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at any time in radical new forms and in some way the primordial chaos of creation creatively revisited. In Ordeal by Labyrinth we read: What I am sure of is that any future forms of religious experience will be quite different from those we are familiar with in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, all of which are fossilized, outmoded, drained of meaning. I am sure that new forms, new expressions, will come. What will they be? I cannot say. The great surprise is always the freedom of the human spirit, its creativity. 78
Eliade had no interest himself in making or even selecting myths for contemporary purposes; he was content to let myths fend for themselves in a free marketplace of ideas. He had no desire for the role of the mythmaker or propagandist, much less to be the founder of a new religion. Indeed, the post1945 Eliade insisted that the sacred cannot be made intentionally, by an act of the will; it can only be discovered, albeit perhaps in new venues.
This is a very important point. It gives the lie to those fascist and other pseudo religions that presume to manufacture their own sacralities, while it permits the sacred to be found in any number of unlikely and unexpected corners of the modem world. The possibility of new discoveries of the sacred meant that one always had the freedom to make new beginnings, it may be alone. This was a freedom very important to an exile whose life and world had been sorely ruptured.
The freedom to make new beginnings: this is the real sense of being free from the terror of history. Here Eliade appears to move into the postmodernism of liberation from the "metanarratives" of progress and universal knowledge, which also meant bondage to the terror of history. For, to the modernist, history with all its terrors was the necessary vehicle of anything modernism could understand as progress or the increase of knowledge. Now, back before history, Eliade has discovered another possibility: the return to the near memory, at least, of illud tempus, and the nonreactionary recreation of the world.
But the abolition of historical time stands in equal relation, in principle, to all points in time. It therefore comes at the end of history—the eschaton—as well as at the beginning. Moreover, it can be enacted, at least symbolically, at any point in time; we can become primal man, not by regress but by egress, moving out of history to gain, as far as possible, the vantage of one who is unconditioned,
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merely human before the universe. Eliade perceptively saw that the modern quest for the "origin" of religion, so earnestly engaged in by an earlier generation of anthropologists and historians, was in fact futile since an absolute and singular beginning could never be reached. The search was really little more than a scholarly version of the mythical quest for origins. 79 One can only try: Eliade once said, "My essential preoccupation is precisely the means of escaping History, of saving myself through symbol, myth, rite, archetypes." 80
How is egress to be done? It can only be approximated, of course. Primal man can only hear of illud tempus and yearn for it, or recover it symbolically at the turn of the year, never actually. So one leaves history only, so to speak, in one's spiritual body. One way—the modern way—is through attaining a level of scholarship so sublime that one is able to gaze panoramically over the world with serene and untouchable understanding, the modern "privileged position." This was a way which Eliade himself strove as arduously, and as successfully, to master as anyone in the twentieth century. It represents, in fact, his contribution to culturecreation as the sublimest of politics.
In the end he felt he could only chronicle the escape from history of others. Eliade once said in my hearing that the highest human being was the mystic, since he could actually perceive and experience ultimate timeless reality; the second highest was the poet, who could at least express what the mystic saw in adequate language; the third was the historian of religion like himself, who could only record the seeings and the words of the mystic and his poet. But as their scholarly chronicler, one could perhaps make the best political contribution, for the mystic and the poet with their words that draw lightning are dangerous mediators in that realm, as he doubtless well knew though did not say. For by such a mystic out of time Eliade did not necessarily mean only a cloistered monk or a yogi in a cave. Judging from his novels, especially The Forbidden Forest, the idea was important to him that in the midst of active life, even of wartime flight across Europe, one could know moments when time stopped and began anew. Perhaps while becoming a fulltime historian in 1945, Eliade attained an Altizerian radical coincidentia oppositorum of the sacred and the profane, and of time and timelessness.
If he did not, it was because he tended spiritually to privilege archaism over the contemporary world, and to hold that we can no longer quite experience reality as fully as our ancestors. It was only in
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the archaic world, before history, that one could fully face reality unmediated and without terror. To Eliade, the primitive was not unconscious and "buried in nature,"
as Hegel claimed. Rather, it is important to realize that the primal cosmos is "open," a realm where transformation is possible, so the sacred is not automatic in the real world, but is an existentialist possibility. 81 Thus, we are told in Patterns in Comparative Religion, the inauguration of a new king or chief is like a new creation of the world. 82 This merely symbolizes the perennial yearning for primordial return, which is not a return to the "primitive,'' but to the chaos of completeness, when male and female are equal, and all are embraced within the divinity. 83 History is a fall, a rupture, from that primordial unity.
The loss of this state goes back to the beginning, to cosmic religion, as does its memory. The deus otiosus could be called "the first example of the 'death of God'" of Nietzsche, 84 but gods do not so much die as change, taking camouflaged forms in a diversity of myths. Perhaps more could be said than Eliade did about the living sacred in contemporary religion. For whatever the case with God, religion certainly lives and is vibrantly experienced, no doubt as much now as ever.
But Eliade, afflicted by the secularization myth like most intellectuals of his time, and also by his own nostalgic temperament, often affected a yearning attitude toward the sacred past while acknowledging its metamorphosed forms in the present. In so doing he did no more than distill the attitude of most modern people, who generally assume religion past to have been stronger than religion present. No myth of religion is more powerful, even among scholars of religion, not to mention among the pious, than the myth of the pious past. Like all myths of loss, it is laden with guilt.
The crime is there: the death or murder of God cannot be forgotten; that would be the supreme sacrilege. So we have a modern world in which the memory of God remains, but the divine is camouflaged and hidden in an infinite variety of disguises. Eliade said that the sacred is camouflaged in the profane in a reverse of the way Freud and Marx had claimed the profane is hidden in the supposedly sacred! To find it in such places as modern works of literature one needs a sort of
"demystification in reverse." 85
What can be done? Origins and eschaton tell us there is hope available, that we do not need to be tied to a guilty past or historical
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terror. Eschatology, the new beginning, is in the future but starts now. In Cosmos and History Eliade often referred to the futurology of Joachim of Flora, whom he like Campbell and Voegelin saw as a paradigmatic visionary of modernism and beyond. Hope requires a founding myth. Once it was Codreanu's idea of national resurrection and a "new man." Eliade never apologized for this faith or wished to proclaim it again. But what if the new world could come about in an entirely novel and surprising way, nonrevolutionary and only marginally political?