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Rel. Stud. 14, pp-

159-173

ROBERT

A. SEGAL

Assistant Professor of Religion,ReedCollege,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 itsmeaning rather than its cause.' Yet presupposed in the meaning he finds is a theory of its cause, and that theory isworth 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 asmerely 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 inmysticism, 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 quaman 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 falsewithout 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 inman 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 'Cosmic and Eschatological especially in The Two and the One, tr. J. M. Cohen Renewal', (New York: Harper See also Cosmos and History: Torchbooks, I969), pp. 125-59. The Myth of the Eternal Return, tr. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, and Myth and I959), passim, tr.Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Reality, Torchbooks, I968), passim.

i6o

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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 iswhat 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 themetaphysical 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 themeaning 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
the term says: 'In using edition of Cosmos and History Eliade to the paperback In the preface to the archetypes described by Professor to specify that I was not referring I neglected " archetype," the arche say that, for Professor Jung, error ... I need scarcely C. G. Jung. This was a regrettable But in my book I nowhere touch upon the problems unconscious. of the collective types are structures As I have said, I use the of the collective unconscious. nor do I use the concept of depth psychology . . .' (viii-ix). or "paradigm" model" for "exemplary . . . as a synonym term "archetype"

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 themyths, 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 themeaninglessness mythic man finds in it is 'the crucial difference' between the one kind of man and the other.3
1 CosmosandHistory, p. 75.
2 Ibid. p. 95. 3 Ibid. p. 154.

I62

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Far from explaining why, ifman 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 ',1and '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 '.3 These tactics by giving historical events a metahistorical meaning... 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 raisond'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 thatwhich his characterization of historical man poses: the fact that historical man finds meaning in history yet, as man, should not.

1Ibid. p. 75.
'

2Ibid. p.95-

p. 142. 3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

Eliade lists other means of rationalizing short of imputing suffering, means See ibid. pp. 95-102. - 'suffering from the magical action of an it to Providence, but these strategies [it is said] proceeds a taboo, from entering a baneful zone, from the anger of a god...' from breaking (ibid. enemy, to the bestowal on historical events. p. 97) - bear little evident connection of metahistorical meaning

ELIADE

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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 aswell. 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
and so on), the metahistorical meaning (cyclical theory, eschatological significations, man of the traditional event no value in the historical civilizations accord[s] 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 itmeaning 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 themeaning he finds is not genuine but ismerely 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 thatmight stem from the same sources asmythic 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 themeaning which history has forman 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.

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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 theMelanesian cargo cults, as Eliade describes them,' events do not lead naturally to the return of the ancestors and the realization of themillennium. On the contrary, each
of the two stages of the millenarian movement constitutes a rupture, and an

unanticipated rupture,with the present.When thewhites come toMelanesia, 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

2 Ibid. p. i28.

and Eschatological

Renewal',

pp.

I25-40.

3 Ibid.p. 130.

ELIADE

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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, themillennium represents a return to primordial time. Itmay be only when Eliade interprets the seeming value placed on history by avowedly historical religions like Judaism and Christianity and by secular ideologies likeMarxism 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 inwhich 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 ishe 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, iswholly 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

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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 theNew Year inMesopo
the Jews the archaic tamia and in Israel cannot be put on the same plane. Among historicized, while scenario of the periodic renewal of the world was progressively 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 theworld was read into 'such historical events as the exodus and the crossing of theRed Sea, the conquest of Canaan, the Babylonian captivity and the return from exile, etc.'2He concludes that 'however great the differences between theMesopo 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
leader of the forces of light, over the the triumph of Yahweh, commemorated This (the chaos of the sea, the primordial monster Rahab). forces of darkness as king and the repetition of Yahweh triumph was followed by the enthronement act. The slaying of the monster Rahab and the victory over the of the cosmogonic to the creation of the cosmos .. .5 were ... waters equivalent

The studies he cites, however, are exclusively those of myth-ritualists, who hardly constitute the consensus of Biblists. For at least asmany other scholars, the forces over which God triumphs are from the outset physical rather than
1Myth 3 Ibid. p. 50. 2 Ibid. and Reality, p. 49. of them see 4 For a summary reconciliation and an attempted of these different interpretations in Biblical Motifs: in Israel's Early Cult', Origins and Cross, Jr., 'The Divine Warrior Frank Moore I966), Mass.: Harvard Press, Altmann University (Cambridge, ed. Alexander Transformations, 5 Cosmos and History, p. 6o. I I-30. pp

ELIADE

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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 theWorld 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 isheading. 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 ratherwhether 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
1Myth andReality, pp. 64-5. 2 CosmosandHistory, p. I02.
3 Ibid. p. 104.

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cycle (the conception that ensures all things will be repeated forever), and discovered a one-way time'.' Yet even 'in the Israel of theMessianic 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 theMessiah comes, the world will be saved once and for all and history will cease to exist '.3Eliade 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 ismeaningful in the first place? Indeed, his argument that themeaning which history has for Israel ismetahistorical rather than historical was supposed to demonstrate
this point Israel must generally. Eliade cannot argue that that the meaning transcends in the sense of history history, that for for ismetahistorical argue in the sense that meaning

he himself notes that themeaning of history for Israel lieswithin history. He

culminates that the meaning in the abolition and is metahistorical thereby rejection history of itself. And so, as seen, he for of If it

does.
Not Israel history is not then history, tolerate him has it seemed far from clear that the end of history however, means its abolition. It is hardly clear that the abolition necessarily only, would clear it is not in and of itself mean that the abolition clear that man, its rejection rather than fulfilment.

in which

history, is only a means and

of history necessarily its rejection, represents Israelite or other, necessarily wants to reject case it is not clear that in the meantime he seeks simply to case it is not clear that the meaning in which history has for of tolerating historian it rather J. H. than history, its genuine has lamented been meaning. 'the death as dead. 'a living of From past, Plumb

Recently, the past' something the earliest for a variety

the English recorded which

its replacement

by straight

or the past

the past has time, he explains, has been used day after day, life after

life, never-endingly',

of purposes:

to explain the origins and purpose of human life, to sanctify institutions of govern to class structure, to provide moral to vivify to give validity ment, example,
1 Ibid. 2 Ibid. pp. i06-7. 3Ibid. p. 107. 4 Ibid. p. i i i.

ELIADE

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[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 truthswhich 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 ismore than, as mythic man purportedly conceives it, a succession of 'meaningless conjunctures or infractions of [archetypal] norms '.2 It iswhat lhasshaped 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 forman. 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 iswhat interests him, and themeaning of it for him is the expression of a natural eschatological yearning inman, 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 themwould 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 TheDeath of thePast (London:Macmillan, I969), p. i i. 2 CosmosandHistory, p. I54.

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Man, says Eliade, forever longs to abolish history and return to primordial time. Millenarianism is only the fulfilment of that longing. But ifman 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 inman, 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 'explainwhy themillennium is realized when it isbecause 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 asmillenarian, 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 of the millennium, the way Jewish and Christian evidence of the imminence millenarians interpret events in history as signs of the comingof the nmillen nium. The appearance of the whites in ships with cargo is for them the millennium itself. The question iswhether 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.

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

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describe themillennium 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 thewhites 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 expostfacto, 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 thematter. 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 Schocken, New Heaven, New Earth (New York: 2 p. 129. Renewal', 'Cosmic and Eschatological i969), passim.

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novelty of themillennium is less significant than his indifference to them. He is indifferent to these aspects ofmillenarianism exactly because theymark the discontinuity of millenarianism with ordinary life. To askwhy themillennium 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 seesmillenarianism 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.