The Myth of the Eternal Return

In 1949, Mircea Eliade published Le Mythe de l'éternel retour, or, in English, The Myth of the Eternal Return, a study of the religious beliefs and customs of “archaic man,” the peoples of prehistoric time. In this book, Eliade describes his theory of archaic ontology and contrasts it with the modern worldview. Ontology is the study of the nature of being, or the fundamental components of reality. Archaic societies, like all societies, have a set of fundamental ontological assumptions about the way the world is, and they act based on this assumption. According to Eliade, the ontological orientation of prehistoric (archaic) peoples was founded on an essential distinction between the sacred and the profane.

The sacred realm, for archaic humanity, is the space of religious ritual in which the creations of the gods are glorified, worshiped, and reconstructed by devotees. Sacred creation, action, and ritual exist in illo tempore, that is, outside of history, against the flow of linear time. These gods exist—or are supposed to exist—in eternity. The sacred is a realm of eternal recurrence, the never-ending repetition of divine actions at regular intervals. The sacred stands in opposition to the profane. The profane realm is the place of ordinary, forgettable human experience. It is primarily understood as that which is not sacred and has no distinctive reality of its own. For archaic humanity, according to Eliade, the profane space advances with the sense of history incumbent upon the modern individual and the reduction of the sacred sphere. It is the place of humanity cut off from an inherent connection to the cosmos. Eliade discusses this distinction at length in another of his most influential books, appropriately titled The Sacred and the Profane (1961).

Two other proposed titles for The Myth of the Eternal Return—Archetypes and Repetition and Cosmos and History—indicate the thematic core of Eliade’s work. Archetypes and Repetition, which would become the title of the first chapter (and was the subtitle of the original French version) clarifies two of the fundamental ideas of the myth of eternal recurrence. Archetypes were paradigms—usually divinities—after which archaic societies sought to model their own behavior through ritual, consecration, and other personal acts of spiritual renewal. These rites—partly constituting the idea of repetition—intended not only to reproduce divine archetypal standards within the human realm, but also to re-enact the divine creation of the universe.

Likewise, Cosmos and History, the subtitle of the work, also announces two clear, competing ideas: Eliade steadily develops the opposition between archaic cosmology (which entails a sense of cyclicality and eternity) and modern humanity’s history (which is linear and fundamentally progressive). The opposition treats the archaic and modern imaginations as foils—but the foil extends to humanity’s self-understanding. A society’s ontological narrative, whether cosmological or historical, is a form of “man writ large”; it reflects a society’s sense of identity and their perspective on the human condition. This, more than archaic cosmology itself, is Eliade’s central concern.

This study guide references the Bollingen Series edition with Princeton University Press, specifically the Princeton Classics paperback edition produced in 2018. The Myth of the Eternal Return is the 46th book in the series. It was originally published in French and was translated into English by Willard R. Trask. This edition also features an introduction by Jonathan Z. Smith.

Summary

The book is divided into four chapters, each with a series of thematic components. Chapter 1, “Archetypes and Repetition,” sets up many of the essay’s fundamental themes. In it, Eliade outlines the first task of the essay: a study of the various practices and behaviors of archaic humanity to tease out the ontological groundings of these behaviors. The architecture of temples and cities, for instance, reflects an ontological fascination with centers of divine power. Rites of initiation, the settlement of new territories, stories of the hero’s journey, and marital union are among the customs Eliade mines for ontological, religious meaning.

In Chapter 2, “The Regeneration of Time,” Eliade develops the ontological ideas posited in the first chapter by focusing on archaic humanity’s relationship to time. Archaic societies had a fundamentally different relationship to time than modern societies. Much of this hinges on the distinction between the sacred and the profane. At sacred moments in time, time is essentially utterly reconstituted. The new year, for instance, is a sacred time reintroducing the cosmic moment of initial creation. It is not merely a symbolic ceremony; it is the actual regeneration of time. If an individual is reborn, then they are completely new; all transgressions (or sins) are not merely forgiven—they are forgotten as well. Additionally, the cyclical “regeneration of time” leads to the individual’s explicit engagement with eternal return, an endless process of divine creation and destruction.

“Misfortune and History,” Chapter 3, focuses on the ethical, existential reasons for the study of archaic ontology. These reasons derive in no small part from the universal reality of suffering. Archaic ontologies have a unique way of grappling with the problems of suffering, especially the sense, or meaning, given to suffering. According to Eliade, because archaic individual human life was always understood as nested within a divine cosmic order, this suffering, however difficult it may be at a given time, was never unbearable or hopeless. Suffering was unfortunate but not intolerable. It did not cause despair, the feeling that has so brutally befallen the modern individual.

Finally, in Chapter 4, “The Terror of History,” Eliade advances his criticisms of modern, historical accounts of the human place in the world, linking these narratives with despair and alienation. Historical sufferings are no longer unfortunate; they are terrors. The introduction of the historical perspective—which, Eliade notes, was meant to be connected to the advancement of human freedom (and very well might have been in its early formulations)—has become the very yoke of modern humanity’s unfreedom. In the modern world, Eliade still sees hope for a better orientation to reality in the Eastern philosophical traditions. He believes there is no way to go beyond the ontology of archaic humanity—no way to move past the eternal return—without invoking the sacred in some capacity; the ultimate choice is between despair or faith. For Eliade, the choice is clearly faith, which he sees as the chance to express the “creative freedom” in the ontological nature of reality. There could be no freedom more profound for Eliade, who believes that the alternative liberation offered by the historical perspective of modern philosophy is (at best) a distraction from the more potent and healing potential of freedom via faith.