Perenniality

The theme of perenniality is fundamental in the religions and the mythologies of primitives and ancien (urban)civilisations.

They show adversity in respect to History, the primitive mind according to Mircea Eliade, shuns a notion of individuality (they replace it by the "archetype", in a boutade one could say, the primitives invented sociological labelling; in a way, the rethoric pattern and spirit of contention behind factional adversary, be it political or religious often evokes mythological pathos) and a sequence of irreversible events captured in a historic and thus evolving framework.

Rites and cermonies, aka " repetition of paredigmatic gestures", help to abolish the context of time and reconnect with the primordial and only true and truth-extracting state of our Existence. The course of History must be annihilated, repetition of the acts and deeds of the initial beings or archetypes secures perenniality, since what is actualized is the very birth of our Cosmos. All starts anew, rites and ceremonies as reset buttons to initialize that event by which a person acquires a meaning and mission in Life.

In Flight of the Wild Gander, Joseph Campbell applies a biological interpretation of Myths, so in reference of the problem of the "second birth" and a cyclical vision of Time,the myth becomes a post-natal womb which assures man's identity as an individual and member of the group.

His viewpoint stresses growth, maturation and nurture of a human being, while Eliade seems to differ in that man can only truely exist if one in assuming an architypical role. Campbell speaks of a balanced intuitive, instinctive an normalizing ontogenesis, a maverick in throwing
psycho-somatic and crypto-Freudian elements and concepts in his discours, he helps me remind nevertheless me of the antagony raises by Macinver between Culture and Civilisation.

Whereas Culture cherish things in itself and seeks their values in their essence and substance, civilisation is like a prosthesis or an instrument to achieve by utilarian-technical means things of
quantitative nature, it helps to feed and control the basic instincts and the loss due to desintegration, hence why rites and ceremonies are like therapies to re-integrate and become whole again and defined, thus going against the course of time's corrosion, the Fall.

Culture is spontaneous, immutable, coherent and creative, and while Civilisation drills the Many, Culture is always of divine, transmutative nature, an act, say a rite and ceremony committed by an eminent personality, which can't be reproduced so likely and comes only once and a while(like the primordial event of which our existence is derived), a gifted and titanic Individual or Genius.

Are virtues and higher principles lost and perishable in a Civilisation?
It appears that they're replaced by a total loss of comprehension, meaning, passion, sublimity, enrapture, soul, virtues and manly character, suffocating under a thick crust of alienation and a thanatos fit that has to compensate the overwhelming and omnipresent dull hazy monotony; it evokes abject sentiments, super-charged and over the top, to destroy the stale dank dungeon where hope is no more, perspectives are intermingled and deconstructed till one doesn't know what he/she was seeking or hoping to achieve...Pessao described it in his Book of Restlessness how a new condition creeps in one's mind, that of Revulsion, more sickening than ordinary boredom and far less aesthethic than spleen...a rotten flagrancy with not a single moment of redemption...

And does a return to the primitive soul, a regression to a naturalistic existence the key to some Sanctuary?
But in which predicament lives this primitive soul? And how is this primitivism defined?
When the first human being received a spark of consciousness, it's primitive, fetal individuation was one of potentialities abound. He could see the world with a proverbial innocence and he hadn't grasp himself by means of theories, "-isms" and the chase after spooks that tamed his mind, impoverished his vision and bounded him to clichéd pathways to bring order in his life, relationships with others and connection to his ecology.

Knowing oneself too much, disclosing the finest quintesses of his personality might cause a fatality. We yearn to know more, but what remains to aspire if everything has been brought to you on a tray, the sheer magnitude of information would not put the spirit ablaze, but quell its vivacity.
Like an animal in a cage.
Some high-class individuals will endure the transgression and strain, as if they made a metaphysical walkabout to and fro the margins of our
existence, seen secrets best veiled and entombed forever, a supra-conscious experience that can break a person definitely or positively crack him open to more etherical levels of being, a satori stage, wherein it doesn't matter what sways around helplessly matter and fluids, where success and defeat doesn't count anymore...

The contemporary primitives worldwide on the globe aren't finalized, but contrary to the naturalistic approach of some anthropologists and humanitarians alike they should be counted as degenerates.
Perenniality lives on in their myths and cults, but the modus isn't refreshed nor seasoned, but a fossil that holds people back to perform an act of creation, i.e. bring life where none is, supremacy over death and corruption.

It's a hideaway, possibilities aren't embraced, but shunned out of fear and apathy, it fashions rites, customs and ethics as mechanics to dispel the omni-creativity that the universe represents for a limited, self-engrossing pathos to ensure basic needs or subsistence, a hunger for profusion feeding upon a certain rigid exoterism that has no sense of asymmetry, spontanity, naked essence which is expressed in the Universe to which they seek a connection only as a facade, to bribe off a little piece of eternity and infinitude...