The romantic school harbored within itself a further tension between the individual and the political potentials of myth as modern medicine, a cleavage closely related to what we have called apocalyptic and gnostic uses of myth. Should one really undertake a revolutionary rebuilding of the collective, or heal a smattering of individuals plucked out of the spiritual emptiness of the modern world? One can perceive in our mythologists the two eyes of which Campbell spoke. One eye turned to the social role of myth, perhaps envisioning the psychic security of a new organic society and/or the glory of a society based on a newly empowered individualism. The other eye, chastened, recoiling from the dragons that lurked in such dreams, looked back to individual therapy and private life for all practical purposes. While that turning toward inwardness might mean abandoning collective dreams for the sake of the sometimes despised modern individual, it also meant potentially making all the mythologist's clients or students heroes insofar as they enacted myth in their own lives.
While myth may have universal themes, concrete myths are always particular, of particular cultures and times, pointing to the specific form wisdom took in a certain people on a certain soil. Yet the second of François Lyotard's metanarratives of modernity, the unity of knowledge, evokes the universal languages—that is, those of science and social science—by which particular cultures and their particular knowledges can be interpreted universally. To these scholarly tongues the particulars
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are subordinated, for it is the universal that gives power. As we have noted, the modern university was above all the custodian and power dispenser of both of Lyotard's modern metanarratives—progress and the unity of knowledge. Our three mythologists were university people or closely related to university ways of thinking. Archaic myth was undeniably an outsider to the cognitive university world of nineteenthand early and middle twentiethcentury modernity. On the surface at least, myth is that which scientific progress has progressed beyond. From the scientific point of view, myth does not unify knowledge but fragments it into a thousand faces. Myth might be studied, but only as ''mythology," that is, in a way that subordinated it to the metanarratives, treating it as prescientific and bringing to it the tools of the unified knowledge of modern science, social science, and philology.
The three mythologists were enough persons of modernity to profess to do this. As scholars, they took the panoptic privileged position of the modern observer, surveying the world past and present to bring all its myths into their purview, and subordinating them to various kinds of hermeneutics or styles of interpretation. But Jung, Eliade, and Campbell were not able to subject myth simply to the rationalist reductionism of the Victorians. They lived a little too late for that, in a world that seemed far more dangerous and nonrational than Queen Victoria's. Over against their modernity, the mythical world, the world of a cosmos that is alive and harmonizes soul and matter, in which processes of individual transformation obtain, and where heroes go on adventures of ultimate significance, seemed an appealing
"otherness" to set beside the drab world of "mass man."
For by the midtwentieth century when the mythologists were in their prime, talk was rising to high decibels of how science and reason, far from unifying knowledge or humanity, had produced deep levels of alienation: humanity from nature, humanity from its own soul. The problems were becoming visible, but no antidote was at hand. Material progress was still happening, from jumbo jets to the computer revolution, but as the twentieth century advanced, hopes that it would, almost of itself, make human life unequivocally better and happier were clearly fading. It may be, first Jung and then Eliade and Campbell thought, that the archaic peoples whose language was myth had in some ways done it better.
But to make myth accessible to modernity as a remedy, it also had to become sufficiently modern to be heard: it had to be made
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compatible with what was left of the idea of progress, and speak some species of universal tongue. The mythologists sensed the vast saving potential of their archaic material, yet they were also people of their time. They could not simply become archaic, not even to the extent of the noisiest of volkists and nationalists, most of whom were nonacademic. Rather, the mythical empowerment would need to be advanced through the means of modernity, which meant in effect through the metanarratives of progress toward emancipation, and of the unity of knowledge. Whatever the case in archaic times, twentiethcentury myth had to bespeak some kind of progress, individual or social, and become a universal language. It could talk the language of national redemption, or of personal psychotherapy, both familiar themes by midcentury. The mythologists explored both of those options, ending up more with the latter than the former.
The three mythologists lived for the most past before the frank deconstructive fragmentation of postmodernism; they lived in a time when it was still possible to think in terms of a grand theory or an overarching symbol system that could unify the world. But they did live at a late stage of modernism when scientific rationalism had sufficiently broken down that the proffered symbol system could, in fact, be mythical and nonrational, unifying history and experience in terms of the worlds of myth rather than of science or reason. It would be scientific in the sense that it was based on modern comparativist and psychological studies, but its appeal would be to levels of human nature deeper and more powerful than the rational. It would, in a word, say that all myths were one, that behind their thousand faces they had in effect one message, based on the psychic unity of humanity, and proclaimed one intrapsychic path to salvation. This was essentially the point of Jung's archetypes, Eliade's structuralism, and Campbell's one message behind all myths.
What about the myth of myth itself? Whether there was ever such a thing as living primordial myth in the sense the mythologists envisioned it may be questioned. Myth as we know it is always received from an already distant past, literary (even if only oral literature), hence a step away from primal simplicity. To be sure, such myths as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid in classical Greece and Rome, the Kojiki as it became a scripture of Japanese nationalism, or the Arthuriad in Tudor and Victorian England had, officially, broad cultural meaning, but they were hardly truly stories of "the folk." Even
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if widely disseminated in schools and at governmentsponsored rallies, it was not the same. As any schoolboy knows, there are stories one learns in the classroom, and then there are the stories one tells in the playground to one's peers.
"Official" myths like these are inevitably reconstructions from snatches of folklore and legend, artistically put together with an eye for drama and meaning. But the real mythic images of a society, those that are so fresh they are not yet recognized as "myth" or "scripture," are fragmentary, imagistic rather than verbal, emergent, capable of forming many different stories at once—like the "myths" of UFOs in contemporary society, or the different ways in which the Civil War was told in different parts of the United States in the first generation after its end. Eventually perhaps UFOs will resolve into a new gnostic myth of cosmic salvation, as C. G. Jung anticipated, even as the Civil War has gradually, and still imperfectly, become a single myth of national crisis and healing.
It was at this last stage that myths took the form in which they were received by the three mythologists. For them, myth and therapeutic or saving purpose were inseparable because they saw myth only in its "finished" paradigmatic role, and so as something that inevitably came out of the past and calls us back to it, as to an Eliadean illud tempus of primordial power and singleness of heart. A myth, to them, was a story that came from elsewhere but had universal meaning. Its saving power came from the fact that it was not the "official" myth of its environing society, but like a gnostic savior, like Campbell's unofficial Western scripture of the Arthuriad to set against the West's official JudeoChristian Bible, came from realms of gold elsewhere to succour us in our need. But a society's real myths are far less formally constructed even than the "loyal opposition" of recognized alternatives.