The Myth of the Eternal Return

After the original 1949 publication of The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade wrote a foreword and a preface to reflect on the importance of the text and to make clarifications. In the Foreword, Eliade makes explicit his work’s basic theme as well its presumed audience. The Myth is not a technical book made for specialists in the history of religious ideas or philosophy. It is, rather, a text for the consideration of “cultivated man in general” (xxv). Eliade hopes this study of “archaic ontology” will be “instructive for our knowledge of man and for man’s history itself” (xxv). The thematic core of The Myth is the ontological framework of “archaic,” or traditional, humanity. An essential aspect of this framework is the “revolt against concrete, historical time” (xxiii). In Eliade’s view, this “revolt” is rooted in the “valorization” of the human being (xxiii). Later chapters will clarify these concepts.

In the 1958 Preface, Eliade briefly recounts the publication history of The Myth and the alternate titles he thought to give the essay. He restates the “essential theme” of the essay, which is “the image of himself formed by the man of the archaic societies and of the place that he assumes in the Cosmos” (xxvii).