Being in Hyrule
Hegel, Eliade, and Fukuyama in The Legend of Zelda.
Being in Hyrule: Hegel, Eliade, and Fukuyama in The Legend of Zelda.
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return
Abraham Heschel, The Prophets
Frances Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Political Order and Political Decay, Identity
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lies That Bind
Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Success in a Distracted World.
Mircea Eliade (1907 - ‘86) was a Romanian Historian of Religion who taught for many years at the University of Chicago. Myth of the Eternal Return (1949) set out his central insight: rituals do not just commemorate humanity's common cyclical myths, but participate in and regenerate them. These great cyclical hierophanies demonstrated a primitive ‘thirst for being’ against the ‘terror of history.’ ‘Primitive ontology’ therefore resisted history (personal identity, historical memory, politics, the individual detail on which modernity relies), in favour of archetypes and myths which embedded the participant back in their ‘real’ home; an atemporal, immortal world.
Abrahamic religions, beginning with Judaism, broke with this ‘archaic consciousness’. The Israelite Prophets introduced a personal yet wholly distinct God. If ‘primitive ontology’ resisted the profane world, then ‘modern ontology’ suggests Yahweh is legible in the linear, inexorable details feared for countless millennia. Yet this ‘terrifying dialogue with God’ was and is only ever a possibility. Indeed Judaism, Christianity, Islam all contain some ‘primitive’ echo that makes history tolerable. Even then, most believers resist it. Accordingly, no wholly secular, wholly modern ‘historicisms’, Eliade contends, can survive for long.
Mircea Eliade’s work therefore offers a useful guide to Francis Fukuyama’s apologia for liberal democracy in The End of History, Political Order and Political Decay, and Identity. Modern ontologies are at their most tolerable, Eliade argues, when some great progress is made. The problem is when ‘modern’ people are forced to endure the existential shocks from which primitive man fled. The End of History is therefore a quasi-millenarian defence of historicism and the modern individual. In retreating (despite his protests he is doing no such thing) from this optimism in the decades after the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama predictably requires recourse to these ‘primitive ontologies’. When conceptualising ‘Political Decay’ to explain 21st century state crisis, he pointedly concedes to the language of death and rebirth he eschewed when arguing the accumulation of scientific knowledge was unidirectional. Indeed, it is the accumulation of knowledge-cum-history that Eliade would say drives us back to archetypes. This is most evident in Fukuyama’s argument for the incompatibility of Identity Politics and the liberal state. In this he is correct, but not for the reason he thinks. The return of Identity is the return of Archetypes. It is therefore a symptom of historicism’s failures, rather than a cause of them.
The Legend of Zelda and its increasingly mythic and open-world incarnations therefore underscore both Eliade’s central insight and our reading of Fukuyama. The player’s freedom in Hyrule compensates for the precarity, crisis, and suffering of the early 21st century via its abnegation of the historical details of each incarnation’s Link. The relief offered the modern adult in Breath of the Wild is, as the advert alludes, a moment where details of self, life, and environment can be forgotten. In this conception then - please suspend your disbelief - playing Zelda is a ritual act of repetition. Just as each incarnation of Link exists only insofar as he enacts his role in the Hyrulian mythos, in so doing Nintendo offers the player the chance to step outside their historical identity. Rather than try to redeem profane history Zelda denies it. It does not matter whether you are playing the same series at 40 you were at the age of 10. Nor does it matter where you are, your relative wealth, or how well you fit into the intersection of race, gender, class, and violence. Zelda promises you the freedom that Fukuyama’s historicism couldn’t: freedom in the certainty of archetype and myth against history.
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Sometimes, though very rarely, an investigator chances to come upon the actual transformation of an event into myth. Just before the last war, the Romanian folklorist Constantin Brăiloiu had occasion to record an admirable ballad in a village in Maramures. Its subject was a tragedy of love: the young suitor had been bewitched by a mountain fairy, and a few days before he was to be married, the fairy, driven by jealousy, had flung him from a cliff The next day, shepherds found his body and, caught in a tree, his hat. They carried the body back to the village and his fiancee came to meet them: upon seeing her lover dead, she poured out a funeral lament, full of mythological allusions, a liturgical text of rustic beauty. Such was the content of the ballad. In the course of recording the variants that he was able to collect, the folklorist tried to learn the period when the tragedy had occurred; he was told that it was a very old story, which had happened "long ago." Pursuing his enquiries, however, he learned that the event had taken place not quite forty years earlier. He finally even discovered that the heroine was still alive. He went to see her and heard the story from her own lips. It was a quite commonplace tragedy: one evening her lover had slipped and fallen over a cliff; he had not died instantly; his cries had been heard by mountaineers; he had been carried to the village, where he had died soon after. At the funeral, his fiancee, with the other women of the village, had repeated the customary ritual lamentations, without the slightest allusion to the mountain fairy.
Thus, despite the presence of the principal witness, a few years had sufficed to strip the event of all historical authenticity, to transform it into a legendary tale: the jealous fairy, the murder of the young man, the discovery of the dead body, the lament, rich in mythological themes, chanted by the fiancee.
The primitive world view was indifferent to individual identity. For Mircea Eliade, this was evident not just in the account of Constantin Brăiloiu and the mountain fairy, but in common pre-modern beliefs about post-mortem survival:
The transformation of the dead person into an "ancestor" corresponds to the fusion of the individual into an archetypal category. In numerous traditions (in Greece, for example) the souls of the common dead no longer possess a "memory"; that is, they lose what may be called their historical individuality. The transformation of the dead into ghosts, and so on, in a certain sense signifies their reidentification with the impersonal archetype of the ancestor. The fact that in the Greek tradition only heroes preserve their personality (i.e., their memory) after death, is easy to understand: having, in his life on earth, performed no actions which were not exemplary, the hero retains the memory of them, since, from a certain point of view, these acts were impersonal.[2]
It is a fundamental quality of the ‘archaic consciousness’ then, that it ‘accords no importance to personal memories.’ Eliade concedes that modern man might find this difficult to understand. Surely, the loss of personality and memory in the afterlife qualifies as a real death. Yet there are some circumstances in which modern man embraces such ego death. There is nothing ‘personal and historical about the emotion we feel when we listen to the music of Bach’ or in the ‘concentrated lucidity’ of grappling with mathematical or philosophical problems. Outside Eliade, archaic consciousness is surely reminiscent of the ‘flow states’ conceived by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, ‘Deep Work’ by Cal Newport, or the artistic raptures described by Abraham Heschel. Perhaps too that of the ego death found in psychedelics. Our own reliance on linear narrative, personal experience, and our own fables of Bildungsroman therefore must be seen as contingent, odd, and radically novel. For ‘archaic consciousness’ however, personal identity and the unique history of one’s life was not only unimportant but something to be rejected at all cost.
Primitive life is instead soaked through with ritual and myth. There was no lack of meaning or being in the archaic world. Quite the opposite: A stone might be sacred because ‘they are the dwelling place of the souls of ancestors (India, Indonesia), or because they were once the scene of a theophany (as the bethel that served Jacob for a bed)’.[3] Human acts and:
[t]heir meaning, their value, are not connected with their crude physical datum but with their property of reproducing a primordial act, of repeating a mythical example. Nutrition is not a simple physiological operation; it renews a communion. Marriage and the collective orgy echo mythical prototypes; they are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning (“in those days,” in illo tempore, ab origine) by gods, ancestors, or heroes.
In the particulars of his conscious behaviour, the “primitive,” the archaic man, acknowledges no act which has not been previously posited and lived by someone else, some other being who was not a man. What he does has been done before. His life is the ceaseless repetition of gestures initiated by others.[4]
This ‘conscious repetition’ of ‘paradigmatic gestures reveals an original ontology.’ Things, lives, and actions, ‘acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality [and ritual that] repeats a primordial act.’[5] The distinction between modern man’s reliance on personal identity, memory, and history rooted in day to day life and archaic man’s weltanschauung, in which things and acts are meaningful only in terms of their relation to a wider mythic world is critical to understanding Eliade. The value we place on personal experience, impression, and memory was completely alien to archaic man. Without an archetype, it meant nothing. With an archetype, everything. The struggle, then, was to resist at all possible cost events without archetypes and acknowledge ‘no act which has not been previously posited and lived by someone else.’
Archaic conceptions of architecture and place were no exception. Eliade musters examples from around the world: The Tigris ‘has its model in the star Anunit and the Euphrates in the star of the Swallow.’[6] ‘In Egypt, places and nomes [sic] were named after the celestial “fields”: first the celestial fields were known, then they were identified in terrestrial geography.’ ‘In Iranian cosmology of the Zarvanitic tradition’ everything responds to an ‘“idea'' in the Platonic sense.’ In other words, ‘the creation is simply duplicated.’ YHWH had the idea of the temple before he told Moses how to build it, and conceived Jerusalem before its incarnation. ‘We find the same theory in India’ Eliade argues, since ‘all the Indian royal cities, even the modern ones, are built after the mythical model of the celestial city, where, in the age of gold (in illo tempore), the Universal Sovereign dwelt.’[7] While ‘the world in which the presence and the work of man are felt [...] have an extraterrestrial archetype’, this is not the case for ‘everything in the world that surrounds us.’ Such spaces instead ‘participate in the undifferentiated, forless modality of pre-creation.’ When primitive man accumulates new territory then, whether this is taken from enemies or via expansion into the wilderness, Eliade argues that he invariably takes part in ‘rites [...] that symbolically repeat the act of creation.’[8] This applies equally to Scandinavian colonisation of Iceland; Vedic India consecration to Agni; Spanish and Portuguese Conquistadores in the New World, or ‘English Navigators t[aking] possession of conquered countries in the name of the king of England, new Cosmocrator.’ To take new territory then is to find a way to incorporate it into primitive mythology. Because everything outside the mythos is formless, such incorporation necessarily repeats ‘the act of creation.’
Rituals in primitive ontology thereby sustain and recreate the world ab initio. A ritual here is not just an explicitly religious act, but rather anything that has a definite telos or goal. A dance, for example, is never ‘just’ a dance, but rather has its origins in a definite ritual that in turn mirrors mythic events:
The archaic world knows nothing of “profane” activities: every act which has a definite meaning - hunting, fishing, agriculture: games, conflicts, sexuality, - in some way participates in the sacred. [...] the only profane activities are those which have no mythical meaning, that is, which lack exemplary models. [...] Take the dance, for example. All dances were originally sacred; in other words, they had an extrahuman model. [...] Struggles, conflicts, and wars for the most part have a ritual cause and function. They are a stimulating opposition between the two halves of a clan, or a struggle between the representatives of two divinities (for example, in Egypt, the combat between two groups representing Osiris and Set) but this always commemorates an episode of the divine and cosmic drama. War or the duel can in no case be explained through rationalistic motives.[9]
Therefore ‘in the Nordic tradition, the first duel took place’ between Thor and Hrungir and thereby serves as a model for all future duels.[10] ‘Construction rituals’ in turn ‘repeat the primordial act of cosmogenic construction.’[11] Certain herbs have healing properties not due to intrinsic chemical properties, but rather because a god or hero once used them. Justice meanwhile has a model in cosmic law (‘tao, artha, tra, tzedek, themis, etc’), beatitude in the ‘divine condition’, and even art in divine art. Everything important, everything meaningful, was meaningful only insofar as they were originally revealed ‘ab origine by gods and heroes.’[12] Every ritual, every act, every refounding, every dance, every moment of suffering, is therefore anchored in and regenerates the transcendent moment. Individual perspective, to return to Brailiou, is without an archetype and therefore cannot be repeated. What the dancers felt, the tiredness of their feet, or the hunger of the hunters, or the specific fears of the warrior are less than ephemeral. They are meaningless, valueless, and profane. Unless, of course, the warrior felt fear before the battle, or the hunter’s exhaustion came before the kill.
Primitive ontology thereby reveals a fundamental horror of linear, inexorable, contingent and deeply personal history. Eliade’s argument is again scattered, but runs something like this: all rituals are repetitions, and these rituals are fundamentally cosmogenic: they repeat the creation of the universe. This proves:
their antihistorical intent. This refusal to preserve the memory of the past, even of the immediate past, seems to us to betoken a particular anthropology. We refer to archaic man’s refusal to accept himself as a historical being, his refusal to grant value to memory and hence to the unusual events (i.e events without an archetypical model) that in fact constitute concrete duration. In the last analysis, what we discover in all these rites and all these attitudes is the will to devaluate time.
[...]
Basically, if viewed in its proper perspective, the life of archaic man (a life reduced to the repetition of archetypal acts, that is, to categories and not to events, to the unceasing rehearsal of the same primordial myths), although it takes place in time, does not bear the burden of time, does not record time’s irreversibility; in other words, completely ignores what is especially characteristic and decisive in a consciousness of time.[13]
Eliade therefore makes his critical distinction between profane and sacred time. Profane time is linear and inexorable. It ‘exert[s] itself upon consciousness by revealing the irreversibility of events’, and thereby reveals the disconnection between man and his true place among the gods and their mythic time.[14] Awareness of historical time is therefore awareness of disjuncture; of man’s fall due to some original sin. Sacred time is one of eternal repetition; Repetition of the archetypes from which he has fallen in turn allows man to escape this fall, and to live in what Eliade terms a ‘continual present’ that resists ‘profane time’. To repeat is therefore to ‘devaluate time’, to ‘pay no attention to it’ and therefore to pretend that that linear, inexorable march does not in any way exist. To take part in ritual is, critically, to continually embed oneself in and regenerate a continual present.
Primitive ontology’s consistent evocation of eternal return was rooted in observation of the phases of the moon. In brief, man first looked up at the moon’s phases and from there derived not just a idea of the passage of time, but of a wider mythos of eternal repetition:
We find analogous concepts especially in the archaic apocalypses and anthropogonies; deluge or flood puts an end to an exhausted and sinful humanity, and a new regenerated humanity is born, usually from a mythical “ancestors'' who escaped the catastrophe, or from a lunar animal. A stratigraphic analysis of these groups of myths brings out their lunar character. This means that the lunar rhythm not only reveals short intervals (week, month) but also serves as the archetype for extended durations; in fact, the “birth” of a humanity, its growth, decrepitude (“wear”), and disappearance are assimilated to the lunar cycle.[15]
Primitive ontology is profoundly optimistic; decay is always followed by rebirth. It is particularly evident in cultures derived from Babylon; ‘Berossus popularised the Chaldean doctrine of the “Great Year” in a form that spread throughout the entire Hellenic world (whence it later passed to the Romans and Byzantines)’. The stoic idea of ekpyrosis[1] - destruction and rebirth of the universe by fire - has parallels not just in India and Iran, but also Mayas and Aztecs. The point however is not in the ‘end’ of the universe as such, but rather the freeing nature of accepting its inevitability. What has happened before will happen again. Eternal return, as Eliade suggests, therefore reveals ‘a time uncontaminated by time and becoming’. To prove the reality of this world, all man had to do was look up at the night sky.
Primitive man therefore seeks the ‘abolition of time through the imitation of archetypes and the repetition of paradigmatic gestures.’ Sacrifice is a clear example of this desire for renewal:
A sacrifice, for example, not only exactly reproduces the initial sacrifice revealed by a god ab origine, at the beginning of time, it also takes place at that same primordial mythical moment; in other words, every sacrifice repeats the initial sacrifice and coincides with it. All sacrifices are performed at the same mythical instant of the beginning; through the paradox of rite, profane time and duration are suspended.[16]
It takes another forty or so pages for Eliade to grace the reader with a full example. ‘The construction of cosmic time through repetition of the cosmogony is still more clearly brought out by the symbolism of Brahmic sacrifice.’[17] Each of these sacrifices, he argues, ‘marks a new creation of the world’ and therefore ‘re-establish[es] the primordial unity’, which is in turn ‘characteristic of the Indian spirit with its thirst for primordial unity.’[18] Sacrifice, then, does not just kill an animal because such and such god killed an animal, therefore proving that god likes, say, venison, and furthermore accepts future gifts of venison to make the crops grow on a whim. This would be an alien disjuncture. History would creep in. Instead, each sacrifice repeats and therefore takes part in that original timeless and transcendent sacrifice. Sacrifice marks the individual’s thirst for ‘real’ being, to escape linear time, the horror of personal memory of both joy and loss, and to knit together heaven and earth. The same, of course, ‘holds true for all repetitions.’ Every repetition, every ritual, collapses the distinction between profane and sacred time and, moreover, sends the actor ‘into the mythical epoch in which its revelation took place.’
Eliade’s “terror of history” then is the terror of inexorable linear time without metaphysics. Eliade again attempts to pin down this definition; ‘archaic man set himself in opposition, by every means in his power, to history, regarded as a succession of events that are irreversible, unforeseeable, possessed of autonomous value.’[19] Primitive man refused to accept history as having value in and of itself. Yet this history - events, wars, suffering - still existed. Moreover, primitive man periodically confessed his faults and so, Eliade asks, surely this desire to return to a state of innocence, ‘to have no “memory”, to avoid interiorising time, reflects a desire to return to a state of pre-civilisational nature. Not so:
we have reason to believe that among the primitives the nostalgia for the lost paradise excludes any desire to restore the “paradise of animality.” Everything that we know about the mythical memories of “paradise” confronts us, on the contrary, with the image of an idea humanity enjoying a beatitude and spiritual plenitude forever unrealizable to the present state of “fallen man.” [...] Hence it is more probable that the desire felt by the man of traditional societies to refuse history, and to confine himself to an indefinite repetition of archetypes, testifies to his thirst for the real and hist terror of losing himself by letting himself be overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of profane existence.
In other words, the profane world does not constitute the real, but rather the ultimate reality of the cosmos makes the world the unreal par-excellence. Man does not seek to return to nature, but rather to escape the world and return to his proper place in the ‘absolute reality’. This in turn has a much wider meaning; the inexorable nature of linear time, the historical individual, personal memory, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune all remind the archaic man of his fall from his ‘proper’ place. His resistance, and Eliade states we must not judge the ‘extravagant behaviour’ of rituals and festivals, in fact ‘corresponds to a desperate effort not to lose contact with being.’[20]
We therefore have a well-defined primitive theodicy. Since archaic man lives according to the obvious reality of cosmic laws, the veracity of which he merely has to look up at the sky to validate:
What could suffering and pain signify? Certainly not a meaningless experience that man can only “tolerate” insofar as it is inevitable, as, for example, he tolerates the climate. Whatever its nature and whatever its apparent cause, his suffering had a meaning; it corresponded, if not always to a prototype, at least to an order whose value was not contested. [...] it was never regarded as meaningless. [...] If it was possible to tolerate such sufferings, it is precisely because they seemed neither gratuitous nor arbitrary. It would be superfluous to cite examples; they are to be found everywhere. The primitive who sees his field laid waste by drought, his cattle decimated by disease, his child ill, himself attacked by fever or too frequently unlucky as a hunter, knows that all these contingences are not due to chance but to certain magical or demonic influences, against which the priest or sorcerer possesses weapons. [21]
Why, then, does evil exist? Firstly, because there has been a ritual fault which caused the rupture of man from the mythical golden age. Secondly, because of some other fault or cause or enemy incantation. ‘The primitive’ in other words, ‘cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering.’ There must be some reason why a crop failed or a child died, and because there is a reason there is a remedy in fitting it into a wider system of cause and effect. If the answer wasn’t a ritual fault or incantation, there was always identification with a god who suffered; Eliade gives us the example of the mythologies of the Mediterranean-Mesopotamian area. Again, there is a connection to the lunar cycles; not only is there always some reason why some suffering happened, but those cycles reminded man that ‘suffering is never final; death is always followed by resurrection; that every defeat is annulled.’[22] Each meaningful act in primitive ontology is therefore enmeshed in a wider causal network. To ask ‘why’ suffering happened always has a defined answer, because each act is fundamentally sacred and therefore legible in primitive cosmology. The Assyrian suffering from a toothache for example, could repeat a cosmogenic incantation that not just explains why the patient is suffering (a worm asked the gods for teeth to feed on) but in recitation softened his own suffering and regenerated the world.
Judaism, meanwhile, marked the beginning of historicism: of the idea - terrifying to archaic man - that linear history might have meaningful value in itself. This, Eliade argues, was caused by a series of catastrophes caused primarily by the Assyrio-Babylonian empires and then confirmed by the Prophets. At first ‘every new historical calamity was regarded as a punishment inflicted by Yahweh, angered by the orgy of sin to which the chosen people had abandoned themselves.’[23] Every time history gave the Jews a moment of peace and prosperity, off they went ‘to the Baals and Astartes of their neighbours.’ Only catastrophe brought them back to the Supreme Being. So far, so primitive. The difference, Eliade contends, was the ‘terrifying visions of the prophets’ whose ‘prophecies were ratified by catastrophes’ in turn. These ensured ‘historical events acquired religious significance.’ Therefore:
For the first time, we find affirmed, and increasingly accepted, the idea that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined by the will of God. The God of the Jewish people is no longer an Oriental divinity, creator of archetypal gestures, but a personality who ceaselessly intervenes in history, who reveals his will through events (invasions, sieges, battles, and so on). Historical facts thus become “situations” of man in respect to God, and as such they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able to confer on them. [24]
Eliade’s argument here is very similar to Abraham Heschel’s later claim for the particularity of the God of the Hebrew Prophets over the gods of their neighbours: God is personal, emotional, and in no way removed from man’s concerns. He constantly intervenes in the world: “The central achievement of biblical religion was to remove the veil of anonymity from the workings of history. There are no ultimate laws, no eternal ideas. The Lord alone is ultimate and eternal.”[25] In the prophetic historicist imagination, then, suffering does not happen because of some ritual failure or because such and such archetype happened that way. A city is not destroyed as the eternal city was once destroyed, but potentially because Israel displeased God and so he sent their enemies to overrun them. History, linear time, its irreversibility, therefore became potentially meaningful ‘as an epiphany of God’. The consequence of the personal God, however, is the realisation that the world of archetypes and ritual order no longer exists. Man therefore has the possibility of faith, but none of the primitive’s certainty.
The best example of this break is in Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. Eliade stresses the normative quality of first-born sacrifice in the Paleo-Orient. ‘Morphologically considered,’ there’s nothing particularly novel about considering the first-born a child of a god to whom blood must be restored in order to rejuvenate heaven. Fertility gods sustain the world, such sustenance is draining and must be periodically re-generated by sacrifice. Isaac, however, was not a normal first-born. Sarah had ‘long since passed the age of fertility.’ Although his sacrifice superficially resembled the near-eastern custom, then:
Such a sacrifice [...] is an act of faith. [Abraham] does not understand why the sacrifice is demanded of him; nevertheless he performs it because it was the Lord who demanded it. By this act, which is apparently absurd, Abraham initiates a new religious experience, faith. All others (the whole Oriental world) continue to move in an economy of the sacred that will be transcended by Abraham and his successors.[26]
This is not just a break between the customary sacrifice; faith - chance - divine contingency is the key element here. Primitive man saw any event without an archetype as literally meaningless and something to be resisted and ignored at all cost. Abraham, by contrast, was told by the Lord to do something with no possible archetype and to find meaning in it. For Abraham’s neighbours, sacrifice of the firstborn was just a rite that kept the divine order ticking over. Isaac, however, was in no sense a result of the normal cosmic order. Abraham and Sarah should have been barren. Isaac, then, ‘was a gift from the Lord and not the product of a direct and material conception.’ His birth was in no way an occurrence within a nice, predictable and totalising mythological system. Instead, Isaac is evidence of that system’s absence and a terrifying new reality. God’s demands thus ‘reveals himself as a personal, as a "totally distinct" existence that ordains, bestows, demands, without any rational (i.e., general and foreseeable) justification, and for which all is possible.’[27] The possibility of meaningful acts with no archetypes are thus not only brought forward, but are built on the ruins of the old world.
Faith, however, is only ever a possibility. As Norm MacDonald said, you have to choose it. Whether Jew or Christian, most people who seemingly subscribe to a worldview in which God is present in history will see the difficulty of looking history in the face and retreat to ‘primitive ontology.’ Nevertheless:
The same conception, enriched through the elaboration of Christology, will serve as the basis for the philosophy of history that Christianity, from St Augustine on, will labour to construct. But let us repeat: neither in Christianity nor in Judaism does the discovery of this new dimension in religious experience, faith, produce a basic modification of traditional conceptions. Faith is merely made possible for each individual Christian. The great majority of so-called Christian populations continue, down to our day, to preserve themselves from history by ignoring it and by tolerating it rather than by giving it the meaning of a negative or positive theophany.[28]
Primitive man is therefore defined by a rejection - a horror - of linear history in favour of a longing for his true being, in which he participates through ritualised repetition of acts by gods or ancestors. Modern man, by contrast, is defined by the possibility of faith in finding a redemptive meaning in the historical event in itself. ‘Possibility’ here is the key word. It requires, as Eliade repeats again and again, the ‘steadfast will’ of the Hebrew Prophets, ‘to look history in the face and to accept it as a terrifying dialogue with Yahweh.’[29] Faith therefore must be constantly regenerated and constantly chosen in each new historical event. Return to the archetype is always a possibility and, Eliade suggests, perhaps an inevitability for the masses.
Both Judaism and Christianity, indeed, struggle against the myths of archetypes and eternal repetition. Messianic beliefs in which history will be finally redeemed ‘indicate an antihistoric attitude. Since he can no longer ignore or periodically abolish history, the Hebrew tolerates it in the hope that it will finally end’ - at some point in the future.[30] Periodic regeneration may be replaced with a final regeneration, but that does not do away with regeneration in either Judaism or Christianity.
Similarly dominant in pre-Messianic Judaism, it was never totally eliminated, for rabbinic circles hesitated to be precise as to the duration that God had fixed for the cosmos and confined themselves to declaring that the illud tempus would certainly arrive one day. In Christianity, on the other hand, the evangelical tradition itself implies that βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ is already present "among" (ἐντός) those who believe, and that hence the illud tempus is eternally of the present and accessible to anyone, at any moment, through metanoia. Since what is involved is a religious experience wholly different from the traditional experience, since what is involved is faith, Christianity translates the periodic regeneration of the world into a regeneration of the human individual. But for him who shares in this eternal nunc of God, history ceases as totally as it does for the man of the archaic cultures, who abolishes it periodically.[31]
Indeed,‘the Christian liturgical year is based upon a periodic and real repetition of the Nativity Passion, death, and Resurrection of Jesus.’[32] The believer’s participation in this - not just via the baptism which forms him again in his new life, but also the rituals of the daily office and liturgical year - offers transcendence and abolition in much the same way as the pre-modern rituals. Thus, although Eliade cites St Augustine as evidence for Christianity’s attempt to privilege the historical event and personality over necessary celestial archetypes, Christianity in particular retained these key archetypal elements at the same time it espoused a historicism with roots in the Hebrew Prophets. Justification of the historical event in itself, then, remains troubling for Jew and Christian alike. To look at the loss of one’s son, a failure of the harvest, sickness, or death as another inexorable step in world history is intolerable, even if they represent ‘situations’ between man and god.
Eliade therefore argues that the struggle between the archetype and historicism is a constant theme of European Christianity. Archetypes survived quite easily; the ‘barbarians’ of the ‘High Middle Ages’ became Gog and Magog, with ‘ontological status and an eschatological function.’[33] Genghis Khan, meanwhile, became ‘a new David, destined to accomplish the prophecies of Ezekiel.’ Yet if archetypes were easily accommodated, the question of how to balance linear and cyclical history was more difficult. Cyclical time was at first violently opposed:
We must remind ourselves that, for Christianity, time is real because it has a meaning - the Redemption. [...] The development of history is thus governed and oriented by a unique fact, a fact that stands entirely alone. [...] It is this linear conception of time and history, which, already outlined in the second century by St. Irenaeus of Lyon, will be taken up again by St Basil and St. Gregory and be finally elaborated by St Augustine.
Other ‘Fathers and ecclesiastical writers, such as Clement of Alexandria, Minucius Felix, Arnobius, and Thodoret’ accepted this supposedly heretical historiography. How, then, to reconcile the cross and the world? The Carthaginian motto, stat crux dum volvitur orbis, points to the difficulty; the world turns, the cross does not. If the liturgical year is one of repetition, but Christ’s death and resurrection both historical event and transcendent truth, how can this be reconciled? The cross, of course, marks a discrete historical event. But it also transcends and redeems a linear history. It invites the believer to find God - to offer up one’s suffering on the cross - in the historical moment in the manner of Israel’s prophets. Yet participation in the liturgical year harks back to a primitive ontology and escape from history and self in the believer’s participation.
This tension continues through the Middle Ages and into Modernity. The middle ages in particular saw ‘cyclical and astral theories begin to dominate historiological and eschatological speculation,’ thanks in part to translations of Greek thought from Arab manuscripts.[34] Brahe, Vico, Kepler &c all bring with them an idea of imminent cyclical theories from astronomical observations. The idea that history might have some sort of linear progress nevertheless ‘begins to assert itself’ at the same time, e.g., in ‘Albertus Magnus and St Thomas,’ but only really gained traction with Joachim of Floris’s trinitarian epochs in which each age is dominated by father, son, or holy ghost. The Holy Ghost, of course, presaged the ultimate freedom. From the Seventeenth Century onwards, we see Leibniz, the Enlightenment, the triumph of the Darwinists, and later the Whig historians, all demonstrating the supposed primacy of the historicists and the historical event. It is only in the twentieth century - after the horrors of the trenches and the camps - that there begins to be a renewed reaction against historicism. It is quite easy to see the historical person emerge from historicism in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. To believe that history is improving as human knowledge is pushed forward by great historical individuals is to prioritise the novel over the archetype. But Eliade’s point is precisely that this perspective is novel, fragile, and contingent on historical circumstances. Indeed, as we shall see, such faith in history and progress remains what it was for the prophets - a possibility.
To what extent, then, can enlightenment thought and its derivatives justify historical suffering? Eliade is sceptical. ‘From Hegel on, every effort is directed toward saving and conferring value on the historical event as such, the event in itself and for itself.’[35] Looking at each event, moreover, will demonstrate that each event could only have taken place given the historical context and the will of the Universal Spirit. Therefore all cruelties are justified in the historical moment. Eliade concedes briefly that Hegel may not have intended to go so far, but nevertheless cites his comment about how modern man reads newspapers as a pre-modern man might say his prayers as evidence of how ‘only daily contact with events could orient man’s conduct in his relations with the world and with God.’[36]
Now it is possible to discern a parallel between Hegel’s philosophy of history and the theology of history of the Hebrew prophets: for the latter, as for Hegel, an event is irreversible and valid in itself inasmuch as it is a new manifestation of the will of God - a proposition really revolutionary, we should remind ourselves, from the viewpoint of traditional societies dominated by the eternal repetition of archetypes. Thus, in Hegel’s view, the destiny of a people still preserved a transhistorical significance, because all history revealed a new and more perfect manifestation of the Universal Spirit. But with Marx, history cast off all transcendental significance: it was no longer anything more than the epiphany of the class struggle. To what extent could such a theory justify historical sufferings? For the answer, we have but to turn to the pathetic resistance of a Belinsky or a Dostoyevsky.
If there was some transcendence in Hegel, then there is none apparently in Marx. Eliade rejects the possibility that a Hegelian view of history might in any sense be emancipatory. The Universal Spirit is no third age akin to that theorised by Joachim of Floris. To find comfort in the necessity of historical ‘progress’ from the viewpoint of the Universal spirit then requires a particularly Russian and Christian sense of grappling with Absurdity. The word pathetic here should not cloud Eliade’s wider sense that Christianity remains the sole possibility of finding meaning in history. What it does do is underscore the fundamental difficulty of faith when confronted with the constant record of suffering.
Before we turn briefly to the possibility that grace might transfigure the world, it’s worth underscoring how Eliade sees Marxism as holding a slightly more redemptive promise than pure Hegelianism. Indeed, it ‘preserves a meaning to history.’:
For Marxism, events are not a succession of arbitrary accidents; they exhibit a coherent structure and, above all, they lead to a definite end - final elimination of the terror of history, “salvation.” Thus, at the end of the Marxist philosophy of history, lies the age of gold of the archaic eschatologies. In this sense it is correct to say not only that Marx “brought Hegel’s philosophy back to earth” but also that he reconfirmed, upon an exclusively human level, the value of the primitive myth of the age of Gold, with the difference that he puts the age of gold only at the end of history, instead of putting it at the beginning, too.[37]
While being more materialistic in its historicism than Hegelianism, Marxism nevertheless preserves a transcendence from its cyclical antecedents. This for the Marxist is the remedy for the terror of history. “Just as the contemporaries of a “dark age” consoled themselves [...] by the thought that the aggravation of evil hastens final deliverance,” so too does the ‘militant Marxist of our day’ transfigure suffering to a “premonitory symptom of the approaching victory.”[38] Any suffering, in other words, could be endured thanks to the archetype for history provided by Marx and Engels. The proletariat could find emancipation in embracing the archetype of worker, of knowing the ‘true science’ of history etc. But this, of course, is not a panacea per se; like other historicisms, it’s only the possibility of such a transfiguration that Abraham and even Marx make a possibility. The proletariat has faith in the fulmination of history in revolution just as the Christian has faith in the redemption of history. Both, however, find it easier to erase the self; ‘[Christ] must increase and I must decrease’ (John 3:30) than look at painful history in itself.
Grace, then, remains the best possibility of redemption. To illuminate this possibility requires a brief turn to Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self. Taylor’s broad argument is that the development of the modern self, by which he means an individualistic, historic personhood and agency, is characterised by a search for an anchor that justifies and roots that self. There is no space here for a wider consideration of how Taylor and Eliade might co-exist or disagree. For the moment, we want to look at Charles Taylor’s description of Dostoyevsky’s answer to the problem of evil:
Dostoyevsky in his early life was deeply influenced by the German Romantics. In particular by Schiller. Visions of this kind are still articulated by the characters in later novels. I am thinking, for instance, of the picture of a restored humanity in Raw Youth, matched by Stavrogin's dream in the appendix to The Devils. It also comes out in his sympathy for the elder Verkhovensky in that novel. Moreover, in the great statement of Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov, we have a picture of grace as a current flowing through nature, which marries certain traditional themes of Christian thought and the Romantic vision.
But one of Dostoyevsky's central insights turns on the way in which we close or open ourselves to grace. The ultimate sin is to close oneself, but one's reasons for doing so can be of the highest. In a sense, the person who is closed is in a vicious circle from which it is hard to escape.
[...]
What will transform us is an ability to love the world and ourselves, to see it as good in spite of the wrong. But this will only come to us if we accept being part of it, and that means accepting responsibility. Just as 'no one is to blame' is the slogan of the materialist revolutionaries, so 'we are all to blame' is of Dostoyevsky's healing figures. [39]
Dostoyevsky’s central insight - or perhaps reclamation - lies in the possibility of grace. Grace allows us to choose to see the world as good and in so doing transfigure it. In other words Genesis 1:31 becomes an instruction for us to see the materialistic forces of the world, the inexorable march of history, and will it into Good. Yet we must recall that God only ever grants us the possibility of faith. We must choose to see God’s will in the inexorable march of history. Not merely accepting it, but taking responsibility in both sin and goodness. This, Taylor goes on to argue, requires us to be loved in turn; grace and sin can therefore both radiate out, an apostolic succession of grace or sin. This is Dostoyevsky’s key insight as his characters struggle to come to terms with the consequences of their actions on the world around them. This of course raises yet more questions; whether grace can be earned, merited, or chosen. Dostoyevsky seems to assert that grace is a kind of heroic alignment with and choice of God-in-the-world despite the world. In fact, what Dostoyevsky has done is to return to the Prophets. Taylor wonders aloud what can orient the historical individual, and in Dostoyevsky returns to Eliade’s conceit: that the historical individual is predicated on the possibility of a ‘terrifying dialogue’ with God.
But historicism never really survives an encounter with the brutality of the historical event. He mentions this almost as an aside in a footnote; Yes, Christianity and Marxism are defences against the terror of history, but ‘only the historicist position’ in its purer forms - and here I suspect he means secular or deistic - ‘remain disarmed’:
We take the liberty of emphasising that “historicism” was created and professed above all by thinkers belonging to nations for which history has never been a continuous terror. These thinkers would perhaps have adopted another viewpoint had they belonged to nations marked by the fatality of history. It would certainly be interesting, in any case, to know if the theory according to which everything that happens is “good,” simply because it happened, would have been accepted without qualms by the thinkers of the Baltic countries, of the Balkans, or of colonial territories.[40]
Eliade remains sceptical about the ability of historicism to survive the twentieth century. Indeed, he asks directly how it could possibly ‘justify’ itself for those who have seen and experienced Auschwitz or Hiroshima. Historicism had only ever really been an elite pre-occupation. Most Jews and Christians let alone avowed Marxists and Hegelians, remained primitive in their ontology. Only a handful of the elites ‘are forced, and with increasing rigour, to take cognizance of their historical situation.’ Yes, Christianity and Marxism have softened some of the terror, but only for some. The more suffering one encounters - and Eliade is here sceptical about the second half of the twentieth century - the more difficult it becomes to find the will to continue to live, to endure suffering.
A resurgence of cyclical theories in twentieth century culture was therefore almost inevitable. Historicism, he repeats, such as that of Heidegger or Nietzsche, necessitates ‘despair, the amor fati, and pessimism’ and in those philosophies they are often ‘elevated to the rank of heroic virtues and instruments of cognition.’ Not only had historicism ‘not yet made a definitive conquest of contemporary thought,’ there was little chance it would. Instead, the first half of the twentieth century saw a resurgent interest in historical cycles:
These orientations disregard not only historicism but even history as such. We believe we are justified in seeing in them, rather than a resistance to history, a revolt against historical time, an attempt to restore this historical time, freighted as it is with human experience, to a place in the time that is cosmic, cyclical, and infinite. In any case, it is worth noting that the work of two of the most significant writers of our day - T.S. Eliot and James Joyce - is saturated with nostalgia for the myth of eternal repetition and, in the last analysis, for the abolition of time. There is also a reason to foresee that, as the terror of history grows worse, as existence becomes more and more precarious because of history, the positions of historicism will increasingly lose in prestige. And, at a moment when history could do what neither the cosmos nor man, nor chance have yet succeeded in doing - that is, wipe out the human race in its entirety - it may be that we are witnessing a desperate attempt to prohibit the “events of history” through a reintegration of human societies within the horizon (artificial, because decreed) of archetypes and their repetition.[41]
Indeed, Eliade argues that the cyclical theories of the universe - i.e of the big bang being just one in an infinite loop of births and deaths in the history of the universe, destined to repeat ad infinitum - is a fulmination of these theories.[42] Even when we think we are producing new knowledge, we are in fact beholden to primitive ontologies. Such a path, Eliade might say, is understandable if we are to attempt to ‘make sense’ of the world. Faith offers freedom but historicism remains utterly terrifying in its blind novelty.[43] There may, however, be some moments of freedom at the points of rupture from primitive ontology. Eliade points to the development of agriculture, metallurgy, and the industrial revolution. We will shortly argue that this applies equally to the post-imperial moment of 89-08. Yet the ability of man to act independently ‘tends to become inaccessible as the period becomes more historical, by which we mean more alien from any transhistorical model.’[44] In other words, humans tend to laud linear histories, personal identity, novelties at times of historical change. The old shackles are cast off and the human breaks free. Yet these are only ever brief moments. Children die, wars break out, sicknesses return, and as they do so they prove linear time to be utterly intolerable.
Eliade therefore argues that primitive ontology is based on ritual participation in mythic time. Meaning is derived not through act, process, or ritual in themselves, but rather in how these items and acts repeat the archetypal doings of gods or ancestors in a prelapsarian golden age. Such repetition is regenerative, and in those regenerations offers a totalising theodicy against which suffering can be redeemed or endured. Against all this is linear, inexorable, history and the contingent historical ‘event’. History is profane. Hunger, pain, old age, and death all remind us of our distance from the golden age in which man mingled with the Gods. It proffers no reason, no meaning, no redemption for the intolerable suffering and decay it brings. It must therefore be resisted in desperate favour of true being. The Israelite prophets were the first, Eliade contends, to give history in itself a value. They dared the Jewish people to look at linear history (war, suffering, harvest time, death, victory) and transfigure it as the locus of God’s will. The profundity of this break - of historicism - cannot be understated. Yet it is only a possibility. Faith, then, is the possibility of freedom from eternal repetition by turning to and transfiguring the brutal river of historical necessity. Christianity, and St Augustine in particular, developed this further. Yet both Judaism and Christianity would retain strong elements of primitive ontologies, and even Hegelianism and Marxism require a transcendent belief that historical time will be at some point redeemed. Dreams of secular enlightenments, of progress, and of agency during the enlightenment and its aftermath stutter. Humanity requires the agonies of Dostoyevskian Christianity to make the long march of history tolerable.
Eliade then pivots to the atrocities of the twentieth century. If dialogue with YHWH was terrifying for Dostoyevsky, then what hope does it have for a generation scarred by two great wars? Eliadian history was always a minority viewpoint for the educated elites. As those elites - the educated classes - expanded historicism unsettled rather than comforted. Especially when that generation had seen the horrors of war up close. Much easier to return to ‘archaic ontologies’, especially among societies still tied to agriculture. There is a reason historicism did not develop in countries where the great Empires routinely ravaged the land. It is in retreat at the time of his writing, when the shadow of the Somme, of Hiroshima and of Auschwitz darkened a broken Europe. History can offer no comfort for those to whom history happens.
We now turn to the End of History. Eliade offers useful context for Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and his recent rejoinder Political Order and Political Decay. Fukuyama’s description of the post-cold war period in 1989 appeared at first glance to confound Eliade. It was possible for linear history to reach transcendence. History was over; liberal democracy had won; historicism was vindicated. The guillotine - whisper it - had been worth it. Historical man now had freedom, but history was over; the great debates had been settled. But by the second decade of the 21st century, Fukuyama was forced to admit that history had begun again. In response, he invoked Samuel Huntington. Since institutions are made for their historical moment, they have to be constantly regenerated in order not to decay. Yet by invoking decay and rebirth in response to the shadow of history, Fukuyama vindicates Eliade’s pessimism. Fukuyama’s path in the decades since The End of History therefore underscores the difficulties of historicism even - particularly? - among the elite. Beginning with quasi-millenarianism in his Kojeve inflected reading of Hegel, the accumulation of events transmutes Fukuyama’s political thought. Liberal democracy may be the end, the telos, of history but this final state can be both attained and lost. In accepting this in the face of world history then, Fukuyama embraces an archaic ontology as the most meaningful interpretation of history. Indeed, there is something almost Babylonian in his lamentation of a lost golden age.
Fukuyama therefore suggests Eliade’s archaic ontology is a contemporary response to what Adam Tooze would call the polycrisis. The question then becomes whether there is any other evidence for this return. This section of the essay has two steps. First, I want to suggest that ‘identity politics’ fits Eliade’s theory of archetypes and therefore acts as theodicy, or an attempt at it. I do this by looking at Fukuyama’s own writing on identity alongside Kwame Anthony Appiah’s. Secondly, in the final section of this essay I suggest a close reading of The Legend of Zelda series demonstrates a primitive thirst for being, meaning, and freedom situated in an explicitly cyclical mythology. First, however, we need to explain Fukuyama’s engagement with Hegel and Kojeve.
Key to Fukuyama’s argument in The End of History is his apparent defence of a form of unidirectional historicism. Fukuyama evokes the accumulation of knowledge, particularly in natural science:
as a possible underlying "mechanism" of directional historical change, because it is the only large-scale social activity that is by consensus cumulative and therefore directional. The progressive unfolding of modern natural science permits one to understand many of the specific details of historical evolution, for example, why men moved by horse-drawn carriage and railroad before they went by automobile and airplane, or why later societies are more urbanized than earlier ones, or why the modern political party, labor union, or nation-state has replaced the tribe or clan as the primary axis of group loyalty in industrialized societies.[45]
In other words, the accumulation of scientific knowledge about the world and about humanity can only be unidirectional. It can only increase. Scientific knowledge in turn creates economic growth. Calls for degrowth can only ever be marginal. Individuals can seek - and here he cites Rousseau - to return to nature, but these are only ever really small groups. Nor would an apocalypse lead to a break from the past. There would be survivors, the memory of the past would survive - and even if that was lost then there would be some archaeological record which would preserve that unidirectional link.[46] Archaeological evidence of global trade, skyscrapers, heavy industry, all create a roadmap by which survivors of some global event could use to rebuild civilisation. One could say that the practical knowledge of flight might be lost, but the presence of millions of aeroplanes show that it was once and therefore will again be possible.
History, then, has one direction - ever forward. Since there is no reasonable prospect to sever that link from past accumulation, that accumulation must continue.
Hegelian thought underlied unidirectional historical theory. Historical conflict was propelled by the search for ever-greater political, social, and economic freedom. Every conflict therefore edged closer towards an ultimate goal as weaker political systems withered and died in favour of freer states.
Hegel saw progress in history arising not from the steady development of reason, but through the blind interplay of the passions that led men to conflict, revolution, and war—his famous "cunning of reason." History proceeds through a continual process of conflict, wherein systems of thought as well as political systems collide and fall apart from their own internal contradictions. They are then replaced by less contradictory and therefore higher ones, which give rise to new and different contradictions—the so-called dialectic. [...] And as Kant postulated, there was an end point to the process of history, which is the realization of freedom here on earth: "The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom." The unfolding of Universal History could be understood as the growth of the equality of human freedom, summed up in Hegel's epigram that "the Eastern nations knew that one was free; the Greek and Roman world only that some are free; while we know that all men absolutely (man as man) are free." For Hegel, the embodiment of human freedom was the modern constitutional state, or again, what we have called liberal democracy.[47] (60)
Hegel was not a radical materialist since he did not truly believe that history would go on forever. Nor did he believe that economic / material conditions were necessary and sufficient for a universal idea of human nature. There was, instead, a radical contingency. What it meant to be human, to be free, to be a citizen or subject, was dependent on the ideological conditions in which each individual found itself throughout time. Moreover, since history was propelled by ideological contradiction, linear progress was generated by the struggle for an ever-greater form of government that permitted economic and political freedom. As he says, lesser forms of freedom were and would be supplanted by greater forms of freedom until this had reached its fulmination. Like the accumulation of scientific knowledge, history accumulated as it ‘progressed.’ There would always be some sort of record of previous forms of government encoded in the forms of political states, history, archaeology, and political thought.
For Fukuyama, Marxism continues to obscure the value of Hegelianism. Max Weber’s arguments against strict materialism remain the most cutting. This is succinctly described in Fukuyama's original essay in National Interest in 1989.
[A] central theme of Weber's work was to prove that contrary to Marx, the material mode of production, far from being the "base," was itself a "superstructure" with roots in religion and culture, and that to understand the emergence of modern capitalism and the profit motive one had to study their antecedents in the realm of the spirit.
[...]
[Not recognizing that] the roots of economic behavior lie in the realm of consciousness and culture leads to the common mistake of attributing material causes to phenomena that are essentially ideal in nature. For example, it is commonplace in the West to interpret the reform movements first in China and most recently in the Soviet Union as the victory of the material over the ideal - that is, a recognition that ideological incentives could not replace material ones in stimulating a highly productive modern economy, and that if one wanted to prosper one had to appeal to baser forms of self-interest.
Marxism therefore treats economic and materialist forces as the uncomplicated root and cause of ideology. Economic life is the substrate on which society gains its reality. Weber and Fukuyama on the other hand argued that religion, society, and intellectual currents precede the material conditions of economic production. Humans are social creatures. We tell stories about ourselves and how we relate to the world around us. This is true whether we live in a monarchy, a hunter-gatherer tribal unit, or even a modern liberal democracy. It is questionable to say that the human individual is formed by economic conditions if those conditions are reified, debated, and extended by intellectual arguments. It is only by understanding this, Fukuyama argues, that certain economic facts - price per unit leading to lower productivity, Spartan vs Athenian conceptions of luxury, the fall of the USSR - begin to make sense as humans again and again reject bountiful chains for austere freedom. An obvious rejoinder here would be to say that this is a simplistic reading of Marx or of Hegel, or that this is surely a chicken and the egg problem. A rejoinder to the latter would be that human cultures evolved in dialogue with the world, and each were shaped in turn, both explicitly and implicitly. A step back, on the other hand, would be to argue that both Marx and Hegel mirror Aristotle and Plato, and in so doing return inexorably to Eliade’s ontology.[48]
Kojeve suggests that Hegel might be a better guide to the late 20th century moment than Marx. As a ‘good Hegelian’, Kojeve understood that ‘understanding the underlying processes of history’ required ‘understanding developments in’ intellectual and cultural history.[49] We therefore need to resurrect the
Hegel who proclaimed history to be at an end in 1806. For as early as this Hegel saw in Napoleon's defeat of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena the victory of the ideals of the French Revolution, [...] Kojève, far from rejecting Hegel in light of the turbulent events of the next century and a half, insisted that the latter had been essentially correct. The Battle of Jena marked the end of history because it was at that point that the vanguard of humanity (a term quite familiar to Marxists) actualized the principles of the French Revolution. While there was considerable work to be done after 1806 - abolishing slavery and the slave trade, extending the franchise to workers, women, blacks, and other racial minorities, etc. - the basic principles of the liberal democratic state could not be improved upon. [50]
Post-War Europe represented the ‘fullest embodiment of the principles of the French Revolution’, since ‘those capitalist democracies [with] a high degree of material abundance and political stability’ lacked fundamental political ‘contradictions’ and ‘could preoccupy themselves with economic activity alone.’[51] History was over. Philosophy was pointless. Kojeve promptly went off to work for the European Community. Fukuyama supports this by suggesting that Gorbechev’s renunciation of Stalinism may be cloaked in Leninist language, but this is a mere trick of rhetoric - the need for a foundational myth for Soviet reform that does not wholly break with the raison d’etre of the state. The late Soviets were much closer to the free market liberals of Von Hayek and Friedman in their embrace of market democracy. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, meanwhile, show that the pressure of Taiwan’s example is winning; Fukuyama - again we must remember he’s writing in 1989 - suggests that the tens of thousands of children of the Chinese Communist Party elite studying in the States will force economic and political liberalisation upon their return home. Maoism is an anachronism, after all. We shall see the ‘ultimate ironic victory of Taiwan.’ Marxist and Fascist challenges to liberalism have failed. It is intellectual and social, not materialist, forces that drive history.
Fukuyama’s reading of Kojeve and Hegel nevertheless struggles under the shadow of the death camps. To claim the end of history is, he acknowledges, almost blasphemous. Kojeve wrote among the ruins of the Second World War and at the beginning of the Cold War: ‘To his contemporaries at mid-century, Kojève's proclamation of the end of history must have seemed like the typical eccentric solipsism of a French intellectual.’ Fukuyama, indeed, seems almost hesitant: ‘it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history.’ In the next paragraph: ‘people sense dimly that there is some larger process at work, a process that gives coherence and order to the daily headlines.’ But in the book version of this argument - published three years after the article - he concedes:
I am inclined toward the view that the Holocaust was both a unique evil and the product of historically unique circumstances that converged in Germany during the 1920s and 30s.[52]
[...]
There is a widespread expectation that a Universal History, if one can be discerned, must function as a kind of secular theodicy, that is, a justification of all that exists in terms of history's final end. This no Universal History can reasonably be expected to do. From the beginning, such an intellectual construct represents an enormous abstraction from the detail and texture of history, and almost necessarily ends up ignoring entire peoples and ages that constitute "pre-history." Any Universal History we can construct will inevitably give no reasonable account of many occurrences which are all too real to the people who experience them. A Universal History is simply an intellectual tool; it cannot take the place of God in bringing personal redemption to every one of history's victims. [53]
The spectre of historicism haunts Fukuyama. Though here he denies that his ‘Universal History’ functions as a ‘kind of secular theodicy’, both book and essay know they must grapple with the shadow of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He cannot fully face the fact that history leaves suffering unredeemed, and so naturally attempts to place that suffering in a redemptive context at the same time he seeks to explain it away.[54] Note, for example, how Fukuyama rejects Marx as reductive and abstract. Marxism is condemned because it flattens out the human as a historical individual. Marx must not just be rejected because of the poverty of its economic history. It must be rejected because the reduction of the human individual to the archetype of worker, bourgeois, capitalist negates self-evident intellectual freedom. Yet a purely secular approach to history has no answer to the terror of history, to the ‘account of many occurrences which are all too real to the people who experience them.’ For this, Fukuyama suggests, ‘it cannot take the place of God’. It is why he has to steel himself to look history in the face and engage in Eliade’s terrifying dialogue.
The End of History therefore encapsulates the difficulties of secular historicism. It is an attempt that still requires the ‘faith’ of the biblical prophets, and therefore still carries with it the archetypes and repetitions of the last three thousand years. We have seen this best in the explicitly prophetic opening paragraphs of the essay. He speaks of ‘something’ in the air, as if peace has broken out but people are too afraid to hint at the radical hope: that the world-shaking battles are over, that God has come again. His description of his contemporary world, meanwhile, already begins to detach it from the historical event as such:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affair's yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in. the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run. To understand how this is so, we must first consider some theoretical issues concerning the nature of historical change.[55]
Fukuyama here mashes together the aspirations of Old and New Testament prophets. He urges us to look history in the face and there find our redemption, only to inform us that the redemption is actually in our hearts. History will be continuing. We just won’t be calling it history. Nevertheless, we can forgive Fukuyama for an optimism that, for a moment, appears to dare confound Eliade in announcing a radical hope for the populus and elite alike. It remains pertinent however that at the same time he was pointing to the transcendent nature of ‘the end of history’, he was already trying to defend its inevitable continuity in ‘the pages of Foreign Affairs.’ Here, then, we see an Eliadian rejection of historicism per se; the historical event is redeemed by its relationship to the transcendent telos. Suffering, however, will continue - so how to make that bearable? The answer is by pointing back to that moment at the end of the Cold War in much the same way primitive man pointed back to illud tempus. Fukuyama and Kojeve’s thought is therefore indebted, whether they knew it or not, to that of Mircea Eliade. As far as Fukuyama knew, he was indeed facing the end of history. With Chinese reforms, the collapse of the USSR, and the dominance of American consumer culture, the Hegelian triumph over crass materialism must have seemed self-evident; Fukuyama could look history in the face and dare declare victory, even if that victory was predicated on a soft-historicism and he had, behind his back, fingers crossed.
History, of course, continued. From the moment of its publication, critics of The End of History were able to point to dozens of military and ideological conflicts which confounded Fukyama’s optimism. While the most recent ‘gotcha’ has been the invasion of Ukraine (a moment which Fukuyama suggests, with particularly biblical optimism, might yet turn into another 1989 moment), criticism of The End of History began with Jacques Derrida (who derided Fukuyama’s johnny-come-lately misreading of Kojeve), and has trundled on through Russian collapse, Islamic terrorism, several financial crises, the failures of the Arab Spring, Brexit, Trump, Covid, and Russian & Chinese attempts to split capitalism from democracy. Each new atrocity feels like kicking an international relations scholar when he’s down. Eliade’s point thus remains: how does one look at the inexorable march of history (indeed, as we are forced to do with both TV, then the Internet, and finally social media) and not despair? How do we do so and remain modern?
By the time of Political Order and Political Decay, Fukuyama had returned to a cyclical theory of history. The so-called continuation of history could be explained, he argued, by the concept of Political Decay:
Following Samuel Huntington’s definition, political institutions develop by becoming more complex, adaptable, autonomous, and coherent. But he argues that they can also decay. Institutions are created to meet certain needs of societies, such as making war, dealing with economic conflicts, and regulating social behaviour. But as recurring patterns of behaviour, they can also grow rigid and fail to adapt when the circumstances that brought them into being in the first place themselves change. There is an inherent conservatism to human behaviour that tends to invest institutions with emotional significance once they are put in place. Anyone who suggests abolishing the British monarchy, or the American constitution, or the Japanese Emperor and replacing it with something newer and better, faces a huge uphill struggle.[56]
The second source of political decay lies in human sociability. ‘While modern political orders seek to promote impersonal rule, elites in most societies tend to fall back on networks of family and friends, both as an instrument for protecting their positions and as the beneficiaries of their efforts.’ Their success is known as elite capture,[57] ‘which reduces the [state’s] legitimacy and makes it less accountable to the population as a whole.’ In particular, Fukuyama argues, this tends to get worse as long periods of peace stretch out.[58] In other words, political orders - history and society - cycle interminably through death and rebirth as they struggle between political order and decay. In a more profound sense however, Fukuyama’s joy of newfound freedom in the fall of the USSR is perfectly understandable. So too is his attempt to defend it as proof of the primacy of the historical individual as a free agent. Such a moment as the fall of the USSR and the opening up of Communist China should be seen in the context of Eliadian moments of social change and freedom. His declaration of the end of history at a moment of freedom and his latter identification of political decay in the face of the resurgence of history are quite natural. But they are also equal evidence of the insufficiency of linear history as theodicy. In order to justify his reading of history against new waves of suffering, Fukuyama has had to do what he prepared even when daring to proclaim history’s goal: to invoke cyclical time.
One central insight of Fukuyama’s return to cyclical history is his awareness of archetypes’ fundamental incompatibility with modernity. In Political Order and Political Decay, for example, he argues that identity politics undermines the intra-class cooperation required for stable states:
But the rise of new forms of identity in the developed world by the middle of the twentieth century around black empowerment, feminism, environmentalism, immigrant and indigenous rights, and gay rights created a whole new set of causes that cut across class lines. The leadership of many of these movements came out of the economic elites, and their cultural preferences often stood at cross-purposes to those of the working-class electorate that had once been the bulwark of progressive politics.[59]
By 2018, Fukuyama suggested that while e.g., Black Lives Matter rightly drew attention to police violence in America, conflicts over who belonged to which group and increasingly vicious competition over who best ‘deserves’ dwindling state resources compound the state’s inability to function or deal with existential threats.[60] Identity groups, he points out, are often led by members of the elite. Their concerns - representation on stage, screen, in C-suits - are narrow and self-interested. When they win political representation, political capital is expended on narrow victories, extracting rents, and finding sinecures for their own ingroup. All this hampers the liberal state’s claim to popular legitimacy. Yet this must be seen in the context of the ‘return’ of history. Identity politics are not just symptoms and causes of state breakdown. They are surely further evidence for Eliade’s thirst for being. Faced with the brute force of history, to identify as a member of an identity group offers meaning. While the liberal may say that it comes at the expense of human individuality, Eliade would say that that is the point. The rise of identity politics must therefore be seen as a quite natural response to the terror of history. Fukuyama is right to say that this is incompatible with the modern liberal state, with his conception of the historical individual as the prime mover. But it is the liberal state which is the newcomer, and which struggles to justify itself as its people suffer.
Incongruence between the historical individual and the identity they claim therefore reflects the former’s ontological precarity. As Kwame Anthony Appiah repeatedly notes, identities and archetypes never quite encompass the whole person. Writing of his own experience as the son of a ghanaian father and aristocratic white british mother he reflects on:
a Ghanaian man I know, who has lived in Japan for a long time, told me that he once approached a Japanese woman who was having trouble with a bicycle with a flat tire. When he first started speaking to her, she didn’t look up. His Japanese sounded quite normal to her. When she finally looked up at him, he could see a look of astonishment cross her face. She hadn’t expected to see a black-skinned foreigner. (for the record, the story turns out well; she’s now his wife).
[...]
Charles Steele describes how a young black graduate student at the University of Chicago, troubled by the fearful responses of white people, takes to whistling Vivaldi as he walks down the street. The student signals his knowledge of “high culture,” and white people (who might not know it’s Vivaldi), recognise this is classical music.
[...]
I’ve been told I adjust my accent in an American direction when i’m telling New York taxi drivers where I want to go. [61]
The latter two situations, of course, are coloured by the presence of white supremacist violence. The anecdote told by Charles Steele in particular suggests that the student displays his integration into high social class and thereby his dislocation from racial stereotypes that might evoke violent responses. Yet as Appiah notes, categorisations in themselves appear fundamental to human social development. Our view of the world, then, is dependent on a bundling together of attributes into archetypes. What happens here is not just that marginalised individuals find themselves demonstrating in group behaviour, either accidentally or subconsciously. Rather, what Eliade called primitive ontologies are never far beneath the surface; the Japanese woman has an idea of who might speak polite japanese, the graduate student dissolves himself in the archetype of an upper-class culture, and Appiah himself shifts his language to his environment.
To step outside of these archetypes is to unsettle. It is safer to shave off the edges - the historical details - which do not quite fit. To stuff oneself into what Fukuyama calls identity politics is to make oneself more rather than less legible to those around you. It, then, is in some sense ontologically prior to the historical details which trouble the boundaries of identity groups.
A final example of how the archetype has resurfaced requires us to return to Abraham Heschel and Cal Newport. Heschel, we recall, distinguished the prophet from the artistic transcendent experience by the prophets’ awareness of God’s presence and the extinction of the artistic self in the moment of creation. Newport meanwhile couches his call to a similar state by acknowledging our current state of economic precarity.
There are many ways to discover that you’re not valuable in our economy.
[...]
Deep work is not some nostalgic affectation of writers and early-twentieth-century philosophers. It’s instead a skill that has great value today.
[...]
To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.[62]
In other words, we’re living during a period of profound economic instability. ‘To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing - a task that requires depth.’ The past may have been predictable enough for mediocrity, but history is running away with us. Newport’s strategy to tread water is therefore to evoke a flow state. Long periods of intense work, during which the awareness of the outside world - of linear time, of oneself as an individual historical actor - is negated is the only way in which the worker can even survive in such market turmoil. Newport thereby returns to interwar Romania, to the ethnomusicologist wandering to the border to collect folk tales. War, famine, climate change, economic precarity roar outside. But you too can find meaning as the roar of history mounts. All it will cost is your Self.
The release advert for Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Nintendo Switch, 2023) promises the player a retreat from the drudgery of daily life. Titled ‘Rediscover your sense of adventure’, a man struggles to find a seat on a crowded bus home from some white-collar work. The sky is grey and he is damp. By the time he gets home it is already dark. His children - whose crayon drawings fixed to the fridge are one of the first bright colours shown - have long since gone to bed. The day is already over. Tomorrow will soon begin. There is, however, another source of primary colours. On the table, he finds a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller and a copy of the new Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Sitting on the edge of the sofa, his arms holding the controller awkwardly in the air, the man is awash now in primary colours as Link falls through the sky, fights a huge, pig-like monster, and builds a boat out of logs. Though forced to begin the day again, this time the commuter has his Switch. The bus is still cramped, grey, and damp (this is England after all), but the new Legend of Zelda promises a regeneration via those primary colours to the joy of childhood. Life is tolerable. Though he still has to go to work, he can at least derive meaning from those brief colourful moments on the switch to anchor him against the day.
The Legend of Zelda offers an escape from the terror of history. Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (2011) established the ur-myth; three ancient goddesses create a wish-granting artefact, the Triforce. The time-controlling Demon King Demise invades the land in search of this power. The Goddess Hylia manages to imprison him, but the land is scarred and the populace have been forced onto floating islands. All knowledge of the past and even of the surface below has been lost. Link soon learns he is the hero prophesied to destroy Demise with the Master Sword; Zelda the reincarnation of Hylia. Link manages to kill Demise, but is unable to prevent Zelda from being sacrificed to resurrect him. Demise however is once again defeated, his spirit trapped in the Master Sword, but not before he curses Link and Zelda’s bloodlines to forever be haunted by his spirit. We therefore have the ur-myth illos tempus in which the Gods’ original drama played out, and the parallel founding drama which will be repeated throughout Zelda and Link’s descendents. These descendents, however, are less historical individuals and more incarnations of their prototypical ancestor. As we will see, the historical particulars of each Link and Zelda are meaningless. Their reality lies in their ability to repeat the actions of that ur-Link and ur-Zelda. So far, so Eliadian.
Ocarina of Time (1998) best underscores Zelda’s primitive ontology.[63] In brief, child Link is woken from a prophetic nightmare of a man on horseback by the fairy Navi, who brings him to the Great Deku Tree. The tree explains it has been cursed by an evil man, and before dying sends him to confer with Princess Zelda at Hyrule Castle. Zelda explains that Ganondorf seeks the god-like power of the Triforce. Link must gain access to the Sacred Realm via sacred stones to claim the Triforce to stop him. Link wins the stones, but returns to find Ganon on horseback chasing Zelda. Link now hurries to the Sacred Realm and claims the master sword. Ganondorf follows Link, claims the prize and seizes the world. Game over. Or so it seems. Seven years later Link wakes to a post-apocalyptic Hyrule. One of the seven sages is there to greet him and explains that Link’s spirit was ‘sealed’ for seven years until he was old enough to wield the Master Sword and fight Ganon. He must now find the other spirit sages - protectors of the Sacred Realm - by wresting control of their temples from Ganon’s forces. Eventually Ganon is sealed in the Dark Realm, vowing revenge on the sages’ descendents. Zelda in turn sends Link back to his childhood with his adult memories. The game ends with the young Link and Zelda meeting at the Castle to stop Ganon. Linear time has no meaning in the face of Ganon’s resurgence. Nor are the historical particulars of Link or Zelda of any import when faced with what ‘really matters’: the process of defeating Ganon and resealing him. The sages tellingly see no point in Link accumulating memories during those seven years. The American teenager playing Zelda might think his own teenage years are the most important stage of his life. Not so for Link. Profane history, anything which can distinguish this link from all the other links, is meaningless. ‘Real life’ is found in the repetition of Hyrulian myth.
Ocarina of Time serves an inflection point for what critics often decry as the haphazard timeline of the Zelda mythos. Link’s success or failure in OoT splits the world into three broad timelines. Polygon again:
Per the official timeline in Hyrule Historia, the outcome of Ocarina of Time plays out in one of three possible ways: Link is defeated and Ganon wins; Link wins and goes back in time to his childhood to warn Zelda about Ganon(dorf); or Link wins and goes back in time to his childhood, only to vanish from history. These are officially called the Fallen Hero, Child, and Adult Timelines.[64]
Link either loses, ushering in a new age of darkness; wins and goes off as a child to new adventures; or goes back to childhood and ‘just kind of vanishes’ into history. In terms of the biographical void of the ‘Adult Timeline’ then, we can see another example of how communal memory resists the historical individual. Now the cycle has been fulfilled and the player steps away from Hyrule, the swordsman no longer exists as Link. Just like the indifference of sage and developer to Link’s lost seven years, there’s no need for the player to know what exactly Link ate for dinner each evening, or his own personal emotional reactions to finding his loved ones murdered. Such details constitute profane history. If each link were to describe the torment of each game, he would step out of his archetype and no longer be Link. There would, indeed, be no link to primitive ontology and therefore there would be no response to the terror of Ganon. Nor - despite the critics - does it really matter whether the linear timelines of zelda make coherent sense. What matters is the plot of each game and how it allows the player to fulfil the Eliadian myth.
Over the decades, Zelda’s designers have accordingly attempted to resist both the accumulation of profane and digital history. The first in the series Legend of Zelda (1986), was briefest on lore. Over the next three decades however, ‘the stories [became] more nuanced, with a tone and artistic style displaying the influence of the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki.’[65] By the time Breath of the Wild was released: “Hyrule’s recurring periods of prosperity and decline have made it impossible to tell which legends are historical fact and which are mere fairy tale.’[66] As Polygon complains: ‘A handful of [stories in the 20 games] fit neatly together [...] but any chronology across the whole series quickly gets muddied by time travel, multiple timelines, and a 10,000-year time skip.[67] Eiji Aonuma - with Nintendo since 1988 - explained:
"Hyrule’s history changes with time," [...] "When we think of the next game and what we want to do with it, we might think, 'Oh, this’ll fit well', and place it neatly into the timeline, but sometimes we think, 'Oh crap', and have to change the placement. Actually, the decided history has been tweaked many times." [68]
Aonuma’s approach is to ‘keep Link on the archetypal hero’s journey, giving the young knight the task of healing the world from a cycle of generational violence.’[69] It is telling, too, that the NYT notes that Majora’s Mask - a direct sequel to OoT in which the moon will crash into Hyrule in 48 hours - was inspired by the missile crisis of 1998.[70] Aonumi was attending a wedding when North Korea fired a missile over Japan for the first time: ‘That juxtaposition of celebration and fear influenced the game’s apocalyptic tone.’[71] It did so in much the same way as Breath of the Wild’s map almost mirrors Kyoto, where Nintendo is headquartered.[72] The designer desperately needs a way to make sense of his home city, and he finds it in Zelda. Hyrule’s ‘archaic consciousness’, its ‘primitive ontology’ sits uneasily against the world outside its instantiations. The developers and critics feel the modern pressure to fit the games into some sort of linear timeline, or at least to fall back on alternate linear timelines. But Aonuma’s comment about how the North Korean Missile Crisis influenced perhaps the most explicitly Eliadian of the N64 Zelda Games is the best explicit evidence we have for how this series fulfils a ‘primitive’ function for designer and player alike. The fact that the Zelda series began a few years before Fukuyama’s End of History and have become more explicitly mythic with each passing year illuminates Aonuma’s otherwise merely curious anecdote. Participating in the Hyrulian myth, with its borrowings from ‘primitive ontologies’ reveals modernity’s insufficiency in tolerating history.
The Zelda Myth Cycle strips away all profane history, outside or within the game-world. It is no wonder then that the in-game mythos is so Eliadian. As Aonuma plainly states, this offers a way for designer and player alike to reclaim its archaic ontology and find a form of meaning in the face of global history.
The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is perhaps the most explicit in how even the in-game population resists the terror of irreversible history. Wind Waker exists in the final timeline. Ganon is eventually reborn but Link is not. In desperation, the Gods drown Hyrule. Centuries later, people scratch out a living between isolated islands on the Great Sea. The fate of the Kingdom below is forgotten, and the memory of the Hero of Time similarly fades. Boys, however, dress in green in his honour when they come of age. Eliade identifies the deluge of a sinful world as a common thread among near-eastern traditions. From Akitu Festival in Sumer, the Epic of Gilgamesh, to Christian Baptism, deluge marks a return to formlessness: “Deluge or flood puts an end to an exhausted and sinful humanity, and a new regenerated humanity is born.”[73] Since Link was not reborn, the Hyrulian gods were forced to impose the Deluge and reset the cycle. A new people were reborn from the survivors and the ‘profane history’ of Hyrule forgotten. The only thing that survives, in other words, are fragments of archetypes. The boys do not know quite why they don green to come of age, but they know that it is repetition of and therefore becoming an archetypal hero which supercedes the details of their lives. In other words, now history has been reset, the impulsive thirst for being is enacted in each boy’s possibility of being link and thereby regenerating the cosmic cycle. Wind Waker then is not just an example of the return to formless mass, of a break with linear time, and how the individual boys’ histories are resisted in favour of the archetype. It also pointedly serves to reset the accumulations of history. First released in December 2002 in Japan and May 2003 in Europe, Wind Waker resets the apocalyptic histories of Ocarina, Majora’s Mask, and the profane world of terror attacks and incipient colonial wars. Both the player and link yearn to take refuge in higher ontologies.
Of course, if we’re discussing the end of the world in Zelda the most obvious example is Majora’s Mask (2000). MM is unusual for two reasons. First is that it is a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time, taking place a few months after OoT and beginning what’s considered to be the Child branch of the timeline. Secondly, it introduces the radical cyclical mechanism of the moon. In brief,
As he wanders through a mysterious forest on his trusty horse, Epona, [Link] is mugged by a masked Skull Kid and his two Fairy Companions, who steal Epona and the Ocarina of Time before fleeing.
[...]
Link soon discovers that he has fallen into the parallel world of Termina, the residents of which are preparing for the annual Carnival of Time. But a sinister omen hangs in the sky: The Skull Kid has taken control of the moon, and he intends to crash it into Termina within three days. The impact will wipe out everyone and everything.[74]
Link, however, reclaims the Ocarina of Time and - remembering how the Goddess of Time is watching over him - is able to return at will to the moment he entered Clock Town, the largest town of Termina. While the impact of the moon wipes out everything, Link is able to save his progress within these cycles by playing the Ocarina and resetting the clock. We have, therefore, the clearest example of the primacy of Eliade’s primitive ontology in Zelda. ‘The moon is the first of the creatures to die, but the first to live again [and thereby] reveals the “eternal return”.[75] ‘In the “lunar perspective”, the death of the individual and the periodic death of humanity are necessary, even as the three days of darkness preceding the rebirth of the moon are necessary.’[76] There are several obvious elements here. First is the use of masks.[77] Second is the role of the Carnival of Time, a harvest festival which represents the ‘harmony of nature and time.’[78] The explicit link between progress, lunar cycles, and the harvest festival reveal how the Zelda universe understands progress as the quote-unquote historical individual’s ability to fulfil the archetype of Link and perpetuate sacred cyclical history.. It is no accident that the anchor for the player against the fall of the moon is the harvest festival; indeed, the player’s role here is to ensure the continuity of the cycles by keeping the moon in the sky just long enough to complete one mythic cycle. Such regeneration, of course, formed a central part of comforting rituals in pre-modern societies. To complete MM, then, is paradoxically to avoid the final physical union of moon and earth yet maintain their spiritual cyclical link.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom continue the reliance on lunar-derived mythos. Breath of the Wild (2017) and its direct sequel Tears of the Kingdom (2023) have already been noted for their distance from attempts to place Zelda games into linear history. From certain in-game lore, it takes place 10,000 years or so after Hyule was at its civilisational peak. Whether this is during the child, adult, or fallen hero timelines is not apparent. Nor is this profane history important. What is important is how the common threads link back to Eliade. In Breath of the Wild:
Blood Moons occur at midnight on nights when Calamity Ganon's power reaches its peak and escapes from Princess Zelda's control within Hyrule Castle, dyeing the night sky and the Moon red with Malice. The effects of this Malice revive any fallen monsters and enemies, returning them to where they once were prior to being slain. In addition to reviving enemies and Overworld Bosses, Ore Deposits are replenished, and Materials ranging from plants and trees, to gear left lying in the field, effectively respawn, allowing Link to collect them again if the ones he took before the Blood Moon broke in the interim period.[79]
In BoTW this also serves a mechanical function: the Switch is not the most powerful of consoles, and the open-world environment of Zelda is resource intensive. The more you explore, the more data the switch needs to load, the slower the game gets as the in-game memory fills. You can think about this in terms of a juggler: everything that appears on screen needs to be kept track of ‘is a ball’ and the more balls being juggled leads to slower cycles and more chance of errors as the juggler strives to keep everything in the air. Blood moons reset the cache, free resources (jugglers’ balls in the air), and have the side effect of ensuring that difficulty for the player doesn’t drop off a cliff as monsters become scarce. In Tears of the Kingdom, Blood Moons are triggered every 168 minutes of in-real-life time (about a week in-game-time), and similarly serve as a reset button for the world.[80] Even in the para-historical timeline, then, the ur-myth stands firm. Lunar time holds sway, both in terms of the underlying construction of the game in order to deal with the constraints of the platform, and in the game-world itself. There was not, in other words, a need to introduce a new or disjointed mechanism to clear the cache; the lunar cycle was already built into, and foundational, the Legend of Zelda.
Reading Elaide therefore gives us a new insight into the satisfaction of the Legend of Zelda. In a wider sense, we should note that Zelda’s publication history is no accident. The first game came out as the Cold War crumbled and the end of history dawned. But it was only a decade or so later, with the publication of Ocarina of Time that the mythos became fully formed. Ocarina and Majora’s Mask emerged at the beginning and end of the dot com bubble. Wind Waker was the first console Zelda to emerge after 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror. The vast open worlds of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom offer the freedom tasted in ‘89 but confounded by the accumulation of history in the decades since. Through this lens, then, it is little surprise that as political order began to decay and the American imperial landscape fractured under the weight of its own contradictions, Zelda and its fans responded with a turn to the mythic. There is nothing quite as satisfying as a retreat to the archetypical order when the world outside is slipping through your fingers. Players flock to Zelda for the same reason they thirst for the safety of a discrete identity group. In fighting over who belongs where, and which group merits priority, they enmesh themselves in meaning in much the same way as when they pick up a Nintendo controller. Both archetypes offer meaning and freedom from the inexorable march of suffering and paralysis in daily life. More than this, the success of Zelda and other open world games suggests a way forward to dealing with the difficult timescales of climactic time. As Amitab Ghosh and Bruno Latour have both pointed out, it’s difficult to grasp the depth of climactic time. Paintings, sculptures, poetry grapple moments out of the relentless march of history; even novels, which deal best with longer periods of time and change, most commonly take place over months or years. Even dynastic novels - Powers’ The Overstory, Meyer’s The Son, to take some recent American examples - only deal with decades or a century. Humans have great difficulty in envisaging change over a timespan greater than half a lifespan or so. Video Games, however, form a ritual space in which those profane histories can be explored and visualised. In other words, if playing a video game is a ritual act that attempts to return to a comforting meta-temporal space, then video games offer both a space in which new rituals, new ways of understanding the world, can be worked through and developed. The retreat to video games is not just a sign of the decay of political order at the end of history, a warning of discontent, but a space in which sacred and profane history can meet. Where, ultimately, new archetypes of liberal democracy can struggle to be born.
[1] Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 44-5.
[2] Eliade,The Myth of the Eternal Return,, 45-7.
[3] Eliade, 4.
[4] Eliade, 4 - 5.
[5] Eliade, 5
[6] Eliade, 6.
[7] Eliade, 9.
[8] Eliade, 9-10.
[9] Eliade, 27-29.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Eliade, 30.
[12] Eliade, 32.
[13] Eliade, 85-6.
[14] Eliade, 74-5.
[15] Eliade, 87.
[16] Eliade, 34-5.
[17] Eliade, 78.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Eliade, 95.
[20] Eliade, 92.
[21] Eliade, 96.
[22] Eliade, 101.
[23] Eliade, 102-3.
[24] Eliade, 104.
[25] Heschel, The Prophets, 277.
[26] Eliade, 109.
[27] Eliade, 110.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Eliade, 108.
[30] Eliade, 111.
[31] Eliade, 129.
[32] Eliade, 130.
[33] Eliade, 142.
[34] Eliade, 144.
[35] Eliade, 147.
[36] Eliade, 148.
[37] Eliade, 149.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 451 - 3.
[40] Eliade, 152.
[41] Eliade, 153.
[42] Eliade, 146.
[43] Eliade, 160.
[44] Eliade, 157.
[45] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (NYC: Free Press, 1992), 80.
[46] Fukuyama, The End of History, 80-88.
[47] Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 60
[48] This of course mirrors the split between thought and action, our mental model and the things we can do with our hands and bodies. In another sense, we might say the division lies between our willed or conscious actions and those things our bodies do for us automatically.
[49] End of History, National Interest, 1989.
[50] Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, National Interest, 1989.
[51] Frances Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 1992, 67.
[52] The End of History, 129.
[53] The End of History, 130-1.
[54] Indeed, he suggests elsewhere in the book that we must find theodicy in God at the same time he describes an explicitly judaeo-christian world view.
[55] Fukuyama, ‘End of History’, National Interest.
[56] Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, (London: Profile, 2015), 27.
[57] See also Peter Turchin’s description of wealth pumps, whereby elite capture tends towards wealth extraction and rentierism which in turn breaks down social trust. Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, (London: Penguin, 2023).
[58] This argument, that peace tends towards the accumulation of severe inequality and war to the breakdown of the structures that protect this wealth, can also be found in Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty First Century, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
[59] Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, 438.
[60] Francis Fukuyama, Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition, (London: Profile, 2018), 115-23.
[61] Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lies That Bind, (London: Profile, 2018), 24-5.
[62] Cal Newport, Deep Work, (London: Piatkus, 2016), 11, 13.
[63] Polygon relates how OoT takes place at the end of an ‘eras long’’ civil war, and that Skyward Sword (2011) took place at the beginning of the Zelda mythic cycle.
[64] In the ‘Fallen Hero’ timeline, a Demon King called ‘Yuga’ tried to resurrect Ganon in A Link Between Worlds. Eliade pointed out that in the Vedas and Germanic tradition there exists a ‘[b]elief in the periodic destruction and creation of the universe.’ ‘Indian speculation [...] amplifies and orchestrates the rhythms that govern the periodicity of cosmic creations and destructions. The smallest unit of measure of the cycle is the yuga, the ‘age’. A yuga is preceded and followed by a ‘dawn’ and a ‘twilight’ that connect the ages together.’ (112-3). One might say, then, that the Ganon-Link cycle represents an age of birth-conflict-death that finds ultimate source in Proto Indo-Aryan myth.
[65] Zachary Small and Rumsay Taylor, ‘How Legend of Zelda Changed the Game’, New York Times, May 4 2023.
[66] Quoted in Parkin, 2023.
[67] Jeffrey Parkin, ‘The Legend of Zelda Timeline, explained’, Polygon, May 10 2023.
[68] Ahabana Arif, ‘The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Now Has an Official Place in the Series' Timeline... Sort Of’, IGN, Aug 6 2018.
[69] New York Times,
[70] There is some academic work which links the mask-wearing gameplay of Majora’s Mask to bio-social theories of child development. The element of the mask and its role in switching archetypes also links to Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism.
[71] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/04/arts/zelda-nintendo-history.html:
Aonuma returned to direct the project with a developer named Yoshiaki Koizumi. The men had attended the wedding of a colleague shortly after the 1998 missile crisis, when North Korea fired a rocket across Japanese territory. That juxtaposition of celebration and fear influenced the game’s apocalyptic tone: Link would have three days to prevent the moon from crashing into the world.
It was a much smaller game, with only four dungeons after Ocarina had about a dozen. But developers focused their efforts on intricate side quests in which the player helps townsfolk slightly improve their lives before the impending doom; one climactic plot reunites two lovers so they can exchange vows minutes before moonfall.
[72] Andrew Webster, ‘The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s map is based on Kyoto’, The Verge, March 6 2017.
[73] Eliade, 87.
[74] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaMajorasMask
[75] Eliade, 86.
[76] Eliade, 88.
[77] “Majora’s Mask was a smorgasbord for game theorists. Some compared its themes of identity and confusion — mask-wearing is an important gameplay mechanic — to Erik Erikson ’s theory of psychological development. Others said the game’s narrative followed the Kübler-Ross model of grief, arguing that Link dies at the very beginning and spends the rest of the game coming to terms with it. Some Zelda fans, however, were dismayed by the emphasis on narrative instead of combat and exploration.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/04/arts/zelda-nintendo-history.html
[78] https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/Carnival_of_Time
[79] https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/Blood_Moon
[80] https://www.polygon.com/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-guide/23732914/blood-moon-length-cooking
Caps?