The methodological criticisms of Eliade's axis mundi work noted in the main entry are inseparable, in the more recent scholarly literature, from a separate and more troubling line of inquiry into Eliade's own political history, and understanding why requires setting out what became known after his death.
Mircea Eliade was, in his youth in interwar Romania, an active supporter and public defender of the Iron Guard, a fascist and antisemitic ultranationalist movement, publishing articles praising its leaders before his later academic career in France and the United States; this history was known in fragments during his lifetime but was documented much more fully by later historians working from Romanian-language sources after his 1986 death removed any chance of his own response to the fuller record.
The scholarly consequence has been an ongoing reassessment of how far Eliade's theoretical commitments, including his treatment of "archaic" religious consciousness as possessing a lost wholeness modern, historically-conscious societies have fatally abandoned, and his preference for cyclical, myth-saturated worldviews over the linear historical consciousness he associated with Judaism and secular modernity, reflect the ideological commitments of his youth rather than functioning as neutral scholarship. Critics argue the preference for archaic wholeness echoes exactly the anti-modern, nostalgic and at points antisemitic cultural politics of interwar Romanian nationalism; defenders argue his mature work should be assessed on its own merits rather than assumed guilty by association, a debate that has changed how axis mundi and Eliade's other categories are now taught, typically alongside this history rather than as free-standing method.