I forget in what context we brought up the "myth of the eternal return" in class last week, but my interest was peaked, and I googled it that afternoon. There are two big endorsers of this idea who's names frequented my search results: Mircea Eliade and Fredrich Neitzche. I found an excerpt from Eliade's book "The Myth of the Eternal Return" online that amused me:
"The past is but a prefiguration of the future. No event is irreversible and no transformation is final. In a certain sense, it is even possible to say that nothing new happens in the world, for everything is but the repetition of the same primordial archetypes; this repetition, by actualizing the mythical moment when the archetypal gesture was revealed, constantly maintains the world in the same auroral instant of the beginnings."
Now those blockquotes are holding in some mind-boggling ideas about life and the universe- the same idea that was boggling my mind in my linguistics class that I have just prior to Classical Lit. The day we brought up "eternal return", I had just come from a discussion about linear and cyclic scales of time. This applied to linguistics b/c we were discussing obligatory tenses and how when we speak in our culture, we put everything onto a scale of time: past, present, future tense. But I learned that day that not all cultures view time in this manner, some indigenous cultures see time as cyclic. They believe that the important things in life are recurring, so nothing is in the past or future, it is constantly coming around again. I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around this scale of time; how does a culture function on this time scale? What about history? Then MS mentioned "eternal return", and my google search gave a lot of insight into this concept, which is essentially the central belief of our English 213 class:
Everything that has happened before and will happen again, since the universe (or time itself) is fundamentally cyclic Imagine that: did it ever even cross your mind that time could be anything but linear? I know I never questioned the system. I like the idea of cyclic time. Nietzche used it as a basis for practical hope. I think there is a lot of hope in the idea of constant recurring, but how deep are we taking this? To say that nothing is ever new and nothing is irreversible is to deny reality, because while the
ideas keep recurring throughout history, they occur under different circumstances and yield a situation that is entirely unique. I completely believe in these archetypes and universal themes- they're the stuff that epiphanies spring from! But they are all colored differently according to the terms under which they occur. I guess that's how history is made. So in a broad sense, I subscribe to this "thought of eternal return"- and absolutely to it's application to this class- but these situations are recurring if you examine them broadly and without the details. The details are what make time linear, and real. And since time is such a fundamental component to our entire existense, it's good to know we have options!
So we know that the word myth comes from the greek "muthos" meaning a "traditional tale". This is indicative of a story, something made up, but in greek society these myths of the gods that we are studying in class were taken for truth.
