Illud Tempus

The Latin phrase — in illo tempore, “in that time” — Eliade’s technical name for the time of origins: the mythical when in which the gods or ancestral heroes accomplished the paradigmatic gestures that every subsequent ritual repeats. It is not a historical time. It is the time before time, the eternal present from which all sacred time descends.

“In illo tempore the gods had displayed their greatest powers. The cosmogony is the supreme divine manifestation, the paradigmatic act of strength, superabundance, and creativity. 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).

Every festival is an ingress back into illud tempus. “The festival is not merely the commemoration of a mythical event; it reactualizes the event” (ibid.). The participants do not remember; they become contemporary with the gods.

Christianity, Eliade argues, revalues the phrase. “The illud tempus evoked by the Gospels is a clearly defined historical time — the time in which Pontius Pilate was Governor of Judaea — but it was sanctified by the presence of Christ. When a Christian of our day participates in liturgical time, he recovers the illud tempus in which Christ lived, suffered, and rose again — but it is no longer a mythical time, it is the time when Pontius Pilate governed Judaea” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). The liturgical illud tempus is historical and archetypal at once; this is the innovation that distinguishes Christian sacred time from archaic sacred time while preserving the structure.

For Seba, illud tempus is the technical anchor of sacred-time — the name for what ritual recovers and what the profane condition has lost.

Relationships

• sacred-time
• eternal-return
• cosmogonic-paradigm
• hierophany
• anamnesis

Primary sources

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