Cosmogonic Paradigm

Eliade’s principle that the cosmogonic myth — the story of the world’s creation — serves as the paradigmatic model for every subsequent act of making, healing, and founding. “The cosmogony serves as the paradigmatic model for every creation, for every kind of doing” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957).

The Vedic householder who builds a fire altar to Agni does not simply take possession of a territory; he repeats the creation of the world. The Babylonian priest who recites the Enuma elish at the New Year does not describe Marduk’s victory over Tiamat but performs it, renewing the cosmos in the act. The healer who recites the cosmogony over the sickbed returns the patient’s body to the “blank page of existence, the absolute beginning” — for “to be cured, the victim of an illness must be brought to a second birth, and the archetypal model of birth is the cosmogony” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957).

For the depth tradition, the cosmogonic paradigm supplies the structure behind carl-jung‘s claim that the Self’s self-renewal is experienced as a creatio continua: every genuine transformation of the psyche is, in its own register, a world-making. The archetype of the Creator is the archetype of the self.

Relationships

• sacred-time
• initiation
• archetype
• individuation

Primary sources

• eliade-sacred-and-profane (Eliade 1957)