Eliade was a kindly and conscientious teacher, at his best in a small seminar of highly motivated docents. I recall engrossing discussion of such fascinating topics as shamanism and initiation rites. His
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luminous books taught that myths were from out of illud tempus—that time, the other timeless time when the gods were strong and made the world, and when the primordial "gestures" of heroes set the patterns for what is still sacred in our fallen "profane" world. Few rumors had as yet arisen concerning the aging professor's relation to the profascist and antiSemitic Iron Guard in his native Romania thirty years before, and I recall remarkably little discussion of concrete political implications of his concept of history of religions, despite the intensely political nature of the sixties decade. It was as though Eliade's world was a place of welcome escape from the turmoil all around.
The third mythologist, Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), was American born and bred. He was of Irish Catholic background, and a natural rebel who early began to make his own way in religion and life. But he ended up an academic, teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in suburban New York. On the mythological front, he early made his mark with The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), a tendentious if brilliant and sometimes magical study of the hero myth in all its varieties and commonalities; it was followed by a fourvolume series on myths, The Masks of God. Fundamentally Jungian in temperament and approach, Campbell was for a time also under Freudian influence, chiefly by way of Géza Róheim, the psychoanalytic anthropologist. A widely traveled lecturer as well as a popular writer, Campbell acquired a large following, above all from the posthumously aired series of television interviews with Bill Moyers. The response to that series of six interviews was remarkable. It seemed as though the world was waiting for someone to tell stories that undercut the modern narratives of urbanized meaninglessness and despair, and yet at the same time reinforced the worth modern times put on heroic individual achievement and realization of selfhood. But questions were also asked about how much of the mythic meaning was Campbell and how much was in the myths themselves, and what a world of Campbellite heroes would really be like. For Campbell, the mythic hero was a timeless model of an original ideal humanity that could be set against modernity's fall into ambiguity.
For Jung, Eliade, and Campbell, mythology was nothing less than a grand, ultimate source for the "timeless truth" undertow against the modern tide. Even older and more universal than the great religions, than Trappist monasteries or Huxley's "perennial philosophy," myth seemed a true voice of the primordial and eternal world, the ultimate
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nonmodern pole of human experience. Then, at least in the eyes of the exemplary mythologists and their docents, the human psyche was fresher and purer, and timeless truth could be hidden in its stories. Yet the mythologists, essentially both academics and curés of the soul, were in an ambivalent posture between the primordial world and modernity. They were not dropout Beats or monks, but professors and physicians, inside the modernist camp, credentialed by its most characteristic institution, the modern university. For them, in the end, myth had to become mythology to be useful; it had to be studied and analyzed, and from it extracted what was universal and as applicable today as ever. This was tricky, for in fact myth in its original packaging is only particular and one dimensional. It is always a myth of a particular tribe or people, originating from some particular time in history, full of allusions to matters that would be best known to people of that time and place. Moreover, except in later literary versions ancient or modern, myths do not usually spell out the moral at the end. The reason why it is told, what it is about, must simply be known, perhaps without words.
Jung, Eliade, and Campbell, however, spent countless words in the telling both of the stories and the meanings. Like the nineteenthcentury romantics, whose world of the spirit was their true home, they believed first and final truth to be located in the Distant and the Past, or in the depths of the self. The return to the supposed world of mythology was a return really to the premodern world as envisioned by the modern world. Mythology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was grounded on the modern world's fantasy of the premodern. For the mythologists, as for their romanticist progenitors, the mythological revival meant spirituality that was close to nature and the soil, that was symbol based, that expressed itself in accounts of heroes and other archetypes rather than individual figures. It was the world of Plato's cave, and the shadows on the wall were cast by the pure light of primordial dawn. The mythologists' myths were myths selected and related to fit modern need.
This is not unusual; religion reconstructs itself in every generation and must. The question is, what were the needs of the modern world understood to be? It is significant that in their own mythological reconstruction of religion, these three, especially Carl Jung, paid particular attention to ancient Gnosticism; and that a recent literary critic has provocatively argued that modern America, which by far contained
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the three mythologists' largest and most enthusiastic audiences, is fundamentally gnostic in spiritual style. We will now turn to the matter of gnosticism in the modern world, in this writer's view a touchstone for interpretation of the modern mythological vogue and much else as well.
Modern Gnosticism
The answer to the "needs of the modern world" question was, in mythological eyes, that what the world needed was a wisdom outside itself, for its problems could not be resolved on their own terms. What human wisdom from outside the human present could better be received and applied by modern humans than that contained in myth? It came from elsewhere, yet it did not require the difficult faith of dogmatic, exclusivist religion. It seemed rather, as packaged and interpreted by modern mythologists, to be universal and selfvalidating. This is the kind of wisdom known as gnosticism: a saving wisdom telling a universally important secret, but one which has to be received by one who has undergone right initiation (or perhaps has sufficiently suffered, and has right intent and sincerity), and which has been revealed by the right savior.
Ancient gnosticism was generally part of the Christian movement though related to Neoplatonism, Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, and other activities stirring in the spiritual melting pot of the Hellenistic world. A traveler to marketplaces of ideas like Alexandria or Athens would have heard of the various gnostic schools of teachers like Valentinus, Basilides, or the Ophites, and would also have found related Jewish movements inculcating the sort of mysticism that would eventuate in the Kabbala.
Manichaeanism, commencing in the third century C.E., put gnostictype beliefs on a worldreligion basis.
What were the core beliefs of the ancient Gnostics? Typically, that this world was created by a "demiurge," a lesser god somewhere on the chain of intermediaries between the ultimate Light and material earth, who bungled the job. The true God is pure uncreated light, utterly transcendent and without parts or passions. The inner nature of at least some humans is the same as that of the true God but, owing to the Bungler, the uncreated light is entrapped in our physical envelope. We humans are suffering because we were not made for this world but are caught in it anyway. Salvation releasing us back to the
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light from whence we came is attained through knowledge, or gnosis, of our true origin, nature, and destiny. This knowledge must first be shown to us by a savior or enlightened being, whose revelation then enables us to discover its truth within ourselves; as we shall see, Richard Noll has argued that Carl Jung believed himself to be such a gnostic savior for the modern world.