The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History by Mircea Eliade

Author:Mircea Eliade
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Mythology, Psychology, 20th Century, v.5, Amazon.com, Retail, Social Sciences
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1949-01-02T15:00:00+00:00

In the “lunar perspective,” the death of the individual and the periodic death of humanity are necessary, even as the three days of darkness preceding the “rebirth” of the moon are necessary. The death of the individual and the death of humanity are alike necessary for their regeneration. 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; in other words, it must return to “chaos” (on the cosmic plane), to “orgy” (on the social plane), to “darkness” (for seed), to “water” (baptism on the human plane, Atlantis on the plane of history, and so on).

We may note that what predominates in all these cosmico-mythological lunar conceptions is the cyclical re currence of what has been before, in a word, eternal return. Here we again find the motif of the repetition of an archetypal gesture, projected upon all planes-cosmic, biological, historical, human. But we also discover the cyclical structure of time, which is regenerated at each new “birth” on whatever plane. This eternal return reveals an ontology uncontaminated by time and becoming. Just as the Greeks, in their myth of eternal return, sought to satisfy their metaphysical thirst for the “ontic” and the static (for, from the point of view of the infinite, the becoming of things that perpetually revert to the same state is, as a result, implicitly annulled and it can even be affirmed that “the world stands still”),”’ even so the primitive, by conferring a cyclic direction upon time, annuls its irreversibility. Everything begins over again at its commencement every instant. The past is but a prefiguration of the future. No event is irreversible and no transformation is final. In a certain sense, it is even possible to say that nothing new happens in the world, for everything is but the repetition of the same primordial archetypes; this repetition, by actualizing the mythical moment when the archetypal gesture was revealed, constantly maintains the world in the same auroral instant of the beginnings. Time but makes possible the appearance and existence of things. It has no final influence upon their existence, since it is itself constantly regenerated.

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