The Myth of the Eternal Return

In 1949, Mircea Eliade published Le Mythe de l'éternel retour, or, in English, The Myth of the Eternal Return, a study of the religious beliefs and customs of “archaic man,” the peoples of prehistoric time. In this book, Eliade describes his theory of archaic ontology and contrasts it with the modern worldview. Ontology is the study of the nature of being, or the fundamental components of reality. Archaic societies, like all societies, have a set of fundamental ontological assumptions about the way the world is, and they act based on this assumption. According to Eliade, the ontological orientation of prehistoric (archaic) peoples was founded on an essential distinction between the sacred and the profane.

The sacred realm, for archaic humanity, is the space of religious ritual in which the creations of the gods are glorified, worshiped, and reconstructed by devotees. Sacred creation, action, and ritual exist in illo tempore, that is, outside of history, against the flow of linear time. These gods exist—or are supposed to exist—in eternity. The sacred is a realm of eternal recurrence, the never-ending repetition of divine actions at regular intervals. The sacred stands in opposition to the profane.