{
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  "metadata": {
    "generated": "2026-09-12T06:52:38Z",
    "language": "en",
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  "data": {
  "id": "myth-of-the-eternal-return",
  "title": "The Myth of the Eternal Return",
  "description": {
    "en": "Mircea Eliade's 1949 (English 1954, Princeton University Press) foundational work in the comparative phenomenology of religion. Eliade analyses the cyclical-time cosmologies of archaic cultures — Hindu *yuga*, Mesoamerican *suns*, Norse *Ragnarök*, the antediluvian / post-Flood schema — as expressions of a shared structural pattern: the periodic return of cosmic origins through ritual repetition and mythological narration. The work remains the principal scholarly source for the comparative observation that global cyclical-destruction traditions display deep structural similarities, against which the corpus's reading of these traditions as fragmentary historical memory is positioned."
  },
  "authored_by": [
    "Mircea Eliade"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Comparative Religion",
    "Cyclical Time",
    "Antediluvian",
    "Mythography"
  ],
  "stance": "neutral",
  "source_type": "academic_monograph",
  "publish_date": "1954",
  "source_family": "neo_euhemerism",
  "relation_to_wheel": "scholarly_context",
  "licensing_status": "licensed",
  "follow_url": "https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691182971/the-myth-of-the-eternal-return"
},
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    "self": "/v1/sources/myth-of-the-eternal-return/",
    "canonical_html": "https://www.wheelofheaven.world/sources/myth-of-the-eternal-return/",
    "index": "/v1/sources/",
    "schema": "/v1/schema/source/",
    "traditions": "/v1/sources/traditions/"
  }
}