Paul R. Hyde on Mircea Eliade, historian of religions and philosopher. Mircea Eliade is author of The Myth of the Eternal Return, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, The Dialectic of the Sacred.

Mircea Eliade

"... the work of two of the most significant writers of our day — T.S. Eliot and James Joyce — is saturated with nostalgia for the myth of eternal repetition and ... for the abolition of time." Mircea Eliade

Eliade, the great scholar of religion and myth whose explorations of archaic 'realities' in The Myth of the Eternal Return and Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy regenerate the heart sickened by history, horrified by philosophies of progress, was one of that group of remarkably gifted Rumanians in exile which included Brancusi, Paul Celan, Emile Cioran, Ionesco and many others. As a theorist of myth, Eliade ranks along with Levi-Strauss, Malinowski and Cassirer.

Eliade considered The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949) to be the most significant of his many books. At the centre of his research is the mysterious dimension of man — time. It is man's unhappiness in time that generates myth and religion; and finally, that abasement of eternity - history.

Eliade's marvellous book is a study of archetypes, myths, suffering and history aimed at revealing the alternative structures of perception and understanding of archaic (or pre-philosophical) societies. By default, it is therefore a study of the desacralisation of human experience, a process which has today assumed the value term 'progress'.

Archaic man (man of the cosmos) aspires to sacred time whereas the man of history is a prisoner of profane time. For the former, the events of life acquire meaning from being re-enactments of cosmic events in illud tempus. Such events have their origins in a higher reality and can be considered sacramental. The events and acts in the life of the man of history cannot acquire meaning because they do not imitate or re-enact primordial/mythic events. As such they are isolated in profane (historical) time. Archaic man's ability to escape profane time and return to mythic time — the originary moment before time began — requires him also to periodically abandon his transient historical identity. And this 'absorption' into sacred time constitutes his freedom.

The revolt against the nightmare of history is a revolt against the aridity of historical time. To defend himself against the terror of history, the man of history turns to God as guarantor of his manifest destiny for he reads the history he creates as an epiphany of God. Nonetheless, "modern man's boasted freedom to make history is illusory for nearly the whole of the human race."

The special value of Eliade's work in general and of The Myth of the Eternal Return in particular, is that it ruptures the protective shell of contemporary western 'consensus reality' founded on historicism and allows us to glimpse other paradigms than our own. It thus allows us to question many of the precepts regarded as axiomatic within our own dominant paradigm — above all, the nature and meaning of freedom.

There are today, almost certainly, people on this planet who have not yet read The Myth of the Eternal Return but who, nonetheless, happily gobble down their daily cabbage and rashers; no gnosis for them, nor cosmic ontology; not for them hierophany or archetypal time and no terror of history.

Recommended reading:

Papers from The Eranos Yearbooks 3, 1957, New York & London.
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade.
Mircea Eliade and the Dialectics of the Sacred by Thomas J. Altizer. Greenwood Press, 1976.
Mircea Eliade by M.L. Ricketts. Columbia University Press, 1988.