Flavours of Reversion

Review and Thoughts on Eliade’s “Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return”

Abraham and Isaac, Rembrandt, 1634

I

Eliade’s classic Cosmos and History[1] is a classic for a reason. In here you can find the basics of the world of what he calls the “Archaic peoples” (ignoring the problematic name for now), which as general as he tries to make it, has a corresponding looseness and indeterminacy to it. This is rather in line with my own Platonic priors, for which the more transcendent principles infringe less on the self-constitution of the members of their manifold in proportion to their transcendence; although (and we should note), the archaic worldview is not a principle. However, it is interesting and noteworthy that Eliade says that “Plato could be regarded as the outstanding philosopher of "primitive mentality," that is, as the thinker who succeeded in giving philosophic currency and validity to the modes of life and behavior of archaic humanity” (p. 34). I have found Platonism rather useful for understanding indigenous Yoruba traditions, so I can’t really fault the observation’s spirit. I will have more to say on this later in this essay.

II

Eliade’s book has four chapters. The first, Archetypes and Repetition, seeks to outline the basic aspects of the so called “Archaic Worldview.” This includes the idea of the “archetype”, the “center”, the repetition of acts, rituals, that return the people and the cosmos to both, the category of the “profane”, and the relationship between these things and history. It is interesting that Eliade has to specify that in this world, there are no “profane” activities, except those that have no archetype, that is, those things that do not really have “being” and thus are not activities. He has to call them “profane” for our understanding because we “modern” people have desacralized these activities, or so we think.

The second chapter, The Regeneration of Time, touches on the cyclicity of time enacted in so many rituals, most conspicuous in the rituals around the New Year (whatever calendar the people in question use). I think here we can find a way to understand “cyclical time” that is often lost in the linearity of its descriptions. To put it in Platonic terms, “Time” in the so called “Archaic” sense is a procession and a reversion, the result being a unification of self and World, not thought to be exactly separate anyway. Its measurement is according to resonances across the whole of a cosmic context given in the structure of a narrative, as Antonio Vargas has so aptly been describing in his recent work. It is not mere “history” in our sense of a linear counting of seconds and events that occurred in those seconds, a view that affects even our understanding of cyclical time insofar as we see it as a kind of automatic mechanism of meaningless repetition. Indeed, the phrase “regeneration of time” calls one to the biological framing of the idea, because it is a “rebirth”, a living form only grasped in bio-graphy, that is, a narrative concerning a life lived, with a beginning and an end often seen backwards, in resonances and themes.

The third chapter, Misfortune and History, tries to account for the mark of “history”, defined by the irreversible flow of time, within the “archaic” worldview. It is here, perhaps, that the Eliade’s limits come to the fore. According to Eliade, “Archaic man, as has been shown, tends to set himself in opposition, by every means in his power, to history, regarded as a succession of events that are irreversible, unforeseeable, possessed of autonomous value” (p. 95). One wonders if this is truly the case, but we will leave that for later in the essay. Eliade tries to show that with respect to those things that break the cyclicity (and thus ideality) of the time of true archetypal being, the “Archaic” peoples may see their failure and sin, the corresponding wrath of the Gods, the signs of a degraded age, etc. They may see even greater cycles of Time, from the Yugas to the Hellenic “Ages” defined by precious metals. Whatever it is, it sees history as a theophany or as a message, one that will eventually lead all things back to their source. He takes particular interest in the “Judeo-Christian” concept of history. He says of it:

“But, for the first time, we find affirmed, and increasingly accepted, the idea that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined by the will of God.This God of the Jewish people is no longer an Oriental divinity, creator of archetypal gestures, but a personality who ceaselessly intervenes in history, who reveals his will through events (invasions, sieges, battles, and so on). Historical facts thus become "situations" of man in respect to God, and as such they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able to confer on them. It may, then, be said with truth that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God, and this conception, as we should expect, was taken up and amplified by Christianity.” (p. 104)

This is the place to mention the relative absence of Islam in this book, given the many interesting Islamic views on the afterlife, the end of history and particularly the doctrine of the finality of Muhammad’s revelation, a historical claim I would say is on par with Christianity’s claim of the unique and final historical incarnation of YHWH as Jesus. I have to admit, I am very skeptical of claims of “Judeo-Christian” originality with respect to certain ideas, due to its prevalent use in apologetics, but I will grant that in our modern consciousness, the “Judeo-Christian” conception of history as linear and as linear in its theophany is paradigmatic. It is important to note that, despite this, Eliade rightly states that history is still given an end, and a new beginning, even if it is not an endlessly repeating one. It is a reinterpretation, an extreme reinterpretation I think, of the themes being developed in this book.

It is here, in the last chapter we want to consider, that I’d like to give a reinterpretation of “Archaic” that doesn’t aim to forcefully replace the old (I have no such powers, and I think we should note historical context), but to help us see its spirit in today’s world. The last chapter of the book it titled The Terror of History, and it is aptly named. You see, a key part of the assimilation of Time to archetypes is to reveal meaning in the life one lives. If one’s life is just a succession of events, is it really a life? The point of the regeneration of time and the “defense” against “history” was to give “a meaning that was not only consoling but was above all coherent, that is, capable of being fitted into a well-consolidated system in which the cosmos and man's existence had each its raison d'etre” (p. 142). A question Eliade does not really elaborate, but I think which is important, is the question of Truth. He specifically says he cannot “pass judgment on their validity” (p. 147). In this chapter, the historicism that defines the modern man is compared and contrasted with this “archaic” worldview, which is understood to still be present, despite everything; the two conceptions are, according to Eliade, in a present conflict (p.141).

III

Eliade notes several interesting things about historicism and historicists. I will state two. The first, stated in a footnote, is that the paradigmatic sources of historicist ideas come from people who lived in those places who have not drawn the short straw of history in the last few centuries, by those “belonging to nations for which history has never been a continuous terror”, and wondered “if the theory according to which everything that happens is "good," simply because it has happened, would have been accepted without qualms by the thinkers of the Baltic countries, of the Balkans, or of colonial territories” (p. 152, footnote). This is an important question for anyone seeking to be “decolonial” in their thought. The second thing is that the although the “modern” (and historicist) man sees the cyclicity of time in the “archaic” man’s world as restrictive of freedom, the “archaic” man sees the opposite, and infact would consider modern man as unfree. The modern man, according to the “archaic” view, is unfree insofar as his history, although in principle a history of novels, is a history determined beyond himself, fixed from the past, dependent on initial conditions he has no control over. He is also unfree in a “statistical” sense (my term), in that it is only very few men in practice that make history, who insodoing often restrict others from doing same, who are then, as a result of this, left for dead to the terrors of history’s meaninglessness. In effect, “Modern man's boasted freedom to make history is illusory for nearly the whole of the human race” (p. 156). This is a piercing critique, especially because it describes so much of life today. In contrast, the “archaic” man, in his active recreation of the world, is exceedingly creative, insofar as what he is participating in is the creative generation of his cosmos. He is free, insofar as he returns to his origin, and his agency becomes a starting point.

Eliade, however, provides a way out of the cycles of archetypes and repetition, through Christianity, the religion of the “fallen man” (p. 177), which is in the end, the “modern man”. Here, perhaps, is Eliade’s weakest argument. The argument relies on the earlier claim that the “archaic” man rebels against history. The problem is that it heavily emphasizes a Christian idea, the “fall’, which has similarities with other cosmogonic myths and concepts, to the detriment of their uniqueness and innocence of Christian ideas. There is a sort of anxiety about the world implied in the “fall” that sees it as an inherent problem, one that Christianity (or traditions like Christianity; he cites Zoroastrian theologies in the book) ultimately solves but which other traditions simply postpone indefinitely. But the world is not a problem for many other theologies. There are myths articulating our bewilderment and the unsettled nature of our existence as mortals, even its tragic dimensions, but the whole, the world as a whole, is not automatically considered a problem. It is here I might offer a different definition of “archaic”, as that which concerns the “archai” (principles) of being, rather than that which is simply old. Perhaps Eliade implies this meaning in his use, nevertheless it is absent in this argument. The archai are here, the Gods are present, even in the irruption of the “modern.” Why cede this to the Christian? Eliade sees in the Modern and Christian the abandonment of the archetypes and a movement in history towards progress, but is this necessary? Why can’t the archai include linearity in its cyclicity? See for instance Oludamini Ogunnaike’s extended description of “time” in Yoruba tradition:

“While I agree with Drewal that in Yoruba thought no particular thing repeats itself, and that change and transformation are a perpetual part of the world (aye), I would refine her description slightly. This is a delicate metaphysical point, but one that is essential to a complete understanding of traditional Yoruba conceptions of time. The transition from aye (the world) to ọrun is not just an ordinary transition in time, but rather the transition from time to “outside of time.” In Yoruba, aye means at once world, space, and time. Closely examining Drewal’s statement provides another way of approaching this point. She writes, “The human spirit is always coming into the world . . . there is always change and transformation.” This “always” (lailai in Yoruba) is the boundary between the timeless and time. If something “happens” in eternity (outside of time), then it always happens in time. In Yoruba myth, the human being comes into time as she comes into the world (aye designates both), and so she is always coming into the world/time. This is why people know everything that they will do in the world when they choose their ori in heaven; they are above or outside of ordinary time and can choose and perceive their lives “all at once.”94 If we picture time or the world as a river, then heaven could be a cloud that extends over the entire length of the river, sending down rain and receiving evaporating water. Because the motion of rain is vertical, it doesn’t participate in the horizontal motion of time until it enters the river of the world, and can fall or evaporate up at any point along the river—just as in the Yoruba worldview, people enter and leave the world at every point in time.

But this is not the whole story; there remains what Ṣoyinka calls the “fourth stage,”95 the liminal realm of myth and ritual. If time is a river, and heaven is a cloud, then myth takes place at the source of the river, in the heights of the hills, where the river meets the cloud. What looks like a succession of reincarnations from the perspective of aye (the world) is simultaneous and parallel from the perspective of itan (myth), and utterly undifferentiated from the heavenly vantage point of Olodumare. When combined, these three perspectives—the temporal, the mythical, and the eternal—produce something like Drewal’s “spiral” time. What is a point in eternity is spun to make a circle in the mythical time of heaven, which the linear time of the world stretches out into a spiral. However, it is important to remember that this spiral is only how things appear from the perspective of the world of living human experience. The point is still a point; it merely appears to be a circle or a spiral, like the patterns produced when you wave a stick pulled from the fire.”[2]

There is nothing in this description that precludes history and progress. Although it is a prevalent understanding in Yoruba traditions as much as any other, that the present moment is a worse period in terms of morals and thus substantive being-in-harmony-with-divinity, it is also understood that technologies can embody certain Gods (such as cars being metal and Ogun, the God associated with Iron that is also Iron itself) and that people can do noteworthy things and live noteworthy lives that add to the ever growing list of unique deity manifestations.

IV

With this in mind, we can return to the question of Plato and the “archaic”. This is connected with the question of Truth that Eliade refrains from touching. Vargas and Yitzchok Lowy give this interesting explanation of the need for narrative in the intelligibility of the world:

“[O]ur scientific worldview trains us to think that mechanical motion is the clearest kind of process—so we try to fit everything into that model. But even when we do, we often smuggle in narrative categories. We talk about the year as the time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun, or a month as a lunar cycle—but these measurements don’t mean anything in modern astronomy. They’re just numerical intervals.

Yet we live them as stories. A month, a year, a life—they all carry narrative weight. A living being, even when we deny it has a telos, still seems to move toward something.

Even something as apparently basic as violence has ritual dimensions. Modern people often forget this. … To win a battle, someone has to acknowledge defeat. … A gun can wound, but it can’t confer victory. For that, you need ritual, recognition, story. That’s why the ritual elements of violence—banners, declarations, duels, oaths—exist. They transmute harm into meaningful outcomes. … You needed a way to close the story.

If someone claims these are just conventions,… they miss the point. These are not merely cultural add-ons. They are part of how we experience reality as structured and meaningful. In fact, if we reject prosperity, victory, or healing as “nonexistent” because they aren’t purely physical, we risk undermining our own ability to perceive anything intelligible. These narrative markers are central to how we identify things as real.”[3] (Beyond Sympathy, p. 11, 18, 19)

If the inherent ways we experience reality – by this I mean the basic structures of thinking in general, found in our need for beginnings and ends, narrative categories, etc – do not track reality, then do we really know anything? There is a virtue in realizing the world is beyond our conceptualizations, but there is also virtue in not falling to relativism as a result. If we know the world this way, it must be because there is a sense in which the world presents itself this way. This is the basic insight to Parmenides’ dictum that equates being and thinking. Even modern physical cosmology is given totalizing coherence in terms of narrative (this happened, and then…). This is not inherent to simple atomic instances and discordant data. This is an emergent property of wholes in relation. This is demiurgy, for the Prime Demiurge in the Timaeus weaves a soul, and in doing so weaves a story. In other words:

“the World Soul’s perceptive power in the form of a narrative or logos that is subject to truth. … Proclus says: … ‘all the things that have come to be are parts of the life of the world as if it were a single drama’ … Note that in addition to this causal language, we have the idea of a drama – a narrative speech in which it is true that certain things happen and certain things are said.”[4]

Perhaps knowing the principles behind this dimension of things, partially captured in the “post-modern” concept of the “metanarrative”, might be put to use for us today, such that we might see weaving narrative as an aid towards Justice, Peace, Truth, and co-existence, rather than simply an obstacle in the way of truth by dispersion, which is no truth, but nothingness.

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[1] Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (Harper Torchbooks, 1959).

[2] Oludamini Ogunnaike, Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions, Africana Religions 5 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271087634. p. 220-21.

[3] Antonio Vargas, “Beyond Sympathy: Plotinus, Iamblichus, and the Hidden Power of Ritual,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio (blog), June 26, 2025, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/beyond-sympathy-plotinus-iamblichus.

[4] Dirk Baltzly, “Gaia Gets to Know Herself: Proclus on the World’s Self-Perception,” January 1, 2009, https://doi.org/10.1163/156852809X441331. p. 277-78.