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A review by evan_streeby
The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History by Mircea Eliade
1.0
I hated this book. It was short and I decided to give it my time, but it suffers awfully from three glaring flaws
1. The abhorrent, Jungian-type analysis is essentially an axiom of this text. Lathered with nonsense about how “Plants are only regarded as healing due to them having been referenced as benefitting gods/heroes of the past”, which entail an exhausting number of “It’s clearly A, because it’s A” statements that read like a Jordan Peterson speech
2. It wants to generalize everything; cultures, mythologies, etc. I understand this was in vogue for ethnographies and psychology of the era; how it became so is a mystery.
3. It states it’s thesis on page 1, and then repeats it two or three times every single page all the way through. There is little meaningful diversity of example, and when there are new examples they seem contrived.
I gained nothing from this at all
1. The abhorrent, Jungian-type analysis is essentially an axiom of this text. Lathered with nonsense about how “Plants are only regarded as healing due to them having been referenced as benefitting gods/heroes of the past”, which entail an exhausting number of “It’s clearly A, because it’s A” statements that read like a Jordan Peterson speech
2. It wants to generalize everything; cultures, mythologies, etc. I understand this was in vogue for ethnographies and psychology of the era; how it became so is a mystery.
3. It states it’s thesis on page 1, and then repeats it two or three times every single page all the way through. There is little meaningful diversity of example, and when there are new examples they seem contrived.
I gained nothing from this at all