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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Myth of the Eternal Return, October 17, 2007
This was my second book by Mircea Eliade, and it is very similar in content to his more basic introduction book "The Sacred and the Profane", detailing mostly the so-called Archaic religions views on time and space and related issues of religion. Naturally, being a bit longer, it also is more focused and in many ways more interesting for me personally, since a lot of it deals with the Indo-European concept of the ages and the Cosmos. Eliade was a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, among other things, but he was also very well travelled, having studied under the guidance of an Indian yogi back in Mother India. He was born in Rumania, a contemporary of the European idealist freedom fighter Corneliu Codreanu in the 30's, and in fact a member of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a radical "Right-wing" religious organization opposed to the project of creating a new Israel on Rumanian soil.
Although Eliade throughout his life claimed to be very "apolitical", his views on religion have a natural conservative and reactionary consequence, so hence this is for sure one of "our own boys". The book itself is split into four chapters, the first one being "Archetypes and Repetition". This is highly interesting, and details the many forms of rituals throughout the world (mostly archaic) that have been performed to re-create the cosmogony and the sacred times when the Gods or God-heroes performed the original act that the ritual today resembles. Eliade claims that for sacred rituals there is always a divine model that is more real than the perceived reality around us. He is quite clearly influenced by Platonic philosophy, with his emphasis that it is the divine celestial model that is real, the "idea", if you will, and that reality merely is a cheaper mirror copy of the celestial reality.
The second chapter is "The Regeneration of Time", a chapter dealing with the idea that the world and the cosmos need regeneration, which the human races have a responsibility of helping with. Often, this fell on the first time of the New Year, so hence, the Ragnarok of the cosmos fell on the last day of the year, and then the cosmos was regenerated on the first.
The third chapter is "Misfortune and History", where he does get a little political as well, dryly remarking that those that have claimed all in history is good, probably wouldn't have felt the same way had they been born in the Baltic or in the Balkans, where they for the simple reason of being neighbours with the Red Beast got invaded and killed off in millions. He then goes a little quasi-Hegelian on us, when he details how many races and cultures have though of history as theophany, that is, history as the appearance of God. He also details the various Yugas, or ages if you will, and how we are now decidedly in the Kali Yuga, the last age, known as Ragnarok to my own Germanic ancestors. If you don't believe this, turn on your television, and see how degraded the West and the world has become as of late, always deteriorating further.
The final chapter is "The Terror of History", detailing how these people acted with their knowledge that everything always returns, that unless you find a way out of the circle, your soul will always return to existence, along with the eternal cosmos. The fact that Creation will occur again and again is not something that many so-called "modern Christians" will find acceptable, but alas, this is what our ancestors believed, as well as the fact that for large parts of European Christianity, the Christological interpretation of history was merged with the Aryan one, to create a kind of "Cosmic Christianity", which was the religion that Eliade himself felt a part of.
This is of course a very shallow review of such a wide and deep book filled with examples and information to the brim, but I've read it twice in a month now, so it is certainly a wonderful book.
(I read the first English 1955-edition)
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