The Myth of the Eternal Return

Mircea Eliade's 1949 (English 1954, Princeton University Press) foundational work in the comparative phenomenology of religion. Eliade analyses the cyclical-time cosmologies of archaic cultures — Hindu yuga, Mesoamerican suns, Norse Ragnarök, the antediluvian / post-Flood schema — as expressions of a shared structural pattern: the periodic return of cosmic origins through ritual repetition and mythological narration. The work remains the principal scholarly source for the comparative observation that global cyclical-destruction traditions display deep structural similarities, against which the corpus's reading of these traditions as fragmentary historical memory is positioned.