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Essay on Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return
Subsequent to graduating from the University of Bucharest in 1928 Mircea Eliade exhausted three years in Calcutta studying traditional texts of Indian religious studies. His particular apprehension was with the ascetic and ecstatic techniques whereby the possible saint, having achieved a condition of psychological dissociation, can influence himself that he has admission to the powers of the supplementary world, being himself neither alive nor dead, neither on earth nor in paradise.
Every one of Eliade's successive writings has been anxious with this innermost theme, the representative modes through which announcement is reputable between the consecrated and the profane. His approach is that of a Jesuit: he is scholar and supporter at the same time. Eliade left Romania at the end of the war and anon settled in Paris; for the precedent ten years he has been Professor of the History of Religion in the University of Chicago.
The olden times, which he pursues, is not anxious with sequential sequences or the psychoanalysis of the causes and penalty of exacting events, but somewhat with the expansion of human consideration over vast regions of time and liberty. But this development is a very simple two-stage matter: for Eliade contemporary man stands to antiquated man as Christianity to pre-Christianity.
The astral ideas, which typify archaic religion, are all over the place the same and may be exemplify, in Frazer Ian fashion, by any oddments of exotic ethnography, which expediently come to hand. Modern man is only one of its kinds because the spiritual legends of Judeo-Christianity are set in a matrix of chronological time. Christian time is on departing, it had a commencement and will have an end but it is non-repetitive, it is chronological. In all other religions, time is a recurring procedure. As an alternative of advancing courageously towards the unearthing of a New Jerusalem, archaic man is contented to engage in recurrent but imperfect imitation of divinely ordained archetypes bent by the ancestral deities in the first commencement.......
