Even the terms that force themselves into a discussion like this may be controversial. For convenience, I have repeatedly referred to Jung, Eliade, and Campbell as mythologists. Some will no doubt protest that the three were not really mythologists (or folklorists) in a strict academic sense. They did little field work, it will be said, or serious textual and philological work on myth; rather, depending largely on the labors of others, they employed myth—sometimes selectively and cavalierly—in the service of other agenda: promoting a school of analytic psychology, establishing a history of religion academic discipline, addressing the spiritual problems of the day. It will be pointed out that there are other "working" mythologists, including some now active in the scholarly world, who undoubtedly do not
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share the politics of Jung, Eliade, or Campbell. I take the point, but will have to ask that for the purposes of this book we accept the term mythologist on the grounds of their intense interest in myth and their avid concern for promoting awareness of it.
For a time I thought of labeling the three reactionaries. Even "conservative" did not seem strong enough. Like its antonym liberal, the word conservative is often slippery in meaning, and has had somewhat different connotations in Europe and America. Furthermore, the surface meaning of just keeping things as they are hardly does justice to the radical overtones, as over against their contemporary world, of some of the visions involved.
Reactionary is also not quite right, if it implies merely a Colonel Blimp sort of yearning for days that are no more, or a Bourbonlike passion to recover lost aristocratic privileges. Yet all three men did in fact want to draw wisdom from wells sunk deep in pasts they deemed preferable in crucial human respects to the present. I do not say they wanted simply to return to those pasts, for they were well aware that was not possible, or even desirable. They were also profoundly modern, even if they embraced traditionalism and antimodernism as ideological stances within the modern spectrum. As scholars and intellectually engaged persons, they were also aware that the differentiated consciousness of the modern world had its value. It could even be argued by their partisans that the stance of the modern mythologist, with one foot in each world, archaic and modern, was the ideal. At the same time they knew there was much in modernity to react against, even though in some ways they were more modern than they realized; they knew that one could do worse than look backwards with contemplative if not nostalgic eyes upon cities and centuries well tempered by stories and rites that (ideally) made human society like a great dance, itself integrated smoothly into the dance of the universe.
For them this kind of reaction was an urgently felt ideological and even spiritual cause, which would bring them no economic or social gain, and indeed much obloquy in some quarters, but which they felt entailed a message the world desperately had to hear. The past they evoked was no subject of mere nostalgia, much less of material benefit, but a time when values and spirituality, now almost forgotten, reigned.
Still living and workable pasts were in fact twofold for each of the mythologists. On the one hand, like a lingering earthly paradise an undated primordial golden age when myths were strong and human
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life was meaningful lay shimmering on a distant horizon; on the other hand the mythologists also discerned a more immediate secondary silver age within the last few hundred years, more fallen but also perhaps more accessible, for which they pined: Jung for a medieval harmony of symbol and life before it was fractured by the triple evils of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution; Eliade for the silver years of Romania's nineteenthcentury cultural renaissance; Campbell for an idealized early America of moral virtue and sturdy individualism.
To put it another way, all cast passionate (though not always uncritical) eyes upon the primitive, believing that, largely through the power of myth and ritual, primal humanity was better integrated spiritually and cosmically than moderns, and they also held that enough recent examples obtain to suggest that primal integration can be recovered at least in part, though perhaps only on a individual basis. In their own terms, they were not so much reactionary, then, as integrationist: holding that the mythological past needed to be integrated fully into the subjective lives of modern persons. To ascertain what that meant for the subjectivty out of which political actions flow will be the major theme of this book.
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Myth, Gnosis, and Modernity
The Midcentury Mythic Trinity
Myth, mythology, and the idea of myth have had a remarkable place in the intellectual and spiritual awareness of the twentieth century. Amidst the troubled days and nights of those years have been heard sweet and seductive words from out of the past, not seldom transmitted and interpreted by men widely regarded as living sages.
Tales of creation, of heroes and timeless love fascinated many actors on the stage of a world bound by time and history, by war and cold war. "Myth" took its place in contemporary consciousness alongside expanding economies and genocidal horrors.
To be sure, events of the contemporary drama itself reached nearly mythic proportions in the century's battles of light against darkness, and the introduction of weapons drawing their power from the same awesome energies that light the sun and stars. Myths provided models for the world around, yet at the same time offered avenues of eternal return to simpler primordial ages when the values that rule the world were forged.
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Three "sages" above all were foundational figures of the twentiethcentury mythological revivaclass="underline" C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell. Their work stimulated belief that the recovery of meanings enigmatically encoded in ancient mythologies could do much to heal deep midcentury wounds in both individual and collective psyches. Moreover, the words they transmitted from out of the past resonated with an antimodern counterpoint to the century's giddy devotion to
"progress," with its terrible shadowside of war, devastation, and destructive ideology.
Their teachings in the twentieth century had a role rather like that of gnosticism in antiquity. Both eras confronted dazzling change and baffling contradictions that seemed unmanageable in their world's own terms. Whether in Augustan Rome or modern Europe, democracy all too easily gave way to totalitarianism, technology was as readily used for battle as human comfort, and immense wealth lay alongside abysmal poverty. Faced with a time of rapid changes some accounted progress, yet also surveying suffering too profound to be selfhealing, gnostics past and present sought answers not in the course of outward human events, but in knowledge of the world's beginning, of what lies above and beyond the world, and of the secret places of the human soul. To all this the mythologists spoke, and they acquired large and loyal followings.
The elder of the modern popular mythologists was the Swiss analytic psychologist Carl G. Jung (1875–1961). In his later years, his gentle, whitehaired features suggested a modern master of forgotten wisdom as he prodded a troubled world to look inward through widely read books like Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) or The Undiscovered Self (1958). They inevitably pointed to sicknesses of the contemporary soul that could well be diagnosed and alleviated through recourse to the lore of myth. For have we not all within us, struggling to declare and rightly align themselves, something of the "archetypes" he identified in both myth and modern dream? Far too often, hardly knowing what we are doing, therefore doing it badly and without balance, we and the tormented human world around us act out the parts of the Warrior, the Wizard, the Mother, and the many sinister guises of the Shadow.