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The Prestige of the Cosmogonic Myth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Mircea Eliade
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Extract

A myth relates a sacred story, that is to say, it recounts a primordial event that occurred at the beginning of time. But to tell a sacred story is equivalent to revealing a mystery, because the characters in a myth are not human beings. They are either gods or civilizing heroes, and therefore their gesta constitute mysteries: man would not know these tales if they were not revealed to him. Consequently, a myth is a story of what happened—what the gods and supernatural beings did—at the beginning of time. “To recount” a myth is to proclaim what occurred then. Once “told,” in other words, once revealed, the myth becomes the apodictic truth: it establishes truth. “It is so because it is said to be so,” the Netsilik Eskimos declared in order to justify the validity of their sacred history and their religious traditions. The myth proclaims the advent of a new cosmic situation or narrates a primordial event, and so it is always the story of a “creation”; it tells how something has been effectuated, has begun to be. That is why the myth is interdependent with ontology; it deals solely with realities, with what really happened, with what was clearly manifest.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 6 , Issue 23 , September 1958 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © 1958 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1. R. Petazzoni, "The Truth of Myth," Essays on the History of Religions (Leyden, 1954), pp. II-23, esp. pp. 13 ff.

2. A few examples are to be found in my study, "Centre du monde, temple, maison," Le Symbolisme cosmique des monuments religieux (Rome, 1957), pp. 57-82, esp. pp. 72 ff.

3. Cf. the texts cited in my Le Mythe de l'éternel retour (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 112 ff.; English trans., The Myth of the Eternal Return (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1955).

4. Sir B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Arunta (London: Macmillan & Co., 1927), I, 374, 386; cf. also E. de Martino, "Angoscia territoriale et riscatto culturale nel mito Achilpa delle origini," Studi e materiali di storia della religioni, XXIII (1951-52), 51-66.

5. Rabbinical text cited in Le Mythe de l'éternel retour, p. 36.

6. C. Tg. Bertling, Vierzahl, Kreuz und Mandal in Asien (Amsterdam, 1954), p. II.

7. This iconographic complex is to be found in China, India, Indonesia, and New Guinea (cf. Bertling, op. cit., p. 8).

8. Cf. Werner Müller, Kreis und Kreuz (Berlin, 1938), pp. 6o ff.

9. Ibid., pp. 65 ff.

10. Cf. my Le Chamanisme (Paris: Payot, 1951), pp. 235 ff.

11. Cf. Le Mythe de l'éternel retour, pp. 30 ff.; Images et symboles (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), pp. 33 ff.; and "Centre du monde, temple, maison," op. cit., passim.

12. Cf. Le Mythe de l'éternel retour, pp. 89 ff.

13. A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1925), pp. 177, 498.

14. Werner Müller, Die blaue Hutte (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1954), p. 133.