ABSTRACT
It was the phenomenologist of religion, Mircea Eliade, who popularized the notion of the "terror of history". He meant the following: archaic communities whose life is strictly regulated by rites, symbols, and magic, the starry sky above and the community rules below, abhor unforeseen change, novelty, hazard, fortuitous events. Western man has always been preoccupied with the course and renewal of history, although since the triumph of the christian worldview which brought with it the linear view of time, history could not be identified with "terror". Modern man manipulates history in various ways, always in the hope of eliminating it, "solving its riddle". These methods are abolition, fragmentation, immanentization, therapy, or re-location in another register, such as marxist dialectics or technological progress. In all these remedial operations the attempt is clearly to exorcise history and its relentlessly renewed terror.
