The Sacred Is an Element in the Structure of Consciousness, Not a Stage in Its History

Eliade opens the first volume of his trilogy by restating the wager on which the whole history rests. Citing his own preface to The Quest, he holds that “the ‘sacred’ is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness,” and that on the most archaic levels of culture “to be—or, rather, to become—a man signifies being ‘religious.’” The consequence for prehistory is immediate. If the Paleanthropians were complete men, they possessed beliefs and practiced rites, and the burden of proof falls on whoever asserts their nonreligiosity — a thesis Eliade traces to the heyday of evolutionism rather than to the evidence. The opening chapter then reads the Paleolithic record for what it can still communicate. “The domestication of fire—that is, the possibility of producing, preserving, and transporting it—marks, we might say, the definitive separation of the Paleanthropians from their zoological predecessors.” Burials carry symbolic meaning; deposits of bones remain controversial; the rock paintings hover between images and symbols. The hunting economy generates the first religious relation the volume will track: a “mystical solidarity” between the hunter and his victims, revealed in the act of killing itself, since the shed blood is similar in every respect to human blood. Eliade is candid about the “opaqueness” of prehistoric documents — every document is spiritually opaque until integrated into a system of meanings — and the chapter’s discipline is to state what the worked stones permit and to mark precisely what they can no longer communicate.

Agriculture Is the Longest Revolution

The second chapter names the discovery of agriculture “the longest revolution,” and its argument is that the Neolithic precipitates a crisis in the values of the Paleolithic hunters. Religious relations with the animal world are supplanted by what Eliade calls “the mystical solidarity between man and vegetation. If the bone and the blood until then represented the essence and the sacrality of life, from then on it is the sperm and the blood that incarnate them.” Woman and feminine sacrality are raised to the first rank: because women domesticated the food plants, they become owners of the cultivated fields, and the fertility of the earth is bound up with feminine fecundity — women know the “mystery” of creation. The soil is assimilated to woman; after the discovery of the plow, agricultural work is assimilated to the sexual act. Out of the agrarian experience comes the mythical theme that, in Eliade’s account, will dominate the religions of the Near East for millennia: the god who dies and returns to life, the crises that threaten the harvest translated into mythological dramas. He flags the terminus of this scenario inside the Neolithic chapter itself — in certain cases these archaic scenarios give birth to new religious creations, Eleusis and the Greco-Oriental mysteries among them. The volume’s destination is set two hundred pages before it arrives.

Mesopotamia and Egypt Diverge on Death

The Mesopotamian chapter opens under the rubric “History begins at Sumer,” and its center of gravity is anthropological. In the Sumerian traditions man is created in order to serve the gods; the Enuma elish aggravates the condition by fashioning mankind from the blood of the archdemon Kingu, so that man is made from a demonic substance and, in Eliade’s phrase, seems already condemned by his own origin. Akkadian religious thought puts the accent on man, and the accent is somber: “Man was created mortal, and he was created solely to serve the gods.” The sovereigns, despite the hieros gamos with goddesses, remained mortals, and “it was never forgotten that even the fabled king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, failed in his attempt to gain immortality.” Egypt reverses the emphasis. Everything valid — temples, calendar, writing, rituals, royal emblems — was created during the “First Time,” the golden age “before anger, or noise, or conflict, or disorder made their appearance,” and the rites exist to reactualize that initial perfection against disorder. The pharaoh is an incarnate god with the responsibilities of one; Osiris, the murdered god, presides over a long “democratization” of the afterlife by which the postmortem hope of kings extends downward. Where Mesopotamia proclaims the precariousness of the human condition, Egypt organizes an entire civilization around crossing it.

The Covenant Is Not a Contract

The chapter Eliade titles “When Israel Was a Child” reads Genesis and Exodus as religious documents in the strict sense: the first two chapters of Genesis, paradise lost, the flood, the religion of the patriarchs. The decisive ritual is Abraham’s covenant sacrifice, sealed by a nocturnal theophany in which there appeared “a smoking furnace and a firebrand that went between the halves” of the divided animals. Eliade’s gloss carries the theological weight of the chapter: “This covenant is not a contract. God laid no obligation on Abraham: it is only he who engages himself.” At Sinai the pattern recurs at national scale — Yahweh descends on the mountain in fire and makes a covenant with the people, dictating the Laws of the Covenant beginning with the Decalogue. The monarchy is later interpreted as a new covenant between Yahweh and the dynasty of David, continuing Sinai; and when the prophets announce catastrophe, the hope that survives is a covenant renewed with the remnant, in Jeremiah’s words a Law planted deep within and written on hearts. The chapter’s throughline is a God who binds himself in history, to a people, by fire.

The Road Ends at Eleusis

The Greek chapters move from the theogony and the struggles between divine generations through the triumph of Zeus, Prometheus and Pandora, the Olympians and the heroes, and the religious meaning of the “joy of life,” before arriving at the sanctuary toward which the volume has been traveling. The Mysteries were celebrated at Eleusis for nearly two thousand years. The Hymn to Demeter relates the myth of the two goddesses and the founding of the rites: Persephone carried off by Hades, Demeter’s grief and disguise at Eleusis, the failed immortalization of Demophoön, and the secret rites taught only after mother and daughter are reunited. Through the initiation the human condition was modified — not into immortality, but in its postmortem prospect. “Happy he who has seen this before descending underground!” exclaims Pindar. “He knows the end of life! He also knows its beginning!” As a result of the things seen at Eleusis, Eliade writes, “the soul of the initiate will enjoy a blissful existence after death; it will not become the mournful fallen shade, without memory and strength, so feared by the Homeric heroes.” Beneath the rite he deciphers the archaic agrarian stratum: “The old mythico-ritual scenario, continued and developed by the Eleusinian Mysteries, proclaimed the mystical solidarity between the hieros gamos, violent death, agriculture, and the hope of a happy existence beyond the grave.” And he notes in the preface what the endpoint proves about method — very little is known about the Mysteries, yet the fascination they exercised over the best minds of Europe for more than twenty centuries is itself a religious fact; sometimes the importance of a religious creation is revealed by its later valorizations.

Volume 1 is the first panel of Eliade’s late summa, and it reads differently from the morphological works that made his reputation: where Patterns in Comparative Religion arranges hierophanies in a timeless grammar, the History dates, places, and connects them, with chapters on the megalith builders, Minoan Crete, the Hittites and Canaanites, Vedic and Upanishadic India, and Zarathustra filling out the arc summarized above. The trilogy continues in A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 2, from Gautama Buddha to the triumph of Christianity, and concludes in Volume 3. For the sanctuary where this volume ends, Kerényi’s Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter provides the archetypal counterpart to Eliade’s historical reading, and The Sacred and the Profane and The Myth of the Eternal Return state compactly the categories — hierophany, sacred space and time, the reactualization of origins — that this history deploys across eight millennia.