Cyclic Time and Judeo-Christian Historicity

Eliade persuasively argues that Judaism and Christianity have given us westerners a linear, desacralized historicism in which the terror of monstrous time without end threatens to swallow us, the temporal distance from the sacred mythic times which sustain us grows ever greater, and in which only death awaits. Understanding cyclic, sacred time is thus difficult for us - but not impossible. We indeed cannot escape our past, and sacred time is part of that past, surviving with us. Eliade's evaluation of our received condition may be accurate, but even with such conditioning, a grasp (and a life) of sacred time in the sense that Eliade describes it is within the modern Judaeo-Christian westerner's reach. We can still work only that we may dance, as it were.