October 14, 2022
So here it is mid-October, reminding me that I have been writing this newsletter for well over a year, and that last year around this time I wrote about autumn. Not wanting to repeat myself, I have decided this year to widen the frame of reference and write about the cycle of the seasons, and about cyclical time in general. Autumn is the memento mori season, reminding us that time is not only passing but passing away. I suppose that the poignance of the turning of the fall leaves in this part of the country comes from the fact that they blaze into miraculous brilliance at the exact moment they are dying. It is what the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, of whom more in a moment, calls a hierophany, an epiphany of the sacred. Moses saw one burning bush: we see hundreds while just driving to work.
But that is exactly the riddle: how can transience, decline and death, what the Renaissance called mutability, be sacralized? Surely it is the essence of what Eliade called the profane, the opposite of the sacred. Joni Mitchell has an early song about the cycles of time called “The Circle Game,” which follows a child through the cycles of his growing and maturing, from 10 to 16, ending at 20. I confess I am not very fond of it: the verses sentimentalize in their effort to put a positive spin, pun intended, on the idea of growing up: “There’ll be new dreams maybe better dreams and plenty / Before the last revolving year is through.” But Joni Mitchell was only in her twenties when she wrote the song. There were indeed to be new dreams realized in her remarkably creative life, but what is missing is the 79-year-old woman she is now, just recovered enough from serious health problems to give her first live concert in many years. The chorus of “The Circle Game” is in tension with the insistent affirmation of the verses:
And the seasons they go round and round The painted ponies go up and down We’re captive on the carousel of time We can’t return we can only look Behind from where we came And go round and round and round In the circle game.
“Urge for Going,” from the same early period, is a stronger song because it is more honest about the death of all things symbolized by autumn. She awakes to find “The frost perched on the town,” and everything around her possessed of an urge for going: the geese, a summertime lover, Summer itself when her “empire’s falling down.” The speaker too gets the urge for going—“But I never seem to go.” Instead she plies the fire with kindling and resigns herself to the fact that, unlike the geese, we cannot just fly away, but must live the cycle through, until the point at which we say, with the speaker in Shakespeare’s sonnet 73,
That time of year thou may’st in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
Under the influence of 19th-century realism, the Victorian critic John Ruskin condemned the idea that nature has any correspondence with human feelings as the “pathetic fallacy.” Autumn isn’t sad: that’s just naïve projection. But it is the pathetic fallacy that is naïve: Wallace Stevens has a whole series of poems—“Credences of Summer,” “The Auroras of Autumn,” “The Snow Man”—based on the deeper insight that seasons are states of the imagination.
The autumnal mood depends upon what point in the season the poet chooses as a focus. Pick early autumn with its blazing colors and the fullness of the harvest and you get Keats’s “Ode to Autumn.” Pick late autumn and the leaves are yellow or few, and the weather, at least around here, is most often incessant, cold rain, and you have the elegiac mood whose full literary form is that of tragedy. Literature teachers draw the shape of tragedy for students as a cycle: the tragic hero rises to a point of eminence, reaches a turning point, Aristotle’s peripeteia, and then falls. Tragedy is a specific dramatic genre, but it is also a wider vision informing other literary genres. Beowulf is heroic epic in the tragic tonality: it begins with the exploits of Beowulf’s vital youth, the defeating of Grendel and his mother, but ends in Beowulf’s final, fatal fight with the dragon when he is 70, and Beowulf’s dying speech prophesies the future decline and extinction of his whole people, the Geats. The mood of tragedy is elegiac, even if Aristotle insisted there should be a catharsis that rises beyond the sense of loss. Tolkien’s famous essay on fairy tales insisted that they have a happy ending, or eucatastrophe, but The Lord of the Rings is not a fairy tale, and its ending is darkly elegiac.
But there is another way of understanding and experiencing the cycle, one that does not deny the validity of the tragic vision but qualifies it as incomplete, as but one phase in a larger divine comedy. Central to mythology in many cultures is a death-and-rebirth cycle that renews the world and returns it, full circle, to the first moment of Creation. Suffering, transience, and loss are not denied, but they are not the end of the story. Instead, they are transvalued by being contained within a larger process in which they become, to use my own term, decreative rather than merely destructive. From one point of view, the struck match is destroyed: from another, it has become the flame. The final choral ode of Milton’s tragic drama Samson Agonistes speaks of Samson, whose dead body lies beneath the ruins of the Philistine temple he has destroyed, in terms of the image of the phoenix rising into the air. Time runs down, yes, and entropy increases. But there is a turning point, a peripeteia moving in the opposite direction from the tragic one in Aristotle, a reversal, a metanoia, the New Testament word translated “repentance” but which really means a re-orientation, a turning in a new direction. There is a plot twist, and suddenly the impossible happens. The magician’s empty hand is holding a dove. The women go to the tomb and find it empty. We do everything we can to keep from believing in this metamorphosis, not because we are logical and skeptical, although that is what we pretend, but because we want it so much we feel the pain of disappointment would be unbearable. In Book 16 of the Odyssey, Odysseus’s son Telemachus encounters his father, who is disguised as an old down-and-out beggar and con artist. When Odysseus steps outside and comes back as himself, Telemachus cries out in pain and anger that it is not really his father, but not because of the physical transformation. In the very first moment we see him in Book 1, Telemachus is dreaming of the return of his father. It is the thing he yearns for the most in the entire world—which is exactly why he refuses to believe in it.
Such a conversion narrative, as we may call it, moving from skepticism through epiphany to self-transformation, is perhaps easiest for us moderns to understand because we ourselves are skeptical. What Eliade recurs to again and again, however, in many of his books, is the possibility of a life lived entirely upon the plane of the sacred, the numinous, the archetypal—and perhaps not just one life but the life of a whole society, a whole era. He is not talking about an “age of faith” in which everyone believes, subscribes to the same ideology, but rather about ages in which actual spiritual experience is widespread and collective rather than rare and individual.
Over the course of a number of books, Eliade speaks of the sacred or spiritual in terms of a cycle driven by human desire, a desire not merely to gratify the universal human needs that Northrop Frye calls primary concerns but to sacralize the profane, which means returning it to the state of unfallen perfection of the Creation:
Religious man’s profound nostalgia is to inhabit a “divine world”….In short, this religious nostalgia expresses the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos, as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the Creator’s hands” (SP, 65; italics in original).
While the word “nostalgia” may have a helpless sound, Eliade believes that the religious individual may indeed live continuously in a sacred reality. The sacred is not some other place to be fled to after death but here and now. Not only that, but it is dynamic and transformative: it cyclically transforms our profane—Christians would say “fallen,” atheists would just say “ordinary”—reality into a sacred one. The seasons, that is to say the natural world, are not just symbols of this cyclical transformation but are involved in it. Because of this, in cultures he calls “archaic,” meaning pre-modern, Eliade sees the central religious ritual as the New Year’s festival. Time runs down like a battery and has to be recharged annually. Moreover, “the festival is not merely the commemoration of a mythical (and hence religious) event; it reactualizes the event” (SP, 81), and the event it re-actualizes is the original Creation. Elsewhere, however, Eliade recognizes that the New Year ritual is only the culminating point, the climax of the plot. What actually repeats the original act of Creation that took place in illo tempore—a favorite Eliade phrase that literally means “in that time,” thus “in the beginning” or “once upon a time—is the entire cycle of the year: “Man only repeats the act of the Creation; his religious calendar commemorates, in the space of a year, all the cosmogonic phases which took place ab origine. In fact, the sacred year ceaselessly repeats the Creation” (ET, 22).
Eliade’s favorite paradigm for this repetition of the original Creation is the Babylonian New Year festival, the akitu (ER, 55-62), whose rudiments go back to Sumerian times. During the ceremony, the Babylonian Creation epic, the Enuma elish, was recited. Yet, again, the recitation did not merely commemorate the original Creation but re-enacted it. Catholics should not find this unfamiliar, for they are told that with every celebration of the Mass Christ is crucified and resurrected all over again. Time is transcended: through the ritual, the participant enters into an Eternal Now in which past, present, and future are simultaneously present, as they are to God. The story of the Enuma elish is the battle of the god Marduk with the female sea monster Tiamat, who represents the natural forces of chaos in the beginning. Marduk undergoes a symbolic death and rebirth:
To Marduk’s descent into hell (the god was a “prisoner in the mountain,” i.e., in the infernal regions) there corresponded a period of mourning and fasting for the whole community and of “humiliation” for the king, a ritual that formed part of a great carnival system….It was at the same period that the expulsion of evils and sins took place by means of a scapegoat. The cycle was closed by the god’s hierogamy…that was reproduced by the kind and a hierodule in the chamber of the goddess and to which there certainly corresponded a period of collective orgy. (ET, 56-57).
Thus the god suffers, is humiliated, dies, revives, defeats Tiamat, and creates the world out of her body, which is to create an order out of chaos; evil is cast out and a sacred marriage celebrated. Each of these phases corresponds to a phase of the New Testament narrative, not only the Gospel narrative of Christ’s death and Resurrection but also the Second Coming of Christ in the Book of Revelation, the final defeat of evil, and a sacred marriage of Christ and his people as Bridegroom and Bride. In the Book of Revelation, the world is destroyed, but out of the ruins rises “new heaven, new earth.” The Christian myth does exactly what the Babylonian one does: it redeems time and restores the world to the unfallen state of the original Creation. And it redeems not only the world but the participants. Eliade says of the Babylonian rite, “by participating ritually in the end of the world and in its re-creation, any man became contemporary with the illus tempus; hence he was born anew” (SP, 80). Our “New Year’s resolutions” hang on to a dim vestige of this feeling of starting afresh.
Religious people do not just believe in the myth: they live inside it. Religious consciousness lives in the sacred, in the eternal. The radical nature of this assertion should not be minimized: the truly (not just ostensibly) religious person already lives in heaven or paradise, exists in an unfallen state. Even in moments of suffering, loss, violence, or death, whatever may happen to their natural self, their real, spiritual self is in eternity. In some early Christian representations of the Crucifixion, Christ on the Cross shows no sign of suffering but stares tranquilly into the transcendent. There are accounts of Christian martyrs who underwent torture and death with extraordinary calm endurance, not because they were tough but because they were elsewhere. But participation in the timeless realm of the sacred does not always have to be so extreme. I grew up Catholic before Vatican II and have vivid memories to this day of the old style Mass, conducted as a solemn high ritual and not a social bonding occasion. The incantatory Latin, the Gregorian chants, the priest facing away from the congregation towards the mystery upon the altar, surrounded, with dim lights and candles, by stylized paintings and statuary instead of the empty, sunlit spaces that make contemporary Catholic churches indistinguishable from their Protestant counterparts: all this transported me into another world, a dreamlike world of an archetypal story that was always transpiring.
I know: I was not typical. I was a weird, introverted kid with mystical leanings, and perhaps the rest of the congregation was just bored. But I think I know what Eliade is talking about. What I felt was quite different from the convert’s zeal, that loud, excited holy sales talk that has always struck me as someone trying too hard to convince themselves by convincing others. It was anything but herd instinct, getting caught up in the emotion of the crowd, which has always repelled me. It was in fact a private experience, a form of meditative solitude although in the midst of an entire congregation. And it revolved through the liturgical seasons, Advent through Lent through Pentecost, as the congregation was taught through the changing symbolic colors of the priest’s vestments, the changing readings, the priest’s sermons (if he had any talent) dramatizing the current stage, the current mood, of the never-ending story. The older I got, the greater the role the arts had in the religious experience, as my horizon expanded from the more-or-less folk art of St. Joseph’s Church in Canton, Ohio to an awareness of the great Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, whose encyclopedic imagery, through sculptures, paintings, and stained glass, no doubt did serve as a teaching aid for a congregation mostly illiterate, but that is a reductive view. One picture is worth a thousand words, and a thousand pictures, especially of the intensity of some of those renderings, can have an impact that no words could be capable of. I was no William Blake, who as a child had a vision of an angel. But I can understand why Blake went on to become an artist, to enable others to share in his experience of the sacred through a visual language that does not demand literacy and perhaps higher education.
It is easy enough to imagine whole societies, whole historical eras united in a shared religious ideology, that is, a belief system enforced by social conditioning. Ideology is collective by nature and binds groups together by herd instinct. But what Eliade is proposing is more controversial: that pre-modern societies were united not by, or not only by, ideological power structures but by actual widespread religious experience. It is one thing to imagine a single oddball child with visionary proclivities, but an entire people or age that lived not in “reality” but in what amounts to an unfallen state? Surely, the skeptics say, this is one of two things: either religious hysteria or ideological mystification posing as spirituality. The first objection was Freud’s, to whom religion was simply mass neurosis. But whatever may have been the case in Babylon or some Australian tribe, traditions that are not our own and about which we can only speculate, religion in the Middle Ages can only be reduced to mass neurosis if you are absolutely determined to do so for ideological reasons, like Richard Dawkins. We have all too much genuine religious hysteria all around us right now. We know what it looks like, and religious hysteria did not and could never build the great cathedrals. Neither did a conspiracy of princes and clerics wanting to impose the Chain of Being and the divine right of kings on a gullible population for purposes of maintaining power. Mind you, there was plenty of religious neurosis too, and a lot of ideological mystification. But a con artist selling splinters of the true Cross does not invalidate Chartres, and Dante’s ideological obsession with putting people in hell, even people he respected and loved, does not invalidate his moments of breathtaking vision. A few newsletters ago, I mentioned Raymond Carver’s wonderful story “Cathedral,” in which two contemporary men try to imagine the spiritual impulse that built a medieval cathedral, and fail utterly. Any attempt at such a project now would no doubt result in capitalist vulgarity, theme-park tackiness, or post-modern absurdity. A single genius can produce the Divine Comedy, but the communal spirituality that could create a medieval cathedral utterly baffles us. To their credit, the two men in Carver’s story try to feel their way into the spirituality of a cathedral by drawing one together.
Eliade’s use of the word “nostalgia” hints at his sensitivity to the objection that he is projecting an impossible perfection on people distant from us in space and time. In the good old days, people lived in a golden age of unfallen consciousness, compared to the miserably profane mess we are in right now—really? Such arguments may seem not only implausible but dangerous, because they are often accompanied by a reactionary political impulse to remake the godless modern world in the name of old-fashioned values—in other words, religious fascism, like the Christian nationalism of the present moment. Eliade has been accused of a brief dalliance with Romanian fascism when he was young, but whatever the truth of that allegation, there is nothing reactionary about his mature writings. He qualifies what at first seems like an overly idealized view of archaic religious sensibility in several ways.
First, Eliade sometimes refers to Homo religiosus, but it would be wrong to conclude that he thinks in terms of a kind of master race superior to mere Homo sapiens, which would qualify him as a kind of mystical fascist. Nor do I think he is saying that we are misnamed, that we are religiosus instead of sapiens. The real insight is that we are both: we have two natures. We are religiosus first, sapiens second: we live in both the sacred and the profane, and therefore have two selves, corresponding to the spiritual self and natural selves spoken of by Paul. He does not quite say this explicitly: I have begun to realize, in trying to think this through, that there are a number of things Eliade does not say explicitly, and I am trying to connect the dots. But it follows from the fabric of his argument and enables him to acknowledge the inevitable differences of perception and insight among individuals even in the most religious of ages. In any population of any era some people are awake to vision and others merely flow with the crowd: “for some, at least, of the individuals in an archaic society the symbolism of the ‘Centre’ was transparent in its totality; the rest of society remaining content to ‘participate’ in the symbolism” (“Foreword,” IS, 25). A religious era can be defined as one in which a greater percentage of people are open to the sacred and transformed by it, but amidst the otherworldly sublimity of the New Year ceremony there was always undoubtedly Joe Babylon who was just there for the free beer.
Second, the existence of the profane, even if it is in the end re-sacralized, implies some kind of “fall.” This is not just a Christianization but is evident in many mythologies:
Everything that we know about the mythical memories of “paradise” confronts us, on the contrary, with the image of an ideal humanity enjoying a beatitude and spiritual plenitude forever unrealizable in the present state of “fallen man.” In fact, the myths of many peoples allude to a very distant epoch when men knew neither death nor toil nor suffering and had a bountiful supply of food merely for the taking. In illo tempore, the gods descended to earth and mingled with men; for their part, men could easily mount to heaven. As a result of a ritual fault, communications between heaven and earth were interrupted and the gods withdrew to the highest heavens. Since then, men must work for their food and are no longer immortal. (ET, 91)
That certainly alters the picture. It seems to imply two things: (1) that the re-sacralizing of reality through rituals such as the New Year ceremony represents a yearning rather than an actual accomplishment, which would explain what Eliade means by “nostalgia,” a word he uses frequently in a number of his books; (2) that the re-sacralization and return to the original moment of Creation does occur, but imperfectly, within limits, which is perhaps why the world cyclically decays again into the profane and the ritual has to be repeated. There is no reason to make this into an either-or: humanity yearns for a definitive apocalyptic transformation but achieves only a real yet partial, cyclical one—the existence of the cycle implies a failed apocalypse. This not only fits the facts, at least in my view, but potentially provides a role for linear time, in other words, for history: more of this to come.
The sacred is not just wish-fulfilment or nostalgia: it is a real experience, whether episodically, as in the epiphanies of the sacred that Eliade calls “hierophanies,” which have much in common with what Abraham Maslow called peak experiences, or continuously, as a mode of consciousness, even a way of life. In his late work, Maslow was beginning to talk about “plateau experience” in a way that seems parallel. Of the person who lives continuously in the sacred, Eliade says, “Clearly, his life has an additional dimension; it is not merely human, it is at the same time cosmic, since it has a transhuman structure. It could be called an open existence, for it is not strictly confined to man’s mode of being….in living, religious man is never alone, part of the world lives in him” (SP, 166). But he is immediately at pains to make clear that he is absolutely not implying what was so often said about “primitives” and “savages” in the 19th and early 20th centuries—that they lived in some kind of mythical Neverland, some kind of childlike, dreamlike mode of consciousness that left them oblivious to the practical reality all around them, which is why they hadn’t invented guns and the steam engine. This was a racist assumption used as an argument for white superiority, and therefore as an excuse for white, imperialist domination. Religious consciousness is a double consciousness. It perceives the world simultaneously as sacred and profane: “In other words, cosmic symbolism adds a new value to an object or action, without affecting their peculiar and immediate values. An existence open to the world is not an unconscious existence ‘buried in nature’” (Sacred and Profane, 167), as Hegel had put it. In other words, the religious individual could live at least partly in eternity but still know a hawk from a handsaw. In sum, “life is lived on a twofold plane; it takes its course as human existence and, at the same time, shares in a transhuman life, that of the cosmos or the gods” (SP, 167). This is what Blake meant by seeing the world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour. This twofold simultaneous perception of the sacred and the profane is what Northrop Frye explores in his last book, The Double Vision, the title phrase itself taken from Blake.
So we have two selves, two modes of vision, the sacred and the profane, Paul’s natural self and spiritual self, imagination and the ego’s perception of “ordinary reality.” Periodically, the sacred or imaginative mode gets recharged, whether spontaneously as in Maslow’s peak experiences or deliberately and periodically, as in much religious ritual. But there is one more factor. The mode of being we are calling sacred is not static but is rather a process of continual cyclical recreation, giving birth to itself endlessly like the phoenix. But that cycle repeats itself indefinitely, which is why Eliade’s book speaks of an “eternal return.” There is change—but there is never anything new: “Everything begins over again at its commencement every instant. The past is but a prefiguration of the future. No event is irreversible and no transformation is final. In a certain sense, it is possible to say that nothing new happens in the world, for everything is but the repetition of the same primordial archetypes” (SP, 90). This can be enormously comforting as we move deeper into the elegiac mood of autumn, with its sense of an ending. It does not spare us our grief and sense of loss, but it does put our melancholy into perspective: “The death of the individual and the death of humanity are alike necessary for their regeneration. Any form whatever, by the mere fact that it exists as such and endures, necessarily loses vigor and becomes worn; to recover vigor, it must be reabsorbed into the formless if only for an instant; it must be restored to the primordial unity from which it issued” (ET, 88). Jesus said that the seed must die into the ground to be reborn (John 12:23-24). Autumn is the season of harvest, but also of the planting of the seed that will spring up next year.
Christianity claims uniqueness: unlike “natural religion,” which remains bound to the cycles of death and rebirth, it promises a final super-natural deliverance, an escape into an eternity beyond the cycles of time. To do so, however, it has to grant a role to an aspect of the spirit or the imagination that is in fact the Blakean Contrary to the eternal return: the progressive, recreative aspect that, like profane time—in other words, history—is linear, but is not profane or “fallen.” We may call it creative time, and it enables us to say that all is not eternal repetition: sometimes there is indeed something new under the sun that rises and again goes down. It is latent in the Biblical vision of history called typology, but Classical culture had its own version of it, and it has come into its own in the modern period that began with the Romantic revolution at the turn of the 19th century. There is a dry humor in the fact that I have to postpone discussion of the progressive vision until another newsletter…for lack of time.
I will only say for now that I do not think that the linear vision of a historical destiny ending in an apocalypse eliminates the cyclical vision that Eliade sometimes calls “cosmic Christianity,” though it modifies it. In traditional Christian cosmology before it was replaced by modern science in the 17th century, the tragic cycles of nature and human life had as their boundary the orbit of the moon, whose cyclical phases were an apt symbol for the “sublunary” imperfection that the Renaissance called mutability. Beyond that boundary, however, the stars still had their cycle of eternal return, the circle of the Same, in Plato’s terminology, as compared to the circle of the Different. Science eliminates the stellar cycle too, and tells us that the entire universe is subject to mutability, which it calls entropy. Someday it will complete its final cycle, resulting in “the heat death of the universe,” from which there is no rebirth. Spengler’s Decline of the West, which enormously influenced the young Northrop Frye, presents a panoramic vision of all civilizations, not just the West, subject to a tragic cycle of rise, decline, and fall, for which he uses the symbols of the seasons. The West, he wrote in 1918, had arrived at the end of autumn, and was increasingly aware of a long, oncoming winter. That is exactly the situation in Game of Thrones, and it is no accident that the world in which it is set is called Westeros.
Spengler’s version of death and rebirth is entirely profane and ironic: it challenges at once the sacred eternal return of traditional mythologies and the belief in linear progress of various 19th century optimistic visions of history, notably Hegel’s. Right now, after two years of pandemic, an increasingly urgent climate crisis, and the possible worldwide collapse of democracy into authoritarianism, we are in a bleak, autumnal mood and willing to take Spengler’s pessimism seriously (even though we reject the Nazi ideology he later tried to attach to it). I too take it seriously, as Frye did, but, as I have said above, think that there is another factor, a wild card, a joker in the pack, that Spengler did not consider. Within profane time, creative or spiritual time works invisibly like a Trickster. Such an intuition is not new: out of it emerged the Romantic theory of the imagination that informs these newsletters. But creative time demands patience. Its process is “maieutic” in the sense in which Socrates used it to describe his dialectic, referring to midwifery and giving birth. And birth demands gestation. So for now we ply the fire with kindling, and warm ourselves at the fire of hope, even if we have no idea of what we are hoping for, waiting for what the New Testament calls the “fullness of time,” or pleroma, whose culmination is the kairos, the moment of a miracle. As always, belief has nothing to do with it. The same fire warms the believer and the atheist, the saint and the sinner, drawing them together despite irreconcilable differences.
References and Abbreviations
IS: Eliade, Mircea. Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism. Princeton University Press, 1991. Originally published 1952.
ET: Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return: or, Cosmos and History. Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XLVI, 1954. Translated by Willard R. Trask.
SP: Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Originally published 1957.