Restoration of the Creative Time
The Original Time The ‘union of the polarities’ and the ‘return to the origin’ are primordial images related in direct continuity, and stand for the restoration of the creative time, the illud tempus of creation, the Original Time. The union of the polarities stands for the empirical, bodily process that will eventually result in the return to the origin, to an unconditioned state, the state of freedom, of self-accomplishment or self-realization, often obtained through a ‘rupture of plane’: from a historical, conditioned, profane plane to a a-historical, unconditioned, sacred plane. The human situation of return to the origin, or the aspiration to return to the origin, is expressed both as the return to an embryonic state, pre-formal, or a temporary return to chaos, with the merging of all forms.
The embryo The archetypal image of the embryo, or cosmogonic egg, ‘cannot be explained by any empirical or rationalist interpretation of the egg looked upon as a seed (...) and bears not so much upon birth as upon a rebirth modelled on the creation of the world (...) the basic idea is not that of ordinary birth, but rather the repeating of the archetypal birth of the cosmos, the imitation of the cosmogony (Eliade, 1971, Patterns in Comparative Religion, London: Sheed and Ward, p. 414).
Return to the embryonic state In initiatory contexts, from the return to the embryonic state, the novice can do one of five things: resume existence, with all the possibilities intact; re-immerse himself in the cosmic sacrality; attain to a higher state of existence; prepare himself for the participation in the sacred; begin an entirely different, transcendent mode of existence (Eliade, 1995, Rites and Symbols of Initiation, Woodstock: Spring Publications, p. 58). In any case, the newness of this life, its autonomy, finds its expression on the image of the ‘absolute beginning’, image whose structure is anthropocosmic, deriving at once from embryology and from cosmogony (Eliade, 1995, p. 60).
The merging of all forms For the mind which cannot conceive perfection unless all opposites are present in their fulness, the merging of all forms does not express a return to ‘the chaos that existed before any forms were created, but the undifferentiated being in which all forms are merged’, the merging of all forms ‘into one single, vast, undifferentiated unity is an exact reproduction of the “total” mode of reality’ (Eliade, 1971, p. 399). It is within this archaic sense that the collective behaviour of amalgamation enacted during the traditional festivals, such as the Japanese matsuri or the Brazilian carnival, can be understood.
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