Summary catch up Eliade
When I took Religion and Culture last year we went over many different religious theorists. Two of them ended up being my favorite to use when studying cultures. The first was Durkheim. He was so scientific in applying all the categories groups of people had to be a community and they worked out very well. However, he didn’t believe in the existence of a “higher” power which I personally believe there is and should be accounted for when considering religious groups. Enter my second favorite Eliade. His book, The Myth of the Eternal Return this time around has some of the same features as the Sacred and Profane. The idea of heirophany, axis mundi and separation of reality from the divine are all scattered about in there.
The new ideas I pulled from this reading were man’s longing to act like God. This is prevalent in his discussion of man cultivating communities. When we create a town or whatever it is an act of creation, an primal instant to form something out of nothing just as God did. This can be seen as his chaos to cosmos theory in which God brought cosmos to the chaotic world. This idea has interesting aspects in today’s society as we have literally made completely new things with the Internet and virtual reality. In a sense we are God when thinking of these virtual places. Eliade continues this train of imitating the divine by stating humans do this in the creation of temples and through ritual. Whenever we create an axis mundi such as a church we are tapping into the divine and trying to recreate the divine temple from there. This goes the same for rituals. We are trying to remember the divine actions of God or Gods and do them here on earth.
In these arguments we can see the meaning of the title o the book. As Eliade states humans are always trying to imitate or return to the divine through recreation. So the recreation of rituals, temples and communities are all our primal urge to return, thus the myth of the eternal return. His theories are very intriguing to me when considering them in the western religious sense, but they fall apart when applying to eastern and indigenous American religions. They don’t state that the world was in chaos at the beginning, but this is a staple to Elaide’s theory. However, they seem to have this separation from the divine that Eliade always mentions. In either way I wonder what Eliade has to say about virtual reality and how we now imitate our imitations through virtual temples. Are these creations tapping into the divine or our recreation? We’ll never know.
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