Lucian Blaga and "Zamolxis" : The Revolt of Our Non-Latin Nature

"Zalmoxis" is a dramatic poem in which each character autonomously structures his own discursive lyric, expressing thus a variety of concepts over the spiritual foundation of the Dacians. The charm of each nuance in part relates in the last instance, the mode in which the author understands the proper structure of the actual dramatic perspective above the revolt of our non-Latin foundation. The new god is a vain and vengeful one. His emergence from the data of the natural condition of humanity tries the character who is both chthonic and Dyonisiac of the new religion. The solution to transform the prophet Zalmoxis into one of the gods of the traditional polytheistic religion appears rightfully inherent, the only compromise possible for a community unprepared and incapable of being initiated into monotheism. The Dacians would close their eyes to the teachings of the Blind One while in a spiritual night they are complacent, so evident because they cannot perceive the truth; they cannot live the religious revelation the way it is very possible to do. The Dacians were not Greek, but to catalogue their faith whether by the embodiment of the Dyonisiac, or the regimentation of the Apollonian means to denature the true spiritual dimensions that were impossible for them to define in the first place. The Dacians configured by Lucian Blaga in “Zalmoxis” have a heterogenous character in comparison with the concept of humanity. They are an imperfect construct, their community is undefined, and it is but an embryo of society. The interpretation in conformity with Dacians, who would have been more than men, is illusory; Dacians appear as something less than men. Their incapacity to frame within a specific divine project need not be viewed as a spiritual failure. Moreover, the Dacians were not yet ontologically completed and thus were unprepared for the revelation of the new faith of the Blind One. The original mystery of existence cannot be, therefore, overcome: you, as a man, endowed or not, to intuit, however incomplete, imperfect and partial, you are finally forced to let him subjugate you. To recognize oneself bound in the face of the mystery means, at most, to know it luciferically, meaning the guarantee of survival of the secret beyond yourself. It is tragedy from hereon in, but all the greatness of the human condition as well, because the ontological destiny of man is to live in the “horizon of mysteries” and to be endowed with “revelation” that is realized through the act of creation, from the prophet. The destiny of the prophet Zalmoxis would have been to sacrifice himself for his entire people, as a kind of scapegoat over whom he concentrates the sins of the community, sacrificed by people in order to be forgiven and saved by gods. Once they have accomplished the killing of the prophet Zalmoxis, killing even his statue, the Dacians earn the revelation of the myth of the Blind One. Post facto they seem to believe that The Blind One is, from this day forward, among them, theirs, themselves. In Lucian Blaga’s debut play he does not reconfigure the cult of Zalmoxis in his historical markings, but rather creates a space in which the creative imagination of the poet begets his own myth. Between the chthonic and the uranic, in Blaga’s play, it is possible that Zalmoxis could have lost contact with his kind. Starting from an existential dimension so specific and familiar of his people, namely the chthonic, Zalmoxis will have estranged himself to Dacians through his overstay in a cave, where in his attempt to embrace a new dimension—the uranic—seemed too much to those below, who, prisoners of their own spiritual limitations, ontological or drastically sanctioned and from within a primary instinct of self-protection. However, the myth is born spontaneously after the disappearance of the prophet, the intuition and consciousness of the Dacians suggesting a revelation. Sacrificing his messenger, the Blind One guaranteed his being in the horizon of immortality.