Archetypes and Repetition
 

9
The world that surrounds us, then, the world in which the presence and the work of man are felt—the mountains that he climbs, populated and cultivated regions, navigable rivers, cities, sanctuaries—all these have an extraterrestrial archetype, be it conceived as a plan, as a form, or purely and simply as a “double” existing on a higher cosmic level. But everything in the world that surrounds us does not have a prototype of this kind. For example, desert regions inhabited by monsters, uncultivated lands, unknown seas on which no navigator has dared to venture, do not share with the city of Babylon, or the Egyptian nome, the privilege of a differentiated prototype. They correspond to a mythical model, but of another nature: all these wild, uncultivated regions and the like are assimilated to chaos; they still participate in the undifferentiated, formless modality of pre-Creation. This is why, when possession is taken of a territory—that is, when its exploitation begins—rites are performed that symbolically repeat the act of Creation: the uncultivated zone is first “cosmicized,” then inhabited. We shall presently return to the meaning of this ceremonial taking possession of newly discovered countries. For the moment, what we wish to emphasize is the fact that the world which surrounds us, civilized by the hand of man is accorded no validity beyond that which is due to the extraterrestrial prototype that served as its model.
 

14
A rabbinic text says: “The land of Israel was not submerged by the deluge.” N21
 

20
 

… in certain archaic cosmogonies, the world was given existence through the sacrifice of a primordial monster, symbolizing chaos (Tiamat), or through that of a cosmic giant (Ymir, Pan-Ku, Purusa). To assure the reality and the enduringness of a construction, there is a repetition of the divine act of perfect construction: the Creation of the worlds and of man. As the first step, the “reality” of the site is secured through consecration of the ground, i.e., through its transformation into a center; then the validity of the act of construction is confirmed by repetition of the divine sacrifice. Naturally, the consecration of the center occurs in a space qualitatively different from profane space. Through the paradox of rite, every consecrated space coincides with the center of the world, just as the time of any ritual coincides with the mythical time of the “beginning.” Through repetition of the cosmogonic act, concrete time, in which the construction takes place, is projected into mythical time, in illo tempore when the foundation of the world occurred. Thus the reality and the enduringness of a construction are assured not only by the transformation of profane space into a transcendent space (the center) but also by the transformation of concrete time into mythical time. Any ritual whatever as we shall see later, unfolds not only in a consecrated space (i.e., one different in essence from profane space) but also in a “sacred time,” “once upon a time” (in illo temore, ab origine), that is, when the ritual was performed for the first time by a god, an ancestor, or a hero.
 

22
 

It is useless to multiply examples; all religious acts are held to have been founded by gods, civilizing heroes, or mythical ancestor. It may be mentioned in passing that, among primitives, not only do rituals have their mythical model but any human act whatever acquires effectiveness to the extent to which it exactly repeats an act performed at the beginning of time by a god, a hero, or an ancestor.
 

23
 

…it was on the seventh day of the Creation that God “. . . rested. . . from all his work which he had made” (Genesis 2:2).The message of the Saviour is first of all an example which demands imitation. After washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus said to them: “For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you” (John 13:15). Humility is only a virtue; but humility practiced after the Saviour’s  example is a religious act and a means of salvation “. . . as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34; 15;12). This Christian love is consecrated by the example of Jesus.
 

27
 

If the myth sometimes followed the rite—for example, proconjugal ceremonial unions preceded the appearance of the myth of the preconjugal relations between Hera and Zeus the myth which served to justify them—the fact in no wise lessens the sacred character of the ritual. The myth is “late” only as a formulation; but its content is archaic and refers to sacraments—that is, to acts which presuppose an absolute reality, a reality which is extrahuman.
 

28
 

…every responsible activity in pursuit of a definite end is, for the archaic world, a ritual. But since the majority of these activities have undergone a long process of desacralization and have, in modern societies, become profane, we have thought it proper to group them separately. Take the dance, for example. All dances were originally sacred…
 

Choreographic rhythms have their model outside of the profane life of man; whether they reproduce the movements of the totemic or emblematic animal, or the motions of the stars; whether they themselves constitute rituals (labyrinthine steps, leaps, gestures performed with ceremonial instruments)—a dance always imitates an archetypal gesture or commemorates a mythical moment.
 

29
 

Struggles, conflicts, and wars for the most part have a ritual cause and function.
 

War or the duel can in no case be explained through rationalistic motives.
 

…Thor, provoked by the giant Hrungnir, met him at the “frontier” and conquered him in single combat.
 

…in fact, the military initiation consists in an act of daring whose mythical prototype is the slaying of the three-headed monster. The frenzied berserkir, ferocious warriors, realized precisely the state of sacred fury (wut, menos, furor) of the primordial world.
 

The Indian ceremony of the consecration of a king, the rajasuya, “is only the terrestrial reproduction of the ancient consecration which Varuna, the first Sovereign, performed for his own benefit—as the Brahmana repeat again and again. . . All through the ritual exegeses, we find it tediously but instructively reiterated that if the king makes such and such a gesture, it is because in the dawn of time, on the day of his consecration, Varuna made it.”
 

34
 

Myths and History
 

Each of the examples cited in the present chapter reveals the same “primitive” ontological conception: an object or an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype. Thus, reality is acquired solely through repetition or participation; everything which lacks an exemplary model is “meaningless,” i.e., it lacks reality. Men would thus have a tendency to become archetypal and paradigmatic. This tendency may well appear paradoxical, in the sense that the man of a traditional culture sees himself as real only to the extent that he ceases to be himself (for a modern observer) and is satisfied with imitating and repeating the gestures of another. In other words, he sees himself as real, i.e., as “truly himself,” only, and precisely insofar as he ceases to be so.Hence it could be said that this “primitive” ontology has a Platonic structure…
 

35
 

A sacrifice… exactly reproduces the initial sacrifice revealed by a god ab origine, at the beginning of time…
 

Thus we perceive a second aspect of primitive ontology: insofar as an act (or an object) acquires a certain reality through the repetition of certain paradigmatic gestures, and acquires it through that alone, there is an implicit abolition of profane time, of duration, of “history”;’ and he who reproduces the exemplary gesture thus finds himself transported into the mythical epoch in which its revelation took place.
 

The abolition of profane time and the individual’s projection into mythical time do not occur, of course, except at essential periods… (alimentation, generation, ceremonies, hunting, fishing, war, work). The rest of his life is passed in profane time, which is without meaning: in the state of becoming.”
 

39
 

This “mythicization” of historical personages appears in exactly the same way in Yugoslavian heroic poetry. Marko Kraljevic, protagonist of the Yugoslavian epic, became famous for his courage during the second half of the fourteenth century. His historical existence is unquestionable, and we even know the date of his death (1394). But no sooner is Marko’s historical personality received into the popular memory than it is abolished and his biography is reconstructed in accordance with the norms of myth. His mother is a Vila, a fairy, just as the Greek heroes were the sons of nymphs or naiads. His wife is also a Vila; he wins her through a ruse and takes great care to hide her wings lest she find them, take flight, and abandon him—as, by the way, in certain variants of the ballad, proves to be the case after the birth of their first child. Marko fights a three-headed dragon and kills it, after the archetypal model of Indra, Thraetaona, Herakles, and others. In accordance with the myth of the enemy brothers, he too fights with this brother Andrija and kills him. Anachronisms abound in the cycle of Marko, as in all other archaic epic cycles. Marko, who died in 1394, is now the friend, now the enemy of John Hunyadi, who distinguished himself in the wars against the Turks ca. 1450.
 

It is interesting to note that these two heroes are brought together in the manuscripts of epic ballads of the seventeenth century; that is, two centuries after Hunyadi’s death.
 

N71 H. Munro and N. (Kershaw) Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, II (Cambridge, 1932-40), pp. 375 ff. texts and critical bibliography
 

42
 

To repeat, the historical character of the persons celebrated in epic poetry is not in question. But their historicity does not long resist the corrosive action of mythicization. The historical event in itself, however important, does not remain in the popular memory, nor does its recollection kindle the poetic imagination save insofar as the particular historic event closely approaches a mythical model.
 

43
 

…a particularly heroic exploit provided sufficient occasion for the popular imagination to seize upon it and assimilate it to the traditional archetype of Marko’s exploits…
 

…the recollection of a historical event or a real personage survives in popular memory for two or three centuries at the utmost.
 

The historical personage is assimilated to his mythical model (hero, etc.), while the event is identified with the category of mythical actions (fights with a monster, enemy brothers, etc.).
 

44
 

…the memory of historical events is modified, after two or three centuries, in such a way that it can enter into the mold of the archaic mentality, which cannot accept what is individual and preserves only what is exemplary.
 

Just before the last war, the Romanian folklorist Constantin Brailoiu had occasion to record an admirable ballad in a village in Maramures. Its subject was a tragedy of love: the young suitor had been bewitched by a mountain fairy, and a few days before he was to be married, the fairy, driven by jealousy, had flung him from a cliff. The next day, shepherds found his body and, caught in a tree, his hat. They carried the body back to the village and his fiancée came to meet them; upon seeing her lover dead, she poured out a funeral lament, full of mythological allusions, a liturgical text of rustic beauty. Such was the content of the ballad. In the course of recording the variants that he was able to collect, the folklorist tried to learn the period when the tragedy had occurred; he was told that it was a very old story, which had happened “long ago.” Pursuing his inquiries, however, he learned that the event had taken place not quite forty years earlier. He finally even discovered that the heroine was still alive. He went to see her and heard the story form her own lips. It was a quite commonplace tragedy: one evening her lover had slipped and fallen over a cliff; he had not died instantly; his cries had been heard by mountaineers; he had been carried to the village, where he had died soon after. At the funeral, his fiancée, with other women of the village, had repeated the customary ritual lamentations, without the slightest allusion to the mountain fairy.
 

45
 

Almost all the people of the village had been contemporaries of the authentic historical fact; but this fact, as such, could not satisfy them: the tragic death of a young man on the eve of his marriage was something different form a simple death by accident; it had an occult meaning that could only be revealed by its identification with the category of myth. The mythicization of the accident had not stopped at the creation of a ballad.
 

54
 

…on the occasion of the division of time into independent units, “years,” we witness not only the effectual cessation of a certain temporal interval and the beginning of another, but also the abolition of the past year and of past time. And this is the meaning of ritual purifications: a combustion, an annulling of the sins and faults of the individual and of those of the community as a whole—not a mere “purifying.”
 

55
 

…we are dealing with documents of the earliest “historical” civilization, in which the sovereign played a considerable role, since he was regarded as the son and vicar of the divinity on earth; as such, he was responsible for the regularity of the rhythms of nature and for the good estate of the entire society. Hence it is not surprising to find him playing an important role in the ceremonial of the New Year; upon him fell the duty of regenerating time.
 

During the course of the akitu ceremony, which lasted twelve days, the so-called epic of the Creation, Enuma elis, was solemnly recited several times in the temple of Marduk.
 

N4 The same among the Hittites, where the exemplary combat between the hurricane god Tesup and the serpent Illuyankas was recited and reactualized within the frame of the New Year festival. Cf. Albrecht Gotze, Kleinasien (Leipzig, 1933), p.130
 

60
 

…for the combat with Rahab presupposes the reactualization of primordial chaos, while the victory over the waters can only signify the establishment of “stable forms,” i.e., the Creation. We shall see later that in the consciousness of the Hebrew people this cosmogonic victory becomes victory over foreign kings present and to come; the cosmogony justifies Messianism and the Apocalypse, and thus lays the foundations for a philosophy of history.
 

65
 

It is also because the New Year repeats the cosmogonic act that the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany are still regarded today as a prefiguration of the twelve months of the year. The peasants of Europe have no other reason for their universal practice of determining the weather of each month and its quota of rain in accordance with the meteorological signs of these twelve days. We hardly need remind ourselves that it was at the Feast of Tabernacles that the quantity of rain assigned to each month was determined. For their part, the Indians of the Vedic era set apart the twelve days, of midwinter as an image and replica of the year (Rg-Veda, IV, 33, 7).
 

71
 

…Slawik situates the ceremonials of the secret societies in what he calls the tama complex. This tama is a spiritual substance that is found in man, in the souls of the dead, and in “holy men,” and that, when winter passes into spring, becomes agitated and attempts to leave the body, while it impels the dead toward the dwellings of the living (cult complex of the visitor). It is to prevent this forsaking of the body by the tama that…the festivals…are celebrated.
 

73
 

In connection with this “world’s restoration,” it is instructive to recall the ideology at the base of what has been called the ghost-dance religion; this mystical movement, which seized upon the North American tribes toward the end of the nineteenth century, prophesied the approach of universal regeneration, that is, the imminence of the end of the world, followed by the restoration of a paradisiacal earth. The ghost-dance religion is too complex to be summarized in a few lines, but for our purposes it will suffice to say that it attempted to hasten the end of the world by a massive and collective communication with the dead, achieved after dances that continued for four or five days without intermission. The dead invaded the earth, communicated with the living, and thus created a “confusion” that announced the close of the current cosmic cycle. But since the mythical visions of the “beginning” and the “end” of time are homologues—eschatology, at least in certain aspects, becoming one with cosmogony—the eschaton of the ghost-dance religion reactualized the mythical illud tempus of Paradise, of primordial plenitude.

74
 

…New Year scenarios in which the Creation is repeated are particularly explicit among the historical peoples, those with whom history, properly speaking, begins—that is, the Babylonians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Iranians. It almost seems that these peoples, conscious that they were the first to build “history,” recorded their own acts for the use of their successors (not, however, without inevitable transfigurations in the matter of categories and archetypes…
 

75
 

…primitive man’s need to free himself from the recollection of sin, i.e., of a succession of personal events that, taken together, constitute history.
 

Thus we observe the immense importance that collective regeneration through repetition of the cosmogonic act acquired among the peoples who created history. We might point out here that, for reasons which, of course, are various, but also because of the metaphysical and anhistorical structure of Indian spirituality, the Indians never elaborated a cosmological New Year scenario as exclusive as those found in the ancient Near East. We might also point out that an outstandingly historical people, the Romans, were continuously obsessed by the “end of Rome” and sought innumerable systems of renovatio.
 

82
 

Among the Polynesians, the number of “situations” in which the recitation of the consmogonic myth is efficacious is still greater. According to the myth, in the beginning there were only the primordial waters, plunged in cosmic darkness. From “within the breathing-space of immensity,” Io, the supreme god, expressed the desire to emerge form his repose. Immediately, light appeared. Then he went on: “Ye waters of Tai-Kama, be ye separate. Heavens, be formed!” and thus, through Io’s cosmogonic words, the world came into existence. Recalling these “ancient and original sayings . . .the ancient and original cosmological wisdom (wananga), which caused growth from the void, etc.,” a Polynesian of our day, Hare Hongi, adds, with eloquent awkwardness:
 

‘And now, my friends, there are three very important applications of those original sayings, as used in our sacred rituals. The first occurs in the ritual for planting a child in the barren womb. The next occurs in the ritual for enlightening both the mind and body. The third and last occurs in the ritual on the solemn subject of death, and of war, of baptism, of genealogical recitals and such like important subjects, as the priests most particularly concerned themselves in.'
 

The words by which Io fashioned the Universe—that is to say, by which it was implanted and caused to produce a world of light—the same words are used in the ritual for implanting a child in a barren womb. The words by which Io caused light to shine in the darkness are used in the rituals for cheering a gloomy and despondent heart, the feeble aged, the decrepit; for shedding light into secret places and matters, for inspiration in song-composing and in many other affairs, affecting man to despair in times of adverse war. For all such the ritual includes the words (used by Io) to overcome and dispel darkness. Thirdly, there is a preparatory ritual which treats of successive formations within the universe, and the genealogical history of man himself.’
 

84
 

…recital of the cosmogonic myth (followed by the recitation of the myths of origin) and contemplating the sand paintings, the patient is projected out of profane time into the plenitude of primordial time: he has gone back to the origin of the world and is thus a witness of the cosmogony. Very often the patient takes a bath on the same day that the recitation of the myth of or the execution of the sand paintings begins; in effect, he too rebegins his life, in the strict sense of the word.
 

Among the Navajos, as among the Polynesians, the cosmogonic myth is followed by recitation of the myths of origin, which contain the mythical history of all “beginnings”: the creation of man, animals, and plants, the origin of the tribes traditional institutions and culture, and son on. In this way the patient goes over the mythical history of the world, of the Creation, down to the moment when the narrative that is being told was first revealed.
 

85
 

Collective or individual, periodic or spontaneous, regeneration rites always comprise, in their structure and meaning, an element of regeneration through repetition of an archetypal act, usually of the cosmogonic act. What is of chief importance to us in these archaic systems is the abolition of concrete time, and hence their antihisorical intent. This refusal to preserve the memory of the past, even of the immediate past, seems to us to betoken a particular anthropology. We refer to archaic man’s refusal to accept himself as a historical being, his refusal to grant value to memory and hence to the unusual events (i.e., events without an archetypal model) that in fact constitute concrete duration. In the last analysis, what we discover in all these rites and all these attitudes is the will to devaluate time.
 

86
 

Like the mystic, like the religious man in general, the primitive lives in a continual present. (And it is in this sense that the religious man may be said to be a “primitive”; he repeats the gestures of another and, through this repetition, lives always in an atemporal present.)
 

90
 

For Hegel, history is “free” and always “new,” it does not repeat itself; nevertheless, it conforms to the plans of providence; hence it has a model (ideal, but none the less a model) in the dialectic of spirit itself. To this history which does not repeat itself, Hegel opposes nature, in which things are reproduced ad infinitum. But we have seen that, during a very considerable period, humanity opposed history by all possible means. May we conclude from all this that, during this period, humanity was still within nature; had not yet detached itself from nature? “Only the animal is truly innocent,” Hegel wrote at the beginning of his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. The primitives did not always feel themselves innocent, but they tried to return to the state of innocence by periodically confessing their faults. Can we see, in this tendency toward purification, a nostalgia for the lost paradise of animality? Or, in the primitive’s desire to have no “memory,” not to record time, and to content himself with tolerating it simply as a dimension of his existence, but without “interiorizing” it, without transforming it into consciousness, should we rather see his thirst for the “ontic,” his will to be, to be after the fashion of the archetypal beings whose gestures he constantly repeats?
 

92
 

Hence we are justified in speaking of an archaic ontology, and it is only by taking this ontology into consideration that we can succeed in understanding—and hence in not scornfully dismissing—even the most extravagant behavior on the part of the primitive world; in fact, this behavior corresponds to a desperate effort not to lose contact with being.
 

Ch 3: MISFORTUNE AND HISTORY: Normality of Suffering; History regarded as Theophany; Cosmic Cycles and History; Destiny and History
 

95
 

Archaic man, as has been shown, tends to set himself in opposition, by every means in his power to history, regarded as a succession of events that are irreversible, unforeseeable, possessed of autonomous value. He refuses to accept it and to grant it value as such, as history—without, however, always being able to exorcise it; for example, he is powerless against cosmic catastrophes, military disasters, social injustices bound up with the very structure of society, personal misfortunes, and so forth.
 

97
 

n2 We emphasize once again that, from the point of view of anhistorical peoples or classes, “suffering” is equivalent to “history.” This equivalence can be observed even today in the peasant civilizations of Europe.
 

98
 

…suffering is perturbing only insofar as its cause remains undiscovered. As soon as the sorcerer or the priest discovers what is causing children or animals to die, drought to continue, rain to increase, game to disappear, the suffering begins to become tolerable; it has a meaning and a cause, hence it can be fitted into a system and explained.
 

100
 

…the archaic world nowhere presents us with a formula as explicit as that of karma to explain the normality of suffering…
 

The destruction of a harvest, drought, the sack of a city by an enemy,  loss of freedom or life, any calamity (epidemic, earthquake, and so on)—there is nothing that does not, in one way or another, find its explanation and justification in the transcendent, in the divine economy.
 

Nor is this all. In the Mediterranean-Mesopotamian area, man’s sufferings were early connected with those of a god. To do so was to endow them with an archetype that gave them both reality and normality. The very ancient myth of the suffering, death, and resurrection of Tammuz has replicas and imitations almost throughout the Paleo-Oriental world, and traces of its scenario were preserved even down to post-Christian gnosticism.
 

101
 

Any suffering could be tolerated if the drama of Tammuz was remembered.
 

For this mythical drama reminded men that suffering is never final; that death is always followed by resurrection; that every defeat is annulled and transcended by the final victory. The analogy between these myths and the lunar drama outlined in the preceding chapter is obvious. What we wish to emphasize at this point is that Tammuz, or any other variant of the same archetype, justifies—in other words, renders tolerable—the sufferings of the “just.” The god—as so often the “just,” the “innocent”—suffered without being guilty. He was humiliated, flogged till the lash drew blood, imprisoned in a “pit,” that is, in hell. Here it was that the Great Goddess (or, in the later, Gnostic versions, a “messenger”) visited him, encouraged him, and revived him. This consoling myth of the god’s sufferings was long in fading form the consciousness of the peoples of the East.
 

History Regarded as Theophany
 

102
 

Among the Hebrews, every new historical calamity was regarded as a punishment inflicted by Yahweh, angered by the orgy of sin to which the chosen people had abandoned themselves. No military disaster seemed absurd, no suffering was vain, for, beyond the “event,” it was always possible to perceive the will of Yahweh. Even more: these catastrophes were, we may say, necessary, they were foreseen by God so that the Jewish people should not contravene its true destiny by alienating the religious heritage left by Moses. Indeed, each time that history gave them the opportunity, each time that they enjoyed a period of comparative peace and economic prosperity, the Hebrews turned from Yahweh and to the Baals and Astartes of their neighbors.Only historical catastrophes brought them back to the right road by forcing them to look toward the true God. Then “they cried unto the lord, and said, We have sinned, because we have forsaken the Lord, and have served Baalim and Ashtaroth: but now deliver us out of the hand of our enemies, and we will serve thee” (I Samuel 12:10). This return to the true God in the hour of disaster reminds us of the desperate gesture of the primitive, who, to rediscover the existence of the Supreme Being, requires the extreme of peril and the failure of all addresses to other divine forms (gods, ancestors, demons). Yet the Hebrews, from the moment the great military Assyro-Babylonian empires appeared on their historical horizon, lived constantly under the threat proclaimed by Yahweh: “But if ye will not obey the voice of the Lord, but rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then shall the hand of the Lord be against you, as it was against your fathers” (I Samuel 12:15).

103 

Through their terrifying visions, the prophets but confirmed and amplified Yahweh’s ineluctable chastisement upon His people who had not kept the faith. And it is only insofar as such prophecies were ratified by catastrophes (as, indeed, was the case from Elijah to Jeremiah) that historical events acquired religious significance…
 

104
 

…by proving to be the concrete expression of the same single divine will. Thus, for the first time, the prophets place a value on history, succeeded in transcending the traditional vision of the cycle (the conception that ensures all things will be repeated forever), and discovered a one-way time. This discovery was not to be immediately and fully accepted by the consciousness of the entire Jewish people, and the ancient conceptions were still long to survive.
 

This God of the Jewish people is no longer an Oriental divinity, creator of archetypal gestures, but a personality who ceaselessly intervenes in history, who reveals his will through events (invasions, sieges, battles, and so on). Historical facts thus become “situations” of man in respect to God, and as such they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able to confer on them. It may, then, be said with truth that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God, and this conception, as we should expect, was taken up and amplified by Christianity.
 

105
 

…as Isaiah (11:15-16) prophesies, the miraculous passages of the Red Sea and the Jordan will be repeated “in the day.” Nevertheless, the moment of the revelation made to Moses by God remains a limited moment, definitely situated in time. And, since it also represents a theophany, it thus acquires a new dimension: it becomes precious inasmuch as it is no longer reversible, as it is historical event.
 

106
 

The only difference is that this victory over the forces of darkness and chaos no longer occurs regularly every year but is projected into a future and Messianic illud tempus.
 

107
 

Rehandling the old scenarios (type: Tammuz) of the “passion” of a god, Messianism gives them a new value, especially by abolishing their possibility of repetition ad infinitum. When the Messiah comes, the world will be saved once and for all and history will cease to exist. In this sense we are justified in speaking not only of an eschatologocial granting of value to the future, to “that day,” but also of the “salvation” of historical becoming. History no longer appears as a cycle that repeats itself ad infinitum, as the primitive peoples represented it (creation, exhaustion, destruction, annual re-creation of the cosmos), and as it was formulated—as we shall see immediately—in theories of Babylonian origin (creation, destruction, creation extending over considerable periods of time: millennia, Great Years, aeons).
 

110
 

Just as Abraham’s experience can be regarded as a new religious position of man in the cosmos, so, through the prophetic office and Messianism, historical events reveal themselves, in the consciousness of the Israelitic elites, asa dimension they had not previously known: the historical event becomes a theophany, in which are revealed not only Yahweh’s will but also the personal relations between him and his people. The same conception, enriched through the elaboration of Christology, will serve as the basis for the philosophy of history that Christianity, from St Augustine on, will labor to construct.
 

111
 

…if, here, history was refused, ignored, or abolished by the periodic repetition of the Creation and by the periodic regeneration of time, in the Messianic conception history must be tolerated because it has an eshchatological function, but it can be tolerated only because it is known that, one day or another, it will cease. History is thus abolished…in the future.
 

Cosmic Cycles and History
 

112
 

…two distinct orientations...define themselves: the one traditional, adumbrated (without ever having been clearly formulated) in all primitive cultures, that of cyclical time, periodically regenerating itself ad infinitum; the other modern, that of finite time, a fragment (though itself also cyclical) between two atemporal eternities.
 

Almost all these theories of the “Great Time” are found in conjunction with the myth of successive ages, the “age of gold” always occurring at the beginning of the cycle, close to the paradigmatic illud tempus. In the two doctrines—that of cyclical time, and that of limited cyclical time—this age of gold is recoverable; in other words, it is repeatable, an infinite number of times in the former doctrine, once only in the latter.
 

113
 

…the first age, the Krta Yuga, lasts 4,000 years, plus 400 years of dawn and as many of twilight; then come the Treta Yuga of 3,000 years, Dvapara Yuga of 2,000 years, and Kali Yuga of 1,000 years (plus, of course, their corresponding dawns and twilights).Hence a Mahayuga lasts 12,000 years (…Mahabharata…). To the progressive decrease in duration of each new yuga, there corresponds, on the human plane, a decrease in the length of life, accompanied by a corruption in morals and a decline in intelligence. This continuous decadence upon all planes—biological, intellectual, ethical, social, and so on—assumes particular emphasis in the Puranic texts… Transition from one yuga takes place, as we have seen, during a twilight, which marks a decrescendo within the yuga itself, each yuga ending by a phase of darkness.
 

118

…the theory validates and justifies the sufferings of him who does not choose freedom but resigns himself to undergoing his existence, and this by the very fact that he is conscious of the dramatic and catastrophic structure of the epoch in which it has been given him to live (or, more precisely, to live again).
 

This second possibility for man to find his place in a “period of darkness,” the close of a cycle, is of especial interest to us. It occurs, in fact, in other cultures and at other historical moments. To bear the burden of being contemporary with a disastrous period by becoming conscious of the position it occupies in the descending trajectory of the cosmic cycle is an attitude that was especially to demonstrate its effectiveness in the twilight of Greco-Oriental civilization.
 

119
 

The only aspect that interests us is the place the man of these civilizations finds for himself in respect to history, and more especially as he confronts contemporary history.
 

We shall review these cosmological systems—from the pre-Socratics to the New-Pythagoreans—only insofar as they answer the following question: What is the meaning of history, that is, of the totality of the human experiences provoked by inevitable geographical conditions, social structures, political conjunctures, and so on?
 

…the philosophical myths and the more or less scientific cosmologies elaborated by this minority, which begins with the pre-Socratics, attained in time to very wide dissemination.
 

125
 

…in the Iranian conception, history (whether followed or not by infinite time) is not eternal; it does not repeat itself but will come to an end one day by an eschatological ekpyrosis and cosmic cataclysm.
 

126
 

Windisch has shown the importance of these Mazdean ideas for the Christian apologist Lactantius. God created the world in six days, and on the seventh he rested; hence the world will endure for six aeons, during which “evil will conquer and triumph” on earth. During the seventh millennium, the prince of demons will be chained and humanity will know a thousand years of rest and perfect justice. After this the demon will escape form his chains and resume war upon the just; but at last he will be vanquished and at the end of the eighth millennium the world will be re-created for eternity. Obviously, this division of history into three acts and eight millennia was also know to the Christian chiliasts, but there can be no doubt that it is Iranian in structure, even if a similar eschatological vision of history was disseminated throughout the Mediterranean East and in the Roman Empire by Greco-Oriental gnosticisms.

129
 

Simplifying, we might say that, among the Iranians as among the Jews and Christians, the “history” apportioned to the universe is limited, and that the end of the world coincides with the destruction of sinners, the resurrection of the dead, and the victory of eternity over time. But although this doctrine becomes increasingly popular during the first century B.C. and the early centuries of our era, it does not succeed in finally doing away with the traditional doctrine of periodic regeneration of the world through annual repetition of the Creation.
 

Destiny and History
 

130
 

How has man tolerated history? The answer is discernible in each individual system: His very place in the cosmic cycle— whether the cycle be capable of repetition or not—lays upon man a certain historical destiny.
 

131
 

(The mere mention of the swarm of gnosticisms, sects, mysteries, and philosophies that overran the Mediterranean-Oriental world during the centuries of historical tension will suffice to give an idea of the vastly increasing proportion of those who attempted to withdraw from history.)
 

…the historical moment, despite the possibilities of escape it offers contemporaries, can never, in its entirety, be anything but tragic, pathetic, unjust, chaotic, as any moment that heralds the final catastrophe must be.
 

In fact, a common characteristic relates all the cyclical systems scattered through the Hellenistic-Oriental world: in the view of each of them, the contemporary historical moment (whatever its chronological position) represents a decadence in relation to preceding historical moments. Not only is the contemporary aeon inferior to the other ages (gold, silver, and so on) but, even within the frame of the reigning age (that is, of the reigning cycle), the “instant” in which man lives grows worse as time passes.
 

132
 

However, different as were the possible positions of man, they displayed one common characteristic: history could be tolerated, not only because it had a meaning but also because it was, in the last analysis, necessary. For those who believed in a repetition of an entire cosmic cycle, as for those who believed only in a single cycle nearing its end, the drama of contemporary history was necessary and inevitable. Plato, even in his day, and despite his acceptance of some of the schemata of Chaldaean astrology, was profuse in his sarcasms against those who had fallen into astrological fatalism or who believed in an eternal repetition in the strict (Stoic) sense of the term
 

n37 Among many other liberations, Christianity effected liberation from astral destiny: “We are above fate,” Tatian writes… summing up Christian doctrine.“The sun and the moon were made for us; how am I to worship what are my servitors.”
 

133
 

…Saint Augustine will defend the idea of a perennial Rome solely to escape form accepting a fatum determined by cyclical theories.
 

…various Greco-Oriental gnosticisms, Neo-Stoicism, and Neo-Pythagoreanism.
 

Empires rose and fell; wars caused innumerable sufferings; immorality, dissoluteness, social injustice, steadily increased—because all this was necessary, that is, was willed by the cosmic rhythm, by the demiurge, by the constellations, or by the will of God.
 

In this view, the history of Rome takes on a noble gravity.
 

… (1) the life of the city is ended, its duration being limited to a certain number of years (the “mystic number”