ABSTRACT
Closing an entry of January 4, 1945, in Mircea Eliade's journal, "transcribed from pages written in the night", he declares: "My mission in the culture of the twentieth century is to rediscover and make alive the pre-Socratic world". Eliade does not end his discussion of "degradation of myths" without elaborating a second and last example of his rule that "the archetype continues to be creative even though it has 'degraded' to lower and lower levels". This sign-off to Traite's section on "degradation of myths", far from actually concluding anything, seems bursting with open-ended suggestiveness, as is punctuated by the use of "etc". in place of a definitively final period. Of the multiple dimensions of his envisioned oeuvre that remained unfulfilled at his death, among the most salient was his ambition to demonstrate fully the rootedness of significant aspects of literary art, including poetry, drama, and narrative fiction, in archaic myths, rituals, and religious traditions.
