Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade (1907 – 1986) was born in
After graduation he spends
four years in
In 1945 he moves to
Throughout his life Eliade is interested in the development of human thought
over vast regions of time and space. He studies myths as narratives, to
discover the reality of the archaic man. Mythic truth is for him independent of
historical actuality: Eliade considers the experience
of historical actualities to be the perennial source and auditor of the truth which is expressed in creative interpretation[1].
“… every myth shows how a
reality came into existence…”[2]
He explores “the sacred”, the object of worship of
religious humanity, in his view the
source of power, significance and value[3].
In his perspective, any phenomenon reveals the nature of Being
and is therefore a potential hierophany - an
appearance of the sacred - giving man access to “illud
tempus”, sacred, non-historical time. Eliade made his
personal intuitions the basis of his understanding of myth, which is probably
the only way to interpret myths anyway, but important to appreciate noting his
conceptions regarding authenticity and hierophany.
Where Carl Jung saw the function of myth mainly in
the exploration of the psyche and Joseph Campbell thought of myths as
inspirational and models to live by, Mircea Eliade sees myths as representations of man’s way to cope
with life, with history. Real life, here and now, is not
It is interesting to look with Eliade
how humans along their evolution tried to construct a picture of reality. His
focus is on concepts as “reality”, “being” and for instance “God”, in his vision all creations of the human psyche. He sees
“the sacred” as a structure of human consciousness. It is indeed amazing to
discover that so many cultures have reached similar conclusions about the
nature of reality. Humans all over history and all over the world came up with
essentially the same ideas about an higher order
underlying our day-to-day reality.
Eliade
interprets rites, rituals and myths; his way to study the evolution of human
constructs about reality. He explores the differences between “primitive” man
and “modern” man, noting the development of consciousness and
how the different “modes” of consciousness influence the way in which we think
and thus form our concepts.
Eliade
seems unwilling to make a clear statement about his own philosophy. In his circumvent way he looks for answers to questions that
have haunted humans from the beginning of time. He is truly concerned about
modern man, about his lack of connection with the mythic, with nature, with
cosmic rhythms, with a meaningful sacred.
The Myth of the Eternal
Return
The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954) deals with mankind’s experience of history and time; with the
conceptions of being and reality recognized from the behavior of man during his
evolution. Eliade studies symbols, myths and rites which express, in his view, “a complex system of
coherent information in which the ultimate reality of things is revealed”. He
observes in most archaic myths for instance a recognition
of a certain situation in the cosmos which implies a metaphysical position. An
object appears as the receptacle of an exterior force, of a reality that
transcends it, that gives it meaning and value. A rock reveals itself to be sacred because its very existence is a hierophany; it echoes primordial qualities, it repeats a
mythical example, a celestial archetype.
Certain human acts echo mythical prototypes,
consecrated in the beginning, in illo tempore, ab origine, by gods, ancestors or
heroes.
Eliade
compares the images of reality formed by the man of the archaic societies with
those of the man of modern societies. According to Eliade
the different appreciation of time, and thus history, is
caused by a fundamental difference in the way these men perceive their
place in the Cosmos. The man of the archaic and traditional societies, religious man[4], feels himself indissolubly connected with the
Cosmos and the cosmic rhythms and fully accepts the “tyranny of history”, while modern man, non-religious man, lost this
contact with the natural cycles and needs to counter his terror of history with
an idea of God outside himself. This modern man insists that he is autonomous,
connected only with History.
Homo religious perceived time as heterogenous,
as divided between profane time,
which is linear, and sacred time,
which is cyclical and reactualizable.
The history of the Cosmos and human society is sacred history, preserved and
transmitted through myths. This history can be repeated
indefinitely in rites and rituals to periodically reactualize
the events and human acts that occurred at the beginning of time. In this way
the Cosmos and society are periodically regenerated; man transcends his here
and now, profane, historical time and by repeating the acts
of creation in sacred time, cleanses and renews himself. Thus he
protects himself against a condition of helplessness before the absolute data
of historical time (= the tyranny/terror of history).
Non-religious modern man perceives time as
homogenous, linear and unrepeatable.
Eliade
tries to show that myth and symbol constitute a mode of thought that came long
before that of discursive and logical reasoning but still represents an
essential function of human consciousness. This also explains why myths live so
much longer than the recollection of a historical event or a real personage,
which survives in popular memory for two or three centuries at the utmost.
It is interesting to notice how historical events,
often long after the event, are modified in such a way that they can enter into
the mold of the archaic mentality, which cannot accept what is individual and
preserves only what is exemplary, archetypal.
This phenomenon fits into a worldview where all
things are connected and ultimately one. The individual does not really exist
as individual, the specific event is not a separate
historical fact. Every historical personage or event needs to find its place in
the bigger pattern and only then finds meaning in the grander order of the
cosmos as a whole. Universal patterns (archetypes) are the fundamentals of such
a worldview, such a mode of thought, everything needs
its “fixed” place, like the pieces of a puzzle. Maybe even time itself was transcended in this view of wholeness. Maybe the
connection archaic man felt with his ancestors was so strong because in his experience
time did not separate him from them; he made himself his ancestor’s
contemporary by his rites and rituals. Eliade
mentions for instance the Saturnalia as examples of rituals representing the
paradoxical coexistence of past and presence, when profane time is suspended, a
period of chaos “when all modalities coincide” and “all forms reverse to
indeterminate unity”.
When time is abolished in
this way so is the notion of change, decline or growth; everything is and shall
always be the same.
In such a worldview history, with all the novelty
and irreversibility it entails, is indeed almost unperceivable, a threatening
notion.
The cosmogonic
myth
For Eliade the cosmogonic myth serves as the exemplary model par
excellence: it is the pattern of all myths because it is the exemplar of all
genesis stories. “… it tells how something came into
existence, or how a pattern of behavior, an institution, a manner of working
were established; this is why myths constitute the paradigms for all
significant human acts.”[5]
In this essay he traces the
myth of the eternal return through the many scripts and dogma’s of the world’s
religions. Repetition of an exemplary pattern[6],
of an act of Creation in these cases, produces a timeless stasis to an event
in concrete time: the participation in an archetypal model, the projection into
mythical time, which is the center where transformation takes place, is
what gives the act its reality and its value. A human act that repeats an act
performed at the beginning of time by a god, a hero or an ancestor thus becomes
a religious act, a meaningful act.
The rites, ceremonials and rituals that reenacted
the transformation of chaos into cosmos, gave “form” to the formless,
differentiated the undifferentiated, made things become real. “The outstanding
reality is the sacred for only the sacred is
in an absolute fashion, acts effectively, created things and makes them
endure”.
Nothing can endure when it is not “animated”, endowed
with a soul through a ritual or sacrifice. A sacrifice then represents for
instance the primordial monster symbolizing chaos.
Another important aspect of any repetition of the
act of Creation is that, in referring to the sacred beyond the profane, the
cosmic ritual restores the sense of connectedness with all, the sense of
integral wholeness. This is important, maybe the most
important aspect of what Eliade is trying to “prove”
in this essay. These archaic societies where built upon a consciousness of
wholeness, of oneness. Because every person knew his place in the cosmos,
nature and his society the world to him was relatively
purposeful and save. Through day-to-day living conditions
normal human beings sometimes forgot or lost their feeling of connectedness to
the cosmos, to nature, to their society. Rites, rituals and myths then served
as reminders and recollectors of this sense of
belonging.
In his second chapter Eliade elaborates on the regeneration of time and concludes
that archaic man felt an inner need to regenerate himself periodically. He
simply abolished past time, in other words history, by reactualizing
the cosmogony; by enacting the new Creation, the
passage from chaos to cosmos. This happened (and still happens) in all kinds of
rituals surrounding the end of a period of time and the beginning of a new
period. The expulsion of demons, diseases and sins for
instance shows an attempt to restore the mythical and primordial time (“pure”
time), the instant of Creation.
Eliade
tells of the narration of the cosmogonic myth, but
also of its occurrence in art. The execution of complex designs, which
symbolize the different stages of the Creation and the mythical history of the
gods, the ancestors, and humanity, were often part of a healing ceremony. The
mandala-like designs reactualize, one by one, the events which took place in illo
tempore.
Eliade
mentions the paradox in this sacred/profane heterogeneous time-view; in order
to become “real” archaic man needs to escape or transcend who he is here and
now and seek value and meaning in the mythical, the sacred, the illo tempore. Time needs to be suspended,
man needs to be projected into mythical time to find meaning. Life spend in the
profane time appears to him without purpose, lived in a state of “becoming”.
This movement towards “sacred” time seems not so
different from the vertical, or inner journey for instance Carl Jung and Stanislav Grof propose or what
eastern traditions practice with meditation and yoga. Do we, modern men, not
seek enlightenment through transcendence of our personal ego consciousness
which separates us from the larger unity we belong to, or even are,
beyond?
Is it not important to pay attention to/be, or
become aware of our inner experience in contact with our “outer” reality? Are
we not, still, struggling with history, with profane reality, searching for
ways to integrate “it” into our consciousness (as we feel separated from it by
Maya?). I believe we have reached a point where we realize that our perception
of reality is but a secondary manifestation, a representation or imitation of
an underlying Reality. In that sense it is probably a
good idea to explore our possibilities to transcend our limited ways of
perception, open up to innate modes of consciousness, known to archaic man.
The difference between “modern” and “archaic” man
probably is that we accept the idea of evolution, of growth, of
becoming, as valuable and meaningful, where archaic man seems content with the
thought of a cyclical returning to how it was in the beginning. We find freedom
in our responsibility to create our reality, he finds
unity in the symbolic return to the atemporal instant
of primordial plenitude. In our view we evolve through life, in his view life cannot be restored but only re-created through repetition of
Creation itself. We use (or fight) time, archaic man ignores time,
devaluates its effect on him, lives in a continual present.
Although traditional man perceives the cyclical
motion of the seasons, of time in general, he knows his universe is eternal and
although periodically destroyed and reconstructed, never final. This notion of
eternal return reveals an ontology uncontaminated by
time and becoming, Eliade writes; “the past is but a prefiguration of the future, no event is irreversible and
no transformation is final”. In other words: nothing ever
changes, nothing new happens.
Eliade
suggest that man of traditional societies might have refused history because of
his terror of losing himself by being overwhelmed by
the meaninglessness of profane existence. He satisfies his thirst for the real
with an indefinite repetition of archetypes. I doubt whether this was a
conscious choice archaic man made. I think Eliade is
probably right when he concludes that humanity was still within nature and had
not yet detached itself from it during this period in which it “opposed”
history and reproduced things it knew ad infinitum. The cyclical
repetition itself is a rhythm of nature, of the cosmos, which man probably
adapted because he was so much part of nature. Man lived in harmony with
the cosmic rhythms, he entered into these rhythms,
surrendered to them. Probably primitive man unconsciously felt that life
somehow defiled his innocence and probably he tried to return to his mental
paradise by periodically purifying and renewing himself with rituals that
projected him to an absolute reality he felt existed beyond his profane time[7].
The meaning of suffering
In the second part of his book
Eliade talks about the suffering of humanity.
The primitive who sees his field laid waste by
drought, his cattle decimated by disease, his child ill, knows that all these
contingencies are not due to chance but to certain magical or demonic
influences. He knows he can turn to the sorcerer or the priest to do away with
the magical effect, or to make the gods favorable to him. The primitive cannot
conceive of an unprovoked suffering; misery always arises from a personal
fault, or from somebody else’s fault. Suffering is in his world never blind or
without meaning.
In archaic cultures
suffering is always made intelligible and hence tolerable.
Eliade
mentions Karma as an example of a conception of universal causality, accounting
for the actual events and sufferings. Buddhism sets out from the principle that
all existence is pain. There is an overall tendency in the archaic worldview to
grant suffering a “normal meaning”, to be imputed to
the divine will, justified in the transcendent. This also means that suffering
itself becomes cyclical, never ending like the
(optimistic) lunar drama. From this cycle, from this cosmic illusion, man can
wrest or liberate himself only by an act of spiritual freedom, in which he
abolishes the human condition.
Eliade
draws the line between religious and nonreligious, between archaic/traditional
and modern man where/when Judaeo-Christianity starts
to imprint human thought and awakens historical consciousness.
Among the Hebrews, every new historical calamity was regarded as a punishment inflicted by Yahweh. Suffering was not perceived as being the human condition, but as
caused by the evil man did. The prophets who
interpreted contemporary events, transformed them into “negative theophanies”, thus giving them not only meaning, but also
history: connecting the concrete expressions of the same single divine will on
a one-way time-line (and thus transcending the traditional cycle). Historical
facts became situations of man in respect to his God, in relation with his God.
The Hebrews were the first to give meaning to history.
In Judean consciousness history was a series of theophanies, epiphanies of God.
Historical events no longer needed to transcend time
to find meaning in illo tempore, they transcended only history itself,
to obtain a metahistorical meaning.
Eliade
wonders if monotheism, as it is based on a direct and personal (revelation of
the divinity = ) relation with God, does not
necessarily entail the salvation of time. This is interesting. Primitive man
relates to his sacred in sacred time; his revelations occur in mythical time.
Monotheistic revelations take place in profane time, in historical duration. An
event, like the revelation made to Moses, is limited to a moment, definitely
situated in time. A reference is made to the future, to illo
tempore (this time at the end of time), and to the new illud
tempus of prophecy.
With Abraham[8]
God reveals himself as personal, as a “totally distinct” existence.
He ordains, bestows, demands, without any rational justification, and for Him
all is possible. With this revelation humanity has a
new religious position in the cosmos; history reveals the personal relations
between man and the transcendent.
Not only does this mean that man is no longer
embedded in his cosmos, it also means that he must maintain good relations with
the ultimate Being in order to arrive at a heavenly
state of being.
Since he can no longer ignore, or periodically
abolish history, the Judaeo-Christian man tolerates
it in the hope/faith that it will finally end: the irreversibility of history is compensated by the limitation of history to time. History
is tolerated because it has an eschatological function; a single regeneration
will take place in an illo tempore; and at that time in the future history will be abolished.
Christianity however gave value to suffering:
transforming pain from a negative condition to an experience with a positive
spiritual content. Christian thought tended to transcend the old themes of
eternal repetition by revealing the importance of the religious experience of
faith and that of the value of human personality.
Modern Man
Carl Jung claimed that, in view of the desacralization of the modern world, man must rediscover
the deeper source of his own spiritual life. Mircea Eliade also thinks in these lines when he stresses the
relevance of ancient religions, especially their sense of connectedness and
consciousness of wholeness, for contemporary man[9].
Eliade
sees modern man’s resistance to nature and his will to affirm his autonomy. He
notices how much value historical man gives to novelties and historical events, that for traditional man required to be expelled
periodically for him to be re-identified with the modes of nature. He
recognizes that modern man can be creative only insofar as he is historical;
“all creation is forbidden except that which has its source in his own freedom;
and, consequently, everything is denied him except the freedom to make history
by making himself”, which is of course only possible for an increasingly
smaller number of men now.
In a sense modern man needs
other ways to face history and cope with the sufferings of life. Eliade proposes a new metahistorical
view: a vision in which history itself becomes a means
for the human spirit to attain knowledge of levels of reality otherwise
inaccessible to it. This position assumes the existence of an
Universal Spirit, but as Eliade showed, humanity
always saw reality in terms of an higher order underlying the material temporal
world. We should in his view accept a philosophy of freedom that does not
exclude God, nor faith that for man everything is
possible.
Faith, in this context, means absolute emancipation
from any kind of natural “law” and hence the highest freedom that man can
imagine: freedom to intervene even in the ontological constitution of the
universe. It means man defends himself against the terror of history through
the idea of God. Only by presupposing the existence of God, man gains freedom; autonomy and responsibility in collaboration with the
creation, ànd transhistorical
meaning.
[1] Bryan S. Rennie,
Reconstructing Eliade, 1996
[2] Mircea Eliade, Le Sacré et le profane, 1959
[3] http://www.westminster.edu
[4] In Eliade’s work religion is systematically understood as the apprehension of relative worth conferred through non-historical realities, but revealed and confirmed through historical phenomena, and seen as a unifying human universal. “The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world”, Le Sacré et le profane, 1959.
[5] Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, 1964
[6] He calls this “archetype”, noting in a post-Jungian reprint that he used this word in a different sense than Jung does.
[7] In a sense
I believe we still do the same. When one of my kids hurts
I tell him “nice” stories to make him “go” there and forget the pain. Church,
ceremonies, hypnosis sessions, meditations; if you think of it we distract
ourselves from “real” life all the time to re-group our strengths in a “better”
place.
[8] Eliade explains how in his view Abraham’s sacrifice of
Isaac inaugurates a new religious dimension which
renders faith possible.
[9] It is interesting to know that Jung and Eliade met at several occasions. Jung insisted that the images of archaic man are much closer to the European and American psyche than Eliade admitted.