THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY FAITHS AND ARCHAIC REALITIES
I: The Myths of the Modern World
II: The Myth of the Noble Savage or the Prestige of the Beginning
III: Nostalgia for Paradise in the Primitive Traditions
IV: Sense-Experience and Mystical Experience among Primitives
V: Symbolisms of Ascension and "Waking Dreams"
VI: Power and Holiness in the History of Religions
VII: Mother Earth and the Cosmic Hierogamies
VIII: Mysteries and Spiritual Regeneration
IX: Religious Symbolism and the Modern Man's Anxiety
“…We are at last beginning to know and understand the value of the myth, as it has been elaborated in ‘primitive’ and archaic societies—that is, among those groups of mankind where the myth happens to be the very foundation of social life and culture. Now, one fact strikes us immediately: in such societies the myth is thought to express the absolute truth, because it narrates a sacred history; that is, a transhuman revelation which took place at the dawn of the Great Time, in the holy time of the beginnings (in illo tempore). Being real and sacred, the myth becomes exemplary, and consequently repeatable, for it serves as a model, and by the same token as a justification, for all human actions. In other words, a myth is a true history of what came to pass at the beginning of Time, and one which provides the pattern for human behaviour. In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.”
“Every primordial image is the bearer of a message of direct relevance to the condition of humanity, for the image unveils aspects of ultimate reality that are otherwise inaccessible.”
“Everywhere we have found the symbolism of death as the ground of all spiritual birth—that is, of regeneration. In all these contexts death signifies the surpassing of the profane, non-sanctified condition, the condition of the ‘natural man’, ignorant of religion and blind to the spiritual. The mystery of initiation discloses to the neophyte, little by little, the true dimensions of existence; by introducing him to the sacred, the mystery obliges him to assume the responsibilities of a man. Let us remember this fact, for it is important—that access to the spiritual is expressed, in archaic societies, by a symbolism of Death.”
“…if one knows death already here below, if one is continually dying countless deaths in order to be reborn to something else—to something that does not belong to the Earth but participates in the sacred—then one is living, we may say, a beginning of immortality, or growing more and more into immortality. It would follow that immortality should not be conceived as a survival post mortem, but rather as a situation one is constantly creating for oneself, for which one is preparing, in which one is even participating from now onward and from this present world. The deathless, the immortal, ought then to be conceived as a limiting situation, an ideal situation towards which man is straining with his whole being, and that he strives to attain by dying and resurrecting continually.”
“The modern Christian may perhaps succeed in defending himself against the temptations of life, but it is impossible for him, as a Christian, to resist History when once he has become involved in its workings. For we live in an epoch when one can no longer disengage oneself from the wheels of History, unless by some audacious act of evasion. But evasion is forbidden to the Christian. And for him there is no other issue; since the Incarnation took place in History, since the Advent of Christ marks the last and the highest manifestation of the sacred in the world—the Christian can save himself only within the concrete, historical life, the life that was chosen and lived by Christ. We know what he must expect: the ‘fear and anguish’ the ‘sweat like great drops of blood,’ the ‘agony’ and the ‘sadness unto death’ (Luke 22, 44; Mark, 14, 34).”