Cosmos and History (the myth of eternal return)

apsu designating the waters of chaos before the Creation.

Being an axis mundi, the sacred city or temple is regarded as the meeting point of heaven, earth, and hell. A few examples will illustrate each of these symbols: 1. According to Indian beliefs, Mount Meru rises at the center of the world, and above it shines the polestar. The Ural-Altaic peoples also know of a central mountain, Sumeru, to whose summit the polestar is fixed. Iranian beliefs hold that the sacred mountain Haraberezaiti (El-burz) is situated at the center of the earth and is linked with heaven. 17 The Buddhist population of Laos, north of Siam, know of Mount Zinnalo, at the center of the world. In the Edda, Himinbjorg, as its name indicates, is a "celestial mountain"; it is here that the rainbow (Bifrost) reaches the dome of the sky.

every territory occupied for the purpose of being inhabited or utilized as Lebensraum is first of all transformed from chaos into cosmos; that is, through the effect of ritual it is given a "form" which makes it become real.

Settlement in a new, unknown, uncultivated country is equivalent to an act of Creation. When the Scandinavian colonists took possession of Iceland, Landnama, and began to cultivate it, they regarded this act neither as an original undertaking nor as human and profane work. Their enterprise was for them only the repetition of a primordial act: the transformation of chaos into cosmos by the divine act of Creation. By cultivating the desert soil, they in fact repeated the act of the gods, who organized chaos by giving it forms and norms. 13 Better still, a territorial conquest does not become real until after—more precisely, through —the ritual of taking possession, which is only a copy of the primordial act of the Creation of the World.

It was in the name of Jesus Christ that the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores took possession of the islands and continents that they had discovered and conquered. The setting up of the Cross was equivalent to a justification and to the consecration of the new country, to a "new birth," thus repeating baptism (act of Creation). I

Man constructs according to an archetype. Not only do his city or his temple have celestial models; the same is true of the entire region that he inhabits, with the rivers that water it, the fields that give him his food, etc. The map of Babylon shows the city at the center of a vast circular territory bordered by a river, precisely as the Sumerians envisioned Paradise. This participation by urban cultures in an archetypal model is what gives them their reality and their validity.

uncultivated lands, unknown seas on which no navigator has dared to venture, do not share with the city of Babylon, or the Egyptian nome, the privilege of a differentiated prototype. They correspond to a mythical model, but of another nature: all these wild, uncultivated regions and the like are assimilated to chaos; they still participate in the undifferentiated, formless modality of pre-Creation.

Iranian cosmology of the Zarvanitic tradition, "every terrestrial phenomenon, whether abstract or concrete, corresponds to a celestial, transcendent invisible term, to an "idea" in the Platonic sense.

they deliberately repeat such and such acts posited ab origine by gods, heroes, or ancestors.

reality is a function of the imitation of a celestial archetype.