Mircea Eliade and Primordial Eucharist

In his landmark 1957 book The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade lays important groundwork for his hermeneutic of "eternal return."

In this interpretation of religious experience, religious man is made contemporary, by way of "religious festival," with the mythic, primordial, and sacred events (the illud tempus) that ontologically precede and give life to his fallen "secular" experience – with the "time before time," if you will, wherein all things were (and are) more authentic and from which all things derive any substance whatsoever.

"In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time."

Initiated and accomplished primarily through religious ritual (or "festival"), the idea of eternal return is, according to Eliade, common to all proper definitions of religious experience. By attempting to unite with the illud tempus via this festival, religious man routinely transcends historical time and partakes in something contemporaneous to that of the gods.

Eternal return is an awkward idea, perhaps, to modern ears. Eliade acknowledges as much:

"The perspective changes completely when the sense of the religiousness of the Cosmos becomes lost. This is what occurs when, in certain more highly evolved societies, the intellectual élites progressively detach themselves from the patterns of the traditional religion. Periodical sanctification of cosmic time then proves useless and without meaning. The gods are no longer accessible through the cosmic rhythms. The religious meaning of the repetition of paradigmatic gestures is forgotten. But repetition emptied of its religious content necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence. When it is no longer a vehicle for reintegrating a primordial situation, and hence for recovering the mysterious presence of the gods, that is, when it is desacralized, cyclic time becomes terrifying; it is seen as a circle forever turning on itself, repeating itself to infinity."

Modern, materialist man simply has no use for eternal return when the reality of any illud tempus is rejected outright, or even any notion that, as Eliade says, "reality is a function of the imitation of a celestial archetype." Even religious man today, insofar as he or she is allowed to reject any primordial reality even whilst claiming some religious conviction, may never attempt any sort of unity with the primordial in the way that characterized religious man in the past.

But eternal return is not completely lost on modern man. Catholic and Orthodox Christians (among others) embrace the "real presence" in the Eucharist and thereby participate in eternal return on the occasion of every eucharistic celebration.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraph 1085), for example, the "The Paschal mystery of Christ ... cannot remain only in the past ... and all that Christ is ... participating in the divine eternity, and so transcends all times while being made present in them all." This mystery – mysterium fidei – is, of course, a Eucharistic acclamation typically sung immediately after the words of institution.

In this sense, the Eucharist may be understood as properly a "religious festival" whereby (according to Eliade) man unites himself with primordial reality, which "transcends all times."

Yes, the Eucharist was instituted at a particular place and time – the first "words of institution," uttered by Christ himself, happened on the night before Passover sometime around 35 AD. This particular event was not a primordial experience insofar as it was something that might have allegedly been recorded in real-time. But insofar as the Lamb is "slain before the foundations of the world" (Revelation 13) and man is saved by "the precious blood of Christ ... destined before the foundation of the world"(I Peter 1), the Eucharist is a festival that unites man with primordial reality. Anything less, of course, and it is only a "sign."

Further, per Origen (and others), there was a tradition current among the Jews during the time of Christ that Adam's skull was deposited at Golgotha (which thereby gave rise to the hill's name, which means "the place of the skull"). This tradition comes down mostly from the Church Fathers and is thoroughly illuminated by Jordan J. Ryan in his paper Golgotha and the burial of Adam between Jewish and Christian tradition. Eliade himself references it briefly in his 1971 book Myth of the Eternal Return:

"For Christians, Golgotha was situated at the center of the world, since it was the summit of the cosmic mountain and at the same time the place where Adam had been created and buried. Thus the blood of the Saviour falls upon Adam’s skull, buried precisely at the foot of the Cross, and redeems him. The belief that Golgotha is situated at the center of the world is preserved in the folklore of the Eastern Christians."

Indeed, beyond mere folklore, Adam's skull buried beneath the foot of the cross is, and has always been, standard in Eastern Orthodox crucifixion iconography. That the blood of Christ is alleged to have physically washed Adam's skull is a hefty nod, indeed, to the transcendency, and even primordiality, of the Paschal mystery.