The Purifying Chaos
The Purifying Chaos
The Cycle of Ages and the Unabolished Past
The forces of good battle with chaos and keep it at bay, that the ordered cosmos be maintained. This is among the most universal of themes identifiable in human religion. But, equally, it is out of chaos that all things emerge and only through it that new life may arise.
Is chaos, then, wholly bad?
In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the heroine’s scholarly love interest the Reverend Edward Casaubon is left defeated in attempts to write an abstruse treatise named The Key to all Mythologies, a work that consumes the better part of his life and goes on to serve as a “tomb” for his widow,1 whom he entrusts with its completion. No doubt many others have met similar torment and failure in trying to resolve all religion to one factor or another, Casaubon’s fictitious book’s title becoming something of a shorthand for tragically unrealised ambition. This can give some idea as to the difficulty inherent to what we might call the search for the essence of religion.
While such a task can have no hard end point or “resolution” without destroying its object of study, the more modest aims and breadth of research in Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion, gives a picture of the unifying and essential characteristics of human religion without busying itself with overambitious attempts at unification. A read that has been beyond fascinating, I’ve mined it thoroughly as a part of the research for my upcoming book Living Religion (which will hopefully not become a tomb!) and far from hoarding all its goodness in unfinished pages like Mr. Casaubon I have deigned, graciously to sprinkle you all with some choice morsels in the meantime. Of course, in truth, I can’t keep this stuff to myself.
This time I’d like to tie the Romanian historian of religion’s insights to those from what I’ll call the Marble Articles2, a pair of pieces I wrote last year concerning our relationship with the past and what we might call “museification”. They dealt in part with the dilemma of whether the preservation of prior forms hinders the further growth and flourishing of culture. This was only part of their scope, however; where they intersect with my studies in comparative religion.
The Primordial Waters
We’re all familiar with the Age Cycle, itself among the most attested and universal of the patterns identified by Eliade in his work. We know it from sources as diverse as Hesiod and the Babylonians; perhaps the canonical example is the Vedic. Reference to the final, darkest age in the Vedic cycle, Kaliyuga is widespread in online circles far beyond even those of a traditionalist persuasion, down perhaps mostly to its use by Julius Evola. The concept itself is dissemenated as widely as the Joe Rogansphere in the strong men create good times; create weak men; create hard times; create strong men meme: an infectious idea, it would seem; as Eliade shows, the underlying motif is near-universal in human religion.3
The historian’s own favourite example to quote is that of the Mesopotamian myth of Marduk, which puts across the crucial aspect of renewal - the mythic cycle involves the birth of a new world, its decline and descent into chaos and the vanquishing of this chaos to recreate the cosmos.
On the last day of the year the universe was dissolved in the primordial waters. The marine monster Tiamat - symbol of darkness, of the formless, the non-manifested - revived and once again threatened. The world that had existed for a whole year really disappeared. Since Tiamat was again present, the cosmos was annulled; and Marduk was obliged to create it once again, after having once again conquered Tiamat.4
We remain on familiar ground. The forces of good (the gods) maintain cosmic order against the forces of chaos and finally renew this order after the destruction of the world by chaos. But what we also find in Patterns is the intriguing and equally widespread idea that chaos, while feared and to be held at bay, is necessary for creation. Chaos not only succeeds creation, but preexists it. The primordial waters consume reality, but are also what it emerged out of. They are both the “primordial chaos” and the origin of all life.
In the chapter dedicated to its symbolism, we see that water, the “source of all things”, “symbolises the whole of all potentiality […] precedes all forms and upholds all creation”.5 It is far from a merely destructive force.
Principle of what is formless and potential, basis of every cosmic manifestation, container of all seeds, water symbolises the primal substance from which all forms come and to which they will return either by their own regression or in a cataclysm. It existed at the beginning and returns at the end of every cosmic or historic cycle;6
[...] the Great Year opens with a creation and concludes with a Chaos, that is, by a complete fusion of the elements. A cosmic cycle includes a “creation”, an “existence” (or “history, wearing-out, degeneration), and a “return to chaos” (ekpyrosis, ragnarok, pralaya, submergence of Atlantis, apocalypse). Structurally, a Great Year is to the year what a year is to the month and the day. But what is interesting to us at the moment is chiefly the hope of a total regeneration of time that is evident in all the myths and doctrines involving cosmic cycles; every cycle is an absolute beginning because all the past, all “history”, has been completely abolished by reverting in a single instant to “chaos”.7
Here we come across the Eternal Return, title to one of his other major works. Human life is a microcosm of the cosmos and as such reifies in its cycle of birth and death the life of the universe at large.8 Just as man dies, the day, the year and the whole world are “abolished”. This symbolic motif of water as both destructive and generative is why rites of immersion in water are so common:
Immersion is the equivalent, at the human level, of death, and at the cosmic level, of the cataclysm (the Flood) which periodically dissolves the world into the primaeval ocean. Breaking up all forms, doing away with all the past, water possesses this power of purifying, of regenerating, of giving new birth; for what is immersed in it “dies”, and, rising again from the water, is like a child without any sin or any past, able to receive a new revelation and begin a new and real life.9
Here we can see a furthering of water’s symbolism. The Flood coincides with the Age Cycle as a very common motif. Crucially, the choice of the gods to destroy the world in water makes clear that this is a destruction with the purpose of bringing about a renewal, as with the immersion rite, to wash away the sin of the world, to wipe it clean and start afresh. Perhaps counterintuitively and indeed uncomfortably, this would suggest that the coming apart of civilisation and the proliferation of chaos were, if not a good thing, something on which ultimate renewal were contingent. Indeed, as this is a matter of universal and inescapable cycles, it might be better to ask what happens if this does not happen?
The Marble Articles
The example I used in A Beaker Full of the Warm South of Venice is most fitting here. Drawing a love similar to the global adoration of Italy’s countless ancient ruins, Venice, to abridge thoughts more fully put in the earlier piece, shares the “deadness” of these ruins, but differs in its absolute preservation; in its “urban taxidermy”. Venice is a place that has not been allowed to die, held back from being, quite literally, swallowed into the waters.
The reason that we - and I myself - are so desperate to preserve the relics of the past is because we realise that we make nothing to replace them. We do not have the confidence of our own time nor the connection to living history to accept losing any fragment of the past.10
I choose to reiterate this example specifically to highlight the pain of this subject: of confronting saṃsāra. Venice’s “stricken beauty”11 is as captivating for me as for anyone. Those marble mornings in the warm sea breeze and wine with a tagliere in the cadent sun won’t ever leave me, but their enjoyment is undoubtedly decadent. Decadent in the very clearest sense of “falling”; of evening; going down. The evening is the best time to enjoy that delicious sense of ease, akin in ways to the wistful joy of autumn.
Here in the evening of our civilisation we find the same delight in things left us from the morning and high-noon, when we were at work, so to speak. What makes a long summer evening so delightful, in my view, is the sense of the completion of the day; the sun’s recession from the world. The “resolution” to the day that is itself a microcosm of the universe.12 Many think Autumn the most beautiful of the seasons. As things begin to pass through our fingers and wilt away, their beauty takes on a tragic aspect that intensifies it; when its death is near.
And the waters lap away. Many today seem certain, even shyly hopeful, that collapse is well on its way, but our age shows remarkable “antifragility”13. The approach of Peak-Oil, general devastation of the natural world, the collapse of religiosity and the utter social confusion that has taken hold as we have lost a grip on all of our old certainties all seem poised to bring this turgid Kaliyuga tumbling down, but these are only the acqua alta of otherwise robust modernity.
As I often note, the focus of most antimoderns is in holding on to fragments of the noble past à la Venice, or reclaiming submerged trinkets from the waves: the trappings of swallowed religions; musings from buried ideologies, “wisp[s] of evaporating reality”14. Retvurning to Tradition is folly. These old certainties must be remade, by the same necessity that birthed them; by what birthed traditional man himself. It is traditional man’s own doctrine, as Eliade shows, that they must be reborn from their own dissolution.
However, the ascendant lapse in natural and cosmic limitation which, simply put, is modernity, runs on seemingly endlessly. The suspension of limitation: the “hard times” that make the “strong men”, is an ordinary part of the Age Cycle, but it is always righted in the end. It seems this time around, however that there is no limit on unlimitation.
Old Hierophanies
Modern man’s originality, his newness in comparison with traditional societies, lies precisely in his wish to live in a basically desacralised cosmos.15
Nowhere is the undoing of ordered reality, of the “founded world”16, felt more keenly than in the religious sphere. The “hierophany”: appearance of the sacred in the world, through some manner of mythic symbolism,17 is the basis of revelation. The desacralised cosmos is one in which old hierophanies have lost their salience and their symbols no longer act as a “breach”18 between profane and sacred. The decline of one hierophany in favour of new ones is an ordinary religious process, but as will be explored fully in my book, old hierophanies are not only inaccessible, new ones have become impossible.
Eliade notes that religious symbols tend towards what he calls “infantilism”: the gradual hollowing out of their religious meaning and mythic resonance. After this infantilisation takes place and new revelation is experienced, the old hierophanies not only lose their meaning but become “obstacles to the development of religious experience”.19 Of iconoclasm he says:
The assailants of idols […] are justified both by their own religious experience and by the point in history when their experience occurs. There is, in their lifetime, a revelation more “complete”, more consistent with their spiritual and cultural powers, and they cannot believe, they cannot see any religious value, in the hierophanies accepted in previous stages of religious development.20
The uncomfortable reality seen in the Marble Articles is that we are not only unable to engage with the life of the past that we valorise - as if musing on the events of the day with a cigarette at sunset - we are weighed down by its heaped preservation. Every past “desacralisation” came with a new hierophany, a new enthronement of divinity, which undid the old and made it inaccessible.
A tremendous unity then emerges between this historical process and the Age Cycle of myth, in which heaven itself falls and must be recreated, as we saw with water earlier, the creation depending on the fall. The gods, in their fading hierophanies, crash and burn with the death of the universe, returning to the primordial chaos which is not only followed by, but itself enables, the remaking of the world. In Eliade’s understanding, infantilised hierophanies must be abolished to allow for new gnosis, just as the world itself must be “abolished” to be made anew, in many traditions from the carcass of a slain god.21
The Great Concealment and the Museified World
What sets our time apart is not that we have abolished these inaccessible hierophanies, but precisely that we have managed to prolong their infantilised presence in our culture without abolishing them at all. God may be dead, but still we parade his corpse about.
In one sense, the “Death of God” came on the heels of a kind of inverted hierophany. A heirolethy22, a concealment of the sacred, we might call it. Modernity has shielded the earth from new appearances of divinity, while making a museum of the old gods. Every hierophany has become infantilised, all religion and all artefacts of tradition are items on a boundless shelf.
The most tragic aspect of infantilism is that it comes in part from wishing to maximise the presence of the sacred. As a result, “the sacred […] does in fact tend to become one with profane reality, to transform and consecrate all creation.”23
But infantilism almost always has a character of facility, of automatism and often even of artificiality […] to prolong hierophanies ad infinitum, to repeat them at every possible level and often in a quite mechanistic and crude fashion. [infantilism exhibits] the desire to make all creation one and do away with multiplicity. This desire is also, in its own way, an imitation of the activity of reason since reason also tends to unify reality - a tendency which, carried to an extreme, would abolish Creation24
Like with Euhemerism, where pagan gods were rationalised into being historical figures, falsely deified by pre-Christians, infantilism and the throwing down of old hierophanies are both aligned with “rationalising” tendencies, with reason. The totalising worldview of modernity, “rationalism” or what have you has made impossible the revealing of the sacred, in its search for unity.
Science, then natural philosophy was born from a “desire to understand the nature of god’s creation”, which would if anything affirm a sense of cosmic order and structure. In its striving, as Eliade notes, “to unify reality”, the same impulse that guts symbols of their meaning came to inhabit the later scientistic mindset. The clockwork “order” that was established over the world ended up robbing it of reality, which for religious man means closeness to eternity. It did not, as Nietzsche may have heralded, lead to a smashing of old idols. Instead were left a series of infantilised and neutered accessories that act as one among many interchangeable hobbies, none of them dangerous to modernity.
Science and modern technology have held the cleansing power of chaos at bay for a longer time than ever before possible, enabling what usually would incur destruction to proceed without limit. The endless catalogue of our culture that is only ever added to and never pruned allows for nothing new, no rebirth, only an endless evening spent recalling and inspecting and trying to live in various shades of bygone times: even among people who are by no means “antimoderns”. This crisis affects everyone in our “stuck culture”, that produces nothing new and churns out nostalgia bait to tide the masses over. It’s a tidy museum, but it’s just that: it has gone sterile, the destroying and life-giving flood is long overdue. Where the past enjoyed order from out of creative chaos, we have chaos out of an uncreative “order”.
Conclusions
So, is chaos altogether bad? The instinct to preserve is healthy and no one can be blamed for cleaving to fallen tradition in the face of decay, but we must let ourselves see the deadness of these beloveds. As we have seen, what makes things different in our time is the qualitative difference between modernity and “non-modernity”: the condition that not only came before, but will come after it.
Briefly put, what is different in our time is not our desire to preserve things but our ability to see them endlessly preserved. The dizzying catalogue of dead culture at anyone’s disposal cannot provide the fecund soil that gave rise to that rich culture in the first place. Religion and culture as facets of “Creation” are always particular: belonging to a given landscape.
As we saw with reason, which gave rise to technical modernity, the undoing of natural reins creates an unparticular oneness; a chaos, not a cosmos.25 The lapse in limitation is absolutely a manifestation of chaos: formlessness; unmanifestation; distension and dissolution, but is it the primordial chaos that existed under limitation, which is “Creation”: the work of the gods; the divine mandate; giving form to the formless unity. The mortal imitation of divine infinity leads to chaos without end. It is a chaos that is never righted, vanquished or carved into hard shape; therefore, not the primordial waters of the Flood that carry the seed of all life, but something wholly sterile.
There are many cycles within the universal, just as the day is to the year and a human life is to the cosmos itself; a smaller cycle is a microcosm of the absolute. Many of these cycles have passed in the lower world. The Flood myth is related but not wholly equivalent to the myth of the destruction of the gods; to the absolute destruction of the cosmos. Things seem altogether different this time around and, as seems manifestly true, the higher we rise and the greater our debt to nature, the farther will be our descent.
Perhaps, this time, Heaven too will fall.
George Eliot, Middlemarch, p442.
Michael Lindsey, The Whitewashed Classical World and A Beaker-Full of the Warm South.
That is, near universal in Post-Agricultural religions. “[…]the ceremonial of agriculture is a closed cycle. The “year” becomes a sealed unity. Time loses the relative sameness it had in pre-agricultural societies. It is not simply divided by seasons, but marked off into a series of complete unities” Patterns, p349. In my own opinion, “primitive” man, as older scholarship refers to him, while he may not quite so wholly account for cycles in his cosmology, as does agricultural man, who registers the underlying presence of grain and adapts his worldview accordingly to theshape of the circle, à la Chad Haag’s Somatic Context (Hermeneutical Death, p95-101.), pre-agricultural man is shown in Eliade’s work to understand true transcendence, demonstrating “almost universal” belief in a Supreme Being (Patterns, p38.). I would argue that this alone constitutes a recognition of what underlies the Age Cycle motif, in a form that has not been so explicitly “temporalised”; the recognition of the divine heritage of the world, and that the profane world is inferior to the divine. All the rest stems from this fundamental idea.
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (“S&P”), p79.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (“Patterns”), p188.
Ibid.
Ibid. p407.
Mircea Eliade, S&P, p165.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns, p194.
Robert Holland, The Warm South, p61.
Mircea Eliade, S&P, p73. In one Native American language, the word for “year” and “world” are the same.
Michael Lindsey, A Beaker-Full of the Warm South.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: How to Philosophise with a Hammer, p19.
Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, pix.
Mircea Eliade, S&P, p63.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns, p4.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns, p447.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns, p26.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns, p25-6.
Bruce Lincoln, “The Indo-European Myth of Creation”, History of Religions, Vol. 15, No. 2 p128.
From ῐ̔ερός, hieros “sacred, holy” and *ληθής, *lêthes “concealed”. As in ἀλήθεια, Aletheia “unconcealment; truth”.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns, p454.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns, p454-5.
Mircea Eliade, S&P, p30-47.