The Myth of Eternal Return. Mircea Eliade. Harper Torchbooks, NY. 1954.
- In my Religious Studies undergrad days, Eliade was kind of the godfather of the discipline. His other famous works include The Sacred and the Profane, and Shamanism: Archaic Techniques in Ecstasy. He was of Romanian descent and taught at University of Chicago.
- This book is about the difference between sacred, ritual, cyclical, primordial, “ahistorical” time, and secular, commonplace, linear, modern, historical time. The underlying current here is that modern linear time is superficial, anxious, less real, and that the sacred, cyclical time that humans lived in for 99% of our evolution is where the real world is encountered, or where authentic experience can be had.
- Teofilo Ruiz wrote his book, The Terror of History, (the title borrowed from Eliade), fifty years later, and can be considered a sort of sequel to this one.
Common terms in this book:
Heirophany – Appearance of the sacred. Can be accessed by myths, which describe "breakthroughs of the sacred (or the 'supernatural') into the World;” or by rituals, which is an activity that intends to purposefully accesses the sacred.
Theophany – appearance of the gods or godhead
Cosmogony – origin story of the universe
Archetype – a divine/celestial model, a paradigm. this is not the same as the Jungian psychoanalytic term referring to the collective unconscious. Eliade’s sense seems more like a Platonic ideal, but particularly a godly or sacred one.
The Terror of History – the awareness that humans are stuck in an invented linear time, and the yearning to escape it to an eternal, sacred, cyclical, non-historical time. This is done through regularly immersing oneself within myth by enacting rituals and storytelling. In modern, secular terms, this is done with movies, sports, art…anything where our everyday sense of time and personal ego are “lost.”
Intro to 2005 Edition, Johnathan Z. Smith
(x) [this is] Eliade’s fierce polemic against a modernist faith in history as a progressive process.
(xiii) Eliade has persuasively documented in a number of ancient civilizations the presence of one sort of “archaic ontology” – one that conceives of the terrestrial realm as a copy of the celestial; one that claims that proper human praxis in all its modalities repeats the models provided by divine activities as displayed in myths; and that therefore values human creativity to the degree that it is imitative, rather than freely original.
- Did Plato borrow from them?
- Part of creating valid sacredness is claiming that the sacredness creates us
(xiv) An object or an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype. Thus, reality is acquired solely through repetition or participation; everything which lacks an exemplary model [archetype] is meaningless, ie lacks reality. In religious terms, this reality is equivalent to the sacred; meaninglessness to the profane.
- Eliade’s archetype is a celestial model, a divine example, not a culturally inherited idea or pattern of thought as in Jungian psychology.
- And Fanaticism is the vehicle by which we attempt to leave profane, linear time in favor of sacred, transcendent time
(xv) The chiefly Eurasion texts and traditions on which Eliade has focused are largely documents from urban, agricultural, hierarchical civilizations, the products of well organized scribal elites who had a deeply vested interest in structures of conformity, and in celebrating the status of the king as well as the temples on which their livelihood depended.
- Berman’s ‘vertical reality.’
(xvii) Eliade locates himself within a scholarly and theological tradition that views the Israelite religion as breaking with the mythic, cyclical view of the ancient Near Eastern religions and introducing in its place, a historical, lineal view of God intervening in history, irreversible, one-way time.”
(xix) From the perspective of ‘the paradise of archetypes and repetition,’ the faith of modern man in history and progress constitutes a ‘fall.’ It is an aberration within the general history of human kind, rather than history’s culmination.
Preface
(xxvii) The chief difference between the man of the archaic and traditional societies and the man of modern societies with their strong imprint of Judeo-Christianity lies in the fact that the former feels himself indissolubly connected with the Cosmos and the cosmic rhythms, whereas the latter insists that he is connected only to history.
Ch 1. Archetypes and Repetition
(5) [The life of primitive man is a] ceaseless repetition of gestures initiated by others [including, and perhaps especially, non-human others].
(5) The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality. The gesture acquires meaning, reality, solely to the extent to which it repeats a primordial act.
(9) The world that surrounds us [according to Platonic philosophy], the world in which the presence and the work of man are felt – the mountains that we climb, populated and cultivated regions, navigable rivers, cities, sanctuaries – all of these have an extraterrestrial archetype, be it conceived as a plan, as a form, or purely and simply as a ‘double’ existing on a higher cosmic level.
(10) Settlement in a new, unknown, uncultivated country is equivalent to an act of Creation. When the Scandinavian colonists took possession of Iceland, and began to cultivate it, they regarded this act neither as an original undertaking nor as a human or profane work. Their enterprise was for them only the repetition of a primordial act; the transformation of chaos into cosmos by the divine act of Creation.
- See Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (F Turner), Wilderness Lost: The Religious Origins of the American Mind (D Williams), or Perry Miller’s work for the American equivalent. There is an old book called New English Canaan. That phrase captures the mindset of the early colonist. Promised Land is land given by God, in order to turn chaos into cosmos, by the chosen people. Conquering new territory is a divine act of converting chaos into cosmos.
(34) The ‘primitive’ ontological conception: an object or an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype. Thus, reality is acquired solely through repetition or participation; everything which lacks an exemplary model is ‘meaningless,’ ie, it lacks reality.
(35) Insofar as an act (or an object) acquires certain reality through the repetition of certain paradigmatic gestures, and acquires it through that alone, there is an implicit abolition of profane time, of duration, of ‘history;’ and he who produces the exemplary gestures thus finds himself transported into the mystical epoch in which its revelation took place.
(35) The abolition of profane time and the individual’s projection into mythical time do not occur, of course, except at essential periods – those, that is, when the individual is truly himself: on the occasion of rituals or of important acts (alimentation, generation, ceremonies, hunting, fishing, war, work). The rest of life is passed in profane time, which is without meaning: in a state of becoming.
- Profane time = becoming. Sacred time = being.
(47) Archaic consciousness accords no importance to personal memories.
- Ie, “the Piraha think..” instead of “I think.” We instead of I. Don’t Sleep There are Snakes, Everett.
Ch 2. The Regeneration of Time
(52) This conception of a periodic creation, of the cyclical regeneration of time, poses the problem of the abolition of ‘history.’
(59) For ‘primitives,’ nature is a hierophany.
- That is, a ‘portal’ into the Sacred, into the Real.
(76) All rituals imitate a divine archetype and their continual reactualization takes place in one and the same atemporal mythical instant.
- Ritual is the purposeful intent to enter into mythical time, real reality.
(85) What we discover in all these rites and all these attitudes [of primitive culture] is the will to devaluate time. [as if to say] ‘if we pay no attention to it, time does not exist; furthermore, where it becomes perceptible, because of man’s ‘sins,’ ie, when man departs from the archetype and falls into duration – time can be annulled.”…Like the mystic, and like the religious man in general, the primitive lives in a continual present.
- or lives in a ‘blaze of reality,’ in Paul Radin’s words.
(90) It is even possible to say that nothing new happens in the world, for everything is but a repetition of the same primordial archetypes.
- Ie, like Parmenides
(91) In the primitive’s desire to have no ‘memory’ [except that in myths/stories], not to record time, and content with tolerating it simply as a dimension of his existence, but without ‘interiorizing’ it, without transforming it into consciousness, we see his thirst for the ‘ontic,’ his will to be, to be after the fashion of the archetypal beings whose gestures he constantly repeats.
Ch 3. Misfortune and History
(103) No military disaster seemed absurd, no suffering was in vain, for, beyond the event, it was always possible to perceive the will of Yahweh.
- Placating and projecting all negativity to some divine plan.
- Ie, any evil can be transformed into the carrying out of divine plans, whether conquering lands, or committing any kind of genocide, whether it be in North America, or in Hitler’s Poland.
Ch 4. The Terror of History
(145) ..the new conception of linear progress professed by Francis Bacon and Blaise Pascal…From the seventeenth century on, linearism and the progressivistic conception of history exert themselves more and more, inaugurating faith in an infinite progress.
- A simple case of secular ‘progress’ taking over the Christian ‘second coming’ linear time. In either case, in rests in a faith in something better coming soon, which most importantly involves a dismissal of the present as relatively unimportant. When you culturally separate from the cyclical rhythms of Nature, you no longer trust the present, physical world at hand, and you must invent a paradise that once existed in the past, and, in faith, will reappear in the future to true believers.
(151) We should wish to know, for example, how it would be possible to tolerate, and to justify, the sufferings and annihilation of so many peoples who suffer and are annihilated for the simple reason that their geographical situation sets them in the pathway of history; that they are neighbors of empires in a state of permanent expansion.
- Faith in progress and permanent expansion is how we tolerate mass violence. The invention of a God who demands territorial expansion is an act of sublimation. Our Ids, our animality, severs heads, enslaves the conquered, kidnaps children, commits genocide etc, and our egos reveal that it is the will of God to do such things. We are simply vessels of God’s will.
(158) Nature recovers only itself, whereas archaic man recovers the possibility of definitively transcending time and living in eternity.
(159) Whatever be the truth in respect to the freedom and the creative virtualities of historical man, it is certain that none of the historicistic philosophies is able to defend him from the terror of history.
- Creative Virtualities !!!
(160) Faith, in this context [Christian faith as in Mark 11], as in many others, means absolute emancipation from any kind of natural ‘law,’ and hence the highest freedom that man can imagine.
- Indeed, it is an imagined freedom
- Christian faith is the ultimate cop-out, and affords a false freedom from the terror of history.
(162) Christianity incontestably proves to be the religion of ‘fallen man’; and this to the extent to which modern man is irredeemably identified with history and progress, and to which history and progress are a fall, both implying the final abandonment of the paradise of archetypes and repetition.