Within the depth-psychology and history-of-religions corpus, the New Year does not function merely as a calendrical marker but as a charged threshold event encoding the full drama of cosmogonic renewal. Eliade is the dominant voice, arguing across both ‘The Myth of the Eternal Return’ and ‘The Sacred and the Profane’ that New Year ceremonials universally reactualize the primordial act of creation: time is abolished, chaos is restored, and the cosmos is reborn ab initio. The Babylonian akitu, the Persian Nawroz, and analogous rites among North American peoples all instantiate this archaic logic of temporal regeneration. Jane Ellen Harrison extends the analysis into Greek religious practice, identifying the eniautos-daimon — the spirit of the year — as the sacrificial engine driving seasonal festivals and the combat between old and new year as the kernel of Saturnalian and Kronian ritual. Victor Turner frames the same threshold in structural terms: communitas dissolves the old cycle, and sacrificial structure is reborn on the year’s first day. Burkert attends to the transitional tension between dissolution and new beginning in Athenian festival sequences. Across these authors, the New Year emerges as the ritual axis around which cosmogony, sacrifice, initiation, hierogamy, and the expulsion of demons all converge — a nexus where sacred time and profane time are most sharply distinguished.
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. We shall see that this rebirth is a birth, that the cosmos is reborn each year because, at every New Year, time begins ab initio.
Eliade argues that New Year marks the radical recommencement of cosmic time, functioning as an annual cosmogonic rebirth rather than a mere calendrical transition.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
The Nawroz, the Persian New Year, is at once the festival of Ahuramazda (celebrated on the day ‘Ormazd’ of the first month) and the day on which the Creation of the world and of man took place.
Through the Persian Nawroz, Eliade demonstrates that New Year ritual is structurally identical with the cosmogonic act, collapsing the festival day into the mythic moment of original creation.
, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis
during the last days of the year that was ending and the first days of the New Year, the Poem of Creation, the Enuma elish, was solemnly recited. This ritual recitation reactualized the combat between Marduk and the marine monster Tiamat.
Eliade reads the Babylonian akitu as the paradigmatic New Year ritual: the solemn recitation of the Enuma elish reactualizes primordial cosmogony, making creation present again at the year’s turning.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
It is on New Year’s day that Ishtar lies with Tammuz, and the king reproduces this mythical hierogamy by consummating ritual union with the goddess… The German Hochzeit is derived from HochgezU, New Year festival. Marriage regenerates the ‘year’ and consequently confers fecundity, wealth, and happiness.
Eliade connects the New Year hierogamy to cosmic regeneration, showing that ritual marriage — from Mesopotamian temple rites to the etymology of the German word for wedding — enacts the renewal of fertile time.
, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis
Almost everywhere the expulsion of demons, diseases, and sins coincides—or at one period coincided—with the festival of the New Year… on the occasion of the division of time into independent units, ‘years,’ we witness not only the
Eliade catalogues the universal convergence of purificatory rites — expulsion of demons, initiation ceremonies, rekindling of fire — at the New Year threshold, interpreting them as constituent elements of temporal abolition and renewal.
, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis
CHAPTER TWO THE REGENERATION OF TIME New Year, Cosmogony • Periodicity of the Creation • Continuous Regeneration of Time
Eliade’s chapter heading explicitly equates New Year with cosmogony and the periodicity of creation, framing the entire topic within his larger argument about the regeneration of time.
, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954supporting
Communitas is the solemn note on which the old year ends; structure, purified by communitas and nourished by the blood of sacrifice, is reborn on the first day of the new year.
Turner interprets the Ashanti New Year as a dialectical sequence in which communitas dissolves existing social structure, which is then ritually reconstituted — purified and sacrificially renewed — at the year’s inception.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
In Japan, as among the Germans (and among other Indo-European peoples), the last night of the year is marked by the appearance of funerary animals (horses, etc.), and of the chthonico-funerary gods and goddesses… This is one more confirmation of the archaic character of the New Year ceremonials.
Eliade marshals cross-cultural parallels between Japanese and Germanic New Year ceremonials — the visitation of the dead, masked processions, initiation rites — to argue for the archaic universality of the year-end cult complex.
, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954supporting
the akitu festival comprises a series of dramatic elements the intention of which is the abolition of past time, the restoration of primordial chaos, and the repetition of the cosmogonic act.
Eliade’s structural analysis of the Babylonian akitu reveals that the New Year festival systematically enacts chaos restoration and cosmogonic repetition through theatrical ritual elements.
, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954supporting
the single combat appears as the driving out of winter or of the dying year by the vigorous young spirit of the New Year that is to come. It is as eniautos-daimon, not at first as ‘incarnate god’ or as king in the later political sense, that the representative of the fertility powers of nature dies at the hands of the New Year.
Harrison identifies the combat of old and new year — mediated by the eniautos-daimon — as the essential ritual mechanism of Saturnalian and Kronian festivals, preceding and underlying the later mythology of incarnate kingship.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
He is the young Eniautos, the happy New Year. The four Horae are sufficiently explained by the two solstices and the two equinoxes.
Harrison interprets a small human figure on an archaic Acropolis relief as the personified New Year — the young eniautos — dancing among the Horae, linking the iconography of seasonal time directly to New Year’s renewal.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
The change from the old year to the new may be symbolised in various ways. We are familiar with the venerable Father Christmas on the verge of the grave, and with the New Year as an infant.
Harrison traces the iconographic symbolism of the dying old year and the newborn New Year through Greek and popular European tradition, finding it rooted in the figure of Sosipolis at Olympia.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
2.2 Year Ending and New Year
Burkert’s dedicated subsection ‘Year Ending and New Year’ in his account of Greek religion signals the structural importance of this threshold in the organization of the Greek sacrificial and festival calendar.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting
motifs of renewal of the world through rekindling of the fire at the winter solstice, a renewal that is equivalent to a new creation… during the twelve corresponding nights, the dead come in procession to visit their families.
Eliade connects the rekindling of fire at the winter solstice — equivalent to new creation — with the visitation of the dead and initiation rites, situating these within the broader ceremonial complex of the New Year.
, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954supporting
In the East Asian lunar calendar, spring begins on New Year’s Day… In a sense, New Year’s Day was everyone’s birthday. Spring and the new year come without discrimination even to humble homes.
Dōgen’s commentary contextualizes New Year within East Asian lunar tradition and Buddhist egalitarianism, presenting the festival as a moment of universal renewal that arrives without distinction of social rank.
, Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki, 1234aside
this ceremonial only the traces of a primitive agrarian festival… alimentation had a ritual meaning in all archaic societies; what we call ‘vital values’ was rather the expression of an ontology in biological terms.
Eliade cautions against reducing the New Year’s periodic salvation rite to a mere agrarian festival, insisting on its deeper ontological significance as the renewal of being itself.
, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954aside