The Myth of the Eternal Return

After the original 1949 publication of The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade wrote a foreword and a preface to reflect on the importance of the text and to make clarifications. In the Foreword, Eliade makes explicit his work’s basic theme as well its presumed audience. The Myth is not a technical book made for specialists in the history of religious ideas or philosophy. It is, rather, a text for the consideration of “cultivated man in general” (xxv). Eliade hopes this study of “archaic ontology” will be “instructive for our knowledge of man and for man’s history itself” (xxv). The thematic core of The Myth is the ontological framework of “archaic,” or traditional, humanity. An essential aspect of this framework is the “revolt against concrete, historical time” (xxiii). In Eliade’s view, this “revolt” is rooted in the “valorization” of the human being (xxiii). Later chapters will clarify these concepts.

In the 1958 Preface, Eliade briefly recounts the publication history of The Myth and the alternate titles he thought to give the essay. He restates the “essential theme” of the essay, which is “the image of himself formed by the man of the archaic societies and of the place that he assumes in the Cosmos” (xxvii). The value of this enterprise is in the revelatory contrast between archaic and modern perspectives, as the latter is developed by materialist, historicist, and Judeo-Christian influences. The myth of eternal return, which is integral to archaic identity, operates via models, or archetypes, of exemplary action. Humans act well when they emulate the archetypal gestures of the divines. Eliade clarifies that his use of the term archetype should not be confused with Carl Jung’s psychological concept. Nor, Eliade writes, should his use of “the myth of eternal return” be confused with Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical thought experiment. The preface ends with his reiteration that The Myth is his most important work (xxix).

Chapter 1 is divided into seven subsections. The first of these, “The Problem,” outlines the basic tasks of the book: “This book undertakes to study certain aspects of archaic ontology—more precisely, the conceptions of being and reality that can be read from the behavior of the man of the premodern societies” (3). Since archaic humanity did not write books of theoretical philosophy, understanding their relationship to existence requires an analysis of their behaviors and religious rituals. From these traditions, Eliade draws the conclusion that archaic humanity did not accept any intrinsic value to human actions unless those actions were integrally connected to a transcendental, divine reality. Meaningful action was essentially connected to a divine realm beyond contingent, everyday life. In conjunction with this distinction, Eliade posits the concepts of hierophany and theophany, terms for the earthly manifestations of divine reality and of deities, respectively. In order to institute hierophany, an archaic human acted in “imitation of a celestial archetype” (5). In other words, meaningful gestures required people to perform as divinities had once performed.

In the next section, “Celestial Archetypes of Territories, Temples, and Cities,” Eliade provides myriad examples to show how temples and entire cities were constructed to mirror their “celestial prototypes” (7). He draws on Iranian, Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Indian, and other sources for this claim. The temple is “pre-eminently sacred,” but even the city is often a reflection of the divine paradigm. The Babylonians, for instance, built their cities to correspond with celestial constellations. Even the settlement of a new territory was imbued with creative, sacred importance. The untrampled wilderness is made real when it is consecrated and settled: “Evidently, for the archaic mentality, reality manifests itself as force, effectiveness, and duration” (11). In other words, being is not imbued in material existence, but is a function of creative action. The most fundamental creative action is the original creation of the world by the divine archetypes. In sacred ritual, humans recreate this divine act. The construction of temples, cities, and settlements reinforces and articulates this belief structure.

In the next section, “The Symbolism of the Center,” Eliade shows how archaic ontology required deep connections between the celestial and the earthly. Therefore, archaic humanity needed central places for the realms of heaven and earth to intersect. The temple was one such place. The sacred mountain was another. These places, to the archaic imagination, were the center of activity and even the world: Reality flowed through them and out of them. The center had a place of “prestige” (12). Eliade cites Golgotha as the center of the world for some Christians, being the place of both Adam’s creation and Jesus’s crucifixion. Eliade writes that “[e]very Oriental city was situated at the center of the world” (14)—but these are not mathematical or geographical centers with any relationship to the actual nature of the earth. They are sacred places, central to a cosmic view of the world. Pilgrimages to the central temple, or to the city at the center of the earth, were extremely important. Eliade uses the Javanese temple of Borobudur as an example of the sacred value of a pilgrimage to the center: “Ascending it,” Eliade writes, “the pilgrim approaches the center of the world, and, on the highest terrace, breaks from one plane to another, transcending profane, heterogeneous space and entering a ‘pure region’” (15). In other words, this pilgrimage is not merely a physical journey to a place of symbolic importance; it is also, and more essentially, a journey from one plane of existence to another, higher plane.