Mircea Eliade: "Cosmic cycles and history"

"Even within the framework of the three great Iranian, Jewish and Christian religions, which have limited the duration of the cosmos to a certain number of millennia, and affirm that history will definitively cease in illo tempore, there are traces of the ancient doctrine of the periodic regeneration of history ยป: Very ancient doctrine that Eliade, in his essayโ€œ The myth of the eternal return โ€, finds in the Babylonian, Hindu, Buddhist, Germanic and Hellenic tradition.

Pachacuti: cycles of creation and destruction of the world in the Andean tradition

di Marco Maculotti
cover: Paracas culture textiles (coastal Peru)


A central concept in the Andean cosmogonic tradition is the belief in regular cycles of creation and destruction that would initiate and end the various cosmic eras. Time was conceived in a circular way; according to this doctrine, it had only two dimensions: the present (
Kay Pasha) which at its end leads to the "ancient time"(Nawpa Pacha), from which we will return again to the present time [Carmona Cruz p.28].

This doctrine, comparable to that of the Indian Yuga and to the Hesiodic one of the ages, is based on a principle of cyclicality that would govern everything in the cosmos and which is called by the Andean tradition pachacuti, literally "a revolution, a procession of space and time". With this term, in the myths, a series of catastrophic events are described that foresee the general destruction of the humanity of the sky and its subsequent replacement with a new humanity - see the myths of origin of Lake Titicaca, in which it is said that Viracocha exterminated a previous race of giants with the flood or with a rain of fire to then create a subsequent humanity, the current one [cf. Viracocha and the myths of the origins: creation of the world, anthropogenesis, foundation myths].