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The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History
The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History
Eliade’s 1954 book is the structural diagnosis of archaic ontology and the polemic against modern historicism. Its argument runs in two movements. The first shows that for archaic cultures reality is constituted by repetition of the archetypal gestures accomplished in illo tempore; profane time is unreal time, sacred time is the eternal present that festival and ritual recover. “Since the New Year is a reactualization of the cosmogony, it implies starting time over again at its beginning” (Eliade 1954, p. 82, as cited in the 1957 Sacred and the Profane). The second movement diagnoses the modern condition: stripped of the archetypal horizon, “definitively desacralized, time presents itself as a precarious and evanescent duration, leading irremediably to death” (Eliade 1954).
The book names this modern condition the terror-of-history. Eliade reads in the historicist philosophies of the twentieth century — and, by extension, in the existentialism of his contemporaries — “a decomposition product of Christianity” (Eliade 1954) that accords decisive importance to the historical event while “denying it any possibility of revealing a transhistorical, soteriological intent.” The archaic strategy of the eternal return is offered not as regression but as diagnosis: what the modern has lost is the mechanism by which existence becomes contemporary with the gods.
The work is load-bearing for Seba because it names the register in which the depth tradition speaks. When carl-jung reads alchemy and james-hillman reads myth, they both reject the historicist reduction of symbol to document. Eliade supplies the comparative-religious proof that this rejection is the archaic human norm, not a modern eccentricity.