The mythological position on this matter was in some ways ambivalent, but in effect tended toward the Augustinian side. This was first of all because, in Elladean language, it put a clear line between cosmos and history. Cosmic religion and spirituality, embodied in the oldest myths, was pure in that it was pristine, fresh from the hands of the gods. But history, leading down to modernity, was a kind of fall, which has meant that, as Augustinians and Niebuhrians would say, all attempts to change society for the better within history meet with only ambiguous and partial success. While it is necessary to try to make the world better, efforts to do so entail the danger of people believing they can act again as if in the mythical purity of cosmic times. It would be better to try to improve conditions through small and pragmatic steps. Those who advocate revolutionary change as though enacting mythologies of apocalypse are not aware, the gnostic mythologists would insist, of how powerful are the primordial forces they are unleashing. Painful experiences of their own had been the mythologists' first teachers of this lesson. The energies of the first creation are not at home in modern civilization; they are like the proverbial bull in a china shop;
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they are likely to run out of control and work as much harm as good. Thus Jung remarked, "If Communism, for instance, refers to Engels, Marx, Lenin, and so on as the 'fathers' of the movement, it does not know that it is reviving an archetypal order of society that existed even in primitive times, thereby explaining, incidentally, the
'religious' and 'numinous' (i.e. fanatical) character of Communism." 33
Like all believers in original sin, the mythologists would say in effect that salvation must be first and foremost individual, a personal act of divine grace, not merely engineered through social reform. On these grounds too they would favor the gnostic over the apocalyptic use of myth, for mythological "contemplation" is the first step to individuation or personal salvation. Gnostic salvation for the ancients was individual liberation from the stream of historical time in a suffering world back to the our true home, the timeless halls of light. The best hope for society is that enough persons would be sufficiently interested in the inner quest to forego outward greediness, and that nostalgia for Eden might lead one to make this world more of a paradise for the sake of its recollection.
So it was that while all three of the mythologists dabbled at least ideologically in political mythology, even on occasion romanticizing its apocalyptic expression, finally for them myth came to be internalized as a means of cohesion with one's true self rather than with soil and social movements. One could even make bold to say that, in the end and only after some missteps, the three mythologists managed to save what was best in volkish mythology and its romantic roots from fatal contamination with unsavory politics, and redirected those dangerous energies to make of them an inward therapeutic, even as early Christianity allegedly translated disappointed apocalyptic expectations into otherworldly salvation. Let us now turn to the mythologists themselves for confirmation, or disconfirmation, of such an idea.
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2—
Carl Gustav Jung and Wotan's Return
Boy and Man
The psychology of C. G. Jung rests on psychic biography. Biography in this case means the narrative of the subject's inner life, above all as it is expressed in dreams and fantasies. For from the Jungian perspective, the real life of an individual, as of the world, is inward. So it was, at least, that Jung himself saw his own work, which is profoundly autobiographical in its genesis. From the Jungian perspective, real life is not, on the profoundest level, one's worldly life of homes, marriages, or jobs, but is the flow of a mighty underground river to which life's surface phenomena are but reflections or diversions. Politics as such are the least of concerns to the god of this river, yet the river is the ultimate source of all that happens in politics, as in everything else. Seen or unseen, the underground river of the unconscious makes occur what occurs.
If there is anything that Jung's eightyseven years teach us, it is that projecting the passions of the gross political realm onto the psyche, or conversely allowing the psyche to adventure into the realm of outward
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politics armed only with its archetypes, is bound to be disastrous. Better to let the psyche blossom in its own way in its own internal soil and under its own sun, and keep politics plain and low to the ground, as they were in Jung's native Switzerland. Times there were when Jung let the borders between politics and psyche fray more than he should have. But in the end he seems to have learned that only the most rigorous separation between soul and state is safe for real people. If the kind of energy and archetypal symbolism that go into making up the psyche were allowed into political affairs, and one tried to make the outer world work like the affairs of dreams and myths, the results would be as disastrous as if fish tried to live on land, or birds in the depths of the sea. Some birds can of course dive, and fish leap briefly into the air, but such excursions are appropriate only for a short nourishing moment, not as a way of life.
Statecraft ought therefore to be kept at a minimalist, pragmatic level in order to let souls be souls in their own free way. Nonetheless, the maintenance of religious and mythological tradition is important in societies, for these are the treasure houses of resources in story and symbol that souls need to complete themselves. Moreover, as souls go about their own business of finding psychic completeness they may discover themselves, as it were inadvertently, making history.
Thus it is not easy to keep psyches out of politics in Jungian thought, for according to this school psyches ultimately create the world, and the history, in which politics happen. Compared to the psyche, the outer realm is a pale reality, only a screen on which to project the trailings of the soul's inner weather, its turbulence and light.
One must learn to see and let be. Here Jung differed from his sometimes mentor, Sigmund Freud. In the terms of Jung's own system, Freud was an extravert, who saw the outer world as the hard, solid "reality principle" against which one batted one's head in vain. "Maturity" meant to accept it and deeply discount all religious and other systems that would cast specious illusion over the adamantine actuality. But for Jung, myth and religion were flesh and bones of what was real because they were integral to the psyche, and the psyche was in the last analysis the only reality we can know. Looking outward, we see—or make—a soft and shifting "reality" put there by the psyche.
By the logic of his worldview, Freud was basically a pessimist about history and human civilization; they were not so much positive
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goods as desperate stratagems to contain with acceptable limits the powerful irrational energies of the libido, the essentially sexual inner self, yearning to break free and express itself in all ways at once. 1 Over that volcano civilization and the history made by its measures are necessary but repressive caps, and the repressed is seething beneath the polite veneer. Indeed, the legerdemain of politicians could draw as much from what was beneath the lid as cover over the boiling pot. The position of Freud's anthropological disciple, Géza Róheim, has been described in this manner: