Sacred Time and Myths

I’ve been taking advantage of my two-month break in the isolation to read books that I’ve previously attempted and utterly failed to complete. Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane certainly falls in that category. The second chapter, “Sacred Time and Myths,” reminded me of a common question I get in emails asking for “when” the gods were born. That question – in many cases – can be answered in the context of other god’s births or a larger myth, but in terms of years? Forget about it.

Adfamiliares (who taught me everything I know about Roman Religion, and is a pretty cool cat) made a comment about how different that is from the Christian tradition. Eliade explains it by saying “Christianity radically changed the experience and the concept of liturgical time, and this is due to the fact that Christianity affirms the historicity of the person of Christ.” (72) But the “sacred” time in which the myths of the ancient Greeks took place “is an ontological mythical, Parmenidean time; it always remains equal to itself, it neither changes nor is exhausted.” (69)

Most of the myths I’ve collected on my site involve mortal men and women set in a past that has the potential for being “infinitely repeatable” in a ritual sense. It does not seem like a big leap, to me, to include in that category such stories as those that make up the narratives of the Eleusian Mysteries, or even the stories like that of Adonis, whose death was also ritually noted each year.

But Eliade suggests that “we moderns” cannot possibly appreciate the transportation via ritual and myth into the eternal sacred time of our foremothers and fathers. I think, however, when I tell the myths to my nephews and nieces, they are as transported as a child 2000 years ago. What do you think?