230. Eliade, Mircea. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959b.
Traditional societies disregard history and seek a return to the golden age of creation; they allow no innovation, and reality imitates divine archetypes. Reality corresponds to the "symbolism of the center." The millennium is such a restoration of the pristine hour of creation. Messianism proposes an end to the repeating cycles of eternal suffering in a cancellation of history, and eschatology valorizes the future. Millennialism is "exclusively" a creation of a religious elite (p. 107). In messianism history must be tolerated, not denied or renounced, because it has an end.
231. ÷÷÷. "Dimensions religieuses du renouvellement cosmique." Eranos Jahrbuch 28, 1960a: 241-76.
A history of religions tour d'horizon finding in cargo cults, Marxism, and almost every movement in between a common theme of world renewal in which people symbolically reenact the creation, originally as a new year ritual but latterly periodically or uniquely. This involves as it were the erasure of time's effects on the world and a return to a pristine paradisaic state in which rules of conduct are suspended and the orgiastic sexual license of, say, the Naked Cult is understandable as a return to a state of animal innocence like that of the creation, in which people were born to their totem animals. [I have an idea which I can't substantiate that the Bolsheviks, following their accession to power, instituted a free love regimen which was quickly suppressed in favor of puritanism.]
Eliade finds traces at least of this idea in every form of eschatology, tracing it to a religious conception of a symbolically rich cosmos canceled by the "mundanization" of modern rationalism: "Die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist."
[This is an interesting idea, and its structural working-out is clearly visible in all the movements and rituals he describes, but it is difficult to see how it adds a great deal to our understanding of these movements. Victor Turner's communitas and liminality seem to say much the same thing in a rather more operationalizable way, though it might be observed that familiarity with Eliade might have done a good deal to enrich work like that of Hillel Schwartz (1990: item 603) whose notions of "Janiformity" seem pale and parochial by contrast. His study of the calendrization of eschatology might have profited by the recognition that the ideas embedded in it run much deeper than he states.]
232. ÷÷÷. "The Yearning for Paradise in Primitive Tradition." In Murray, H.A., ed., Myth and Mythmaking. New York: Braziller, 1960b: 61-75.
There are two categories of myths of paradise. One of these proposes an original closeness between humans and the divine and easy communication between them. Getting to heaven was easy: it was only necessary to climb a certain tree, the axis mundi, the center of creation. [This is very reminiscent of the Indian fakir's rope trick, which Desroche (see item 211) makes a chief metaphor for the millennium.] When this connection was cut the earth was transformed into its present state, because the gods lost interest in it. Eliade says this myth is chiefly pastoralist in origin. In illo tempore mankind was immortal, spontaneous and free, close to gods and animals both, and knew the latter's language. Shamans try to reconstitute this time through ecstasy, to which animalism is a primary route: shamans take on the attributes of certain animals as a means to re-establish contact with the divine. This is not regression but a fuller spiritual life. Ecstasy is a trip to heaven or hell made by means of a pole or the like, a recreation of the axis mundi. During these trips shamans describe what they see on their returns to paradise. This trip also occurs in Christian mysticism, with special emphasis on the purifying fire guarding the entrance to paradise, which is also a shamanic motif. Thus there is "ideological unity" (p. 73) between Christianity and primitive religion.
233. ÷÷÷. "'Cargo Cults' and Cosmic Regeneration." In Millennial Dreams in Action edited by Sylvia L. Thrupp. The Hague: Mouton, 1962a: 139-43.
Cargo cults can only be understood in the light of indigenous myths of the annual return of the dead and of annual cosmic regeneration: a "regression to chaos, followed by a new creation" [a cosmic liminality]. The theme of destruction before a period of bliss is widespread. The John Frum and Mansren movements entirely reverse the cosmic order and offer complete detachment from the ordinary rules of behavior. In sum, cargo movements are based on indigenous tradition and Christianity in a sense renews the myth.
234. ÷÷÷. The Two and the One translated by J.M. Cohen. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962b.
The Naked Cult explicitly demanded animalistic (public and promiscuous) sex acts. The logic of this requirement is that it is necessary to become [like] animals in order to bring the Kingdom. [This logic may also operate in extreme asceticism, where one abandons even some necessities like shelter to live as an animal.] This is to approach God, and, for those without sin, all is permitted if not required. Cargo cults reenact new year ceremonies, and they, like all groups up to and including completely political nationalisms, depend on the idea of cosmic renewal.
235. ÷÷÷. Cultural Fashions in the History of Religions. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1967.
Fashion is itself religious in being relatively impervious to "rational" criticism. For example Freud's views on religion were shown to be absurd at the time he published Totem and Taboo, but the ethnographers' protests have had no effect whatsoever on the popularity of that work. In fact this "wild gothic novel" is by now gospel among intellectuals. Eliade discusses here the religious reasons for the popularity of Teilhard de Chardin, Claude Lˇvi-Strauss, and Pauwels and Bargier, the authors of the pseudo-scientific Morning of the Magicians, which was immensely popular in France during the sixties, less so here. They also published a wildly popular magazine in the same vein. What these three fads have in common is first a rejection of the doom and gloom of existentialism, to which they offer a charismatic (by virtue of varying degrees of scientism) alternative; the three schools of thought amount to scientific salvationism, and Teilhard in particular bridges these opposed categories, making life sacred and offering the possibility of a new Eden. Lˇvi-Strauss reduces man back into nature, reintegrating the two, and all three exalt physical nature.
236. ÷÷÷. "Paradise and Utopia: Mythical Geography and Eschatology." In The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969b. Reprinted from Utopias and Utopian Thought, edited by Frank E. Manuel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.
On eschatology among new world pioneers and its transformation to the secular cult of progress and among the Tupi-Guaran’, who had, apparently pre-contact, a recurring movement led by prophet/shamans to seek a paradise in the East. This movement was first recorded in 1515 and continues sporadically "today." Some branches of this tribe had an important myth of an eschaton, and the quest for paradise rests on this; the paradise is to be a refuge from the apocalypse.
237. ÷÷÷. "History of Religions and 'Popular' Cultures." History of Religions 20 (1 & 2), 1980: 1-26. Shows the value of the study of ethnology and folklore in the history of religions.
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