The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History

Mircea Eliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return, Cosmos and History, translated by Willard R. Trask and published by Princeton University Press, first appeared in French in 1949 and argues that archaic religious thought regenerates time through ritual repetition of a cosmogonic act, treating historical, linear time as a later and in Eliade's view more anxious development. Eliade was among the twentieth century's most influential historians of religion, and this book helped establish the comparative categories, sacred and profane time, the eternal return, still used across the field. Its strength is the scope of comparative material it draws together into one argument. Its limit is Eliade's own method, building a universal pattern from selected examples across unrelated cultures and periods, a comparative approach later historians of religion have substantially criticized for flattening real differences between traditions into one archetype, so a specific claim about how a given culture actually experienced time needs that culture's own record, not Eliade's synthesis alone.