The Myth of the Eternal Return

“The chief difference between the man of the archaic and traditional societies and the man of the modern societies with their strong imprint of Judeo-Christianity lies in the fact that the former feels himself indissolubly connected with the Cosmos and the cosmic rhythms, whereas the latter insists that he is connected only with History.” 

Eliade introduces an essential distinction between two contrasting people: archaic and modern humanity. For the archaic individual, there was a fundamental connection between their humanity and the natural world, the cosmos in its entirety. Truth resided in the establishment and reinvigoration of this connection. For modernity, though, the individual is alienated from the cosmos and is, instead, embedded in a historical progression. 

“If we observe the general behavior of archaic man, we are struck by the following fact: neither the objects of the external world nor human acts, properly speaking, have any autonomous intrinsic value. Objects or acts acquire a value, and in so doing become real, because they participate, after one fashion or another, in a reality that transcends them.”

For the archaic individual, the value of any object or act derives from its connection to the transcendent. The value of an object is not intrinsic to it but instilled through its connection to the beyond; in other words, meaning exists solely within a field of relational tension between immanent and transcendent. The archaic ontology therefore has a nascent structure of analogy.

“Every territory occupied for the purpose of being inhabited or utilized as Lebensraum is first of all transformed from chaos into cosmos; that is, through the effect of ritual it is given a ‘form’ which makes it become real. Evidently, for the archaic mentality, reality manifests itself as force, effectiveness, and duration. Hence the outstanding reality is the sacred; for only the sacred is in an absolute fashion, acts effectively, creates things and makes them endure.”

On Eliade’s account, an archaic human granted “reality” to something if that thing acquired form through active creation. Reality is given to something that is made, not something that simply is. Occupying a territory was a form of instituting reality, of making something real and therefore sacred.

“For Christians, Golgotha was situated at the center of the world, since it was the summit of the cosmic mountain and at the same time the place where Adam had been created and buried. Thus the blood of the Saviour falls upon Adam’s skull, buried precisely at the foot of the Cross, and redeems him. The belief that Golgotha is situated at the center of the world is preserved in the folklore of the Eastern Christians.”

Eliade shows how a particular Christian myth, one that may be more familiar to his readership than most of the material he discusses, fits nicely into his theory of archaic sacred belief. Mountains are amongst the kinds of places commonly designated as the center of the world, and this center is seen as the place of initial creation. As such, it is of special import.

“The Road is arduous, fraught with perils, because it is, in fact, a rite of the passage from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life, from man to the divinity. Attaining the center is equivalent to a consecration, an initiation.”

The center of the world is the place of absolute, sacred reality. The path of the hero to this center is a difficult, perilous one that must establish the worthiness of the individual striving for the truth. It is, figuratively and literally, the path of creation, toward the well-spring of life. This schema conveys a principle of the archetypal hero’s journey (articulated in scholarship beyond Eliade’s): The journey makes the hero worthy of the destination.

“Humility is only a virtue; but humility practice after the Saviour’s example is a religious act and a means of salvation: ‘...as I have loved you, that ye also love one another’ (John 13 : 34; 15 : 12). This Christian love is consecrated by the example of Jesus. Its actual practice annuls the sin of the human condition and makes man divine.”

Here Eliade makes a distinction between everyday virtue (of the profane world) and the sacred religious act that extends beyond the threshold of normal virtue. In the Christian world, Jesus is exemplary as a person who transcended normal human virtue and was divine through transcendent love.

“It is interesting to observe that the state of beatitude itself, eudaimonia, is an imitation of the divine condition, not to mention the various kinds of enthousiasmos created in the soul of man by the repetition of certain acts realized by the gods in illo tempore.”

Eliade frequently makes use of Latin and Greek terminology to specify his claims. In this case, eudaimonia refers to a state of human flourishing or excellence. This state is approximated when one acts in the image of the divine, transcending normal human virtue. From the Greek term enthousiasmos we derive the English enthusiasm. In its archaic usage, it meant more than mere excitement and referred to a religious ecstasy in which God (or some divinity) was present within one’s soul.

“Leaving aside the conceptions of the transformation of the dead into ‘ancestors,’ and regarding the fact of death as a concluding of the ‘history’ of the individual, it still seems very natural that the post-mortem memory of that history should be limited or, in other words, that the memory of passions, of events, of all that is connected with the individual strictly speaking, comes to an end at a certain moment of his existence after death.”

Eliade forms a connection between an individual’s life, death, and the end of personal history. This connection will be crucial in the ontology he later elaborates. The existence of the individual after death is disconnected from the events and experiences that constituted their unique life. They will eventually pass out of time and into the realm of myth.

“And this is the meaning of ritual purifications: a combustion, an annulling of the sins and faults of the individual and those of the community as a whole—not a mere ‘purifying.’ Regeneration, as its name indicates, is a new birth.”

Eliade distinguishes “mere” purification from wholesale regeneration. During rituals of regeneration, the archaic person is not merely cleansed of sin but completely reborn, stripped of connection to former deeds and misdeeds. This distinction, in turn, derives from the fundamental distinction between the sacred and the profane. To understand such rituals, one must approach them from the perspective of the sacred.

“We have seen that all rituals imitate a divine archetype and that their continual actualization takes place in one and the same atemporal mythical instant. However, the construction rites show us something beyond this: imitation, hence actualization, of the cosmogony. A ‘new era’ opens with the building of every house. Every construction is an absolute beginning; that is, tends to restore the initial instant, the plenitude of a present that contains no trace of history.”

Cosmogony is the field of study concerned with the origins of the world. Archaic peoples were very much interested in mythical cosmogonies, or creation myths, and patterned their own creations after the original. Temples and houses are consecrated as creations, but these creations are not simply something new—they are instances of restoring the initial beginning of something. Such consecration marks a “mythical instant.”

“Any form whatever, by the mere fact that it exists as such and endures, necessarily loses vigor and becomes worn; to recover vigor, it must be reabsorbed into the formless if only for an instant; it must be restored to the primordial unity from which it issued.”

With time and age, the purity and endurance of something wears away. It becomes less than it once was. Ancient myths often refer to bygone ages greatly superior to the present age, as golden ages. For the once-decadent, now-diminished thing to regain brilliance and novelty, it must first return to nonexistence before being restored.

“It is the profound meaning of primitive behavior that is revelatory; this behavior is governed by belief in an absolute reality opposed to the profane world of ‘unrealities’; in the last analysis, the latter does not constitute a ‘world,’ properly speaking; it is the ‘unreal’ par excellence, the uncreated, the nonexistent; the void.”

This doctrine is at the center of Eliade’s theory regarding the difference in ancient and modern ontology. Archaic ontology divides the world into the sacred and the profane. Because it was not created, the profane does not properly exist. The value of the study of “primitive behavior” is in the depth and difference of their view of the world. 

“Living in conformity with the archetypes amounted to respecting the ‘law,’ since the law was only a primordial hierophany, the revelation in illo tempore of the norms of existence, a disclosure by a divinity or a mystical being.”

Hierophany is the manifestation of the world’s divinity. It is the living presence of the sacred. According to Eliade, for archaic humanity, hierrophanies “disclose,” or reveal, the true, sacred dimension of reality. Ethical action, on this view, means obeying archetypal law, or, in other words, doing what the divine would do. It requires a fundamental heroism.

“Against this suffering, the primitive struggles with all the magico-religious means available to him—but he tolerates it morally because it is not absurd. The critical moment of the suffering lies in its appearance; suffering is perturbing only insofar as its cause remains undiscovered.” 

Eliade again works through an essential distinction between the tolerance for suffering in archaic psychology and the absurdist despair of much modern existentialist psychology. Whereas modern humanity has a diminished (if not altogether absent) sense of the sacred, archaic humanity is engulfed in the sacred as the core of reality. Because of this, archaic humanity could tolerate affliction without finding it absurd. They still suffered tremendously, but the suffering had value within a narrative of transcendence. 

“But, for the first time, we find affirmed, and increasingly accepted, the idea that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined by the will of God. This God of the Jewish people is no longer an Oriental divinity, creator of archetypal gestures, but a personality who ceaselessly intervenes in history, who reveals his will through events.”

Eliade posits that Jewish theology presents a new orientation to history and, therefore, to the spiritual position of humanity in the cosmos. Whereas archaic humanity took God to be a creator whose acts were to be infinitely repeated, and emulated in sacred rituals, the God of the Jews “intervenes in history,” which continuously updates his will.

“How has man tolerated history? The answer is discernible in each individual system: His very place in the cosmic cycle—whether the cycle be capable of repetition or not—lays upon man a certain historical destiny.”

Regardless of whether the archaic individual subscribed to the myth of eternal return, or whether they instead held a Judeo-Christian mythology, history was tolerable through a sense of destiny. In other words, history became tolerable because of its inherent meaningfulness, either because of a saving power that would overcome the suffering of the past or because that suffering was situated within a cosmological order. For modern humanity, by contrast, history may be intolerable because suffering seems absurd.

“Just as, in the Indian view, every man of the Kali Yuga is stimulated to seek his freedom and spiritual beatitude, yet at the same time cannot avoid the final dissolution of this crepuscular world in its entirety, so, in the view of the various systems to which we have referred, the historical moment, despite the possibilities of escape it offers contemporaries, can never, in its entirety, be anything but tragic, pathetic, unjust, chaotic, as any moment that heralds the final catastrophe must be.”

The Kali Yuga is a period in Indian cosmology defined by the degeneration of virtue, lifespan, and enlightenment. It is a period of social and religious darkness. Similar ideas exist in many other cosmologies around the globe. Despite the darkness of the epoch, or yuga, it is still possible for particular individuals to transcend their situation. 

“An Albert Magnus, a St. Thomas, a Roger Bacon, a Dante, and many others believe that the cycles and periodicities of the world’s history are governed by the influence of the stars, whether this influence obeys the will of God as is his instrument in history or whether—a hypothesis that gains increasing adherence—it is regarded as a force immanent in the cosmos.”

By noting all these acclaimed medieval scholars, Eliade clarifies that the myth of eternal return was prevalent up to the outset of the Modern Era, when it was finally (largely) eclipsed by history. The idea of cyclical repetition remained even as the sense of its numinousness faded. In other words, it became more common to think that repetition was inherent to the material nature of the cosmos, not an act of divine creation. Still, both are different from the linear, non-repetitive few of the Modern Era.

“The terror of history becomes more and more intolerable from the viewpoints afforded by the various historicistic philosophies. For in them, of course, every historical event finds its full and only meaning in its realization alone.”

Eliade is deeply concerned with the “terror of history.” History, he believes, is terrible because of the meaningless onslaught of human suffering. This suffering has no sacred meaning except through the realization of some great, future event. 

“And in our day, when historical pressure no longer allows any escape, how can man tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history—from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings—if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning; if they are only the blind play of economic, social, or political forces, or, even worse, only the result of the ‘liberties’ that a minority takes and exercises directly on the state of universal history?”

Eliade asks a challenging, rhetorical question. His proposed answer is, simply, that a person cannot tolerate this situation, which is why humanity is consumed with anxiety and dread. Social and historical forces exercised by a few powerful people can have terrible consequences for multitudes. Eliade believes that the historical, modern perspective can offer little solace for this unfortunate circumstance. 

“In our opinion only one fact counts: by virtue of this view, tens of millions of men were able, for century after century, to endure great historical pressures without despairing, without committing suicide or falling into that spiritual aridity that always brings with it a relativistic or nihilistic view of history.”

Eliade’s defense of archaic views of religion, spirituality, and cosmology rests on their practicality. He claims that, because of their governing philosophies, archaic peoples did not despair in times of extreme hardship. He also claims the same cannot be said of modern humanity. If this were truly the case, then these archaic ways of thinking would be instructive and useful regardless of whether they are truer than historical views—and such usefulness would make the study of eternal return a valid pursuit. Eliade sees the pursuit as not only valid but ethically imperative.

“The ‘freedom’ that historical existence implies was possible—and even then within certain limits—at the beginning of the modern period, but it tends to become inaccessible as the period becomes more historical, by which we mean more alien from any transhistorical model.”

According to Eliade, at the outset of the Modern Era, the historical perspective seemed more sensible than it does in his contemporary 20th century. The further history progresses, the more it detaches from any transhistorical standard (that is, any standard beyond history itself). It advances according to only its own logic, which becomes increasingly isolated from the human freedom it was intended to buttress.

“Only, the East does not accept the destiny of the human being as final and irreducible. Oriental techniques attempt above all to annul or transcend the human condition. In this respect, it is justifiable to speak not only of freedom (in the positive sense) or deliverance (in the negative sense) but actually of creation; for what is involved is creating a new man and creating him on a suprahuman plane, a man-god, such as the imagination of historical man has never dreamed it possible to create.” 

Eliade believes that the East, by which he means East Asia, is the only remaining place where one can escape from the historical perspective. Eastern religions and philosophies are still oriented toward transcendence and the creative capacity of individual human beings. For this reason, believes Eliade, these practices should be studied and appreciated.