From Cliche to Archetype 315 been done before. His life is the ceaseless repetition of gestures initiated by others. For archaic or tribal man there was no past, no history. Always present. Today we experience a return to that outlook when technological breakthroughs have become so massive as to create one environment upon another, from telegraph to radio to TV to satellite. These forms give us instant access to all pasts. As for tribal man, there is for us no history. All is present, including the tribal man studied by Eliade. The assumption of cliché as a breakthrough, as a probe into a new dimension, is challenged by Plato. His cave is the first “rag-and-bone shop,” to use Yeats’s phrase, the first archetypal storehouse. The sacralizing of the archetype was the work of civilized man with his literate, historical perspective. Petrarch, “the first modern man,” stood on the border between two worlds: as one student put it, “With one foot firmly planted in the Middle Ages, while with the other he saluted the rising star of the Renaissance.” His Ruins of Rome began the humanist cult of the rag-and-bone shop. The very small part of antiquity accessible to the twelfth-century historian was brought to bear upon the task of the exegesis of scripture. The sacralizing of the archetype, or ancient form, was not characteristic of the pagan world. For that world the words of Eliade describe the role of the archetype: What does living mean for a man who belongs to a traditional culture? Above all, it means living in accordance with extrahuman models, in conformity with archetypes. Hence it means living at the heart of the real since…there is nothing truly real except the archetypes. Living in conformity with the archetypes amounted to respecting the “law,” since the law was only a primordial hierophany, the revelation in illo tempore of the norms of existence, a disclosure by a divinity or a mystical being. And if, through the repetition of paradigmatic gestures and by means of periodic ceremonies, archaic man succeeded, as we have seen, in annulling time, he none the less lived in harmony with the cosmic rhythms; we could even say that he entered into these rhythms (we need only remember how “real” night and day are to him, and the seasons, the cycles of the moon, the solstices). Naturally, the Old Testament repudiated this archetypal world as understood by pagan man. It repudiated all technologies as pagan deities, from the Tower of Babel to the Golden Calf. For Christian culture the scrapping or superannuation of the formulas and rituals and technologies sacred to pagan man became a natural form of behavior; but the door was now wide open for technological innovation in a merely humanist context.