Time and History in the Conceptual Plan of the Sacred: Four Stories

Time and space, manifested in such well known phrases and expressions as in illo tempore, ab origine, repetition and regeneration, center, omphalos, as well as the abolition of the profane, belong to the most important yet immensely complex concepts within Mircea Eliade's work. Based on Eliade's central publications of The Sacred and the Profane and The Myth of the Eternal Return, this article attempts to trace Eliade's notions of the terms and their relation to human thought and practice. Furthermore, the article discusses crucial critiques and elaborations of the concepts, implications and methods of Eliade's research, in order to develop an approach to the social constitution of sacred space which also considers current research in the Social Sciences on the production of space.

With this study, it is aimed to reveal that Gülten İmamoğlu’s paintings have established a what kind of relationship with the concept of “time”, and created what kind of universe as a result of this relationship. This study is significant because of that it is an analysis that reveals the relationship which underlying of how a painter handles “time” in her paintings. This research performed as a case study in a qualitative pattern. This study is an existing analysis study by using document analysis and the technique of interview. The case studies base on the questions of “how” and “why” and enable to examine the depth of an event or event that the researcher cannot control. This research look for an answer “What is going on?” with a explicitive approach. Collected data was resolved with content analysis. The investigation process was carried out by the researcher. Traditional man; with the belief of “eternal return”, he repeats archetypes and myths throughout the ages and realizes the interest of non-religious time. The relevance of non-religious time has eliminated the temporality of time and a sense of “time” where everything is finite. This is prevented from drifting to a “nihilist” end of man. Humanity which adopted social and spiritual integrity is protected by a “time” insight through the ages. This approach enabled man to see himself as a part of the cosmos and positioned him in a coherent existence with cosmic rhythms. In Mircea Eliade's book “The Myth of the Eternal Return”, the concepts of “repeat”, “archetype” and “myth” are discussed. The thinker went for a comparison by putting forward the characteristics of the traditional understanding of “time” and the historical approach of “historic”, and made conclusions. It can be said that the idea of “time” reflected in the paintings of Imamoglu is fed from the same source with the understanding of “time” determined by Eliade in the “The Myth of the Eternal Return”. This work is an attempt to interpret the artist's paintings on this plane. It is suggested that the paintings of Gülten İmamoğlu should be handled in the context of the “chaos”, “orgy”, “dark” and “water” archetypes as well as their relationship with time. Keywords: Gülten İmamoğlu, Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, the eliminated of time, archetype, myth, culture, time

The introduction glances at the historical background of seventeenth-century Japan and the role of Kumazawa Banzan. His views are then presented as a variant of the ‘anthropocosmic’ character of premodern religious thinking as identified by the Romanian scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade (1907-86). Banzan adopted the Neo-Confucian view of man as ontologically embedded in the natural order and held a Confucian faith in the arcadian ancient Chinese ‘Three Dynasties’ created through the artifice of Chinese Sages. The essay describes Banzan’s cyclical view of time, fall from arcadia, and man’s agency in post-lapsarian history. It addresses failures in rulership responsible for the ecological crisis of contemporary Japan. It then turns to the ‘eternal return’ characteristic of the traditionalist religions studied by Eliade. A conclusion explores homologies between Banzan’s diagnosis of crisis in his pre-industrial world and the fraught views of man and nature in the twenty-first century.

This article explores how themes of birth, rebirth, genesis and coming into being are present in modern and contemporary Catalan art, focusing on the works of Eugènia Balcells (b. 1942), Xicu Cabanyes (b. 1946), Mari Chordà (b. 1942), Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), and Joan Miró (1893–1983). In particular, the article looks at how these themes emerged for the artists as a way of expressing Catalan identity in the wake of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain (1939–1975), as well as following Catalonia’s broader history as a nation without a state in Europe. In exploring the artists’ lives and works, the article also considers the topics of rebirth and the eternal return as they occur in the philosophy and history of religion of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Albert Camus (1913–1960) and Mircea Eliade (1907–1986). Ultimately, the author interprets the artworks of the study as physical representations of rebirth that relate in part to a longstanding Catalan sentiment of an eternal recurrence to life after destruction.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1923–1975) fashioned poetry, prose, cinema, and theatrical works, and how he conceived of the sacred is more thoroughly understood in relation to his working biography. Two films, The Gospel According to St Matthew and La Ricotta, together with his tragedies, overwritten on the Greek plays The Eumenides and Medea are here in focus, indicating why Pasolini drew on Mircea Eliade’s method of integrating historical, phenomenological, and hermeneutical approaches. Declaring himself a Marxist, Pasolini did not accept Eliade’s theory in full, while the two concepts that most link him to Eliade are the latter’s ‘eternal return’ and ‘hierophanies’. Pasolini had grown up immersed in the natural world of Friuli, Northern Italy, and he considered hierophanies as an immanent manifestation of the sacred in nature. In doing this, he discovered both the immensity of the archaic peasant world and the cosmogonic matrix of his religion. Pasolini’s ontological vision of being led him to define the eternal return as the cyclical time of nature, the movement of life in respect of the inscrutable laws of the cosmos and the transcendent supernatural. Cyclical time meant death and resurrection and thus the possibility of regeneration, like a seed that dies to become a plant.

The notion of transcendental love in the context of “the eternal return”, the motif of Eros, and the image of a woman are discussed in Marcelijus Martinaitis’s book “Atmintys: meilės lyrikos albumas” (Eng. Reminiscences: the album of love lyrics”) (2008). The methods of mythopoetic thought, comparativistics, and interpretative mind have been applied. On the basis of the Bible, mythology, the notion of and relation between Eros and Love, also combining notions developed by philosophers as Nikolai Berdyaev, Erich Fromm, Vladimir Solovyev, phenomenologists as Algis Mickūnas, Mircea Eliade, Plato, and insights by popes Paul VI and Benedict XVI, a concept which might be useful in deciphering the language of love in Marcelijus Martinaitis’s book is introduced. The primary code of the album of love is the concept of memory and the notion of love as seen by Oskaras Milašius, while the secondary code relates to Dante, chivalric romance of Provence troubadours, legends of King Arthur, Celtic mythology. The genre of M. Martinaitis’s reminiscences was born when the poet was studying in Gervinės, and the first collection of Reminiscences appeared in 1986. The text of Reminiscences was seen as hermetic, intertextual, reflecting the act of cosmogony and antropogony in permanent space-time. The process of word re-creation is associated with archetypal consciousness, and the cycle of “the eternal return” prevails. Love is perceived as transcendental and existential basis, a purpose to merge with God, God’s gift to humanity, and the vision of love object. Eros (passion) is ambivalent: it is earthly / heavenly, sinful / divine, creating / destructive, and driving power of creation. A woman is seen as earthly / sensual, divine / unreachable. An issue which motif (Christian or courtesan literature) dominates in the album of love lyrics is discussed. Album is of great interest as an immanent text.

This paper aims to discuss the rains in Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn and the rich meanings behind the pouring rains. As known, rain is a natural cycle of water. Tsai' intentionally projected King Hu's Dragon Inn in the Goodbye Dragon Inn, this special recycle phenomenon of images is just like water recycle in nature. The endless repetitions of falling rains in Tsai's films somehow answer to what Nietzsche called 'Eternal Return.' Also in this paper we follow the western philosophers' steps, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Deleuze, to make references to Tsai's films on the subject of repetition and recyclage. Every rain has its temporality, in Tsai's Goodbye Dragon Inn; the rains carry multiple presentations of temporality and labyrinth, and also the visual metonymy. By combining arguments mentioned above, this paper tries to analyze this rain in Tsai's film and its rich connotations.

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was well known scholar on academic study of religion during the twentieth century. His research studies focused on history of religion and complexity of cross- cultural religious elements such as taboo, ritual, symbol, myth, demon and god. He used the terms of the hierophany, eternal return, the sacred and the profane broadly and interpreted profoundly in his works. He thought religion cannot be explained adequately by means of sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics and art; it should be explained also by its own terms and religious experience. Significance of his theory on religion was different from the reductionistic theories of Freud, Marx and Durkheim.

The Romantic poet Novalis once rhetorically asked: “Where are we really going?” “Always home.” For a Shakespearean scholar like Borges’ Sörgel in “Shakespeare’s Memory”, the path towards “home” turns out to be the exploration of a most unusual gift, the very memory of the great Elizabethan. The process is similar although not identical in scope to Hamlet’s attempt to realign time through keeping alive the memory of his murdered father. My aim in this paper is to explore the process of preserving memory and its relation to identity, mourning and dread in “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” and Borges’ “Shakespeare’s Memory”. The theoretical framework is defined by the concept of “eternal return”, as examined by Nietzsche and Mircea Eliade.

This chapter explores the sense of historicity emergent in the Anthropocene as it is articulated in David Mitchell’s novel and the Wachowskis’ and Tykwer’s film Cloud Atlas. The syntax of historical thinking is examined cross-culturally, and a hybrid idea of temporality is postulated based on the metaphor, presented regarding Memento in Chap. 2, of the Mobius strip. In the multicultural consciousness of the new era, as evoked by novel and film, time is both linear and circular. Christian Europe meets Buddhist East Asia in a new sensibility. The dawning historical consciousness evident in these works combines the linear narrative of modernity and its alternatives of “utopia or oblivion,” in Buckminster Fuller’s terms, together with the cyclical “eternal return,” in Mircea Eliade’s (2005) terms, to shape a paradoxical narrative shifting dialectically and cybernetically between the two. All becomes encapsulated from the self-referential and recursive perspective of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History who, like Janus, looks both ways.

The Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson initiated the Taskforce for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research in 1998 after visiting a Nazi concentration camp and...

Heidegger and the Radical Temporalities of Fundamental Attunements Emily Hughes (bio) In “Melancholia, temporal disruption, and the torment of being both unable to live and unable to die” (Hughes, 2020), I discuss the way in which the temporal desynchronization of melancholia can disrupt the melancholic’s relation to their own death and, on a Heideggerian interpretation, the meaning and significance of their life. In their thoughtful commentaries, Kevin Aho and Gareth Owen draw out some important points for further elaboration and clarification, the most pressing of which invoke Heidegger’s interpretation of time and the radical temporalities of fundamental attunements. As Aho anticipates, this is the conception of time that underpins my interpretation of melancholia and, because this is important to understanding the conception of death and demise I put forward in my article, it is this that I will focus on in the following response. In “Heidegger on melancholia, deep boredom, and the inability-to-be,” Aho (2020) rightly emphasizes that to understand the temporality of attunements, it is important to grasp that for Heidegger Dasein “is time, the temporalizing event that opens up a space of meaning and possible ways to be in the world” (Aho, 2020, p. 215). This temporalizing event is composed of three temporal dimensions or “ecstases”: having-been (past), being-alongside (present) and being-ahead-of-itself (future) (Heidegger, 1984, p. 205/GA, 26, p. 266). The three ecstases are not consecutive or successive, which means they cannot be separated out into three separate sequential “moments” in time. The “future is not later than having been, and having been is not earlier than the present” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 401/GA, SZ, p. 350). Rather, the ecstases are inter-reliant and belong together as a unified totality. This means that at any given time, “Dasein is not only in the moment but rather is itself within the entire span of its possibilities and its past” (Heidegger, 2003, p. 169). For the most part, Dasein is not aware of its time as being three-dimensional because it is absorbed in “ordinary time.” That is, time understood as a chronological sequence of present “nows” which can be measured by the clock. It is only when subject to the radical temporalities of fundamental attunements like anxiety, profound boredom, and melancholy that Dasein is wrenched out of its immersion in ordinary time. Initially, each fundamental attunement modifies or transforms Dasein’s threefold temporality in a distinctive way, by denying and withholding [End Page 223] certain ecstases in varied configurations and constellations, so that although some are refused, others are intensified. Briefly, Heidegger follows Kierkegaard in considering that anxiety temporalizes by denying the present and past, and attuning Dasein toward the ecstasis of the future, which becomes intensified (Heidegger, 1962, p. 395/GA, SZ, pp. 344–45). By contrast, as Aho demonstrates, profound boredom temporalizes by denying the past and withholding the future, while attuning Dasein toward the ecstasis of the present, which becomes intensified (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 152–153/GA, 29/30, pp. 228–29). Beyond his thematization of the distinct temporalities of anxiety and boredom, Heidegger notes that his thesis of the temporality of attunements can be expanded to other attunements, including those “founded existentially upon one’s having been; this becomes plain if we merely mention such phenomena as satiety, sadness, melancholy, and desperation” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 395/GA, SZ, p. 345). Although Heidegger does not pursue these analyses in any depth, he intimates here that melancholy can be seen to temporalize by denying or withholding the future and the present, and attuning Dasein toward the ecstasis of the past (having-been), which becomes intensified. This concurs with the initial stages of melancholic time that I discuss in my article. Depending on the attunement with which Dasein finds itself affected, then, the three ecstases are modified in distinctive ways. Yet, what is critical for Heidegger is that, regardless of the particular configuration of refusal and intensification, all fundamental attunements ultimately come to disclose the unified threefold temporality of Dasein as a whole, because any single ecstasis that has been withheld or denied “presences immediately in its absence” (Heidegger, 1972, p. 13/GA, 14, p. 13...

In the summer of 2017, wildflower seeds were spread on a large, empty open space close to a motorway flyover just outside Copenhagen, Denmark. This was an effort to use non-mechanical methods to prepare the soil for an ‘urban forest’ to be established on the site, since the flowers’ roots would penetrate the ground and enable the planned new trees to settle. As a result, the site was transformed into a gorgeous meadow, and all summer long Copenhageners were invited to come and pick the flowers. In this article, I critically examine different aspects of this project – including the role of design, the perception of nature–culture relationships, climate change, and flower-picking as an event – in relation to my personal experience of visiting this meadow both on-site and on social media. The different temporalities that clash at the site give rise to conflicting interpretations, and I suggest that the meadow can be seen as a living plant archive of the Anthropocene, both physically and digitally. In doing so, I introduce and critique key conceptual pairs, including archive/death and bloom/decay, suggested by Lee Edelman’s queer cross-reading of Jacques Derrida’s ‘Archive Fever’ and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I thereby contrast flower motifs pertaining to the cycles of blooming, decay, and nature’s (failed) eternal return in the meadow with the expansive futurity of the digitally mediated archive.

Although research and discussions of sacred space began to capture the attention of geographers in the late 1970s, the subject of sacred space has factored in the scholarship of religious historians, sociologists and philosophers since the early twentieth century. This chapter provides an intellectual history of the concept of sacred space and examines the ways in which globalizing processes transform sacred space. I engage with key ideas from Mircea Eliade and Gerardus van der Leeuw and focus particularly on the numerous criticisms of Eliade’s work, which is often dismissed as simplistic and anachronistic. I then consider the contributions of the eminent historian of religion, Jonathan Z. Smith. His articulations on the metaphors of locative and utopian maps are profoundly geographic and significantly resist the notion that sacred space is spatially fixed. I also examine other scholarship that deals with the contested nature of sacred space, embodiment, ways of encountering sacred space, sacred ecologies, and the ways in which globalization enables the creation of new sacred spaces through virtual pilgrimages, religious Web sites, religious transnationalism, and commodification. Development practitioners and those involved in disaster recovery now confront very real challenges of grappling with the politics of sacred space as faith-based organizations increasingly participate in recovery efforts. I recommend that contemporary scholarship on sacred space reclaim a place for some of the early foundational works, and identify possible directions for future research.

This article examines the concept of a ‘terror of history’ in the work of historian of religion Mircea Eliade, particularly in his 1948 book The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History. The article turns to Eliade’s journals to trace the genesis of this concept, showing that this book which became a foundational text in the history of religions was originally conceived as a work on the philosophy of history. Tracing the incoherences and contradictions of this ‘terror’ in the context of his wartime diary entries, the continuity of Eliade’s thought from his time as an outspoken supporter of the Romanian Iron Guard in the 1930s to his publication of Cosmos and History in 1948 becomes clear. Eliade’s ‘terror,’ it is shown, is conditioned by his despair at the retreat and collapse of the European fascist powers, but is more fundamentally an expression of horror toward the dissolution and loss of identity that he associates with historicity and, indeed, with difference itself. As this article shows, Eliade’s solution was not an ‘eternal return’ but rather an eternal escape from history, a religious oblivion that would collapse all events into ‘archetypes’ and blot out the horror of history and difference.