By the late 1950s, Jungian interpretations of myth were ascendant forces in the intellectual and spiritual worlds, even as the regnant
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Freudianism was beginning to fade. The distinguished literary critic Northrop Frye, who read Jung assiduously in the late forties, did much to make "myth analysis" of Shakespeare and other literature an academic vogue. 1 Theologians like Victor White ( God and the Unconscious, 1952) and David Cox ( Jung and St. Paul, 1959) took Jungian ideas seriously in relating Christianity to contemporary consciousness.
Nor was regard for Jung limited to academic circles. Time magazine, in 1952, did a story on the sage of Zurich that presented him as "not only the most famous of living psychiatrists," but also as "one of the few practitioners of the craft who admit that man has a soul." Jung was "an unabashed user of the world 'spiritual,''' who held that the "religious instinct is as strong as the sexual," though the news magazine did acknowledge that Jung was odd, in a perhaps lovable though perhaps also slightly disturbing way: "His home is filled with strange Asiatic sculptures. He wears a curious ring, ornamented with an ancient effigy of a snake, the bearer of light in the preChristian Gnostic cult." 2
This piece, and the general tendency to adulate Jung as one of the world's wise men in the fifties and after, was much in contrast with a notorious article only three years before in the Saturday Review of Literature. Robert Hillyer's "Treason's Strange Fruit" was mainly a protest against the awarding of the Bollingen Prize by the Library of Congress to Ezra Pound for his 1948 Pisan Cantos. Hillyer's impassioned essay raised the matter of Pound's wellknown antiSemitism and apologetics for Mussolini, but also pondered the curious fact that this prestigious American prize was named after Carl Jung's home in Switzerland, Bollingen.
The reason was that the award was funded by the Bollingen Foundation of New York, which also happened to be the sponsor of the Pantheon Press, Jung's major American publisher. Joseph Campbell was editor of the Bollingen Series of Pantheon books on mythology and comparative religion. All these Bollingen works were offered ultimately by grace of the wealthy Paul Mellon, son of Andrew Mellon, Twentiesera Secretary of the Treasury. Paul Mellon's first wife had been a patient of Jung's, and Paul was dedicated to the Swiss doctor's name and fame.
But Hillyer, unimpressed, remarked caustically that it was appropriate to give Pound a prize with a Jungian name, given his perception that they were two of a kind;
what was shocking was that the award was granted by an American committee. Hillyer went on to
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claim that Jung was hardly less proAxis than Pound, citing a number of sayings by the former, not all in context, to support the notion that "for a time Dr Jung's admiration for Hitler was warm," and that this enthusiasm also included "racism in general, the superman, antiSemitism, and a weird metaphysics embracing occultism, alchemy; and the worship of Wotan." The article provoked a barrage of letters to the editor, largely but not entirely in defense of Jung. 3
Quite interesting also was Hillyer's mention of a new "literary cult to whom T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are gods." Jung presumably was virtually a third member of what would then have become a divine trinity. This was the "cult" of the "New Criticism" which, in profound reaction against the brutal ideological wars of thirties and forties literary discourse, sought to see only what was in a poetic or fictional text itself, in its own texture of mood, image, and internal allusion. It deliberately detached the printed page from social and doctrinal context. The imagist Pound and the nostalgic Eliot (who had been a member of the controversial Bollingen Prize committee, and whose political and social views have also not gone unquestioned), both considered consummate craftsmen on the level of words and sentences, fitted into the New Criticism canon well despite their baggage of ideas unsavory to holdover Depressionera liberals. Jung, or works influenced by him like Joseph Campbell's 1949
book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, were then able to make modern poets speak the "timeless truth'' of archetype and myth. In the immediate postwar period Jung and the New Criticism were only parts of a larger mood of selective nostalgia for times and values, including forms of spirituality, out of ages past before the disastrous upheavals of the twentieth century: one also recalls Aldous Huxley's perennial philosophy, the pilgrimage of Thomas Merton to his Trappist monastery, and Zen. Moreover, after 1945 the Nazis and fascists had been replaced by another enemy, communism. All lovers of traditional things, though they might have equivocated before the halfarchaic, half modern world of fascism, could freely hate this foe with singleness of heart.
The fifties were only an anticipation of the heady countercultural atmosphere of the sixties. Then Jung and the mythological mood definitely won out, over both Freud and the pragmatic style of modernism that saw progress measured by elongated freeways and better bombers, in the decade's flourishing countercultural circles. But that triumph required a curious movement of myth, archaism, and
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Jungianism from political right to left in its perceived place in the intellectual spectrum, leaving behind people like Eliot and Campbell. In those days when, in the image of a popular song, magic was afoot, revolutionaries even more than reactionaries were likely to dream of earlier times when myths were strong. According to a 1967
Time essay on the "New Left" of those days, the radicals wanted to repeal "bigness"—the mark of modernity—and yearned for small, selfcontained idyllic villages of such nineteenthcentury visionaries as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen—"New Harmony computerized." This would be ''the totally beautiful society," and the article categorized the movement as really "not political but religious." 4 Extremes of consciousness met, and found common ground in opposing what passed for modernity.
Talk of archetypes and return to the archaic world seemed to fit when people dressed like figments of myth or dream, and wanted to establish communes where they could live close to the earth.
It was during the sixties that I had the privilege of studying the history of religion with the second of the three mythologists under consideration in this book, Mircea Eliade (1907–1986). The Romanianborn scholar came to my attention in 1962, when I was a Marine chaplain stationed on Okinawa. Okinawa and Japan had been my first experience of a nonWestern culture, and I had naturally been at pains to come to an understanding of the relation between Western religion and the Shinto and Buddhism I saw around me. I could not help but believe that some indefinable spiritual presence lingered in the lovely sylvan shrines of Shinto, or that there was more than mere atmospherics in the great peace that filled temples of the Buddha. One day I came across a review of one of Eliade's books. Something about the account led me to believe it might help. I ordered the slim volume, read it, and suddenly the significance of a wholly new way of looking at religion rose into consciousness: not theological, but in terms of its phenomenological structures, its organization of sacred space and time, its use of myth as models of how things were done in the ultimate sacred time of origins. It was one of those books that make one think, "This was really true all the time, but I didn't realize it until now." Soon I had left the chaplaincy and enrolled as a graduate student under Mircea Eliade at the University of Chicago Divinity School.