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The Politics of Myth
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SUNY series, Issues in the Study of Religion
Bryan Rennie, Editor
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The Politics of Myth
A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell
Robert Ellwood
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Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 1999 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Acknowledgment
Portions of this book previously appeared in Robert Ellwood, "Why Are Mythologists Political Reactionaries?" published in Jacob Neusner, ed., Religion and the Social Order: What Kinds of Lessons Does History Teach? © 1994 by the University of South Florida and published by Scholars Press for the University of South Florida, the University of Rochester, and Saint Louis University, and reprinted here by kind permission of Scholars Press, Atlanta.
Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data
Ellwood, Robert S., 1933–
The politics of myth : a study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and
Joseph Campbell / Robert Ellwood.
p. cm. — (SUNY series, issues in the study of religion)
Includes index.
ISBN 0791443051 (hc. : alk. paper). — ISBN 079144306X (pbk.
: alk. paper)
1. Eliade, Mircea, 1907 —Views on politics. 2. Campbell,
Joseph, 1904 —Views on politics. 3. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav),
1875–1961—Views on politics. 4. Mythologists—Attitudes—
History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series.
BL303.5.E44 1999
291.1'3'0922—dc21 9854277
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Preface
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1
1
Myth, Gnosis, and Modernity
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37
Carl Gustav Jung and Wotan's Return
3
79
Mircea Eliade and Nostalgia for the Sacred
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127
Joseph Campbell and the New Quest for the Holy Grail
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171
Conclusion: The Myth of Myth
Notes
179
Index
203
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Preface
Amid the horrors of world war and the exponential expansion of technologies and economies, the midtwentieth century saw also a late modern upsurge of popular and academic interest in mythology. Three persons were primarily associated with this development: the analytic psychologist C. G. Jung, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, and the widely read public mythologist Joseph Campbell. The interest was not merely aesthetic: these interpreters of ancient myth said much to lead their public to believe that a rediscovery of meaning in myth could contribute to solving the personal and social problems of those tumultuous times. At the same time, all three mythologists have at times been associated with the politics of the extreme right, even, according to some charges, with sympathy for fascism and anti
Semitism. The present book refers to these serious accusations, while chiefly endeavoring to extract the political and social philosophy presented explicitly and implicitly in the entire lifework and published corpus of the three persons.
The introductory chapter, "Myth, Gnosis, and Modernity," treats of the nature of "modern" belief in progress and the unity of knowledge. It portrays the mythological movement as, like fascism and communism, representing an extreme case of modernism even as it
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was highly critical of many aspects of it: of materialism, "mass man," and the uprooting of traditional societies. For the modern mythologists could only critique the modern from out of the context of modern sciences, academic institutions, and means of communication. The ambivalence of their "reaction" and their "gnosticism''—
seeking a "hidden" wisdom in the remote past—is sought for, as is the relation of modern mythology to romanticism and German "volkish" thought.
C. G. Jung presents a paradigmatic case of this paradox, for though he was a modern medical doctor he came increasingly to believe that his patients—and the modern world generally—needed to get in touch with the "archetypal" powers that lay beneath its rational surface, powers both individual and collective. It is here that Jung came dangerously close to enthusiasm for the German National Socialist revolution. In the end, though, the political stance of this difficult and sometimes contradictory thinker was closer to Burkean conservatism than to fascism.
The Romanian Mircea Eliade, a brilliant young intellectual in his homeland in the 1930s, and for a time an admirer of its fascist Iron Guard, suffered exile and a radical disjuncture in his life after 1945. Despite the early context, in the end it was the experience of exile that shaped what there was of political thought in Eliade: it gave him the freedom to be nostalgic for the unities of the distant past, while allowing him to see the sacred in the secular of the modern world in diverse places, and to appreciate guardedly the kind of institutions he found in his adopted homeland, the United States.
Joseph Campbell, the only of the three born in America, came to extol the heroic radical individualism he perceived in the American past and its traditions. A student in Germany during the Weimar period, he absorbed the influence of such thinkers and writers of that era as Spengler, Frobenius, and Mann, as well as the psychoanalysts Freud and Jung, with their pessimistic view of the future of civilization as the modern world knew it. Like the other two, while supporting the political right he chiefly saw the saving of the world not in "collective" institutions, but in the transformation of individuals with the help of the power of myth.
The book's conclusion points to the way in which the whole concept of myth which underlay the work of these three mythologists is a modern construct. We can, it will be said, certainly listen to their
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wisdom, but we need not hold that it contains a unique "gnosis" that will save us from the obligation to chart our own human future.
It is important to make clear what the book is and is not about. The Politics of Myth is not primarily an assessment of charges that Jung, Eliade, and Campbell were sympathizers with, and involved in, Nazism, fascism, or antiSemitism. To deal with all the charges that have been made would require booklength studies in themselves, and that is not the task to which I have set myself. Rather, my real purpose is to discuss somewhat more abstractly the political philosophy that seems to emerge from the published writings of the three on mythology; I view the aforementioned inflammatory charges essentially as matters that must be faced and dealt with in the course of proceeding on to the real agenda. Thus I do not claim that my treatment of those issues is exhaustive or final; what I hope to do, at best, is to put the 1930s and 1940s in the context of each man's total life and work, and see where that leads. In the course of this project it will be necessary to confront the difficult and often highly charged issue of asking precisely in what way are such accusations, and evidence, important—as they certainly are—to assessing the overall work, even the overall political philosophy, of any intellectual figure, including Jung, Eliade, and Campbell.