by Delia Morgan
March 2000
Mircea Eliade took a unique approach to the history of religion; a bold and radical innovator who produced a prodigious body of work, he has also been criticized for what other scholars may regard as a kind of methodological sloppiness. This aspect of his work seems to reflect a radical re-ordering of priorities; for Eliade the field of enquiry was something beyond purely a history or even a science of religion. Employing a method he termed “creative hermeneutics,” he took as central the task of finding or even creating meaning from the collection of religious facts. He granted primacy to religious experience, as did the phenomenologists, but he did not stop at mere description.
Eliade asserted “the sacred” as a transcendent reality, a truth beyond the grasp of empiricism, materialism or reductionism. (And therefore, it has been claimed, beyond the key scientific criterion of falsifiability. – Strenski, p 108)He disavowed all theories which would purport to explain religious phenomena in terms of some other, more readily observable and indisputably acknowledged, phenomenon. Like Rudolf Otto, he saw in the experience of the sacred that which was irreducible, and hence it constituted an autonomous field of enquiry. (Strenski, p. 114)
He has been interpreted as a cultural revolutionary, a man on a mission to bring about a fundamental and universal change in humanity, with “a species of high-order propaganda, a sort of scholar’s magic which seeks to change the ways people see things.”(Strenski, p 120)The goal toward which this ‘magic’ appears to be aimed is the “image of man as homo religiousus, archaic, and integrated into a personal wholeness.”(Strenski, p 121)
Eliade’s vision and his resulting theories about the nature of religion find some strong correspondences within the neopagan religion of Wicca, as well as within the larger context of the neopagan movement as a whole; there are also some telling differences. What is more, however, is that even Eliade’s approach and perhaps his motivations share much in common with the core of neopagan thought. While generalizations are risky, given the diverse nature of neopaganism in America today, some key features are sufficiently widespread as to allow a comparison with Eliade’s major themes.
Eliade placed great emphasis on mythical thought and its enactment through ritual behavior; key to this is the idea of liturgical or primordial time, the illud tempus of the cosmic beginning. He sees all myth as reflecting, or to some extent partaking of, the myth of the original creation or ordering of the world. Ritual recreates the primordial time and makes it present, often through the repetition of a cosmogonic myth. In archaic cultures this is seen as a cyclical process – each new year is the creation of the world anew. Christianity, in following Judaism, adopted the linear time of history; its central myth of divine incarnation is a one-time event, not to be repeated.
But while Christian clergy fought against pagan elements and refused to see the mythos in their own tradition, there was a constant influx of pagan influence. Eliade cites in particular the trend toward “cosmic Christianity” which became popular among rural agrarian populations. Rural folklore retained pagan sentiments in a Christianized form, and agrarian peoples emphasized “mystical empathy with the cosmic rhythms” and sacraments which “sanctify Nature too.” (Eliade, Myth and Reality, p 172)But this re-sacralization was necessary only because Nature had previously been de-sanctified by Christian doctrine; as Eliade noted, in archaic or prehistoric societies virtually everything had a sacred aspect, including hunting and agriculture, sexuality and alimentation. (Eliade, Crisis and Renewal, p. 68)
Among later pagan mythic elements which became incorporated “under a varnish of Christianity” were various Celtic beliefs regarding the Other World; these were reflected in the Arthurian cycle and the quest for the Grail. (Eliade, Survivals, p 174)In this reading selection Eliade was mainly discussing survivals of pagan beliefs in Christian practice.Quite possibly he thought, as did many scholars, that European paganism had vanished forever; however, in light of the rebirth of paganism in Europe and America, we can relate his ideas directly to the revitalized pagan religions of modern times.
Central to Wicca and to most neopagan religion is specifically the idea that Nature is inherently sacred; Wicca can most aptly be described as a Nature religion. In this respect, neopagans have returned to the lost paradise, at least as an inner psychological reality; many are also involved with environmental causes, in an attempt to restore the pristine beauty of the Earth as an empirical, external reality. Many sport bumper stickers which echo Eliade’s comment about archaic attitudes: “Everything is Sacred.”To pagans, Nature does not need to be redeemed, because it is the eternal field of the sacred. On the contrary, Nature is what can redeem us. This pantheistic view defies easy categorization of the sacred as transcendent versus immanent; it’s both at once. In this respect, perhaps, it differs from Eliade’s transcendent version of the sacred.
Also central to neopaganism is its emphasis on myth; what is perhaps unusual is that most neopagans will readily grant that their myths are precisely that, metaphorically and spiritually true rather than reflective of some literal historical event. In Wicca, myths are enacted through ritual drama, particularly at the eight solar holidays, known as sabbats. Wicca envisions time in the archaic, cyclical manner, as the “wheel of the year” with the sabbats as its spokes. Ritual dramas reflect the myths associated with the changing of the seasons; the Horned God of Wicca is a version of the dying and reborn deity associated with vegetation, as well as being lord of animals and the hunt. He is born at the winter solstice, grows strong and mates with the Goddess in spring, and dies in autumn and embarks upon a journey to the underworld from where he will be reborn as the sun at Yule. This is basically the archaic myth of universal regeneration. (Eliade, Survivals, p 180) But in it we can also see echoes of Eliade’s “eternal return” as well as the central theme of the initiatory journey. In fact, traditional Wicca remains an initiatory “mystery religion” and initiation echoes the death-and-rebirth theme seen in the yearly cycle of the Horned God. Eliade saw initiatory themes, an entering of “closed worlds,” in modern literature, but thought that this experience had “almost vanished.” (Eliade, Survivals, p 188)
Of even more direct relevance to Eliade’s “eternal return” is that Wiccan rituals take place within a consecrated circular space; as the circle is first cast, it is an unformed void, a chasm corresponding to Eliade’s primordial chaos. (Eliade, Myth and Reality, p 190)Then at the beginning of the ritual, the act of consecrating the circle recapitulates the primordial creation of space and time.Out of the darkness, candles are lit to represent the Goddess and the God, who are the primordial creative forces of the universe; then candles are lit at each of the four directions and the corresponding element is invoked. This mandalic pattern, the quartered circle, represents the original creation of space and matter out of primordial chaos. The center of the circle, often the location of the altar, is the axis mundi, the sacred center which connects the worlds. When magical energy is raised, it is thought to travel around the circle spiraling upward to a point above the center, in a “cone of power,” from where it is projected to the entire cosmos.
The Wiccan circle sacralizes not only space, but time. Once the circle is ritually cast, participants are said to be “between the worlds.”Profane time does not exist in the circle; as a token of this, watches or other timepieces are traditionally never brought into the circle. The circle, which is dissolved at the end of the ritual, exists “never and always” – that is, in the sacred liturgical time which Eliade calls the illud tempus.
Eliade thought that the cosmogonic myth was the prime model for all myth and ritual. In Wicca this shows up not only in the casting of the circle, but in the central sacrament known as the “symbolic Great Rite.”In Wicca, all creation is the fruit of the womb of the Goddess.It proceeds from the intimate union of the Goddess and the God, who form a divine polarity, a “coincidence of opposites” which form the primordial totality of being. In their conjoining, there is the idea of beginning creation “anew, with the original power,” as Eliade put it. (Eliade, Crisis and Renewal, p 65)The Wiccan rite consists of the lowering of a ritual dagger, representing the God, into a sacred chalice, representing the Goddess; and “from their union, the worlds are born.”This is an obvious cosmogonic re-enactment. Significantly, and related to Eliade’s ideas, is the conception of the divine polarity in Wicca.The Goddess signifies all that is beyond time itself – she is infinite and eternal, while the Horned God signifies all that moves through time – the eternal cycle of life and death. The God returns to the Goddess and is absorbed into her, through the mysteries of sex and death; this effects, mythically, what Eliade calls the breakthrough to the timeless. The mythic journey of the God stands in as a symbol for the journey of all things which emerge from the timeless sacred – the Goddess – and ultimately return to it.
More commonalities can be seen between Eliade’s views and those of modern pagans, especially in his notions of the creative invention of religious meaning as a means for transforming the consciousness of humanity. In modern Wicca, the practice of “magic” quite often refers to a process of internal transformation through ritual practice and/or the internal integration of mythic themes. An oft-heard saying paraphrases a quote from a famous occultist: “Magic is the art of changing consciousness according to will.” (From either Aleister Crowley or Dion Fortune.)Ritual is often done with the purpose of exploring the realms of the subconscious and the collective unconscious and bringing their hidden wealth of archetypal symbolism to the more accessible conscious levels of the mind. This can allow one to become a conscious creator of meaning and self-expression in life. Two prominent Wiccan authors, Vivianne Crowley and Starhawk, are also practicing psychologists; Crowley follows specifically Jungian lines of thought regarding the unconscious. All of this expresses a desire for a holistic integration of the various levels of the psyche, with the religious level seen as the most profound. It also echoes Eliade’s ideas about the“nostalgia for the ‘primordial totality’”and his approval for bringing this about through a variety of means; for him such means would include surrealist art and literature, as well as his own program of bringing about an ‘awakening’ in the reader of his books.(Eliade, Crisis and Renewal, p 65-66; Strenski, p 120)
It could even be argued that the neopagan movement, like Eliade, sees this transformation as occurring not merely on an individual level but on a collective level. While more traditional branches of Wicca tend to eschew political purpose, the feminist and eclectic influences which began in the 1970’s introduced a frankly revolutionary spirit into the neopagan movement. “Subvert the dominant paradigm” is a slogan which graces many a bumper on the cars of pagans, along with “The Goddess is alive and magic is afoot.”For many Wiccans, the re-awakening of “Goddess consciousness” is very much the kind of cultural renewal that Eliade described. Pagans tend to see the advent of missionary Christianity and its world domination as a long process of destruction which has come to threaten even the Earth itself, and the solution is to be found in a radical re-visioning of the very nature of reality itself. Paradigms which emphasize rationality to the exclusion of emotion and intuition, and which reinforce ideas of man’s control over Nature, areto be discarded in favor of the idea of reality, or Nature, as an organic, living, sacred whole.
In line with this agenda, many pagans eschew the purely historical in favor of the mythical.Wicca lays claim to being a survival or revival of a ancient religious sensibility; but whether this is historically true is of little consequence.One could easily see, in the Wiccan myth of “The Old Religion” which survived underground through centuries of Christian persecution, a metaphor for the re-emergence pagan religious sensibility itself: we had it, we lost it, we found it again. The old pagan mythic themes retreated to the subconscious, often surviving as cultural artifacts under a cover of Christianity, only to re-erupt with a passion when triggered by the crises of the twentieth century.Wicca and other neopagan religious traditions are frankly creative; even those based on known historical religions such as Norse or Greco-Roman paganism freely admit that much was lost, and that it is necessary, to some extent, to re-create the religion anew.As one priestess said, in Margot Adler’s book Drawing Down the Moon: “Remember. Or, failing that, -- invent.”
Much of this is reminiscent of Eliade’s own seeming agenda of cultural revolution. Strenski sees in Eliade’s approach a comparison with Jungian psychology and surrealism, which are “meaning-seeking movements” which try “deliberately to upset the everyday common sense view of existence.” Furthermore, these movements are “forms of cultural conjuring” which “seek to uncover, beneath the common-sense level of reality, something described as archaic, primordial, primitive...”(Strenski, Four Theories, p 120)This is, not by mere coincidence, a description which could also be aptly applied to the neopagan movement as a whole.
Eliade saw, in the transition from archaic to historical time, a profound crisis. For man’s life to have meaning, it must be related to something transhistorical and transcendent – the sacred. He saw Christianity as a unique religious view which linked the historical with the trans-historical, through the singular events of Jesus’ incarnation and the coming end of the world. But he also sought to convey the timeless sacred through discerning meaning via the comparative study of religion, as well as avant-garde literary and artistic movements. What he could not foresee was a revival of paganism, which would proceed to bring about, in modern persons, a direct perception of the archaic religious mode of being.
One notable exception to the commonality of themes between Eliade and the neopagan movement is to be found in the attitude toward eschatology. For Eliade, the importance of the theme ofthe end of the world is that, like the primordial time of the beginning, it breaks free of historical time and into the sacred transcendent. Most modern pagans do not subscribe to any mythos regarding the end of the world. (Norse paganism may be an exception.) In fact, they see it as a very dangerous idea. For pagans, the Earth itself is sacred, here and now; Nature is Divinity, and it is both transcendent (beyond ordinary perception) and immanent (the root of all that exists). Any religious conception which places its hopes on a time after the destruction of the Earth is deeply misguided, and may even trigger irresponsible behavior towards the planet of our birth.
Pagans today, while embracing the archaic idea of cyclical time, do not deny the reality of history; but they see it in a different perspective. In the pagan view, the time of destruction began with Christian attempts to eliminate paganism; we have hopefully passed the time of crisis, and have now begun the process of renewal – the rebirth of the idea of the sacred cosmos, brought about by the re-awakening of the Goddess.Not that there might not be more crises awaiting in the historical future, but the overall schedule of the sacred is a cyclic one.Nature is billions of years old; the coming and going of species, even the human species, is both of sacred import and yet ultimately insignificant in the larger scale of things. In this conjunction of perspectives – the now moment and the timeless – paganism also achieves the conjunction of opposites implied by a sacred reality which is both immanent and transcendent.
It is difficult to know what Eliade would have thought of the neopagan movement; he might well have been horrified. But a remarkable sympathy of spirit shows through the various themes held in common, and neopagans may well be the main torch-bearers for Eliade’s vision of “homo religiosus, archaic, and integrated into a personal wholeness,”and the cultural revolution thereby implied.(Strenski, p 121)
(Note: Unreferenced quotes used above, when they exceed a few words in length, are taken from common Wiccan liturgy; generally the sources are unpublished but widely known within the neopagan community.)