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Advances in Politics and Economic 
ISSN 2576-1382 (Print) ISSN 2576-1390 (Online) 

Vol. 2, No. 1, 2019 
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38 
 

Original Paper 

The Romanian Mythology—Between National Identity and 

Globalization 

PhD student Coculiana ACĂR1* 
1 Faculty of Philosophy and Social-Political Sciences, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, 

Romania 
* PhD student Coculiana ACĂR, Faculty of Philosophy and Social-Political Sciences, “Alexandru Ioan 

Cuza” University of Iași, Romania 

 

Received: February 1, 2019   Accepted: February 16, 2019    Online Published: February 21, 2019 

doi:10.22158/ape.v2n1p38              URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/ape.v2n1p38 

 

Abstract 

Although the soul of a people is not an eternal, unchangeable substance, the national specificity is still 

a permanent one. Starting from the idea that mythology occupies an essential place in a culture, it is 

important to know the national mythology, because it presents in a specific form the themes of the 

everlasting thought, whose discovery makes sense to a life, and illustrates at the same time, the 

specificity of the national spirituality and even of the cultural identity. The national identity means 

differentiation and, at the same time, a specific opening to the existence where a collective 

consciousness is reflected, starting from the idea that a people’s mentality can be a collective 

self-portrait. 

In the following study, we shall only refer to two of the myths specific to our people, namely: Miorita 

and Manole, the Artisan. For the Romanian spirituality, mioritism is a profound, ontological and 

anthropo-historical dimension where one can speak of a human becoming in layers of interference. An 

alternative to the popular Carpathian vision of existence from the plan of the native psycho-social 

Universe is the positive value of the abyssal categories of the culture where the man is fulfilled by 

creation. As a follow-up to this statement, the myth of the creative sacrifice, exemplified here by Manole, 

the Artisan, highlights the man’s destiny to become a culture creator. Culture is a necessary and 

complementary dimension of the human-specific way of being. 

Keywords 

mythology, national identity, culture, globalization 

 

 



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1. National Identity—Between Permanence and Development 

Having a spirituality of historical and cultural duration, the Romanian people originally identify 

themselves among the peoples of the world through its founding myths, which ensure its specificity 

with respect to others, while giving it the guarantee of a certain perenniality. Located in a meeting area 

of the great European cultures, the Romanian people manifested in each epoch a permanent receptivity 

to thinking innovations, selecting the elements that could be integrated into its own structures. If, by 

myths the essence of a history or of a civilization, even of a system of thought is expressed, we can say 

that the Romanian mythology is “the result of the fusion of the ethnic forms with those transmitted 

from the proto-historical period” (Cosma, 1942, p. 8). Therefore, the myth always provides a key, 

allowing the access to an interpretation system and an ethical code that “the most secret part of the 

identity of a culture is entrusted to its mythology” (Detienne, 1898, p. 1). 

The culture of the Romanian people, in all its forms of manifestation: myths, customs, beliefs, morals, 

norms of coexistence, etc., “keeps and integrates in its own substance the traditional Daco-Get and 

Roman fund” (Vlăduțescu, 2012, p. 26). The Romanians have long relied on their Roman origin, going 

as far as completely ignoring the other elements of the ethnic mixture (the Dacians and the Slavs). 

From the second half of the 19th century, the dominant idea became the Daco-Roman fusion, so that 

“the first origins were not sought in Rome, but in antiquity if, and even deeper in the native prehistory” 

(Boia, 1997, p. 17). The need for self-definition requires us to investigate the cultural creation of our 

historical past and to integrate all the spiritual energies of the country into the ever-renewed dimensions 

of our new society. Starting from the idea that it is important to know the fundamental myths to 

recognize the soul of a people, the great culture people have developed their latencies and built on them 

a metaphysics, a psychology or an ethics specific to the Romanian people. 

The four fundamental myths that are the pillars of our national identity are exploited by both the folk 

culture and the cult creation. The first is that of the origin and formation of the Romanian people from 

the Dacian-Roman symbiosis. It has a definite historical basis demonstrated by facts and documents, 

but, beyond that, the myth of this origin persists in folklore and the cult creation. It is called Traian and 

Dochia. The myth of the Romanian ethnogenesis was formulated by Gh. Asachi, starting from the 

elements of Cantemir’s legend that the oral tradition offered him. Another myth is that of the Flyer. In 

the archaic mentality, love is considered a great force, and the first impact with it is due to a 

supernatural being, which represents a process of initiation, configured by the erotic myth of the Flyer. 

Defined as a “personification of the invasion of the pubic instinct”, Călinescu believes that “through 

Eminescu, the Romanian poetry has shown inclinations to regard love as an implacable force, without 

any participation of the consciousness” (Călinescu, 1986, p. 89), giving as an example: Calin (pages of 

the story), Luceafărul, I. H. Rădulescu—the Flyer. Those who studied this myth were: D. Cantemir, G. 

Călinescu, Simion Florea Marian, Tudor Pamfile. 

Mioriţa and Manole, the Artisan are essential myths of the Romanian spirituality. Some are fighting the 

fatalism of the mioritic shepherd and the criminal cynicism of Manole, the Artisan who builds his wife. 



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They also refuse Anna’s destiny, which remains in the same mioritic resignation, just being content to 

lament in her name and child. Under these circumstances, the two myths could not be considered 

representative for the present-day psychology of the Romanian people, some hesitant and numb 

psychology, incomparable with the competition and the struggle for existence in the present world. 

However, the breaking from Mioriţa would be an ontological breaking with negative consequences in 

culture, ethics, in the civilization itself: on the one hand it no longer corresponds to the attitude towards 

existence, and on the other hand it is the top product of a culture of old time impossible to state as the 

maximum manifestation of the creative energies; it raises some problems of understanding that relate to 

the anthropological, socio-economic, legal, religious, moral fundamentals. 

1.1 Miorita-Hermeneutical Landmarks 

Mioriţa is a polymorphic and polysemantic reality that presents, in an artistic form, an entire 

philosophy of life and death, which Sadoveanu appreciated as “the most noble poetic manifestation of 

our people”. Referred to the specificity of the 17th century through its typical linguistic signs, being the 

product of a certain climate, in relation to a mentality of the community, the mioritic myth contributed 

to the maintenance of our national unity. 

In general, any culture deepens and regulates an existence. In this sense, Mioriţa is the only corpus in 

the world that expresses its existence exclusively from the matter of the individual’s death. Referring to 

the “sense of existence” (Rusu, 2013, p. 84), we can attribute it the meaning of “passivity and 

resignation, with which some agree that “this would be a national feature” (Michelet, 1968, p. 34), 

while for others death is seen as “a threshold of jubilation” (Botta, 1995, p. 92). The ballad reveals a 

mystical solidarity between man and nature that is no longer accessible to the “modern consciousness” 

(Eliade, 1995, p. 260). Only Nietzsche sees the mysterious and paradoxical unity of life and death. The 

presentiment of death can be correlated with the proper fundamental ontological presentiment; it is the 

hermeneutical feeling itself or the feeling of the being’s sense. Understanding the world and expressing 

it is not oriented towards asserting a fact, but rather for the understanding of an opportunity to be. 

A concern in approaching this myth can be seen in M. Eliade’s work, who places the mioritic in the 

hermeneutics of the history of religions and myths, integrated in the Euro-Asian area of Zalmoxis to 

Ginghis-Han. Speaking about the native mentality as a symbiosis of the “Romanian mind matrix” and 

the “cosmic feeling” (Drăgănescu, 1991, p. 12), Mircea Eliade gave us the first express reference of the 

“Cosmic Christianity” (Eliade, 1995, p. 246) by two specific attributes: designing the Christological 

mystery of the whole nature and the liturgical dimensioning of the human’s existence in the world, 

attributes that have the power to implicitly connote up the mioritic vision on the human condition, 

which makes it clear, therefore, a type of human behavior, a mentis form and a specific situation in the 

world, such as Weltanschauung. A. Fochi and M. Vulcănescu will go on other direction, that descends 

into ethnology going to the proper anthropology, considering the pastoral as a layer of civilization; a 

world that searches for the “law” and gives it, Mioriţa becomes in this way the conflict of an ethic. 

Indeed, the legal dimension can not be missed from the approach of the mioritic corpus, and the 



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ethnological element can not cover the philosophical and aesthetic one. 

Lucian Blaga carried forward the philosophical exegesis of the ballad, referring to the mioritic space as 

the “stylistic matrix” of the Romanian culture. In Blaga’s work, the Mioritic space is the specific 

horizon where the Romanian people have been formed and lived: a waved space that is, consisting of 

successive valleys and hills. Blaga resumes and elaborates Frobenius’s conception on the relationship 

between landscape and cultural style, but the “mioritic space generates and limits at the same time”. 

According to Lucian Blaga’s metaphor, the Mioritic space, a waved succession between the hill and the 

valley, from top to bottom would be specific for the Romanians. The hill-valley landscape, 

homologated as a mioritic space, was considered as the unconscious spatial horizon of the Romanian 

stylistic matrix, which explains not only the picturesque onomastics and the rhythm of the popular 

songs, but also our psychology alternating the moments of concentration with the ones of relaxation. 

Even our destiny as a nation, through the historical presence and gaps, appears marked by the waved 

rhythm of the specific stylistic matrix” (Gruia, 2008, p. 26). We know from history that the times of 

affirmation of the Romanian people were few and short; eloquent moments in this regard being the 

formation of the states, Stephen the Great’s reign, the interwar period, instead of the gaps, numerous 

and immense; the latter being the communist stage. 

Since Mioriţa’s message was obstructed and even misunderstood as a resignation and passivity to death 

or an idle peaceful indifference to life, and since Mioriţa was responsible for many historical failings, 

even in the political speech of the present generation it is necessary that its message be approached by 

the most fertile conjectures to see if it is an “unjustified distance from our own culture without any 

plausible justification and without any historical chance” (Mincu, 2002, p. 196). 

1.1.1 The Mioritic Space—The Romanian Matrix Space 

L. Blaga applied his theory of style to the Romanian spiritual phenomenon, defined as a mioritic space, 

characterized by: “the waved space horizon, the temporal horizon of swinging movement, the Sofian 

transfiguration attitude of reality, osand final formative aspiration by orientation to geometric and ght 

shapes” (Blaga, 1985, p. 47). Starting from studies of the morphology of culture undertaken in the days 

of Frobenius and Spengler, Blaga develops the theory of “abisal categories” that would express the 

“stylistic matrix” of a people or group of peoples. Mythology, in a chronological order, would fully 

embody them, hence the idea of reporting our popular culture to other European cultures, revealing the 

“mioritic matrix space” as a structuring factor of a way of life and spirituality, with that a priori “feeling 

of destiny”. 

The identity consciousness of a nation implicitly has a consciousness of the specific relationship to 

sacrament; even in the case of belonging to a religion. In this regard, M. Eliade (1999) synthesizes our 

patriarchal experience, by taking into account the existence of the “domestic psychosocial universe”, 

by introducing and using four “content descriptors”: the first categorical-philosophical descriptor of the 

psychosocial universe would be that of “habitation” configured through space-based dwelling, by 

topographies and architectures of symbolic value, of an anthropological significance, from which the 



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modern mind faded in the benefit of some short-term consumer comfort criteria. In the middle of this 

cosmic breathing residence is, of course, the domestic habitat, where the individual, the sedentary 

socio-cultural community live a miraculous “self-recovery”, living the “feast”. The authentic living of 

the feast is as a maximization of the human in man, an optimal opportunity of the mysterious 

communion with the cosmic reality, of consubstantialization with the divine. But “the situation of the 

modern man is painful because he can not communicate deeply with the world, he can not find himself 

anymore. Life turns him into a race for his own search, so that in the end he can see that he has lost 

both the world and himself” (Băncilă, 1996, p. 74). 

The moment is followed by “passing”—the third descriptor of the Romanian being. Romanianism 

preserves, in a fusion with the Christian ceremony, the old ones of the “deceased” as an invaluable 

anthropological dowry, even in the midst of a Europe of secularization, where even the funerals have 

become formal, official, they still retain the power to fix the man, with all his life and death, with all 

the generations, in the harmony of the Being. The territorial permeability has brought to man’s life the 

“alienation”—the fourth descriptor of the living environment, of the distances, of the authentic 

experience of the totalitarian time of the feast, and the sacred order of fate in the opening of eternity. It 

is the pole of the inauthentic being, alienated to the anthropological dissolution. This descriptor, the 

human alienation, appears as theoretically fertile today, in the modern world, more precisely by the 

specific way in which it is configured. This “matrix-space” of the Romanian folk soul is revealed in 

Mioriţa’s incantations, once aware of it, becoming a key to explaining the Romanian “horizon” and 

“style”. In other words, everything is thought through this specific Romanian “matrix-space”, which 

ineffably, makes every thing get, sooner or later, the seal of our sensitivity. 

1.1.2 Mioriţa—A Cultural Phenomenon 

In the form of carols or ballads, the “pastoral conflict and the mioritic assassination are found in the 

archaic substratum and common to the religion of many European peoples” (Filipciuc, 2001, p. 75). In 

this respect, A. Fochi, in the Traditional Epic Song of the Romanians, approaches Mioriţa from two 

interesting perspectives: either looking for its genesis and the movement of the mioritic texts in relation 

to the Aromanian variants, or by putting them into the thematic light. Only four years after the 

publication of Alecsandri’s version, Mioriţa will be known throughout the world by Jules Michelet’s 

translation, followed by an English translation by Clare Grenville Murrnal Eustache in 1854, and in 

1861 Al. Odobescu makes a comparison with a biblical text, with Lin’s song, invoked by Herodot as 

being Greek. Later, in 1915, G. Coşbuc notes that the ballad’s background is the same as the folk poetry 

of all Indogermans.Among the culture people who analyzed Mioriţa’s variants and themes include: 

Petru Caraman the ethnographer from Iasi, who compares, in a post-mortem study, the Allegory of 

Death in the Folk Poetry with Poles and Romanians, George Ivănescu, in 1970, which analyzes the 

typology of the variants in the Bulgarian and Albanian folklore and Romanian-Serbian constants, and 

Ion Taloş finds similarities between Mioriţa and the medieval French epic, especially with Chanson de 

Roland. 



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The mioritic myth was the subject of inspiration in literary works such as Jules Verne with the 

Carpathian Castle (1892), also called J. Verne’s Miorita, and on the artistic level, Mioriţa’s musical 

theme was always in the attention of the great Romanian composers such as: Paul Constantinescu, Emil 

Lerescu, Mircea Neagu, D. D. Stancu, Sigismud Toduţă, Gh. Dumitrescu and others. In 1946, the 

ethnomusicologist Constantin Brăiloiu publishes in Geneva the exegesis Sur une ballade roumaine: La 

Mioritza, which he edits starting from several coordinates: the field investigations, I. Muşlea’s study 

(1925) and the metaphysical interpretation, especially due to Blaga. Similarly, things continue in 

sculpture, through Irimescu, which has the mioritic motif in binomial groups from the Mythological to 

the abstract Composition, from the Pegasus flights to the Dialogue in To the Star, etc. Miorita Fountain 

is also a monument built in 1927 in Bucharest (by the sculptor Milita Petrascu, the architect Octav 

Doicescu and the engineer Dorin Pavel). It synthetically expresses modernity through its smooth and 

clear architecture, and through the conception of the mosaic that represents, on both sides, one of our 

fundamental legends. 

Mioriţa penetrated so deeply in the soul and mentality of the people that it was preserved not only in 

the oral and written form, but also in the pictures of anonymous painters. Certain authors say that some 

illustrations from the Gospel of Elizavetgrad (the 16th century) would render moments from Mioriţa 

ballad. These were made by the painters Nicolae Brana, Ilie Bogdesco and are creations of high 

inspiration, unsurpassed until today as mastery and value. In Miorita there is a clear, concrete 

controversy of “we”—“they”, which has found its expression in the popular creation, in letters and 

documents. As the Tatar invasions in the central and northern area of Nistru-Carpathian perimeter were 

permanent, the Romanians were put in a position to defend their lands to sacrifice. It can be said that 

the theme of Miorita ballad is based on concrete historical realities. We note that: “The folklore does 

not express exclusively the peculiarities of the Romanian people. Much of the theme and treatment 

belongs to the universal folklore through the background of ideas and general-human feelings, which 

determines its classification in the international typologies” (Dima, 1967, p. 201). 

1.2 The Myth of the Creative Sacrifice—Archetype of Construction 

Another myth specific to the Romanian people is that of Manole, the Artisan, which has been the 

subject of many works in the Romanian literature. In this sense, we are referring to the literary work the 

Monastery of Arges, which develops the theme of the sacrifice for creation, according to which it is 

impossible to build something lasting to confront the ages by beauty and perseverance, but by effort 

and sacrifice. Originated from an ancient superstition, according to which the durability of a building 

consists in building a human being into a foundation, the theme has a great spread to the Balkan 

peoples, but the origin of the Romanian variants consists in the fact that only here it is about the 

construction of a monastery (and not of a bridge, of a city, of a palace), and the accent falls on the 

builder, not on the sacrifice. It is justified here that “the architecture of a country is perhaps the most 

accurate expression of its history, which gives a safer intuition of the past and a more authentic 

conscience of a civilization” (Cantacuzino, 1977, p. 152). 



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The construction works have a ritual and a symbolism that come from a very distant past. Any 

profession, but especially that of a mason or blacksmith, was loaded with a ritual significance and a 

symbolism strictly reserved for the initiates. The belief in the choice of place for the construction of 

holy places is ancient in the folk tradition. “The ruins, as human settlements that could not last, are 

fatidic for a construction that is an act of creation (...) In the cosmic archetype of the Creation of the 

World, any construction becomes real, that is, it receives a being by fixing it in a place which 

corresponds to the World Centre” (Cantacuzino, 1977, p. 85). In this symbolic area of the construction 

of a Centre it is also the search for the place for building; in the legend of Arges Monastery, in this way, 

the building being a cosmogony, a creation of the world. 

The structure of the imaginary universes: a bridge in Greece, Bulgaria and with the 

Macedonian-Romanians; a fortress in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary; a monastery in Romania, 

it is explained by the actual existence of such works; the popular imagination was impressed here by 

the presence of a bridge / fortresses / monasteries. In creation, we are no longer dealing with “real 

things,” but with images of archetypes and symbols. The symbolism of the church-monastery is 

receipted and culturally exploited by the “Christianity of the Eastern Europe, the heir of Byzantium” 

(Sedlmayr, 1993, p. 118). In the Balkan-Danubian area, the world was aware that a church or a place of 

worship enjoys an architectural and iconographic symbolism present in the sacred buildings. This 

awareness took place both on the path of the religious experience (liturgy) and on the path of the 

traditional culture (theology). In order to last, a construction (house, technical work, and spiritual work, 

too) “must be animated” (Eliade, 1995, p. 193), that is, it must receive both life and soul. This is 

transposed into building a church today in the sense that “beneath the Holy Table there the holy relics 

of the martyrs are placed, those who are always in the spirit with Christ. The Holy Table stands above 

them because they are the foundation of the Church” (Larchet, 2017, p. 31). 

One can speak of an “architectural body” (Mus, 1937, p. 117) substituted for the carnal body; 

morphologically, this “transfer of life” is accomplished through relics or drawings of vital organs: eye, 

mouth, etc. For the traditional societies, the dwelling was an imago mundi in the sense that any 

construction work symbolically reproduces cosmogony. The adherence of a people to one or another of 

the mythical scenarios, to one or another of the exemplary images, tells more about his deep soul than a 

great number of historical events. The myth of the ascension of the “sacred place” is an archetype of 

the human creation presented in all the cultures of the world. The analysis of this reason can be made 

from two complementary perspectives: philological—taking into account its literary-artistic and 

hermeneutic denominations, which reveal the hidden meanings of the last realities involved in the 

creative act; aspects we have dealt with in this paper. 

As a legend that reveals a “creation about creation” suggested by the succession of the moments of 

foundation justifies a waved cyclicity. Thus, the abandoned wall, a symbol of the place of foundation, 

appears to be a “predestined archetype, a totemic irreplaceable centre” (Kerbach, 1994, p. 313). The 

sacrifice of the construction to be built is accomplished by an essential germ: life itself. The absence of 



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this element as a structural binder causes the monastery to fail by the inability of its builders to break it 

free from chaos. The succession of days and nights, of light and of darkness has a symbolic value. The 

presence of darkness as a factor with destructive effects on creation causes a permanent return from the 

orderly (cosmic) to the disorganized (chaotic) stage which highlights the symbolism of universal 

circulation. Another element of symbolic value is the oracular dream which after Jung is defined as “an 

unconscious and revealing symbolic phenomenon, which reproduces a certain archetype and reflects a 

fundamental anxiety” (Chevalier, 1975, p. 456). As a bridge between the human being and the sacred, 

divine law, the dream is a Court that rules the man’s actions. In this sense, the built-in woman becomes 

a symbol of the vital transfer, making the construction durable. 

This deep structure, cyclicity, suggesting the image of the wave that permanently is born and dies, 

doubles that of the spiral becoming that characterizes any processuality of the cosmic or human world. 

The symbolic construction of the myth of Arges Monastery reveals on one hand the spiritual unity of 

the human from all times and places and on the other hand, the unity between the values of the 

Romanian folk spirituality and those of the later cult creation. The symbolic reason of the universal 

growth and decrease will be found in: The History of the Ottoman Empire by D. Cantemir, The Theory 

of Universal Wave in V. Conta, The Mioritic Space with L. Blaga, The Morning Star’s vision with 

M.Eminescu, the endless column at Brâncuşi, forms suggesting an unparalleled “opening closure” (C. 

Noica) 

1.2.1 The Myth of the Creative Sacrifice—Echoes in Culture 

The one who profited exceptionally the myths and had an organic view on the universal culture is 

Lucian Blaga. For him, the myths are ancient and give value to the creations of the mankind and to 

every nation. The destiny reserved for the human is to feel the need to reveal it, thus becoming “the 

creator, namely the creator of the culture. Culture is a necessity of its existence” (Crețu, 2008, p. 12). 

Referring to the myth of Manole, the Artisan “the poet does not adapt a legend but shows how a legend 

is created in the spirit of the folkloric tradition based on a factor which he calls the mythical thought” 

(Todoran, 1985, p. 95). Blaga’s Romanian myth completely underlines the ethnography into art by 

dramatizing the idea of the maximum sacrifice imposed as a necessity by the artist’s consciousness, the 

free creator of his work. In Blaga’s work, “Manole is the type of the absolute artist, the symbol and 

mythical prototype of the creator, he is firmly convinced that the great creations involve the sacrifice of 

lives” (Gană, 1976, p. 233). Drama is based on a legend that betrays more than anything, the Slavic 

origin and the Byzantine system. The writer has transfigured the subject into a tragedy of the creative 

man through the force of filling the legendary form with a new life. Thus, “the aesthetic myth, 

understood as the Creator’s own sacrifice, is perfect in Blaga (...); the events are signs of destiny and, 

above all, are determined by the irresistible passion of the creation” (Popa, 2003, p. 56). The 

relationship between the Creator Manole and the transcendent principle, ineffable and always silent 

from the context of the church achievement, can be considered an artistic expression of the 

transcendent censorship. 



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The eternal hesitation and inconsistency in repeating Manole’s creation, whether determined by a 

fatalist of transcendence, or as chosen, assumed and performed by man through the free will, originates 

in the interpretation of the nature of the creative passion. The creative passion, as an intimate resort in 

assuming the sacrifice for the achievement of creation, acquires a double meaning in the Artisan’ s 

sense: on the one hand, he assumes it as his own, and on the other hand he understands it as being 

lowered from nothingness into the self’s being. Applied to the drama and the character in question, the 

idea is also accepted by V. Fanache who sees in Blaga’s play” an unpredictable bipolar Dimonic, 

belonging on the one hand to the areas of the unconscious, on the other hand, to the indictable powers 

(...) Equally suspended in a tragic gap it also remains the creative predestination, which controls the 

human as a disease or passion, coming from somewhere from the unknown” (Fanache, 2003, p. 132). 

How can a world start if not by a creation? This is a question that many thinkers have asked. If the 

world is to be created and subsequently inhabited, “it must be founded by the discovery or design of a 

fixed point, the center (...) The ritual building has a cosmological value because the ritual by which the 

human builds a sacred space is effective insofar as it reproduces the work of the Gods, more precisely, 

cosmogony” (Biciușcă, 2000, p. 33). The center orders both the universe and the built space, the two 

levels being on the same axis. The centre is dynamic, it is “the immobile engine” (Aristotle said) that 

structures and arranges the space around it. In architecture, we find the symbol of the centre and the 

symbol of cyclicity. These symbol classes are embodied in all the myths of the world. In the Egyptian 

mythology, Isis is the symbol of the Creator’s Center / of the Creator, who builds and gives life, and 

Osiris is the symbol of cyclicity, balancing between the Center (Isis) and the Chaos (Seth) between life 

and death. The architectural gesture reproduces that of the Creation as any construction is a projection 

of the universe, and for this reason, constantly repeated, it is a ritual gesture that can not come out of 

the order of the world. For the human, the architecture is a way of discovering the universe, a model of 

the universe that it projects in his own world. 

Among the symbols of the Center present in the architectural language would be: the forest, the 

cross-tree, the cave-mountain, the fire, the sky. The cave is the place inside the mountain, the cavity in 

the Center of the Earth, from where the human begins his journey into his interior. The cave marks the 

beginning of initiation, it is the symbol of the “outside darkness,” of the profane world where the 

novice once lived. This is where his ritual death takes place and his second birth due to the discovery of 

the “inner light” (Biciușcă, 2000, p. 33). Temples, church altars are symbols of the cave, because here it 

is the “inner world” that man purifies himself with God’s help. The spaces of the Church are 

materializations of the architecture symbols, of the center, of creation. The Orthodox Church with its 

consecutive spaces symbolizes: the forest (the narthex as the initiatory space), the cross (the sanctuary 

through which the vertical link is made), the cave that is the secret altar. The altar is the “point” which 

is equivalent to the Center of Creation which through the cross gains a transcendent meaning, and the 

whole church construction, that protects in its belly the Cave, symbolizes the sacred mountain, that is, 

Golgotha. 



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2. Culture as the Dimension of Globalization 

Located in the southeast part of the European continent, Romania has a marginal culture, and in Blaga’s 

terms, we would say a minor culture. But that does not mean that it is an inferior culture because 

“edges are more creative where cultures interfere” forming those cultures of interference. For a 

European, the West is not only a number of major cultures, but a “number of centers of the world 

cultural management” (Alexandrescu, 2000, p. 46). If we look at the modern culture, it has 

globalization at its center, and the cultural practices are at the center of globalization. The psychological 

consequence of globalization is that it “produces transformations of identity, namely of how people 

think about themselves in relation to the environment” (Arnett, 2002, p. 778). In order for the cultural 

globalization to be possible, it is necessary to modify even the people’s vision of existence, as from this 

vision the culture comes. The modern world is not an acceleration of the conditions previously existing 

in the pre-modern societies, but a rupture of the traditional world, which it seems to co-ordinate and 

destroy irreversibly; so it is born from discontinuity rather than a continuation of it. 

The biggest disadvantage that globalization implies is that it annihilates the very identity of the nations. 

For C. Ciopraga, the national identity means differentiation and, at the same time, a particular openness 

towards existence in which the collective consciousness is reflected; he sees in a people’s literature a 

collective self-portrait. For others, the myth defines the identity being the seed from which all aspects 

of reality organically derive the starting point of culture. The national specificity is the capital element 

that becomes the image of a particular people. The human is always a function of the culture in which 

he lives. A problem of our time is the adjustment of the archetypal binomial identity-alterity to the 

European context. The national unit is about to lose ground before a wider unified system, conceived 

on a continental scale. In this sense, the founding myths have a revolutionary function because they 

lead to a restructuring of the world. 

What was perceived as specific, characteristic of every nation is about to disappear, and all the existing 

cultures seem ready to reunite under the shield of a unique culture. The pluralistic model of science and 

culture has its origins in the Renaissance, but it reaches its climax in the Enlightenment. The Great 

European Romanians from Cantemir to T. Maiorescu, from T. Vianu to A. Pleşu, to A. Marino brought 

Europe home. We are the only ones who can not accept what we are offered, but be more selective, and 

so we can help stop the caricature of the Romanian culture and cultural value, as, even if it decides to 

integrate into a global reality, each nation must have the power to preserve its specificity, in one form 

or another. The return to the original forms, to myth and mystery, to ancestrality can save the modern, 

urbanized and alienated man from the mechanical existence in a civilized society. There will inevitably 

be a synchronization of all cultures on all levels, in an attempt to eliminate all previously existing 

discrepancies and contradictions. 

However, the cultural unification has to occur through the exchange of what is best and most useful in 

every culture. Our people “far from being one to seek their identity, to try to assert in all its ways to 

conquer abroad, rather understood to preserve its identity, and historically, it was not formed by 



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expansion but by contraction” (Noica, 1978, p. 154). If personality is, in general, a continuation and a 

form of universal energy, “the personality of the people is the structure of its psycho-physical energies; 

it is a strictly determined moment in the whole evolution of the nature” (Rădulescu-Motru, 1927, p. 

115). It is not by chance that the Romanian folklore was appreciated as a philosophy (in a 

proto-philosophical form) by which the “encyclopedia of the people’s soul” (Candrea, 2001, p. 111) 

transfigures an experience and gives birth to its own aspirations. The research of folklore, its 

valorisation has an important role in the designation and promotion of the Romanian values at a 

European level. Once recognized, the national value of the Romanian spirituality, it will be integrated 

with the European concept; an important role for intellectuals, culture, in this sense. 

 

3. Conclusions  

Drawing out only a few of the exegesis tendencies of the two myths, one of the main concerns was to 

see to what extent Mioriţa and Manole, the Artisan have a Romanian specificity, and which is that, in 

the conditions where themes and even similar narrative structures up to identity are fully found in the 

folklore of the neighboring peoples. As a whole, Mioriţa preserves rites of initiation that represent an 

ethnological cultural stage of almost all the peoples of the world, from Australia to North America. 

Mioriţa has multiple valences of interpretation and it is constituted in the matrix of our national 

specificity. Occupying a well defined place on the axis of the literary history, although on the exegetic 

plane it is the most controversial folkloric text, Mioriţa is also an encyclopedia of arts. The mioritic 

vision on the human condition was imposed and remains the “test stone” and the “keystone” of the 

Romanian philosophical anthropology in its historical continuity. In the case of Manole, the Artisan, 

Alecsandri himself signaled the Serbian ballads about the foundation of Scutari fortress. Then the 

Greek variants, grouped around the Arta bridge, the Aromanian variants, the Bulgarian ones, were 

signaled, and later, the area of the sacrifice theme as a price for the building proved to be more 

widespread than it was believed.  

Mioriţa and Manole, the Artisan, although they have the basis for valorizing death, they actually mean 

“a certain valorization of life”, for the presence of death “does not mean a pessimistic view of the 

world, a decrease of the vital flow”; the death of Mioriţa is a calm return “near to his relatives” the 

death from Manole, the Artisan is “creative” in it, “we identify a heroic and male conception of death” 

(Eliade, 2004, p. 6). Going beyond his being, he made “to last the opera, thus enrolling him in the order 

of perennial values. After the building of love, death is no longer for him but only the cosmic 

reintegration, as in Miorita” (Becleanu Iancu, 1980, p. 194). In both ballads “there is a conception 

derived perhaps from the Gets’ joy to die”; they “are elaborated around the idea of the creative death 

and the death accepted with serenity” (Eliade, 1995, p. 75). Death transfigured by sacrifice “acquires a 

heroic sense, as in the free Dacian ancestors who encountered death with warlike laughter, a Homeric 

laugh”. (Becleanu Iancu, n.d., p. 193) Eloquent in this sense would be the Merry Cemetery of Sapanta, 

where death is dissipated by the omnipotence of life. 



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Thanks to its exceptional qualities, which differentiate it, Miorita can be seen as a window to the 

Romanian culture, personality and reality that opens to the foreigners of the nation and language in 

order to know us. For us, the Romanians, it can be a viable pretext to recognize ourselves as a nation 

and spirituality, beliefs, history and ancient religion. The models transmitted by the archaic spirituality 

have not lost their ability to refresh themselves, being archetypal intuitions, ecumenical primordial 

visions that man revealed as soon as he became acquainted. The archaic spirituality, always thirsty by 

the ontic, continues to our day in the form of a “creative nostalgia for autonomous values: art, social 

mystic science, etc.” (Skok, 1929). We consider that by referring the two central Romanian myths to 

the specificity and value of the Romanian culture, we define by them the Romanian folk soul 

explaining the way of the Romanian being itself.  

 

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