The Myth of the Eternal Return

Cosmos and History

Mircea Eliade, Willard R. Trask

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691238326
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: History of Religion

First published in English in 1954, this founding work of the history of religions secured the North American reputation of the Romanian émigré-scholar Mircea Eliade. Making reference to an astonishing number of cultures and drawing on scholarship published in no fewer than half a dozen European languages, The Myth of the Eternal Return illuminates the religious beliefs and rituals of a wide variety of archaic religious cultures. While acknowledging that a return to their practices is impossible, Eliade passionately insists on the value of understanding their views to enrich the contemporary imagination of what it is to be human. This book includes an introduction from Jonathan Z. Smith that provides essential context and encourages readers to engage in an informed way with this classic text.

CHAPTER ONE

ARCHETYPES AND REPETITION

The Problem • Celestial Archetypes of Territories, Temples, and Cities • The Symbolism of the Center • Repetition of the Cosmogony • Divine Models of Rituals • Archetypes of Profane Activities • Myths and History

The Problem

THIS book undertakes to study certain aspects of archaic ontology—more precisely, the conceptions of being and reality that can be read from the behavior of the man of the premodern societies. The premodern or “traditional” societies include both the world usually known as “primitive” and the ancient cultures of Asia, Europe, and America. Obviously, the metaphysical concepts of the archaic world were not always formulated in theoretical language; but the symbol, the myth, the rite, express, on different planes and through the means proper to them, a complex system of coherent affirmations about the ultimate reality of things, a system that can be regarded as constituting a metaphysics. It is, however, essential to understand the deep meaning of all these symbols, myths, and rites, in order to succeed in translating them into our habitual language. If one goes to the trouble of penetrating the authentic meaning of an archaic myth or symbol, one cannot but observe that this meaning shows a recognition of a certain situation in the cosmos and that, consequently, it implies a metaphysical position. It is useless to search archaic languages for the terms so laboriously created by the great philosophical traditions: there is every likelihood that such words as “being,” “nonbeing,” “real,” “unreal,” “becoming,” “illusory,” are not to be found in the language of the Australians or of the ancient Mesopotamians. But if the word is lacking, the thing is present; only it is “said”—that is, revealed in a coherent fashion—through symbols and myths.

If we observe the general behavior of archaic man, we are struck by the following fact: neither the objects of the external world nor human acts, properly speaking, have any autonomous intrinsic value. Objects or acts acquire a value, and in so doing become real, because they participate, after one fashion or another, in a reality that transcends them. Among countless stones, one stone becomes sacred—and hence instantly becomes saturated with being —because it constitutes a hierophany, or possesses mana, or again because it commemorates a mythical act, and so on. The object appears as the receptacle of an exterior force that differentiates it from its milieu and gives it meaning and value. This force may reside in the substance of the object or in its form; a rock reveals itself to be sacred because its very existence is a hierophany: incompressible, invulnerable, it is that which man is not. It resists time; its reality is coupled with perenniality. Take the commonest of stones; it will be raised to the rank of “precious,” that is, impregnated with a magical or religious power by virtue of its symbolic shape or its origin: thunderstone, held to have fallen from the sky; pearl, because it comes from the depths of the sea. Other stones will be sacred because they are the dwelling place of the souls of ancestors (India, Indonesia), or because they were once the scene of a theophany (as the bethel that served Jacob for a bed), or because a sacrifice or an oath has consecrated them.¹

Now let us turn to human acts—those, of course, which do not arise from pure automatism. Their meaning, their value, are not connected with their crude physical datum but with their property of reproducing a primordial act, of repeating a mythical example. Nutrition is not a simple physiological operation; it renews a communion. Marriage and the collective orgy echo mythical prototypes; they are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning (“in those days,” in illo tempore, ab origine) by gods, ancestors, or heroes.

In the particulars of his conscious behavior, the “primitive,” the archaic man, acknowledges no act which has not been previously posited and lived by someone else, some other being who was not a man. What he does has been done before. His life is the ceaseless repetition of gestures initiated by others.

This conscious repetition of given paradigmatic gestures reveals an original ontology. The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality. The gesture acquires meaning, reality, solely to the extent to which it repeats a primordial act.

Various groups of facts, drawn here and there from different cultures, will help us to identify the structure of this archaic ontology. We have first sought out examples likely to show, as clearly as possible, the mechanism of traditional thought; in other words, facts which help us to understand how and why, for the man of the premodern societies, certain things become real.

It is essential to understand this mechanism thoroughly, in order that we may afterward approach the problem of human existence and of history within the horizon of archaic spirituality.

We have distributed our collection of facts under several principal headings:

1. Facts which show us that, for archaic man, reality is a function of the imitation of a celestial archetype.

2. Facts which show us how reality is conferred through participation in the “symbolism of the Center”: cities, temples, houses become real by the fact of being assimilated to the “center of the world.”

3. Finally, rituals and significant profane gestures which acquire the meaning attributed to them, and materialize that meaning, only because they deliberately repeat such and such acts posited ab origine by gods, heroes, or ancestors.

The presentation of these facts will in itself lay the groundwork for a study and interpretation of the ontological conception underlying them.

Celestial Archetypes of Territories, Temples, and Cities

ACCORDING to Mesopotamian beliefs, the Tigris has its model in the star Anunit and the Euphrates in the star of the Swallow.² A Sumerian text tells of the “place of the creation of the gods,” where “the [divinity of] the flocks and grains” is to be found.³ For the Ural-Altaic peoples the mountains, in the same way, have an ideal prototype in the sky.⁴ In Egypt, places and nomes were named after the celestial “fields”: first the celestial fields were known, then they were identified in terrestrial geography.⁵

In Iranian cosmology of the Zarvanitic tradition, “every terrestrial phenomenon, whether abstract or concrete, corresponds to a celestial, transcendent invisible term, to an “idea” in the Platonic sense. Each thing, each notion presents itself under a double aspect: that of mēnōk and that of gētīk. There is a visible sky: hence there is also a mēnōk sky which is invisible (Bundahišn, Ch. I). Our earth corresponds to a celestial earth. Each virtue practiced here below, in the gētāh, has a celestial counterpart which represents true reality. . . . The year, prayer ... in short, whatever is manifested in the gētāh, is at the same time mēnōk. The creation is simply duplicated. From the cosmogonic point of view the cosmic stage called mēnōk precedes the stage gētīk.” ⁶

The temple in particular—pre-eminently the sacred place—had a celestial prototype. On Mount Sinai, Jehovah shows Moses the “form” of the sanctuary that he is to build for him: “According to all that I shew thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle, and the pattern of all the instruments thereof, even so shall ye make it. . . . And look that thou make them after their pattern, which was shewed thee in the mount” (Exodus 25 : 9, 40). And when David gives his son Solomon the plan for the temple buildings, for the tabernacle, and for all their utensils, he assures him that “All this . . . the Lord made me understand in writing by his hand upon me, even all the works of this pattern” (I Chronicles 28 : 19). Hence he had seen the celestial model.⁷

The earliest document referring to the archetype of a sanctuary is Gudea’s inscription concerning the temple he built at Lagash. In a dream the king sees the goddess Nidaba, who shows him a tablet on which the beneficent stars are named, and a god who reveals the plan of the temple to him.⁸ Cities too have their divine prototypes. All the Babylonian cities had their archetypes in the constellations: Sippara in Cancer, Nineveh in Ursa Major, Assur in Arcturus, etc.⁹ Sennacherib has Nineveh built according to the “form . . . delineated from distant ages by the writing of the heaven-of-stars.” Not only does a model precede terrestrial architecture, but the model is also situated in an ideal (celestial) region of eternity. This is what Solomon announces: “Thou gavest command to build a sanctuary in thy holy mountain, And an altar in the city of thy habitation, A copy of the holy tabernacle which thou preparedst aforehand from the beginning.” ¹⁰

A celestial Jerusalem was created by God before the city was built by the hand of man; it is to the former that the prophet refers in the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch II, 4 : 2-7: “ ‘Dost thou think that this is that city of which I said: “On the palms of My hands have I graven thee”? This building now built in your midst is not that which is revealed with Me, that which was prepared beforehand here from the time when I took counsel to make Paradise, and showed it to Adam before he sinned . . .’ ” ¹¹ The heavenly Jerusalem kindled the inspiration of all the Hebrew prophets: Tobias 13 : 16; Isaiah 59: 11 ff.; Ezekiel 60, etc. To show him the city of Jerusalem, God lays hold of Ezekiel in an ecstatic vision and transports him to a very high mountain. And the Sibylline Oracles preserve the memory of the New Jerusalem in the center of which there shines “a temple . . . with a giant tower touching the very clouds and seen of all . . .” ¹² But the most beautiful description of the heavenly Jerusalem occurs in the Apocalypse (21 : 2 ff.): “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

We find the same theory in India: all the Indian royal cities, even the modern ones, are built after the mythical model of the celestial city where, in the age of gold (in illo tempore), the Universal Sovereign dwelt. And, like the latter, the king attempts to revive the age of gold, to make a perfect reign a present reality—an idea which we shall encounter again in the course of this study. Thus, for example, the palace-fortress of Sigiriya, in Ceylon, is built after the model of the celestial city Alakamanda and is “hard of ascent for human beings” (Mahāvastu, 39, 2). Plato’s ideal city likewise has a celestial archetype (Republic, 592b; cf. 500e). The Platonic “forms” are not astral; yet their mythical region is situated on supraterrestrial planes (Phaedrus, 247, 250).

The world that surrounds us, then, the world in which the presence and the work of man are felt—the mountains that he climbs, populated and cultivated regions, navigable rivers, cities, sanctuaries—all these have an extraterrestrial archetype, be it conceived as a plan, as a form, or purely and simply as a “double” existing on a higher cosmic level. But everything in the world that surrounds us does not have a prototype of this kind. For example, desert regions inhabited by monsters, uncultivated lands, unknown seas on which no navigator has dared to venture, do not share with the city of Babylon, or the Egyptian nome, the privilege of a differentiated prototype. They correspond to a mythical model, but of another nature: all these wild, uncultivated regions and the like are assimilated to chaos; they still participate in the undifferentiated, formless modality of pre-Creati...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the 2005 Edition
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter One: Archetypes and Repetition
• Chapter Two: The Regeneration of Time
• Chapter Three: Misfortune and History
• Chapter Four: The Terror of History
• Bibliography
• Index