The Myth of the Eternal Return

Introduction

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. While 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 imagination 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.

Analysis

When I first read The Myth of the Eternal Return it literally changed my life. Up to that moment I understood time only as a linear progression of seconds, minutes, hours and years. One's life was counted out like the miles on an odometer in a car. When one reached the full number of years given to live, one simply ceased to exist. But then in my youth non existence was a somewhat remote and abstract concept (Mircea Eliade and Willard , pp 23-32).

Science fiction had stories of time machines and spells that could freeze time but these were fiction after all. Never did I imagine time as anything but a straight line from my birth to my death—or, in less personal terms from the big bang to the end of the universe. Then suddenly I began to understand some of what has been revealed in religious ritual and narrative for thousands of years: that time can be understood as cyclical. This “new” sense of time is of history returning upon itself, of time itself turning in on itself in repetition. I had heard the phrase, “history repeats itself” but I had thought that my goal was to liberate myself from all that, not to be, as they said “doomed to repeat history.” Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the greatest fourteenth century text. It was written by an unknown author between 1375 and 1400. The story begins at Christmas time, and there are many symbolic elements. The Green Knight is a color which symbolizes Christmas. Also, changing seasons and the coming of winter symbolize the passing of life and reminds us that Death is unavoidable. The author also skillfully illustrates human weaknesses in the descriptions of Gawain's temptations (Mircea Eliade and Willard , pp 111-122).

The story tells about adventures of Sir Gawain, who takes the Green Knight's challenge. One year after cutting Green Knight's head off, which did not kill him, Gawain has to travel to find the Green Knight and take his blow in return. He finds a strange castle, and while he awaits there for the final day, his knight's ethical code is put to a test by the host and his wife.

In this part, Green Knight, in an unmannerly way, enters the hall where King Arthur and his Knights feast and cleverly gets them committed to take his game ...