The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History
The Myth of the Eternal Return: Outer space and History Books
Product Description
This founding work of the history of religions, first published in English in 1954, secured the North American reputation of the Romanian émigré-scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). Making reference to an surprising number of cultures and drawing on scholarship published in no less than half a dozen European languages, Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return makes both intelligible and compelling the religious expressions and activities of a wide variety of archaic and “primitive” religious cultures. Even as acknowledging that a return to the “archaic” is no longer possible, Eliade passionately insists on the value of understanding this view in order to enrich our contemporary thoughts of what it is to be human. Jonathan Z. Smith’s new introduction provides the contextual background to the book and presents a critical outline of Eliade’s argument in a way that encourages readers to engage in an informed conversation with this classic text.
Buy Cheap The Myth of the Eternal Return: Outer space and History Online
Related posts:
- Spirituality, Healing and Medicine: Return to the Silence
- The Management Myth: Why the “Experts” Keep Getting It Wrong
- The E-Myth Physician: Why Most Medical Practices Don’t Work and What to Do About It
- The Myth of Psychotherapy: Mental Healing as Religion, Rhetoric, and Repression
- The Hippocratic Myth: Why Doctors Have to Ration Care, Practice Politics, and Compromise Their Promise to Heal
So far, this is a very excellent book that has a unique thought of religion. Even as most religion texts focus on either A) Christianity, B) Eastern Philosophy, or C) Atheist Polemics, this is an brilliant study on the actual anthropological and existential functioning of religion as an entity. By the side of with Ludwig Feuerbach and Daniel Dennett, this stands as a very excellent, detached, objective study of religion as far as not being a polemic or an apology. I would certainly urge this to anyone interested in general religious studies, especially if you are an Atheist and still have an interest in non-Dawkins literature on religion.
Rating: 4 / 5
“Myth of the Eternal Return” is typically considered a vital text to anyone interested in sociological,anthropological and psychological approaches to religion.
Eliade is deeply original in his analysis, and I found he transformed my understanding of religious expression and ritual.
I disagree entirely with the hints that other reviewers have made here that Eliade was some kind of white supremacist — Eliade was indeed, a fascist in his youth, with sympathies for Codrineau’s Iron Guard — but, there is not a trace of elitism or tyranny in his work, latent or otherwise, and he writes with balance and the distanced, detached detachment of a dedicated scholar. There is no proof at all that Eliade continued being a fascist after his youthful stage.
It is right that Eliade was friends with Julius Evola,who was certainly an elitist,and arguably a fascist — but what does that prove ? Friendship with Evola makes Eliade a fascist ? Sorry, but that is absurd : indeed, Evola was also close friends with Triztan Tzara, a Jewish avant garde nihilist, Hugo Ball, a German avant gardist mystic anarchist and anti fascist, and Hulsuenbeck, a nihilist who despised fascists. So you see , being close to Evola does not make Eliade a fascist.
Why would a racial elitist fascist, if that is where you presume Eliade’s “sympathies lie”, then go on to devote his entire life to understanding the mysticism and ritual of non white peoples, from looking closely at the ‘outer space’ of Arab Jews to the holistic one ness of Korean Shaman to the insights of Sri Lankan Buddhists and on to the visions of Manicheans and Sufis ?
Eliade was a man of fantastic insight — not a slow witted brown shirted jackbooted stiff armed deluded supremacist.
Rating: 5 / 5
I am a newcomer to the scholarship of Eliade, being referred to him, through address, only recently by the late Terence McKenna (who explicitly mentions the universally respected academic cornerstone “Shamanism”) and Stephan Hoeller. In my initial interest for finding his works I was concerned with where to enter the massive corpus, having already a keen insight into the subjects of cultural and religious psychology (that is to say, their history). By reading a honest quantity of reviews on the highly rated tomes, I came across one that mentions Eliade himself recommending this particular offering as a starting place to his brand of in rank; this a result of Eliade being questioned–as he often was, report has it that–basically, `Where would one start with you?’ Having that come honest from the source, it was simply a matter of placing my order (by the side of with “Shamanism”), and embarking upon my studies in his spill of plotting.
I may possibly regale the reader with a long and caught up report, but would rather say something more to the top: I cannot praise this book too much. It comes highly not compulsory to anyone interested in the main differences, psychologically speaking, between our distant “ahistorical” ancestors’ (from across the globe) and our own “historicistic” modes of religious worship, social activity, and spiritual reconciliation to “time”. Eliade touches upon the non-Jungian archetypes that comprise the tribal structure, and how actual events became interpreted mythologically (thus meaning nothing in themselves); how archaic man was clearly freer than we, his time-bound successors–freer to approach the deity, to appease the deity, to co-make with the deity, et cetera. He concludes with how and why such a disposition, such a world is no longer available to us, being culturally resigned to the temporal realms (via clocks, and other mundane, “profane” scheduling systems). Do not be fooled by the small part–these are considerably deep waters, if one is not well-versed in the material. Eliade is damn thorough, making an astonishing number of references to groups and cultures, authors and works, that might not be at the forefront of your brain or tip of your tongue (his acumen is found to be quite impressive). Aside from reasonably sober expositions, Eliade lends himself to an immensely enjoyable and accessible reading–even inspiring in certain spots. Here is the perfect balance of scholarship and entertainment; for some this will reveal itself to be another piece of “the huge puzzle”, for others it will be a vehicle to starting that puzzle. Read it for fun, homework, inner-work, re-read it for clarification–whatever–the value is immeasurable.
Rating: 5 / 5
In this work, Eliade looks at patterns in comparative religion regarding cosmology, eschatology, and how archaic man saw time, history, and mythology.
Even as Eliade was clearly influenced to a small degree by Jung’s work on archetypes, he has redefined the term and taken it to a new level. Jung regards archetypes as “primordial images,” or at least primordial categories of images (a concept which owes as much to Kant as Plato), even as Eliade sees them as exemplary patterns which archaic peoples immitate in their own actions.
Eliade examines these exemplary facets, and builds a picture not only of how archaic peoples viewed both the outer space and history, but also how our thoughts of modern history have developed hostile to the habitual and cyclic thoughts of time. This work is thus vital for anyone trying to know older, habitual cultures.
There are a few places where the translation may possibly be improved (“Sanguinary civil wars?” Why does that give me an image of cool, smiling people hacking eachother to death?)
Overall, highly not compulsory.
Rating: 5 / 5
The provocative and believable book is a very fascinating analysis of religous patterns aimed at insight into basic features of human psychology. Eliade presents humans as confronting the “terror of history,” the basic facts of the irreversibility of events, the inevitable humanity of human existence, and though the doesn’t say so explicitly, the unavoidable fact of mortality. Eliade analyzes two ways which humans deal with this existential problem. One is the basic pattern of archaic religious plotting in which there is an inevitable cycling of the outer space with recurrent declines and regenerations of the world. The “real” world is not the quotidian reality of daily existence but a effectively platonic mythical world of the gods and heroes whose acts customary the world. Through ritual and the identification of daily acts with myth, men participate in the mythic, “real” outer space by recreating the actions of the founding heroes and gods. Hostile to this background, Eliade suggests that the fantastic monotheistic, salvationist religions initiate a new way of dealing with the terror by introducing a linear concept of sacred history that eliminates the cyclical nature of time, introduces God as the creator of contingent events, but makes existence bearable by guaranteeing the evenuation of a new creation and salvation of believers. At the same time, these salvationist religions include an individual relation with God, which in some ways recreates the whole of history, allowing bestow day believers to participate in the whole sequence. Eliade shrewdly extends this analysis to the fantastic secular salvationist movement of the 20th century, Marxism.
Written well and based on examination of a fantastic deal of scholarship, this is a believable analysis. An vital criticism of Eliade is that he presents as universal what may be only common. In addition, these different modes of plotting are not necessarily exclusive.
Rating: 5 / 5