Founded on the sacred-profane opposition, Eliade's metaphysics had to show what he considered to be the personification of the profane. Eliade was no more orthodox a Platonist when he chose what would assume this role, for he attributed it to history in opposition to the Eternal Return and periodic regeneration of the cosmos by the rites that imitate the initial divine act of creation described by myths:

To understand the reasons for this choice and the importance ascribed it by Eliade, his most private prejudices and his most ambiguous convictions have to be chased out from hiding. For this we shall begin with his conception of time and with the first incoherence relative to it.

Whereas it should have been necessary to distinguish three notions at least (time, historicity, and historicism), Eliade expressly mixes them together. Now, the epistemological and philosophical problems raised by any one of them are not identical upon inspection, even if they are of equal complexity. So it was naive to think of resolving them all at once by subjecting them indiscriminately to a banal metaphysics of time. Let us nevertheless begin with this.