The Myth of the Eternal Return

Archetypes are the paradigms, or exemplary models for the actions of archaic humanity during sacred rites. Archetypes were often the prototypes of ritual ceremony. The archetype was the original king, legislator, God, or other mythic figure who set the world into motion or who created something fundamental and true. Archaic humanity sought to emulate these original, archetypal creative actions. There may be different archetypal legends or divinities for different rites, whether that be the establishment of a temple, the settling of land, or the consummation of a marriage. Eliade explicitly states that he does not mean the archetypes of the collective unconscious, the psychoanalytic model popularized by Carl Jung; Eliade’s archetypes were not psychological entities structuring the mind but mythical deities structuring reality.

A hierophany is the manifestation of the divine in the earthly realm. It is the presence of living divinities on Earth. “Nature,” Eliade writes, “is a hierophany, and the ‘laws of nature’ are the revelation of the mode of existence of the divinity” (59). If nature itself is a hierophany, then it is a form of divine manifestation. The harvest is a hierophany, as is the new year, the building of a sacred temple, and so on. This means that, especially in times of sacred rite, the earth itself is present as divine (or, as Eliade also phrases it, imbued with being). Archaic rituals do not merely celebrate divine achievements: they recreate those achievements. They are thus meant as actual, not merely figurative or symbolic, acts of divine revelation. The entire system of archaic ontologies rests on the experience of hierophany.