The Myth of the Eternal Return

In the next two sections, “Periodicity of Creation” and “Continuous Regeneration of Time,” Eliade builds on the themes developed in his discussion of new year’s festivities. In the former, Eliade describes a number of ancient (and occasionally modern) practices that attempt the suspension and reconstitution of time. One of these practices is the communication with the dead, which happens in a period between the end of one year and the start of another. In a different, modern form, this was also embodied in the ghost-dance religion, “a mystical movement which seized upon the North American tribes toward the end of the nineteenth century” (73). Through extended attempts at communication with the dead, this modern religion attempted to hasten the apocalypse, which would be followed by a new, paradisal earth. This kind of ritual—because it is based on time’s progression, and because it seeks the “end of time” and a future fulfillment (73)—prefigures the modern philosophy of history. In the ancient necromantic rites, rituals intended not to hasten time but suspend it. The profane realm was forgotten for a time before its regeneration. Other common rites associated with the regeneration of time include marriages, orgies, ritual combats, the rekindling of extinguished fires, and initiation ceremonies. In a sense, each of these is concerned with reclaiming a lost innocent.

In the final section, Eliade focuses on a key distinction that reiterates the breakage in time from one era to another. He observes that, in many archaic rituals, there is the tacit idea “that life cannot be restored but only re-created” (81). “Cosmic time,” which is opposed to continuous, profane time, is something constructed through ritual act, mythic creation, and the conceptualization of new eras. A new era, which is the sacred recreation of time, can begin at many moments, be it the new reign of a king, the establishment of new territories, marriages, births, and “curative rituals” (81). Curative rituals aim at the health and healing of a person, whether the affliction is a darkened heart or a physical ailment. Due to the ritual, the person is not merely restored to health but born anew.

The upshot, by this point in the text, is the full-scale ritual orientation of archaic peoples toward the recreation of themselves and their world in the image of divine creation. One may wonder why people would be so concerned with such action. This is Eliade’s general conclusion on the basis of these archaic behavioral patterns:

We refer to archaic man’s refusal to accept himself as a historical being, his refusal to grant value to memory and hence to the unusual events (i.e., events without an archetypal model) that in fact constitute concrete duration. In the last analysis, what we discover in all these rites and all these attitudes is the will to devaluate time (85).

Eliade has not yet extensively delved into psychological reasons for this refusal or devaluation, though the question of psychological motivation is crucial. However, there is a pertinent, implicit commentary in his claim that “this behavior corresponds to a desperate effort not to lose contact with being” (92). For philosophers of history—like Hegel, whom Eliade discusses at some length—archaic humanity lost themselves in their dependence on eternal recurrence and the subservience of their individual lives to mythic identities. Eliade’s interpretation challenges this. Instead, the archaic person discovers themselves through a constant relationship to the heart of being, through an immediate connection to primal reality. The cosmology, and its corresponding practices of sacred ritual, are expressions of a deep drive to remain in continuous connection with that which is most fundamental. In doing so, archaic humanity “constantly maintains the world in the same auroral instant of the beginnings” (90), and, as he writes in the next chapter, “it means living at the heart of the real” (95). Eliade’s vision of archaic ontology is diametrically opposed to the caricature painted by philosophers like Hegel.