“For religious man time too, like space, is neither homogeneous nor continuous” (68).
Sacred time is characterized as follows:
Recoverable because “by its very nature sacred time is reversible in the sense that…it is a primordial mythical time made present” (68). That is, it is the time of the original creation (ab origine), the time of the acts or deeds (gesta) of the gods. It is a time before history, before the beginning of the human story. Therefore, it is sacred, evoking awe, and is referred to as in illo tempore (“in that time”).
Cyclical, reversible. Sacred time is eternal; therefore, it never passes away. Rather, it is “made present” on a renewable schedule, usually based on the seasonal cycle and realized through ritual re-enactment: “…sacred time appears under the paradoxical aspect of a circular time, reversible and recoverable, a sort of eternal mythical present that is periodically reintegrated by means of rites” (70).
Discontinuous from ordinary time. Compare the different experiences of time in playing, working, dreaming, pain or pleasure. Non-religious people experience different intensities of time, but they “always represent a human experience, in which there is no room for any divine presence” (71). Profane time, then, is interrupted in the religious experience of sacred time.
Example: as a church is a break in space, the service celebrated inside “marks a break in profane temporal duration.”
Eliade notes that the sacred time of Christianity is a period in “historical time sanctified by the incarnation of the Son of God”—while the sacred time of archaic religion is primordial time, not found in the historical past, but in the mythical moment of the origin of time as duration. [But there is a similarity as well as a contrast here: the incarnation creates a new reality and so is the origin of the history of salvation in time. According to Christian theology, Jesus as the Christ is not a hierophany or appearance of God. He is the reality of God within history: an event thought impossible by the archaic (as well as the modern) mind.]
The cosmos and the year both live through cycles, including death and rebirth. So “the cosmos is reborn each year because, at every New Year, time begins ab initio” (from the first or beginning). Thus “the cosmos is homologizable to cosmic time (=the Year) because they are both sacred realities, divine creations” (73). The connection is clear in the architecture of sacred buildings. Examples: Lodge house of the Dakota, Vedic fire altar (74), Temple in Jerusalem (75).
Since a temple (templum) establishes the center of the world, so it also sanctifies time (tempus) as the circular course of the year. Each year is renewed in the celebration of cosmogonic rites. Eliade explains that for archaic people each thing has its own time, the time in which it comes into being and endures. “Before a thing exists, its particular time could not exist.” Thus, “every creation is imagined as having taken place at the beginning of time, in principio” (76).
In New Year rituals the Persians celebrated the dissolution of the past by “rituals that signified a sort of ‘end of the world.’ The extinction of fires…social confusion…orgies, and so on, symbolized the retrogression of the cosmos into chaos” (79). The New Year rites symbolized the collapse of the world—not only of the cosmic order, but of social conventions as well.
[Examples: The modern “office party” in which routine inhibitions are broken down, usually under the influence of alcohol, and the hierarchy of authority no longer commands the customary deference: a clerk may kiss the boss’s spouse.
In medieval villages, during the annual “feast of fools,” authority figures in both the town and the Church were caricatured by the peasants in costumes: in the renewal of the ritual cycle the power of cosmic and social order gave way temporarily, regressing into chaos.]
On the “morning after” the world is reconstituted as newly-strengthened wills set out fresh “resolutions” to restore order to personal and corporate lives. For the Babylonians cosmic order must first be re-established by retelling the myth of Marduk’s victory over Tiamat in the Enuma elish and re-enacting the passage from chaos to cosmos. Through ritual re-enactment religious people become contemporary with the time of origins, “when the world was in statu nascendi” (in newborn condition). [Compare modern newspaper cartoons of the old year as a battered and enfeebled old man and the New Year as a bouncing baby in diaper and top hat.]
REGENERATION THROUGH RETURN TO THE TIME OF ORIGINS
By extension the cosmogonic myths and the accompanying rites are performed as archetypes for all forms of creation.
Example: Polynesians refer to myths as models for a wide range of activities (82).
But, above all, myths of origin are also told in healing rituals, on the principle that “life cannot be repaired, it can only be recreated through symbolic repetition of the cosmogony” (82).
Examples: Na-khi (Burmese) therapeutic ritual includes the myth of the origin of the First Healer and medicines (83).
Assyrian incantation against toothache retells the origin of the affliction and its first cure (84).
Festivals always take place in sacred time; therefore, ritual acts are different from the same acts as they are performed in ordinary time. Specifically, they are done with more precision, in a conscious attempt to replicate the acts of the gods in illo tempore. Through ritual recovery of the time of origins religious people express the desire “to live close to [their] gods” (91).
PERIODICALLY BECOMING CONTEMPORARY WITH THE GODS
Just as religious people live near the center of the world to be near their gods, so “[i]t is the nostalgia for the perfection of beginning that chiefly explains the periodical return in illo tempore” (92). Such a description could lead to a reductive interpretation of religion as mere “wish-fulfillment” (Freud). Eliade, however, defends archaic people from the criticism that they exchange personal freedom for the repetition of set gestures and so fail to take responsibility for historical change or progress. He argues that through ritual they assume responsibility for maintaining the order of the cosmos itself by participating in the recreation of the world (93).
MYTH = PARADIGMATIC MODEL
The means of this participation is the recitation of myth, the narration of original divine actions. Once told, or revealed, “the myth becomes apodictic truth” (96) and provides the paradigmatic model for human conduct.
Example: In New Guinea a fisherman does not appeal to a mythical hero to aid him in securing a catch, he rather identifies himself with the divine model of fishing. (98).
Profane time lacks paradigmatic models; therefore, to the religious mind, it is less “real.” The more religious one is, the more divine models one follows. “One becomes truly a man only by conforming to the teaching of the myths, that is, by imitating the gods” (100). Thus, the perpetuation of taboos, the offering of sacrifices—even the practice of anthropophagy, or cannibalism—are in imitation of original sacrificial acts of the gods. Eliade argues that religious people seek to maintain the order of creation in ways that assume “an awesome human responsibility” (104).
SACRED HISTORY, HISTORY, HISTORICISM
When the repetition of mythic actions becomes desacralized, however, and the sense of contemporaneity with the gods is lost, the resulting experience of time as eternal recurring cycles can be terrifying. For “repetition emptied of its religious content necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence” (107).
Example: The doctrine of the yugas in India devised by “the religious and philosophical elites who felt despair in the presence of cyclic time repeating itself ad infinitum” (109). The only escape from the eternal recurrence of karma was to transcend the cosmos altogether through moksha.
Or in ancient Greece the Platonic notion of circular time was elaborated into the doctrine of the infinite succession of temporal cycles in which “[n]o event is unique, occurs once and for all (for example, the condemnation and death of Socrates), but it has occurred, occurs, and will occur, perpetually; the same individuals have appeared, appear, and will reappear at every return of the cycle upon itself” (quoting H. C. Puech, 110).
[But why is the notion of eternal recurrence so terrible? Because in order to relive life, one must relive death also. The point comes clear in C. S. Lewis’s reflections on his desperate desire for his wife, dead of cancer, to return to him:
What sort of lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so much less about hers? Even the insane call, “Come back,” is all for my own sake. I never even raised the question whether such a return, if it were possible, could be good for her. I want her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn’t Lazarus the rawer deal? (A Grief Observed)]
Judaism is a departure from the cyclic view of time: God appears in the irreversible flow of history. Thus, each theophany is not reducible to an earlier manifestation. [Through the process of progressive revelation and convenantal relation, God and Israel create a non-repeating narrative, beginning with the call of Abraham and extending to the coming of the messianic age.]
In Christianity the sacred time is not in the mythical past, but in a segment of the historical (datable) past, which was sanctified by the presence of the Christ. Christianity offers a “theology of history” in which God’s “Incarnation in the historical person of Jesus Christ” has “a trans-historical purpose—the salvation of man” (112).
The nineteenth-century philosopher G. W. F. Hegel developed a philosophy of history in which every historical event is understood as a necessary manifestation of the divine spirit. “Thus, the whole of history becomes a theophany,” but without “any possibility of revealing a trans-historical, soteriological intent” (112). For all forms of modern historicism, time is menacing: “Definitively descralized, time presents itself as a precarious and evanescent duration, leading irremediably to death” (113).