An Eliadian Ode

In Chapter 5, 'Exile and Return', Armstrong seems to describe the desolation exiles feels in very 'Elididan terms'...

"In our own day, we have seen that exile involves far more than a change of address. It is also a spiritual dislocation. Having lost their unique place in the world, exiles can feel cast adrift and lost in a universe that has suddenly become alien. One the fixed point of "home" has gone, there is a fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, people can feel that they are in some sense withering and becoming insubstantial." (Armstrong, 82)

Armstrong seems to be referring to what Eliade called the "axis mundi", the center of the world. In Exile, the Jews had lost their connection to God, their fixed point of worship. They may have felt like the Achilpa, who, if they lost their pole (connection to God), simply laid down, waiting to die. The loss of connection with God, with home, led them to believe that their lives were meaningless now.

It may have been the same with the Jews at the beginning of their exile. Life would seem meaningless without their connection to God. They had been separated with the "center of the World." Like Armstrong states, they had been "spiritually dislocated". Not only had they been exiled from their homes, they felt as if they had been exiled from their connection with God.

It is later described how the exiles rebuilt a relationship with God during the exile, even when they were away from their "axis mundi" in Jerusalem - but the fact still remains that they felt lost at the beginning of the journey. Just as Eliade contends, without a path to the divine, a sacred space planned by God, the Jews may have felt as if their lives were purposeless at that certain point.

Eliade writes that certain Jews believed that "the world was created beginning with Zion" (Eliade 44). Without that beginning, that sacred creation, the exiles would most certainly have felt forlorn, lost, and confused. Holy writings will later contend that God resided with the exiles, creating a new linkage between the Jews and the divine, creating a new sense of purpose in their lives.