who's Christian?

[Terrance]

MalignD at aol.com wrote:
> 
> It's perfectly possible that all we're doing here is tripping over the word
> "religious" and it's application.


Yes, Can't find it at the moment but Roland Barthes has a
little Orange book (at least my copy is orange),
*Mythologies.* In the book he solves this problem with a
brief footnote. I guess I'm lazy is all. 


Anyway, 

  Mircea Eliade, says that  "Archaic believers" experience
the events of ordinary profane life, the daily round of
labor and struggle, as things they desperately wish to
escape. They would rather be out of history and in the
perfect realm of the sacred. Eliade's  term for this desire,
is the "nostalgia for Paradise." It is a concept central to
his theory. Though he refers to it in many places, he
explains it best in the *The Myth of the Eternal Return* 
Or, Cosmos and History, which he first published along with
Patterns In Comparative Religion 1949 (It is Obvious to any
one that takes the time to discover it that  Pynchon read
these and *The Sacred and the Profane prior to writing the
novel V., also Jonas, and several others, so the Hirsch
letter is referring to his additional readings in
comparative religion).  In thses books, Eliade sets out a
strong thesis: that the one theme which dominates the
thought of all archaic peoples is the drive to abolish
history-all of history-and return to that point beyond time
when
the world began. The desire to go back to beginnings, he
argues, is the
deepest longing, the most insistent and heartfelt ache in
the soul of all archaic peoples. A constant theme of archaic
ritual and myth is the wish "to
live in the world as it came from the Creator's hands,
fresh, pure, and
strong."  This is why, according to Eliade, myths of
creation play such a central role in so many archaic
societies. It is also why so many rituals are
associated with acts of creation. These rituals so important
to Pynchon's novels, are 
linked with creation accounts. Usually they involve a
reenactment of what the gods did in illo tempore (Latin for
"in that time"), at the moment when the world came into
being. Every New Year's festival, every myth of rebirth or
reintegration,
every rite of initiation is a return to beginnings, an
opportunity to start the
world over again. When, in archaic festivals of the New Year
, a scapegoat
is sent out and purifications are done to rid the community
of demons, diseases, and sins, this is not just a rite of
transit from one year to the next but
"also the abolition of the past year and of past time." It
is an attempt "to
restore-if only momentarily-mythical and primordial time,
"pure" time,
the time of the "instant" of the Creation.