Sacred Time

This is the name the historian of religion Mircea Eliade gave to the way archaic humanity lived inside time – and it is the very world the first philosopher broke. For the Greeks before Thales, as for the hunters of Chauvet tens of thousands of years earlier, what carried weight was whatever had been established once, at the beginning, by gods or ancestors: how to plant, how to marry, how to raise a house, how to bury the dead. That first time was the real time, the strong time; everything since is a copy that stays alive only as long as it keeps touching the original. So when the priest at the new year tells the myth of creation, he does the creation again – the telling is the act, and the world, worn thin by ordinary days, is set back to its first strength like a wound watch. Time here does not run forward in a line – it turns as a wheel that the labour of religion draws endlessly back to the sacred beginning. From this comes an attitude to novelty opaque to us: the new thing frightens rather than attracts, a tear in a fabric woven at the start of the world and not to be touched. To invent is nearly to blaspheme. Hold that in mind when a man in Miletus looks at the flooding river and asks what it is made of: such a question is alien to sacred time, and it cuts into this very wheel. Eliade's eternal return is other than Nietzsche's: Nietzsche dares you to love the repetition of your own life as a test of will, while the archaic rite turned time backward to save the world from sliding into chaos.