Customer Reviews

The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History

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I was inspired by the icredible insight and interesting acedemic thought in this book -- it's hard to beleive that it was written over fourty years ago. The struggle with "the terror of history" and the horror of linear time is something that many of us still struggle with today.

As a student of literature, I found this book particularly helpful in studying the moderns, such as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, who, as Eliade mentions, both express a longing to return to the cyclical. As a mythology-lover I found that this book gave me a new perspective on the study of myth -- which I feel is still important if we are to understand the primitive depths of our own minds.

This book was written in 1949. In the Preface he says that he considers it his most important work. I think not; I think he was being disingenuous or modest and was concerned about "history," the book having been written only 4 years after WWII. Nevertheless I think it is an important work of his and probably the best to read for an introduction to his thought, which is still surprisingly fresh after more than 50 years.

This is a short book, only 162 pages. Each page, however, is packed with ideas and meaning. Eliade tries to show the differences between what he calls "archaic" or "traditional" man and the man of modern societies, primarily Western; those being that archaic man's behavior is governed by myths and archetypes and a cyclical, or cosmic, view of time, whereas modern man, for the most part, is governed only by himself and his own ability to "make" history, and therefore has a linear, or historical, view of time, a position that is without any "transcendant" models, myths, or archetypes. He also attempts to show the emptiness of various historicisic philosphies, such as those by Dilthey, Heidegger, Croce, Gasset. I think Eliade is still worth hearing, and in fact was one of the great minds and encyclopediasts of the 20th century. If the reader is interested in myth, the philosophy of history, phenomenology, ethnology, and theology, or even just the idea of transhistorical ideas or meaning in life, Eliade is a must read. "The Myth of the Eternal Return" is a good starting point for Eliade, followed by "The Sacred and The Profane."

This little book has managed to influence all discussions about Time not only in religion, but also in psychology (see Norman O. Brown's "Life against Death"), the natural sciences(see Gould's "Time's Arrow"), literary criticism (see Camille Paglia) etc. Eliade's insights into Time are now so pervasive that it becomes de rigueur for this book to be read and relished not just by the scholars of religion, but also by those aspiring to a broader education. Do not be deceived, however, by the book's apparent simplicity; it is only a measure of Eliade's genius that profound insights are offered with the elegance of a true artist.

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I'm in awe over this book! It's a larger lens, a higher mountain to see religious and historical thought. Really, I am amazed at this book. 50 years after it is written and I've read hundreds of books and here I am dumb founded. Read some of the other amazon.com reviews here (some are excellent) and now I am adding to them.

Eliade relates two main types of persons. The archaic man and the modern. The archaic models his life on archetypes, similiar to Plato's "world of ideas," forsaking history in favor of such. He repeatedly and continually destroys all history and recreates himself in a new beginning. He does this by entering a timeless realm Eliade calls the illo tempore, a timeless and numinous death and rebirth, which he bases on cyclic events of some type.

The modern man negates all of this in favor of historicity. He measures all history and time, or the profane time, and bases his entire life on the meaning of such in present existence and all future decision making. However, without the archaic man's non-historical regenerative abilities to recreate himself in such timelessness, or in the sacred, in imitation of archetypes, the modern historical man faces extreme existential despair. But what saves the modern man from suicide and utter meaninglessness in relativism and nihilism; he joins to his historical self, either religious faith, cyclic theories, mysticism, science and philosophy.

Hegel suggests history (and all the evil in history) is never repeated and necessary for the evolution to higher ends. Only persons like Belinsky or Dostoeyski have resisted but weakly in that. Marx had made a science of history as the results of the class struggle, which ultimately fails and leaves us in our existential relativity.

So remedies are created to coincide with historical measurement, as in Nietzsche's Eternal Return,although cyclic in nature is not the Eternal Return of the Archaic man who regenerations a new beginning, but rather that of the Greek Heraclitus and Pythagorean thoughts, are the cyclic meanings needed to live a life of measured time and history apart from the archaic regenerative man of archetype models and rebirth into new beginnings. The same holds true for Oswald Spenglers biological conception of history and Heidegger's idea of historicity transcending all are what modern man must attach to his linear historical measurement.

While monotheism, the first to measure history and time encounters the timelessness of the illo tempore in the beginning of creation and in the "end" of the world or in Christianity in the second coming of the messiah. Unlike the archaic man who enters the new creation each and every time he recreates both himself and his world.

Eliade suggests that perhaps mankind will one day return to the archaic man of regeneration in repetition of rituals and meaning to cease measuring this time and enter in the timelessness, letting go of history and entering in the illo tempore.

(Archetype Non-Historical Regeneration Man)
The wind blows - but - gets continually reborn; or,
(Historical Man with Religious Faith)
Cling to your dusty mirror and hold God's hand.
(Historical Man without Religious Faith)
Or the mirror without dust would destroy the world.

And to sum it up, Archaic man had no history, repeated archetype models, destroying his past (all history) and recreating the beginning of time each year in a mystical, timeless moment in the illo tempore, all history erased. While modern man relies on history and profane time and gains either science, philosophy or religious faith to prevent him from dying in existential despair.

Now I'm reading this great book entitled, When Science Meets Religion, by Ian G. Barbour and reading of those with religious faith who conform the uncertainties of quantum physics with a God who controls such acausual events. Seeing this through Eliade's lens, I see this as an historical man's attempt to join religious faith to his history and science in order to prevent him from existential despair in the terror of history. For the archaic man none of this is needed, as he will erase all history, re-creating the beginning of time reborn in the timeless moment of illo tempore, not of some future time but of the present.

And while the modern man has history and faith, he also forms minority governments to control, organized and maintains his linear history. The majority are followers, freedom is seriously limited. The archaic man has complete freedom as each time cycle or year, to erase all history, to enter in the timeless moment of the archetype of illo tempore and re-create himself and his world.

I can't say enough for this book, this only a summary of a higher mountain to see humanity.

I cannot add to any of the other excellent synopses of the contents of this seminal work. The ideas are fascinating and the perspective unique. The concepts under discussion are sophisticated, but elegant, and the work is certainly written for thinking persons who are given to pondering unanswerables.

Here is where I diverge from the other readers' sparkling reviews: this is the most laborious, bombastic, convoluted text, more given to flamboyant language structure--and leaving content to languish under the suffocation of verbiage--than any book I have ever read.

Be prepared for the most archaic of words, the least succinct of summations, and the most roundabout explanations of what are already intricate interrelationships in a complex system. Although I have never seen, nor could read, the original text, the translators do no favors for the reader, and, I fear, a great disservice to Mr. Eliade's intent in the interest of being faithful to the original.

I hope that one day a more accessible translation will be available.

Somewhere on the cover, or in the preface, or even in the introductions to other of his many profound works in the field of comparative religious studies, one will find Eliade's famous counsel: "I consider it the most significant of my books; and when asked in what order they should be read, I always recommend beginning with The Myth of the Eternal Return." One of the enduring monuments of twentieth century academic writing, The Myth of the Eternal Return expounds Eliade's seminal ruminations on the advent of the nuclear, or post-modern era - the naissance of our capacity for apocalyptic self-annihilation - an attempt to demonstrate in analyzable terms the relation between the foundations of the contemporary psyche to the seemingly adventitious madness which actively anticipates (and even militates in favor of) an end-time, an Armageddon, a Judgment Day, if you will. Eliade thus asks the arch-question: "What can protect us from the terror of history?"
The discussion is framed within a comparison between what Eliade deems as the distinctive difference between the ancient and modern, the archaic (or primitive) and contemporary world-view. The modern envisions reality as a series of events which fulminate in a linear, progressive history - a history which had a beginning and will have an end. The ancient experiences reality as an endless, cyclic repetition of primordial acts. "... the life of archaic man (a life reduced to the repetition of archetypal acts, that is, to categories and not to events, to the unceasing rehearsal of the same primordial myths) although it takes place in time, does not bear the burden of time, does not record time's irreversibility; in other words, completely ignores what is especially characteristic and decisive in a consciousness of time. Like the mystic, like the religious man in general, the primitive lives in a continual present. (And it is in this sense that the religious man may be said to be a `primitive'; he repeats the gestures of another and, through this repetition, lives always in an atemporal present.)"
Eliade points to the centrality of the lunar cycle in the mythological fabric woven from this perspective, which, to a degree, envelops our own world-view, however linear and eschatologically determinate. "The phases of the moon - appearance, increase, wane, disappearance, followed by reappearance after three nights of darkness - have played an immense part in the elaboration of cyclical concepts. We find analogous concepts especially in the archaic apocalypses and anthropogonies; deluge or flood puts an end to an exhausted and sinful humanity, and a new regenerated humanity is born, usually from a mythical `ancestor' who escaped the catastrophe, or from a lunar animal." Regeneration of humanity is thus always implied in its destruction. In the natural imaging, like the seasons, we assure ourselves, fall and dissolution are ever succeeded by renewal. "... just as the disappearance of the moon is never final, since it is necessarily followed by a new moon, the disappearance of man is not final either; in particular, even the disappearance of an entire humanity ... is never total ..." As the modern (historical) cultures translate this concept, "this optimism can be reduced to a consciousness of the normality of the cyclical catastrophe, to the certainty that it has a meaning and, above all, that it is never final... 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 ... what predominates in all these cosmico-mythological lunar conceptions is the cyclical occurrence of what has been before, in a word, eternal return."
Due to the fact that the modern, predominantly Western model, of consciousness, primarily informed by Hebraic/Christian-Greek (teleological) influences, perceives time as a matrix for linear progress toward eschatological fulfillment, an end (and Eliade does not hesitate to analyze with his usual acumen - and here one must highlight the amazing passage where he claims that the concept of `ekpyrosis', the destruction of the world by fire, originates in early Iranian mythology - how Islam developed within this eschatological framework), we are forced to confront what he terms "the terror of history", the assertion (often stated by zealots of various stripes as fact) that human history, itself, must end. Recognition of this shift in human consciousness, from the archaic celebration of the repetition of nativity to the modern obsession with the limitation of mortality yields enormous explanatory power. In the face of the nuclear option, we must seriously consider how far such concepts as "resurrection", "rebirth" have tangible reality, not merely a traditionally assigned or contemplatively evoked meaning, but value as real states of affairs.
"Since the `invention' of faith, in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word (= for God all is possible), the man who has left the horizon of archetypes and repetition can no longer defend himself against that terror except through the idea of God . . . Any other situation of modern man leads, in the end, to despair. It is a despair provoked not by his own human existentiality, but by his presence in a historical universe in which almost the whole of mankind lives prey to a continual terror (even if not always conscious of it) . . .
In this respect, Christianity incontestably proves to be the religion of `fallen man': and to the extent to which modern man is irremediably identified with history and progress, and to which history and progress are a fall, both implying the final abandonment of the paradise of archetypes and repetition." These are the words with which the book concludes. If all that we are is the product of all that has been thought, they deserve the closest sort of reading by every thinking being. For the final abandonment, in the fine sense and print, means no less than the final abandonment of planet earth and the evolutionary project of humanity in full.

Mircea Eliade, in his internationally aclimed authority, does not need to be praised by a non specialist such as myself, but I still feel compelled to express my infinte debt to his work, of which "The Myth of the Eternal Return" was the introductory book. I am a college student of History, Philosophy, and Religion/Mythology. The area is not so promising as computers or medicine, but when one is in love, as I am with my area of interests, the desert becomes atractive, for one believes the Promised Land is on the other side. Eliade's work is so enlightening, accesible, and rich in information and poetry that my fear of entering in such a discredited area is erased as I read it. I hope the Myth of the Eternal Return will bring as much satisfaction to all who read it as it did to me, and that the Myth will also bring back, as its title promises, the old human interest in the ultimate problems of History, Philosophy, and Mythology. Read it and embrace the magic of our culture!

Eliade attempts to show that "archaic man" lives in a world that perpetually recreates the building and maintenance of a cosmos. Using many examples from anthropological work and his own textual work in Indian religion and philosophy, he tries to show that all societies practice religion in a way such that each action gains meaning only be identifying with a cultural archetype. Thus, objects have no "meaning" in and of themselves, but only insofar as they participate in a mythic role. While some might argue against drawing likenesses between "archaic" religions and "modern" ones, Eliade does just that, arguing that the three modern monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, retain, at the least, vestiges of this ongoing mythic repetition.

The most important issue for Eliade is "history." It is so important, that he states that the central problem of "man" is to attempt to abolish history. The word "abolish" is very important. It helps signify that this process is for Eliade, an attempt to banish the withering, terrorizing effect of passing through the "meaninglessness" of ordinary or profane time. Eliade states that for "primitive" societies, time is not allowed to become history. Other, "modern" societies have felt the need to record temporal occurrences, thus making them irreversible. Instead of abolishing this need to return to a mythic beginning, this has made the need grow deeper. Thus the role for religion in the modern world is to enable "man" to become a "primitive" again. Not in a sense of rationally dysfunctional, but in the sense of living eternally in the present, removed from the relentless onslaught of "history."

Perhaps Eliade is simply describing a dualism, where he could chide "archaic" man for not living up to the "truth" of reality. But this is actually far from Eliade's project. In describing a situation where a folklorist had the attempted to correct a mythical account with a historically factual one, Eliade sides with those who refuse to accept the historical account-he argues "...was not the myth truer by the fact that it made the real story yield a deeper and richer meaning, reaching a tragic destiny."

Thus we see that Eliade is willing to let truth become divorced from factuality. In his account of evil among archaic man, Eliade argues that evil is tolerable because it is at least never absurd, or meaningless. That is, evil is never without the ability to be fitted into a cosmic scheme that retains cultural purpose. Occurrences, good or bad, reveal a purpose to the world. Even Marxism, says Eliade, posits a meaning to history, expressing it in terms of class struggle and dialectical materialism.

While this schema of "history" does possess considerable explanatory power, the reduction of all religion to the irruption of the sacred through the individual and culture masks the very real human elements that enforce and maintain religion and religious prescriptions as part of culture. The positing of a "meaning" by a culture (or subculture) also carries with it the possibility (and often the power) to enforce a specific mode of political, economic, and social discourse.

If we only look at the lens of myth in this manner, we miss being able to see how myth contributes to political, gender, racial and economic oppression. "Religion" then becomes a legitimating factor in the commitment of atrocities we might otherwise criticize or punish. For example, are the recent tragedies in the USA any more legitimate because they were committed by fanatics in the name of "Islam" ? Of course not.

For a similar, yet quite different perspective, read Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."

Definitely, this is one of the most profound books about the role of mythologies and rituals in defining, regulating and dwelling a sustainable time-space. For us, moderns, Eliade's insights might appear primitive, but once we drop our prejudices and truly try to see Eliade's observations, we realize the profundity, value and essentiality of the myths of eternal return. I consider this book a classic in the fields of religious studies, cultural studies, architecture and history.

When I first became aquainted with the thought of Mircea Eliade it was through this book. It really changed the way I looked at the world.

The basic Eliade's idea that majority of basic beliefs of human beings about the world do not correspond to the reality but are merely inherited from the religious tradition of our ethnical group is the greatest insight that revolutionized my personal philosophy. After all, how many of our believes are unconsciously shaped by Judeo-Christian dogma? - not only the idea of history as having the beginning and the end which is analyzed in this book, but other ideas as well, such as the idea of death. We think it is bad to die. Why we think so? Because of our belief in soul and its death or possibility of suffering in hell. Tribals share with us the survival instinct which is basic for all mammals but aside from that they are not distressed by the idea of death because they believe that they return back to Mother Earth. Prove them wrong! After all we all come from the matter of this planet in material sense and return to it again, having lived our lives. To believe in the eternal return is more logical than to believe in some entity called "soul" which is separated from the body "once and for all" after death.

This is just a single thought on my part.
After reading this book, those of you who are ready to accept its ideas will undoubtly have more thoughts about the validity of our common-sense beliefs about reality.

Even if scientific materialism is true this is no great reason for pessimism - we are who we think we are!