Eliade's Theory of Millenarianism

Eliade's Theory of MillenarianismAuthor(s): Robert A. SegalSource: Religious Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Jun., 1978), pp. 159-173Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20005480 .

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Rel. Stud. 14, pp- 159-173

ROBERT A. SEGAL

Assistant Professor of Religion, Reed College, Portland, Oregon

ELIADE'S THEORY OF MILLENARIANISM

To the extent that Mircea Eliade is concerned with millenarianism he is concerned with it as only an instance of religious phenomena generally and is concerned with its meaning rather than its cause.' Yet presupposed in the

meaning he finds is a theory of its cause, and that theory is worth examining both because it elucidates Eliade's approach to religion as a whole and because as an explanation of millenarianism it is atypical and even unique.

Where most, perhaps all other, theorists of millenarianism view it as an abnormal phenomenon, one which only extraordinary circumstances can explain, Eliade sees it as merely the realization of a normal, in fact inherent, eschatological desire on the part of man: a desire to abolish history, which is profane time, the time of man, and return to primordial time, which, as the time of the gods, is sacred. It is a desire to do so not annually, as in New Year

festivals, or temporarily, as in mysticism, but once and forever. Man desires to abolish history because he finds it meaningless and because it stands between him and primordial time, where alone meaning lies. Eliade's theory, then, is that, given the meaninglessness which man qua man finds in history and the meaning which he finds in primordial time, he seeks in stinctively to abolish history and return to primordial time. Millenarianism is only the fulfilment of that instinct.

The validity of Eliade's theory that the cause of millenarianism is an

inherent eschatological desire in man, a desire to break with history and return to primordial time, depends on the validity of a first hypothesis: that eschatology, whatever its cause, actually represents a desire to break with history and return to primordial time. Both hypotheses are testable. The second hypothesis can prove false without the first one's being false, but the truth of the second depends on the truth of the first: if eschatology does not signify a desire to break with history and return to primordial time, an innate desire in man to do so can hardly be its cause. Finally, the truth of the first hypothesis does not establish the truth of the second.

How, then, does Eliade proceed to prove his hypotheses? Rather than taking each hypothesis in turn, first showing that eschatology per se con stitutes a desire to break with history and return to primordial time and then

1 See especially 'Cosmic and Eschatological Renewal', in The Two and the One, tr. J. M. Cohen (New York: Harper Torchbooks, I969), pp. 125-59. See also Cosmos and History: The Myth of the

Eternal Return, tr. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, I959), passim, and Myth and Reality, tr. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, I968), passim.



i6o ROBERT A. SEGAL

showinig that the propensity for eschatology is universal and therefore for him innate, he takes the validity of the second hypothesis for granted and on the basis of it interprets every eschatology as a desire to break with history and return to primordial time. Having interpreted every eschatology as a desire to break with history and return to primordial time, he vaunts his effort as proof that the desire to break with history and return to primordial time is universal and therefore, he assumes, innate.

Nowhere does Eliade quite spell out this procedure, needless to say. Rather, one must reconstruct it from his interpretation of particular mil lenarian movements and, before that, from his interpretation of religion in general.

Eliade, in the fashion of the idealist tradition which goes back to Plato, views the world dualistically: there is appearance, and there is reality. Reality is unchanging, eternal, sacred, and as a consequence meaningful. Appearance is inconstant, ephemeral, profane, and therefore meaningless. Appearance is not illusory, as though it did not in fact exist. The mistaking of it for that which is constant and eternal is what is illusory.

For Plato, reality is a distinct metaphysical domain, one which wholly transcends appearance and stands over against it. For Eliade as well, reality is a distinct metaphysical domain which transcends appearance, but at the same time reality manifests itself through appearance. For Plato and Eliade alike, reality confers meaning on appearance, but where for Plato reality confers meaning by the 'participation' of appearance in reality, for Eliade reality confers meaning by almost the reverse: the manifestation of itself in appearance. When Eliade speaks, for example, of sacred space, he

means not the metaphysical realm of the sacred but a physical place in and through which that realm reveals itself. By contrast, Plato scarcely regards any physical entity, any portion of appearance, as the revelation of the sacred, or the real. No one physical entity is for him any more or less real than another, the way, for Eliade, one place, one rock, one tree, or other phenomenon is sacred and another profane.

Where for Plato the forms bestow meaning on the world, for Eliade 'archetypes' do.' Where the forms give meaning to physical objects - table, stone, hand - and philosophical ideals - goodness, beauty, justice - arche types give meaning to physical objects and human acts. Where the meaning

which forms give is exclusively intellectual, the meaning which archetypes give is religious as well: where forms define and explain phenomena, arche types also make them sacred. Where the forms are sacred because they are

In the preface to the paperback edition of Cosmos and History Eliade says: 'In using the term

" archetype," I neglected to specify that I was not referring to the archetypes described by Professor

C. G. Jung. This was a regrettable error ... I need scarcely say that, for Professor Jung, the arche

types are structures of the collective unconscious. But in my book I nowhere touch upon the problems

of depth psychology nor do I use the concept of the collective unconscious. As I have said, I use the

term "archetype" . . . as a synonym for "exemplary model" or "paradigm" . . .' (viii-ix).



ELIADE S THEORY OF MILLENARIANISM i6i

real and indeed are 'sacred' only in the sense that they are real, archetypes are real because they are sacred: they are divine prototypes, or models, of physical objects and human acts. The archetypes of physical objects are their divine counterparts; those of human acts are the acts of the gods, as described in myths. Man does not discover the archetypes on his own, the way he does the forms. The gods reveal them to him. Where, finally, the forms are metaphysically rather than temporally prior to the phenomena they explicate (unless one reads the Timaeus as cosmogony rather than cosmology), archetypes are both temporally and metaphysically prior to the phenomena they 'sacralize'.

Man grasps the forms cognitively. Archetypes he appropriates existen tially. Exactly how man appropriates the archetypes of physical objects is hazy, but the archetypes of human acts he appropriates by reliving the myths and thereby the archetypal acts they describe. In reliving the myths man imbibes not only the deepest kind of knowledge but the power of the sacred as well - not, or not only, the kind of crude, external, impersonal, physical power that Frazer, for example, ascribes to magic but power for man himself, the power to renew an otherwise profane existence. Without knowledge of the forms man lives in ignorance, mistaking appearance for reality. Bereft of archetypes, he lives a meaningless existence, and of that he is never oblivious. With man's quest for archetypes, at least for those of human acts, lies at

last the connection between Eliade's interpretation of religion and his interpretation of millenarianism. For in order to relive the myths man must return to the time of the myths, or the time of creation. Indeed, to relive the

myths is to return to the time of creation. To return to the time of creation is,

however, to abolish history, or ordinary, profane time. Millenarianism is, then, only the realization of the desire to abolish history and return to the time of creation, and its cause is the innate desire in man to do just that.

If man seeks instinctively to abolish history, how does Eliade explain the irksome fact that man has yet to abolish it - that is, abolish it permanently?

To begin with, Eliade distinguishes between primitive, 'anhistorical', mythic man and modern, historical man. Historical man, he admits, does not seek - better, does not consciously seek - to abolish history. On the contrary, he seeks to live in historical time, for in it he finds meaning. History, for him, is teleological. Mythic man, by contrast, does seek to abolish history, which, as a series of 'events that derive from no archetype', he finds 'intolerable'.' Mythic man 'tends to set himself in opposition, by every means in his power, to history... '.2 The difference between the

meaning historical man finds in history and the meaninglessness mythic man finds in it is 'the crucial difference' between the one kind of man and the other.3

1 Cosmos and History, p. 75. 2 Ibid. p. 95. 3 Ibid. p. 154.



I62 ROBERT A. SEGAL

Far from explaining why, if man naturally desires to abolish history, he has yet to do so, the distinction between mythic man and historical man seem ingly only aggravates the difficulty. Mythic man, Eliade says, really does

want to abolish history. Why, then, doesn't he? The question remains. Worse, historical man, according to Eliade, does not even want to abolish history - this in the face of Eliade's original pronouncement that man qua man strives exactly to abolish it. Can Eliade extricate himself from this double bind?

The failure of mythic man to abolish history Eliade manages to explain without sacrificing his argument that mythic man truly desires to abolish it. For he says that as much as mythic man does try to abolish history, he is unable to do so, for he is unable to avoid the experience of irreversibility, which Eliade equates with the experience of history. Mythic man experiences irreversibility both through his memory and through suffering. His 'memory is capable (though doubtless far less intensely than that of a modern man) of revealing the irreversibility of events, that is, of recording history ',1 and 'he is powerless against cosmic catastrophes, military disasters, social injustices bound up with the very structure of society, personal misfortunes, and so forth'2 - in short, suffering, which he doubtless experiences as distinctly real.

Though mythic man cannot exorcise history, he does learn to 'tolerate' it. He tolerates history in two ways: 'either by periodically abolishing it through repetition of the cosmogony and a periodic regeneration of time or by giving historical events a metahistorical meaning... '.3 These tactics

might seem antithetical - the one eliminating history, the other elevating it - but Eliade considers them complementary, despite his use of 'either- or'.

Mythic man periodically abolishes history through rituals. He confers meaning on history by 'fitting' events 'into a well-consolidated system in which the cosmos and man's existence [has] each its raison d'etre'.4 Suffering in particular gets ascribed to the will of the gods and to part of their plan for

history.5 The logical difficulty which led Eliade to postulate the conferring o.

meaning on history by mythic man was the apparent contradiction between his assertion that mythic man seeks to abolish history and his acknowledg

ment that mythic man has yet to abolish it. His postulation of the conferring of meaning on history leads, however, to an even keener difficulty: the seeming contradiction between that postulation and his prior contention that mythic man finds history meaningless. Alas, this difficulty is the same as that which his characterization of historical man poses: the fact that historical

man finds meaning in history yet, as man, should not. 1 Ibid. p. 75. 2 Ibid. p. 95- 3 Ibid. p. 142. 4 Ibid. ' See ibid. pp. 95-102. Eliade lists other means of rationalizing suffering, means short of imputing

it to Providence, but these strategies - 'suffering [it is said] proceeds from the magical action of an

enemy, from breaking a taboo, from entering a baneful zone, from the anger of a god...' (ibid.

p. 97) - bear little evident connection to the bestowal of metahistorical meaning on historical events.



ELIADE S THEORY OF MILLENARIANISM I63

The resolution which Eliade provides in the case of mythic man is surely the one which he would provide in the case of historical man as well. Indeed, by ascribing to mythic man the conferring of meaning on history he has erased the distinction between mythic and historical man - mythic man's not finding and historical man's finding meaning in history being the defining difference between them. For mythic man to find meaning in history is for him to become historical man. Eliade's resolution of the con tradiction his interpretation of mythic man poses must therefore apply to the contradiction his interpretation of historical man poses.

That resolution is twofold. First, Eliade declares that the bestowal of meaning on history by mythic man is no more than a psychological antidote to its intrinsic meaninglessness. The bestowal of meaning is simply a means of 'tolerating' history, and the meaning bestowed is merely 'consoling'.1 Second, Eliade deems that meaning not historical but 'transhistorical' or 'metahistorical'. History itself thereby remains meaningless. As he says,

whether he abolishes it periodically, whether he devaluates it by perpetually finding transhistorical models and archetypes for it, whether, finally, he gives it a

metahistorical meaning (cyclical theory, eschatological significations, and so on), the man of the traditional civilizations accord[s] the historical event no value in itself... [italics added].2

Presumably Eliade would explain the meaningfulness of history for historical man in the same way, though he never explains why historical man is reluctant to abolish history in the first place. Mythic man, he argues, wants to abolish history but because of his experience of irreversibility cannot do so. Instead, he manages to tolerate history by periodically abolishing it on the one hand and by giving it meaning on the other.

Historical man, however, somehow wants to retain history and finds meaning in it. Rather than explaining why he retains it, Eliade says only that the meaning he finds is not genuine but is merely a means of tolerating history. Perhaps Eliade is assuming that historical man's retention of history necessarily reflects his inability to abolish it, an inability that might stem from the same sources as mythic man's inability to abolish it. In that case mythic

man and historical man would be truly identical: not only would they both find meaning in history, but they would both have originally sought to abolish it. In sum, man, mythic and historical alike, would be imposing

meaning on history only to compensate for the real meaninglessness of it. Unfortunately, this happy resolution of the seeming contradiction between

man's finding meaning in history and his finding it meaningless is pro blematic, though not contradictory, in turn. How, first of all, does Eliade know that the meaning which history has for man is but a rationalization for its true meaninglessness and not its native significance? He doesn't. He

1 Ibid. p. 142. 2 Ibid. p. I4I.



i64 ROBERT A. SEGAL

assumes rather than proves this key point. What should be his conclusion is really his premise, and what should be a testable hypothesis becomes a dogmatic assertion. The thesis that man finds history meaningless and yearns for its extinction is itself testable - the evidence being the myriad beliefs and practices of mankind. Eliade's interpretation of the evidence is

what makes the thesis untestable. For he considers all evidence amenable to it: history can either not have or seemingly have meaning and still accord nicely with it. History without meaning automatically bolsters his thesis, and history with meaning he takes to be only a rationalization for its actual meaninglessness. His thesis is thus beyond disproof and so beyond proof.

But there is untampered evidence for the meaninglessness of history, Eliade would retort, and he would proceed to invoke the other part of his explanation of the phenomenon that man apparently finds meaning in history: the fact that the meaning man finds is not historical but 'trans historical' or, better, 'metahistorical'. By 'metahistorical' Eliade means a meaning which not only transcends history but in so doing confirms its meaninglessness. A meaning which transcends history is one which both transcends a single historical event and is fulfilled in the abolition of history and therefore, for Eliade, the return to primordial time. To call a meaning

which supersedes the bounds of a single event metahistorical rather than historical is, however, arbitrary at the least. For any meaning which history might possess would, as the meaning of all history, exceed the limits of a single event. To label metahistorical a meaning which finds fruition in the abolition of history and to equate the abolition of history with the return to primordial time is to argue more persuasively for the meaninglessness of history itself.

For the eschatologies of many, perhaps most, peoples are interpretable as breaking with history and abolishing it, so sparse is the value conferred on events preceding the end. For example, in the case of the Melanesian cargo cults, as Eliade describes them,' events do not lead naturally to the return of the ancestors and the realization of the millennium. On the contrary, each of the two stages of the millenarian movement constitutes a rupture, and an

unanticipated rupture, with the present. When the whites come to Melanesia, they come unexpectedly, and the natives greet them as the dead ancestors not because the natives have been predicting their return but because the whites look and act like the ancestors. They have white skins, have obviously

come from far away, sail in magnificent ships, and bear goods of plenty.2 Only with their arrival, not before, is the millennium proclaimed.

Once the whites establish themselves, however, they 'behave as masters, despise the natives, compel them to work very hard and try to convert them

to Christianity'.3 Above all, the whites refuse to slhare their cargo with the 1 'Cosmic and Eschatological Renewal', pp. I25-40. 2 Ibid. p. i28. 3 Ibid. p. 130.




natives. Certain as the natives are that this situation cannot constitute the

millennium yet that the cargo represents the abundance the ancestors

intended for them, they accuse the whites of having stolen the cargo from

the real ancestors and prophesy their imminent death at the hands of those

ancestors. In the new millennium now announced not only are the traditional promises of abundance and immortality to be realized, but so is a previously unimagined yearning: for the ouster of the whites. In the case of both millenniums, or of the two stages of a single millenarian movement, the eschatology marks a sharp severance with the present, and the present in no

way leads to the millennium. As the restoration of prelapsarian abundance and immortality, the millennium represents a return to primordial time.

It may be only when Eliade interprets the seeming value placed on history by avowedly historical religions like Judaism and Christianity and by secular ideologies like Marxism that he reveals the tendentious nature of his

explanation. His interpretation of the Israelite notion of history best illus trates his view.

In the Old Testament history is the sphere in which God acts, and it is by his actions in history that he is defined. Rather than an abstract being, God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with each of whom he makes or renews a covenant. God is he who leads Israel out of slavery in Egypt, he who gives Israel the Law at Sinai, he who gives the people the land of Canaan, and he who establishes the monarchy.

Yet history remains the province of man. God has no history of his own. He is knowable only in relation to man. The deeds of his which history recounts take place within historical, not mythic, time. Creation, the Exodus, and the revelation of the Law, for examnple, are events in the life of man and not God. Creation marks the birth of the world and of man, not

the birth of God; the Exodus, the liberation of Israel, not the liberation of God; the revelation of the Law, its revelation to Israel, not its revelation to God. These events change the course of history but not God himself. More important, they are irreversible. They may be commemorated annually, but as historical events. They do not recur. The rituals which commemorate them may establish contact with the divine but do not involve the repetition of divine acts.

The Pentateuch itself speaks little of eschatology. Israel awaits only the entry into the Promised Land. As the fulfilment of the covenant going back to Abraham, that event signifies the fulfilment of history. The Prophets do espouse eschatologies, and those eschatologies usually involve not only the destruction of the Kingdom, Northern or Southern, but also its restoration. Nevertlheless, the end, as the destruction of the Kingdom and not the world, is wholly human and therefore historical.

The Prophets ordinarily see life as reverting not to primordial time but to the time prior to the establishment of the Kingdom. And man, not God, is



i66 ROBERT A. SEGAL

responsible for the end. It is his disobedience which breaks the covenant, and

it is his obedience which will one day repair it. As the sphere of human actions, history is responsible for its own fate.

Eliade's denial of the Israelite sense of history may at first glance be less than apparent, for he makes several statements which suggest that he, too, recognizes that history, history independent of myth, can have meaning. For example, having noted the parallels drawn by various scholars between the Babylonian New Year Festival, at which history was abolished and the world recreated, and a reconstructed Jewish New Year Festival, at which, it is theorized, the same phenomenon occurred, he cautions that

obviously, the symbolic reiteration of the cosmogony at the New Year in Mesopo tamia and in Israel cannot be put on the same plane. Among the Jews the archaic

scenario of the periodic renewal of the world was progressively historicized, while

still preserving something of its original [mythic] meaning.'

However, by 'progressive historicization' he means not, as one would expect,

that history ceased being periodically abolished and the world periodically renewed but that on the contrary the periodic renewal of the world was read into 'such historical events as the exodus and the crossing of the Red Sea, the conquest of Canaan, the Babylonian captivity and the return from exile, etc.'2 He concludes that 'however great the differences between the Mesopo tamian and Jewish cult systems, they still obviously share a common hope for the annual or periodic regeneration of the World'3- and so for the

abolition of history. Even if Eliade were to say that the world finally ceased being renewed

annually or periodically, his postulation of a 'progressive historicization' would still be moot. For pitted against every Biblist who believes that the meaning of the Jewish New Year Festival was originally the recreation of the world and was progressively historicized is at least another who maintains the reverse to have beeil the case: that the New Year Festival celebrated a

historical event or series of events and was only later 'mythicized '. Eliade

cites 'recent studies' of Psalms which have shown that the Festival originally

commemorated the triumph of Yahweh, leader of the forces of light, over the

forces of darkness (the chaos of the sea, the primordial monster Rahab). This

triumph was followed by the enthronement of Yahweh as king and the repetition

of the cosmogonic act. The slaying of the monster Rahab and the victory over the

waters ... were equivalent to the creation of the cosmos .. .5

The studies he cites, however, are exclusively those of myth-ritualists, who

hardly constitute the consensus of Biblists. For at least as many other scholars, the forces over which God triumphs are from the outset physical rather than

1 Myth and Reality, p. 49. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. p. 50.

4 For a summary of these different interpretations and an attempted reconciliation of them see

Frank Moore Cross, Jr., 'The Divine Warrior in Israel's Early Cult', in Biblical Motifs: Origins and

Transformations, ed. Alexander Altmann (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, I966),

pp I I-30. 5 Cosmos and History, p. 6o.




divine ones, are creations rather than rivals of God, or are only metaphors for the human enemies of Israel.

Without distinguishing between this-wordly and otherworldly brands of eschatology Eliade speaks collectively of 'Judaeo-Christian eschatological visions'. He does note that 'Judaeo-Christianity makes an innovation of the first importance' over previous eschatologies: 'the End of the World will occur only once, just as the cosmogony occurred only once'. He even speaks of the end as 'the triumph of a Sacred History'. But then he says that 'the Cosmos that will reappear after the catastrophe will be the same Cosmos that God created at the beginning of Time'.' Once again, he will concede no significance to history itself.

In nonapocalyptic Jewish eschatology history certainly triumphs: it witnesses the progressive improvement of mankind, which the eschatology merely completes. Yet even in apocalyptic, where the world progressively degenerates and divine intervention is necessary not to complete but to overturn the course of history, history triumphs, and its triumph is still the realization of the eschatology. For the degeneration of the world becomes part of God's plan for the world, degeneration being as prerequisite to the realization of the apocalyptic eschatology as improvement is to the realiza tion of the nonapocalyptic one. Hence the apocalyptic obsession with reading the present back into the past, exactly in order to know how history is heading.

The world may be under the temporary control of Satan, but his reign, too, is part of God's plan, so that even he is under 'divine supervision'. Nor is the end a return to primordial time. It is the fulfilment of the covenant made

with the apocalyptic group, a fulfilment which now takes place on a cosmic rather than purely human scale. Whether the meaning accorded history is a rationalization for its inherent meaninglessness is not here the issue, which is rather whether history itself has meaning, be it a rationalized meaning or not.

At one point Eliade goes so far as to title the Prophetic view of history 'history regarded as theophany'2- an impressive concession for one who

otherwise dismisses history as profane. The Prophets, he says, were the first, the first 'in history', to 'affirm'

the idea that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined by the will of God. This God of the Jewish people is no longer an

Oriental divinity, creator of archetypal gestures, but a personality who ceaselessly intervenes in history, who reveals his will through events (invasions, sieges, battles,

and so on). Historical facts thus become 'situations' of man in respect to God, and as such they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able to confer on them.3

The Prophets not only were the first to place value on history itself but also 'for the first time ... succeeded in transcending the traditional vision of the

1 Myth and Reality, pp. 64-5. 2 Cosmos and History, p. I02. 3 Ibid. p. 104.



i68 ROBERT A. SEGAL

cycle (the conception that ensures all things will be repeated forever), and discovered a one-way time'.'

Yet even 'in the Israel of the Messianic prophets, historical events could be tolerated' only 'because, on the one hand, they were willed by Yahweh, and, on the other hand, because they were necessary to the final salvation of the chosen people '.2 That salvation might come only once and not annually, but 'when the Messiah comes, the world will be saved once and for all and history will cease to exist '.3 Eliade states outright that

Messianic beliefs in a final regeneration of the world themselves also indicate an antihistoric attitude. Since he can no longer ignore or periodically abolish history, the Hebrew tolerates it in the hope that it will finally end, at some more or less dis tant moment. The irreversibility of historical events and of time is compensated by the limitation of history to time.4

Having begun by singling out the Israelite view of history as unique, Eliade ends by lumping it under the universal longing to overcome history.

How, one might ask, does Eliade know that the meaning which 'the Hebrew' finds in history is only a device for tolerating it? How can Eliade foreclose the possibility that history gets tolerated because it is meaningful in the first place? Indeed, his argument that the meaning which history has for Israel is metahistorical rather than historical was supposed to demonstrate this point generally. Eliade cannot argue that the meaning of history for

Israel is metahistorical in the sense that that meaning transcends history, for

he himself notes that the meaning of history for Israel lies within history. He must argue that the meaning is metahistorical in the sense that history

culminates in the abolition and thereby rejection of itself. And so, as seen, he

does. Not only, however, has it seemed far from clear that the end of history for

Israel necessarily means its abolition. It is hardly clear that the abolition of

history would in and of itself mean its rejection rather than fulfilment. If it

is not clear that the abolition of history necessarily represents its rejection,

then it is not clear that man, Israelite or other, necessarily wants to reject

history, in which case it is not clear that in the meantime he seeks simply to

tolerate history, in which case it is not clear that the meaning history has for

him is only a means of tolerating it rather than its genuine meaning.

Recently, the English historian J. H. Plumb has lamented 'the death of

the past' and its replacement by straight history, or the past as dead. From

the earliest recorded time, he explains, the past has been 'a living past,

something which has been used day after day, life after life, never-endingly',

for a variety of purposes:

to explain the origins and purpose of human life, to sanctify institutions of govern ment, to give validity to class structure, to provide moral example, to vivify

1 Ibid. 2 Ibid. pp. i06-7. 3Ibid. p. 107. 4 Ibid. p. i i i.




[man's] cultural and educational processes, to interpret the future, to invest both the individual human life or [sic] a nation's with a sense of destiny.'

By contrast, 'history' denotes a detached, professional stance toward the past, which no longer exerts any intrinsic authority over man. The past becomes a time distinct from our own, a subject of analysis, not veneration or emulation. As Plumb puts it, history cannot do what the past did: dictate what a man should believe and do.

Clearly, the relationship for Plumb between hlistory and the past is like the relationship for Eliade between history and myth. Where, however, Eliade rejects history altogether, Plumb scurries to add that even if history lacks the authority of the past, it can reveal truths which increase man's awareness of himself. Its power lies in the fact that it is critical and objective, beholden to no tradition and free to seek the truth for its own sake. Here history is more than, as mythic man purportedly conceives it, a succession of 'meaningless conjunctures or infractions of [archetypal] norms '.2 It is what lhas shaped the present, even if it no longer justifies or guides the present. It lives on in the consequences it has for the present and is important just because it cannot be effaced. When radical historians search for a 'usable past' and blacks demand to know their own past, they only underscore the significance of history for man.

Eliade, it was acknowledged at the beginning of this paper, provides no explicit theory, or causal explanation, of millenarianism. The meaning, not the cause, of millenarianism is what interests him, and the meaning of it for him is the expression of a natural eschatological yearning in man, a yearning to break with history and return to primordial time. Only by implication, however logical the implication, is he ascribing millenarianism to that natural eschatological yearning. The validity of the ascription nevertheless depends on the validity of his interpretation of millenarianism as the expres sion of a natural eschatological yearning, and that interpretation has proved dubious.

Moreover, even if Eliade were able to show that every eschatology evinces a desire to abolish history and revert to primordial time, he would still have to explain the two characteristics which distinguish millenarianism from ordinary eschatology: the imminence of the eschatology, and the frequent adoption of a new eschatology rather than the realization of the existing one. Insofar as these are the distinctive features of millenarianism, a theory which could not account for them would constitute a tenuous theory of the phenom enon. Of course, Eliade is not truly concerned with explaining millenarian ism in particular, and just because he views it as only a realized eschatology, its eschatological character explaining it. The differences between millenarian and other eschatologies can, however, undercut the similarities, unless they are explicable within the compass of a single theory.

1 The Death of the Past (London: Macmillan, I969), p. i i. 2 Cosmos and History, p. I54.



I70 ROBERT A. SEGAL

Man, says Eliade, forever longs to abolish history and return to primordial time. Millenarianism is only the fulfilment of that longing. But if man is by nature potentially millenarian, why does he become millenarian when he does? If he has been merely tolerating history rather than truly finding

meaning in it, why does he suddenly cease tolerating it? If he has always sought to overcome history, how does he manage to succeed now? Millenar ianism may for Eliade be only the long-sought realization of an inherent longing, but it nevertheless is the long-sought realization of that longing.

Why does it come when it does? Most, and perhaps all other, interpreters of millenarianism have scant

difficulty answering this question, for they deem millenarian yearnings the product of new rather than old conditions, whether social, political, economic, or other. Such yearnings do not exist potentially in man, awaiting realization. They do not previously exist at all, and when they arise, they arise as yearn ings about to be realized. Eliade alone, perhaps, deems these yearnings innate and therefore latent. What, then, explains their realization? Must not Eliade resort to something beyond man's permanent desire to realize them, and does not his reluctance to venture beyond this sheer desire make his theory of millenarianism inadequate?

In the case of the cargo cults it does not, and for that reason the example is not representative of millenarian movements and may even be unique.

Eliade need not 'explain why the millennium is realized when it is because the millennium just is realized, as it were. He need not explain what new con ditions trigger the millennium because the only conditions which could be said to trigger it - the arrival of the whites in cargo-laden ships - are for the the natives not the cause of the millennium but the millennium itself. The natives do not attempt to explain the nmillennium. It is for them afait accompli - the arrival of the cargo, together with the arrival of the whites and their arrival in ships, coincidentally fitting traditional millenarian expectations.

It is true that the natives must interpret these events as millenarian, so that the appearance of the whites, the ships, and the cargo might still seem to be only the conditions underlying millenarianism. What matters, however, is that the natives do interpret their appearance not as the cause of the mil lennium but as the realization of it. The natives do not interpret events as evidence of the imminence of the millennium, the way Jewish and Christian

millenarians interpret events in history as signs of the coming of the nmillen nium. The appearance of the whites in ships with cargo is for them the

millennium itself. The question is whether Eliade can cite any other millenarian movement

in which the millennium simply arrives, the arrival of which he need there fore not explain. If there are few other instances of the unannounced realization of the millennium, he must still explain why, in the light of an inherent eschatological drive, man acts on that drive when he does.




It is uncertain whether Eliade is aware of this problem, and it is equally uncertain whether he intends either of the two possible solutions to it implicit in his writings. The first solution is the subsumption of the social, political, economic, or other conditions connected with millenarianism under man's millenarian instinct itself. The second solution is the opposite: the severance of these conditions from millenarianism itself and the relega tion of them to the status of preconditions, or mere instigators of the mil lenarian instinct.

Either solution is deducible from Eliade's words:

Of course, all these millenarist movements in Oceania arose as a sequel to precise historical situations, and express a desire for economic and political independence. Numerous works have explained the socio-political context of the 'cargo-cults.' But the historico-religious interpretation of these millenarist minor religions has hardly begun. Now, all these prophetic phenomena become completely intelligible only in the perspective of the history of religions. It is impossible to discover the significance and assess the extraordinary success of the 'cargo-cults' without taking into account one mythico-ritual theme which plays a fundamental part in

Melanesian religions: the annual return of the dead and the cosmic renewal that it implies.'

According to the first solution, the native desire for independence is a desire for the recreation of the world - for starting society and therefore life afresh.

According to the second solution, this same desire for independence merely sparks the desire for the recreation of the world.

Both solutions are problematic. The first solution, precisely by subsuming the desire for independence under the desire for the millennium, fails to explain the phenomenon it is supposed to explain: why the millenarian desire as a whole expresses itself when it does. To say that the millenarian desire expresses itself the moment the desire for independence does - the only conceivable explanation - is to abandon the first solution for the second. But once one acknowledges that the activator of millenarianism is other than religious, it becomes dogmatic to maintain that the activator is merely the activator and that millenarianism is still a wholly religious phenomenon. Indeed, something can logically be the activator of millenarianism only insofar as millenarianism provides a response to it. To acknowledge that

millenarianism is, if only in part, a response to a secular activator is surely, then, to make it other than a wholly religious phenomenom. Eliade thus faces a dilemma: either to refuse to explain the imminence of the millennium, in which case his theory is inadequate, or to explain it nonreligiously, in

which case his theory is not exclusively religious. Just as Eliade has difficulty explaining, at least religiously, the imminence

of the millenarian eschatology, so he has difficulty explaining at all the frequent supplanting of the traditional eschatology by a new one. To

1 'Cosmic and Eschatological Renewal', p. 132.



I72 ROBERT A. SEGAL

describe the millennium as the realization of the native desire to realize it is scarcely to explain why the millennium realized may differ from the tradi tional one. Eliade's explanation of the imminence of the eschatology may be unclear, but his explanation of the change in eschatology is unambiguous: he denies any change. His interpretation of the cargo cults serves again to illustrate his view.

The key to his interpretation is his inclusion of the cargo within the traditional goods to be brought by the ancestors. The goods which the whites bring the natives identify with the goods which the ancestors are traditionally to bring, and the natives continue to identify the whites' goods with the ancestors' even after they have ceased to identify the whites themselves with the ancestors.

With this interpretation of the cargo cults the anthropologist Kenelm Burridge, for one, agrees in part but in part disagrees. He agrees that the natives, if only ex postfacto, see the cargo as part of the traditional abundance the ancestors are to bestow on them. But he stresses the novelty of the abundance the cargo represents - indeed, the way it devalues existing notions of abundance. The cargo thus fulfils the traditional hope for abund ance itself, but with a new kind of abundance.' To label the cargo the ful filment of nothing other than the traditional hope for abundance is to simplify the matter.

Furthermore, not only is the hope for the cargo new; so is the hope for its return. That the natives justify their demand for the cargo on the grounds that it represents the traditional abundance promised them does not obviate the newness of their state of dispossession and their longing to end it. Just, then, as Eliade blurs the distinction between the hope for traditional goods and the hope for the cargo, so he blurs the distinction between the hope for abundance, in whatever form, and the hope for return of the cargo. In the

millennium, he says, 'the natives will once more be masters of their islands' - the new hope - 'and will no longer work, for the dead will bring them

fantastic quantities of provisions' - the traditional hope.2 In fact, the hope for regained mastery is no more tied to the hope for abundance than the hope for cargo is tied to the hope for traditional goods. In both respects, the eschatology now sought goes beyond the eschatology formerly sought, in which case traditional hopes cannot account for present ones.

Whether or not Eliade's inability to explain either the imminence of the millennium or the frequent adoption of a new eschatology undermines his overall interpretation of millenarianism, it does reveal much about that interpretation. It reveals well-nigh the uniqueness of his interpretation: his focus on the continuity rather than discontinuity of millenarianism with ordinary life. Eliade's inability to explain either the imminence or the

I New Heaven, New Earth (New York: Schocken, i969), passim. 2 'Cosmic and Eschatological Renewal', p. 129.




novelty of the millennium is less significant than his indifference to them. He is indifferent to these aspects of millenarianism exactly because they mark the discontinuity of millenarianism with ordinary life.

To ask why the millennium comes now and has not come before and why a new eschatology often replaces the old one is to ask why the present is so different from the past. It is to search for not just new but exceptional con ditions like acute deprivation, whatever the kind, which alone can explain why a previously nonmillenarian society should suddenly become millen arian and why a new eschatology should suddenly replace an old one. It is, as a consequence, to emphasize the 'unnaturalness of millenarianism, its strangeness, its bizarreness, its fabulousness - in brief, those characteristics of

millenarianism which distinguish it from everyday existence. Eliade, by contrast, is almost blase. For he sees millenarianism not as the

supplanting of traditional values and habits by new ones but as the final fulfilment of traditional ones. He sees millenarianism as the product not of new conditions but of old ones, at least realized: man's innate desire to abolish history and return to primordial time. It is the naturalness of mil lenarianism which he emphasizes, its conformity with conventional hopes and practices. Millenarianism is for Eliade no desperate response to unsettling circumstances but the long-awaited opportunity to effect man's keenest urges.



Documents

Eliade's Theory of Millenarianism