Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Back when I posted the Joseph Campbell blog, sartorias mentioned scholar Mircea Eliade, another scholar whose writings cover much of the same territory with far less fame. The two were roughly contemporary, Campbell largely based out of the United States and Eliade out of Romania until he was exiled, during World War II, and eventually became a professor of the history of religion at University of Chicago. (Campbell began teaching at Sarah Lawrence in 1934.) Their early seminal works were published the same year; The Hero with a Thousand Faces and both Eliade's Patterns in Comparative Religion and The Myth of the Eternal Return all came out in 1949.

In the mythology courses I've taken (and for which I've served as a teaching assistant), it's Eliade who becomes part of the course curriculum, in part because of his way of thinking about space and time. He argues that a religious (or, one might say, mythic) man experiences space and time differently than someone who lives in a profane (or, possibly, material) fashion. The following excerpt comes from Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, and while he talks here about symbols, I think that the words can be applied almost equally well to stories, as both symbols and stories have a palimpsest-like* relationship: earlier thoughts and ideas are covered by later ones, and they must be peeled back in order to glimpse what came before.

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Certain Fathers of the primitive church had seen the value of the correspondence between the symbols advanced by Christianity and the symbols that are the common property of mankind. Addressing those who denied the resurrection of the dead, Theophilus of Antioch appealed to the signs (tekmeria) that God had set before them in the great cosmic rhythms--seasons, days, nights. He wrote: "Is there not a resurrection for seeds and fruits?" For Clement of Rome, "day and night show us the resurrection; night sets, day rises; day departs, night comes."

For the Christian apologists, symbols were pregnant with messages; they showed the sacred through the cosmic rhythms. The revelation brought by the faith did not destroy the pre-Christian meanings of symbols; it simply added a new value to them. True enough, for the believer this new meaning eclipsed all the others; it alone valorized the symbol, transfigured it into revelation. It was the resurrection of Christ that counted, not the signs that could be read in cosmic life. Yet is remains true that the new valorization was in some sort conditioned by the very structure of the symbolism; it could even be said that the aquatic symbol awaited the fulfillment of its deepest meaning through the new values contributed by Christianity.

The Christian faith hangs upon a historical revelation; it is the incarnation of God in historical time that, in the Christian view, guarantees the validity of symbols. But the universal aquatic symbolism was neither abolished nor dismembered by the historical (=Judeo-Christian) interpretations of baptismal symbolism. In other words: History cannot basically modify the structure of an archaic symbolism. History constantly adds new meanings, but they do not destroy the structure of the symbol.

All of this is comprehensible if we bear in mind that, for religious man, the world always presents a supernatural valence, that is, it reveals a modality of the sacred. Every cosmic fragment is transparent; its own mode of existence shows a particular structure of being, and hence of the sacred. We should never forget that, for religious man, sacrality is a full manifestation of being. The revelations of cosmic sacrality are in some sort primordial revelations; they take place in the most distant religious past of humanity, and the innovations later introduced by history have not had the power to abolish them.

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*Or, as we argued on the Greece and Turkey trip, palimpsestual. Or, better, palimpsestuous. Both rather make it sound like you're up to something.