The Myth of the Eternal Return

On April 6, 1944, mere days after the World War II bombings of Bucharest, Eliade’s birthplace, the author wrote in his journal:

I’m thinking of writing a book, Teroarea Istoriei [The Terror of History], on this theme: that until a little while ago, any personal tragedy, any ethnic catastrophe had its justification in a cosmology or soteriology of some sort: cosmic rhythms, reabsorption into water, ekpyrosis or purification by fire, historical cycles, ‘our sins,’ etc. Now, history simply terrorizes, because the tragedies provoked by it no longer find justification and absolution (Eliade, Mircea. The Portugal Journal, translated by Mac Linscott Ricketts, State University New York Press, 2010).

The Myth of the Eternal Return—the “book” ideated in this journal—was written on the heels of World War II. This passage (along with other journal entries) contextualizes the book within not only the war but the author’s concomitant existential horror. Indeed, Western existentialism saw a revival after the war, partly because the historical tragedies were on such an incomprehensible scale that they marked a grim advent of unprecedented senselessness; the very essence of life seemed to give way to an abyss. While Eliade may not have committed himself to existentialism, he nevertheless intuited the threat of this abyss in the wake of a historical trauma. Such wartime atrocities could “no longer find justification and absolution”—at least not in the context of modern historical humanity, whose narrative, devoid of any transcendence beyond itself, could neither authentically redeem suffering nor restore salvific order to a fractured cosmos. Stricken with a sense of loss—a lost origin, a lost world of essential human goodness—Eliade could not stomach the progressive and seemingly utopian philosophies that suggested history could be its own salvation (a premise he’d already found dubious).

This traumatized disillusionment with modern philosophical narratives is the backdrop for Eliade’s most heartfelt work. While the work is irreducible to this psychology, the psychology is nevertheless inseparable from the work’s animating tension between two conceptions of the human drama: archaic cosmology versus modern history. History is a unidirectional process in which things change, evolve, and become something wholly different from what they once were. Historical humanity—that is, the modern individual (from roughly the 16th-17th centuries to the present)—is increasingly concerned with the advancement of a historical cause, a future in which the sins and sufferings of the past are rectified (or at least justified by virtue of the historical progress those tragedies made possible). History is directed toward the future, toward a time that is unlike the present or the past. History should make progress, advancement, and growth—yet, in so radically resolving the past, such a philosophy of history also risks forsaking it. Traditional societies, on the other hand, viewed themselves as integrally connected to the universe, not to personal or social history: This is “the chief difference between the man of the archaic and traditional societies and the man of the modern societies,” that is, “that the former feels himself indissolubly connected with the Cosmos and the cosmic rhythms, whereas the latter insists that he is connected only with History” (xxvii-xxviii).

More than anything, The Myth of the Eternal Return—which is wholly distinct from Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous idea of eternal return, and from the myth of Sisyphus—is an exploration of the difference between modern and archaic ontology. Without recommending the readoption of archaic perspectives or cosmologies, Eliade still emphasizes that archaic wisdom is very “instructive” for the modern reader. Eliade clearly favors archaic perspectives and ontologies to modern historicist philosophies like those of Hegel and Marx. Along the continuum—between classic, traditional ontology and the modern, atheistic worldview—is the Judeo-Christian perspective. Jewish and Christian theologies have a significant relationship to archaic belief but also open the door to modern, historical rationality. In many ways, this book is an indictment of contemporary thought but not of Judeo-Christianity. Ancient perspectives, according to Eliade, can help overcome the despair and anxiety so prevalent in the modern world.

As he states in the preface to a later edition of the book, as of 1958 Eliade still considered The Myth of the Eternal Return his most momentous literary contribution to the history of religions. The claim is remarkable, considering that his contribution is extensive. In addition to The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade produced a three-volume History of Religious Ideas as well as influential works on shamanism and yoga, and he edited an enormous encyclopedia of religion. He also produced a number of novels, both autobiographical and fantasy. Still, The Myth of the Eternal Return is singular in its lasting influence. Scholars often situate Eliade alongside Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung as an acclaimed 20th-century thinker whose study of esoteric, ancient ideas can inform modern attitudes about the contemporary world. He develops his theories, in part, to antagonize the materialistic, atheistic, and “historicist” perspective of the contemporary world. His engagement with archaic religious belief is an ethical choice, one that he hopes will influence the hearts and minds of contemporary readers and lead us out of the despair of our age.