the flesh and blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ!” […] Take good note of this advice from our ancestors!”

I am not particularly interested in the historical circumstances of this advice and of the one going to war with it. I’ve only reproduced this fragment in this article to give it a larger circulation. It does truly deserve to be read and contemplated. Not only because it reveals the “experience of our ancestors”, as Alexandru Hașdeu said, but moreover because it betrays the extra-profane, sacred character of battle and war.

One could, naturally, find a plethora of ethnographical facts in order to determine the “magical origin” of this chastity and purity that “our ancestors” considered necessary for fortune in war. Indeed, in many “wild tribes”, the warriors – also hunters and fishermen – must be chaste every time they engage in a new expedition. Chastity has a magical value in itself. To be chaste means to supress, in a certain sense, the human condition: it means, in any case, to overcome a profane state. The first and the most important of all instincts is the sexual one. Its definitive suppression (ascetism) or its temporary suspension (chastity imposed by war, mourning, calamities, etc) – cancels the human condition. The chaste man concentrates in himself a reservoir of “magic forces” which makes every action he initiates fruitful. If he sets out to hunt or fish, his plunder will be rich; if he is going to war, he will be protected from enemy arrows and his weapons will always find their target.

But, beyond this (sometimes doubtful) “magical origin” of the warrior’s chastity – one can make out its metaphysical significance. The true warrior – the hero – also overcomes the human condition, just as the priest or the ascetic does. When he sets out to war, the warrior exits his profane state and overcomes the values of biological, psychological, and social life in which he participated before.

The hero, just like the priest, is an individual which sacrifices. The Greco-Roman world used to attribute a sacred value to war; meaning, they used to identify it with a sacrificial ritual. The men that sacrificed the life of their enemies were the victorious ones; in the same way that priests used to sacrifice animals on the altar. However, this sacrifice could only be made after a long preliminary process of purification; otherwise, the sacrificed animal remains simply an animal with a stab wound. So, just as the priest that is preparing for a sacrifice and maintains a preliminary chastity – and is being purified during the whole process of the ritual, meaning, is being isolated from the profane world – the warrior must maintain his ritual purity during the process of battle (of the “sacrifice”).

But the similarity between the warrior and the priest (on a higher plane: the hero and the saint) is even deeper than that. It is not only impurity (especially sexual impurity) which characterises the human, profane condition – but also passions, desire, hate, etc. You are “human” insofar as you desire for things to happen in your benefit; or, as the Bhagavad-Gita says, insofar as you desire the fruits of your actions (phalatrisna). The hero, just as the saint, overcomes this phalatrisna; they realise, as they say, phalatrisna vairagya, “the renunciation of the fruits of your actions”. The hero, just as the saint, knows no passions, no hate, no desire. He is “placid”, “indifferent”. The saint hates no one and no thing. The hero doesn’t “hate” his adversary. He doesn’t operate under any individual criteria. He only knows the objective pattern of battle – which corresponds to the objective pattern of ritual.

That’s why, the “victory” that the hero achieves is a state, and not an event. The hero is “victorious” during the whole duration of the battle and remains victorious even if he dies in battle. The tradition that sees battle as a sacrifice, in which the warrior fulfils either the role of the sacrificed or of the one who sacrifices, has survived, as we’ve seen, even until the heroic times of Moldavia, and it did so in an astonishingly precise form: ”…go to war with the same saintliness that you would go to receive the Holy Mysteries”. The meaning of this phrase has to do not only with ritual purity, but also with the moral transformation which the warrior has to achieve when he goes to battle.

When you go to receive the Holy Mysteries of the church, you should not only be “purified”, but also “soothed”; you go with love, forgetting worldly things, overcoming all passional elements. Therefore, when you go to war, you should rid yourself of all passion. The mind of the warrior is untroubled, serene, totally free of hate or fear.