Sacred Conquest: From Chaos To Cosmos

Settlement in a new, unknown, uncultivated country is equivalent to an act of creation. When the Scandinavian colonists took possession of Iceland, Landnama, and began to cultivate it, they regarded this act neither as an original undertaking nor as human and profane work. Their enterprise was for them only the repetition of a primordial act: the transformation of chaos into cosmos by the divine act of Creation. By cultivating the desert soil, they in fact repeated the act of the gods, who organized chaos by giving it forms and norms. Better still, a territorial conquest does not become real until after—more precisely, through—the ritual of taking possession, which is only a copy of the primordial act of the Creation of the World. 

In Vedic India the erection of an alter dedicated to Agni constituted legal taking possession of a territory. “One settles (avasyati) when he builds the garhapatya, and whoever are builders of fire-alters are ‘settled’ (avasitah),” says the Satapatha Brahmana. But the erection of the alter dedicated to Agni is merely the microcosmic imitation of the Creation. Furthermore, any sacrifice is, in turn, the repetition of the act of Creation, as Indian texts explicitly state. It was in the name of Jesus Christ that the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores took possession of the Islands and continents that they discovered and conquered. The setting up of the Cross was equivalent to a justification and to the consecration of the new country, to a “new birth,” thus repeating baptism (act of Creation). In their turn the English navigators took possession of conquered countries in the name of the King of England, new Cosmocrator.

The importance of the Vedic, Scandinavian, or Roman ceremonials will appear more clearly when we devote a separate examination to the meaning of the repetition of the Creation, the pre-eminently divine act. For the moment, let us keep one fact in view: every territory occupied for the purpose of being inhabited or utilized as Lebensraum is first of all a transformation from chaos into cosmos; that is, through the effect of a ritual it is given a “form” which makes it become real. Evidently, for the archaic mentality, reality manifests itself as force, effectiveness, and duration. Hence the outstanding reality is the sacred; for only the sacred isin an absolute fashion, acts effectively, creates things and makes them endure. The innumerable gestures of consecration—of tracts and territories, of objects, of men, etc.—reveal the primitive’s obsession with the real, his thirst for being. 

-excerpted from “Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History” (1954) by Mircea Eliade