Terror of History

Eliade’s name, in The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954), for the modern condition produced by the loss of archaic sacred time. Stripped of the horizon of eternal repetition and reduced to pure duration, historical time discloses itself as unbearable: “definitively desacralized, time presents itself as a precarious and evanescent duration, leading irremediably to death” (Eliade 1954).

The diagnosis is polemical. The historicist position — the twentieth-century consensus that the historical event is the real — is “a decomposition product of Christianity; it accords decisive importance to the historical event but to the historical event as such, that is, by denying it any possibility of revealing a transhistorical, soteriological intent” (Eliade 1954). Against this position Eliade mounts a defense of the archaic strategy: the “revolt against historical time, an attempt to restore this historical time, freighted as it is with human experience, to a place in the time that is cosmic, cyclical, and infinite” (ibid.). He reads the impulse back into the modernist literary imagination — the work of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, he argues, is “saturated with nostalgia for the myth of eternal repetition and, in the last analysis, for the abolition of time” (ibid.).

The concept is load-bearing for Seba because it names what the depth tradition is working against. When Jung reads alchemy for the structure of individuation, when Hillman reads myth for the architecture of soul, when Corbin reads Sufi theophany for the mundus imaginalis — each is refusing the historicist reduction of symbol to document. Eliade supplies the comparative-religious evidence that this refusal is the archaic human norm, and the diagnosis of what its loss costs the modern soul. The position stands in explicit contrasts_with to historical-psychology in the Giegerichian sense — where Eliade reads historicism as pathology, Giegerich reads history as psyche’s own medium. The graph records the disagreement without resolving it.

Relationships

Primary sources

eliade-myth-of-the-eternal-return (Eliade 1954)