Eternal Return

The doctrine, named by Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954), that for archaic religious consciousness reality is constituted not by novelty but by repetition. What is real is what repeats the archetypal gestures accomplished by the gods or mythical ancestors in illo tempore, in the time of origins. Profane time — duration in which nothing repeats — is unreal time. Sacred time is the eternal present that ritual reactualization recovers.

“The cosmos is conceived as a living unity that is born, develops, and dies on the last day of the year, to be reborn on New Year’s Day… the cosmos is reborn each year because, at every New Year, time begins ab initio” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). The festival is not commemorative. The participants “emerge from their historical time… and recover primordial time, which is always the same, which belongs to eternity” (ibid.).

The doctrine is Eliade’s most polemical construct. Against the twentieth-century consensus that the historical event is the real, Eliade argues that the archaic refusal of history was a technique for making existence bearable — a wager that “religious man thirsts for the real. By every means at his disposal, he seeks to reside at the very source of primordial reality, when the world was in statu nascendi” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). Its correlate and diagnostic complement is the terror-of-history — the modern condition that the loss of this wager produces.

For Seba, eternal return is the archaic register of what Jung calls the archetype and what Plato calls the Form. Each names, in its own vocabulary, the reality that repetition discloses; each opposes the position that only the unique event is real.

Relationships

• illud-tempus
• sacred-time
• terror-of-history
• cosmogonic-paradigm
• anamnesis

Primary sources

• eliade-myth-of-the-eternal-return (Eliade 1954)
• eliade-sacred-and-profane (Eliade 1957)