“The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History” by Mircea Eliade

Eliade is an excellent excerpter. Turning (arbitrarily) to page 79:

The Vedic altar, to employ Paul Mus’ formula, is time materialized. "That fire-altar also is the Year, — the nights are its enclosing stones, and there are three hundred and sixty of these, because there are three hundred and sixty nights of the year; and the days are its yagushmati bricks, for there are three hundred and sixty of these, and three hundred and sixty days of the year".

Though I chose this passage randomly, it happens to be quite essential, to me. Four days before I read it, I wrote:

360°

"Once a year, the earth travels around the sun. A year has 365 days. A circle has 360°. Something’s wrong here. Either a year should have 360 days, or a circle should have 365°," Rudolph opined.

Another "coincidence" was the timing of this book. I borrowed it a year or so ago from my friend Ann Gross, never expecting to actually read it. Last year, I impulsively began it, three days after Rosh Hashanah. At High Holy Day services, I wondered: "Why do I go to these celebrations every year? They mean nothing to me." As fate would have it, The Myth of the Eternal Return is a great defense of New Year’s rituals, throughout ancient cultures. This is because… well, let Eliade speak:

This need for a periodic regeneration seems to us of considerable significance in itself. Yet the examples that we shall presently adduce will show us something even more important, namely, that a periodic regeneration of time presupposes, in more or less explicit form — and especially in the historical civilizations — a new Creation, that is, a repetition of the cosmogonic act.

Rosh Hashanah is a way of meeting God, going back to the beginning of time, and creating the universe again, with the Divinity! If we don’t do this, we are trapped by history, or rather by what Eliade calls "The Terror of History." (This book is published in 1949, four years after the Holocaust. Our author is searching for a way to see the world without constantly colliding with mountains of corpses.)