Document Type
Paper
Abstract
Compares the use of displacement in time in the plots of Charles Williams’s Descent Into Hell and Mircea Eliade’s novella Nights at Serampore. Both stories involve protagonists interacting with violent events taking place in the past of their presentday location. Williams’s principle of exchange makes Pauline’s experience a joyful and numinous one; Eliade’s story ends more ambiguously, with the participants deriving no spiritual meaning from their experience other than a sense of the illusory nature of what is experienced through the senses. Ellwood goes on to examine real -world stories of similar retrocognitive events and finds recorded examples of both spiritually numinous and ambiguous experiences.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Recommended Citation
Ellwood, Gracia Fay
(1972)
"The Return to the Past in Williams & Eliade,"
Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings: Vol. 1:
Iss.
3, Article 5.
Available at:
https://dc.swosu.edu/mythpro/vol1/iss3/5
