The Myth of the Eternal Return

Chapter 2 focuses on a specific aspect of archaic ontology: the relationship to time, periodicity, recurrence, and eternity. The passage and subjective meaning of time are the chapter’s central, organizing themes. The chapter is split into three subsections: “Year, New Year, and Cosmogony,” “Periodicity of the Creation,” and “Continuous Regeneration of Time.” After establishing fundamental elements of archaic ontology in the previous chapter, Eliade uses Chapter 2, “The Regeneration of Time,” to develop his account of the archaic mythology of eternal recurrence. Eliade’s narrowed focus indicates his agenda: to contrast the archaic conception of time and eternity to the modern, historicist conception. Chapter 2 functions, then, as a transition from the general ontology of the previous chapter to the moral and practical questions of the latter chapters.

In the first section, “Year, New Year, and Cosmogony,” Eliade discusses the cosmological relevance of new year’s festivities for archaic peoples: “The New Year,” he writes, “is equivalent to the raising of the taboo on the new harvest” (51). The harvest is deemed ripe for eating at the new year. It is a period of transition and rejuvenation. The date and length of the new year may vary by culture and geography, but its essential function remains the same. These dates and festivities are not based on a scientific understanding of the Earth’s orbit but rather on the metaphysical assumptions (and spiritual requirements) of archaic peoples. Eliade writes that, amid the superficial diversity of new year’s rituals,

the essential thing is that there is everywhere a conception of the end and the beginning of a temporal period, based on the observation of biocosmic rhythms and forming part of a larger system—the system of periodic purifications (cf. purges, fasting, confession of sins, etc.) and of the periodic regeneration of life (52).

Eliade does not catalog the myriad, inessential differences between various new year’s rituals of various archaic societies. Instead, from these many ritualistic expressions, he extracts philosophical presumptions. He is interested in the diversity of such ritual insofar as comparisons reveal underlying cosmological patterns—and he describes the observation of a “periodic regeneration of time” (52). In other words, archaic humanity recognizes seasonal patterns and cycles and attributes cosmic significance to them. In the cyclical repetition of the world is the renewal of the fundamental creative act, the cosmogony: “In the expectation of the New Year there is a repetition of the mythical moment of the passage from chaos to cosmos” (54).

Eliade distinguishes rituals of purification from those of regeneration: The act of regeneration surpasses mere purification. In the sacred space of the new year, things are completely made new such that past time is abolished. Things begin again. However, while purification is distinct from regeneration, the purpose of many purification rituals is to achieve regeneration; Eliade uses sacred marriages (called heirogamies) and scapegoating (in which a community tries to expel its collective sin through sacrificing or exiling one animal or human) as primary examples of ritual purification that leads to regeneration.

Because regeneration is the periodic rebirth of time itself, Eliade also states that the main concern of the book is “the problem of the abolition of ‘history’” and that these archaic beliefs in regeneration pose this problem on the cosmological and ontological levels (53). Regeneration invokes a cyclicality that overrides the linearity requisite to historical time; history disappears through the reinstitution of the primordial beginning.

While regeneration may dissolve the order of linear history, it is nevertheless “a repetition of the mythical moment of the passage from chaos to cosmos” (54). In some ancient festivals, for instance, religious and moral taboos are lifted, and there is a carnivalesque frenzy and orgy before the reclamation of order through a sacred act, like a marriage. Eliade also notes that the salvation-based (soteriological) cosmogony of the ancient Jews was key in the development of the philosophy of history, which will be important later.