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According to romantic mythology, myths were not the products of individual poets or philosophers but of "the people." They presented a deep wisdom, based on experiences of nature and the cosmos, and of human feeling often conflated with nature, that in humanity's earliest stage of development could only be communicated in stories. Myth instilled a sense of wonder and an almost indefinable kind of insight, like mystical experience. In the end its exaltations transcended the individual, and even the dualism of the human and the natural. 21
The "folk psychology" of Adolf Bastian and Wilhelm Wundt postulated that collective folk wisdom adhered in all distinctive, "rooted" peoples. The idea of
"rootedness," suggesting the superior worth and wisdom of peasant agricultural peoples who lived generation after generation on the same soil, was important and was to have a baleful influence. Different folk, according to Bastian and Wundt, have diverse national or cultural ways of thinking, expressed in national myths. 22 A community is more than a collection of individuals. It has a life of its own, and its products are distinctive both from individual creativity and from those of other nations.
This was believed to be supremely the case among primitive peoples, who at the time were assumed to have only a collective mentality. Pronounced individuals were rarely if ever found among them, although hero figures in myth could singly embody a "people's" characteristics.
One illustration of this sort of romanticism that was politically reactionary, and important to our study, is the German movement known as "volkish thought," familiar to many through its reflection in the operas of Richard Wagner and in the propaganda of the Third Reich. Originally a romantic reaction against the international world of reason, science, and progress adumbrated by the Enlightenment and reinforced by the industrial revolution, volkishness called for Germanic distinctiveness and a simple, closetothesoil way of life.
Here are a few examples. In the 1860s Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, in Land und Leute [Land and People], argued that the German Volk constituted an organic society that could not be separated from the native landscape on which they dwelt. Moreover, this society was to be hierarchical, patterned after medieval feudalism; the commercial, bourgeois tasks, of which Riehl was more suspicious, were to be managed by craft guilds fashioned on medieval lines. To be sure, the former exploitative relation of lord and peasant, or master and apprentice,
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could be improved upon; Riehl admired the idealistic British industrialist Robert Owen for his experimental enterprise at New Lanark, in which that capitalist cared for the welfare of his family of workers in the manner of a kindly patriarch. Workers, in turn, were not to be the dehumanized automatons of the modern factory, but creative individuals rooted in the Volk like the artisan of old.
The shapeless proletariat of the upstart modern industrial city, Riehl argued, was unstable, removed from the soil, antivolkish and almost beyond redemption. That class could only be repressed if not destroyed. The rootless urban mass included not only the wandering jobseeking worker pulled away from soil, kin, and native village, but also such products of modernity as the journalist and the ideologist who argued against the ancient ways of the Volk. Jews were particularly to be found in this group, which had to be extirpated before healthy volkish life could be recovered. 23
The establishment of the German empire in 1871 gave a boost to volkish thought, both because it was a triumph of longheld dreams of German patriots, and also as a consequence of reaction against the disappointingly unromantic, bureaucratic, commercial nature of Bismarck's imperial state. There were those who yearned for something more, something medieval, oriented chiefly to rural peasant life, and at the same time deeply spiritual. As volkish motifs developed, these spiritual yearnings found voice in efforts to isolate a distinctive German religion apart from the universalistic aspects of Christianity and its Judaic roots. Volkish writers like Julius Langbehn (1851–1907), before his ultimate conversion to Roman Catholicism, embraced Swedenborgian and other doctrines of the theosophical type. Emanuel Swedenborg appealed to Langbehn particularly because of his belief that societies and the world as a whole constituted real organisms, while the individual reflected the living universe within.
Meister Eckhart, the great medieval German mystic in the neoplatonic tradition who spoke of a gnostic kind of idea of "God above God," was viewed by radical Germanic religionists as a representative of a deeper perspective than that of the JudeoChristian scriptures. Indeed, in their eyes, all authentic Germanic mystics, imbibing the pure volkish spirit and living close to nature and the common people, like the gnostics of old dwelling on a plane far above that of the literalist and legalist, were attuned to a direct and intuitive realization of the oneness of being. 24
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Spirit, Geist, was an important idea. It was embodied not only in the world of ancient myth but also in a current figure like Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was interpreted by German volkish writers like Karl Joel as a supreme embodiment of Geist or spirit. No less significantly; his doctrine of eternal recurrence undercut as profoundly as any could modern notions of progress as eternally or eschatologically significant. 25 The deeply antiChristian character of Nietzschean thought was also seminal. For Nietzsche as for his sometime friend, the brilliant recreator of myth on the operatic stage Richard Wagner, myth was the distinctive archaic medium of communication, the true voice of Geist and Volk. So well was the job done that the mere mention of Germanic myth all too easily now suggests the entire world of nineteenthcentury, antimodern, volkish values. 26
Such sentiments, at their height in the century roughly from 1850 to 1950, were by no means limited to the Germanic world. Everywhere, amid the dramatic scientific, technological, and political changes of that era, sensitive souls, Januslike, looked forward and backward, forward to the vistas of progress without end promised by modernity, then, seized with anxiety, back to the spiritual comforts of mysticism, medievalism, nationalism, and myth. One need think only of Slavophilism in Russia, Shinto nationalism in Japan, the Hindu renaissance in India, the "Celtic twilight" mystique of Yeats and others in Ireland, and the combined Arthurian cult of chivalry, empire, and the English gentleman in Britain. 27 In England the late Victorian and Edwardian periods to which we are chiefly referring were also the high point for the cultural influence of theosophy and Christian mysticism in the spirit of Evelyn Underhill. In the United States, it was the heyday of the schoolbook apotheoses of such heroes as Columbus and Washington, and of a glorification of the westwardmarching frontier that gave little more consideration to the aborigines behind that frontier than any Germanic quest for lebensraum. In most of these and many other examples, one finds a rediscovery of founding myths and national heroes, an idealization of rural "rootedness" and peasant or pioneer life, an exaltation of feudal hierarchies and values, and a sense that the nation is not just a political entity but a spiritual reality as well. Some of these patriotic mysticisms are now in better odor than others. Some were certainly brought into the service of national independence movements and democratic reform in the progressive era ("make the nation truly worthy of its heroes") as well as of reactionary