CONTRIBUTI / 12 / Alberto Francescato
Amor Mortis in the Rituals to Commemorate the Universal Flood for a Critique of the Idea of ‘Sacred Time’ in Mircea Eliade
The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the Athenian rituality, related to the commemoration of the Great Flood, demands a reinterpretation of certain hermeneutical paradigms inaugurated by Mircea Eliade. For the pioneer of the phenomenology of sacred, the religious celebrations are a repetition of events occurred in illo tempore, when the cosmos has been generated by the gods and was a ‘fullness of essence’, as opposed to the absence and ‘thirst of sacred’ of ancient humanity’s world. However, the symbology of those rituals seems to be linked to the remembrance of the fracture among gods and humanity, and to the discovery of the death, rather than being a repetition of a mythical paradise lost. Nevertheless, this is far from being a refutation of Eliade’s theory of sacred: indeed, the eternal mnemonic return to the archetypal reality is determined by the willingness to remember what occurred before the cosmogonic act, in order to re-enact the generation of the difference among harmony and chaos, life and death, immortals and mortals.
