The mythologists' work was of great value, but we need also to be able to see that living myth, "creative mythology" in Campbell's term, is necessarily scattered, fragmentary, and ambivalent, even as are the stories of the personal dreams to which the mythologists often compared myth. Living myth tells us where we are culturally, but it does not tell us where to go, or what is right and wrong, until it has itself slipped into the past to become, officially or by consensus, received myth. To put it another way, myth is really a meaning category on the part of hearers, not intrinsic in any story in its own right. Myth in this sense is itself a myth.
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However, the mythologists believed that a common myth was possible in the twentieth century, and desperately necessary. They viewed this task differently: Jung saw myth as an analytic tool for understanding and healing both history and the individual. Eliade at first yearned for a modern political and culturecreating myth of national resurrection for his country, but in the end he saw myth as better solace for an exile than ideology for a nation. Campbell wanted myths to have a role in the moral reconstruction of America, but he perceived that there is not just one American myth, though he had his favorites: individualism for the past, space for the future. In the end, all three came to prefer a deeply personal, intrapsychic role for myth over a political career. If myth helped society hold together, that would be because a sufficient number of people had interiorized and made their own myths thrusting in a similar direction: parallel individualism.
Even this upshot, however, is of some political significance. Whether or not myths from out of the past can really provide workable models for contemporary society, they can have certain definable functions.
First, myth is diagnostic. The idealized world of myth can suggest, as it did to the three mythologists, that actual modern society is too given over to onedimensional
"mass man." It is, depending on how one looks it at, too "atomistic" or too collectivized; but in any case the ills of modernity call for the depth and cohesion of an authentic "organic" society, and the heroism of the true individual.
Second, on another level the mythologists are able to remind us that though hopes for a remythologized world may be impractical, the hope itself must be protected, if need be politically. Their own lives and labors tell us that a society needs to be safe for individual myths and dreams. Much is lost if there is no place for the enhanced and enriched individualism of a person who has inwardly taken on a mythic identity, though she or he may be outwardly camouflaged as an ordinary modern person.
What this entails politically, the mythologists seem to say, is a society based on a moderate and benign conservatism, wherein there is some access to tradition, where some honor is given symbols and values from the past, where there is freedom to read mythological books and to undertake private therapy, and the state has no heavyhanded mythological agenda of its own.
Third, the mythologists have found a way to make values and feelings very close to those of religion accessible to many at least
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partially secularized people. These persons are seekers who could accept the symbols and dramas of traditional religious lore as significant mythology, in Jung, Eliade, and Campbell's sense and from them as modern "wise men," but who would have more difficulty with the dogma of institutionalized religion. In them the spiritual quest is as alive as ever, but the literate, universalizing, and also individualizing language of the mythologists speaks to them better than churches or temples. That is because in the mythologists the question of truth can always be sidestepped; they emphasize instead meaning, and by meaning is denominated that which comes from a universal source but is congruous with one's own dreams and deepest significant fantasies. In a real sense, then, the mythical meanings articulated by the mythologists are subjectively selfvalidating, making irrelevant issues of objective or rational truth in religion. In a semisecularized and rampantly pluralized world in which the hold of objective religious truth is increasingly problematic, but in which religious questions and yearnings are certainly real, mythology is a viable and not ignoble alternative to a stark choice between dogmatic religion and sheer secularism.
What does this leave that is of enduring value?
Much is appealing and profoundly true in the sermons of the mythologists to the modern world. Undoubtedly that world is often alienating and dehumanizing, denying people easy access to the depths of their own souls. Myth, like all great literature, can become universal, transcending particular cultural settings to provide general models of the human predicament and ways out of it. This is true even though the mythologists, in their generalized reverence for their subject, did not always take into account that myth, like everything human, can be of quite varied moral worth: the Aztec myth by which the sun must be fed daily the blood of sacrificial victims, or the Babylonian myth, criticized by feminist scholars, in which Marduk created the world by carving up the body of the female entity Tiamat, are not necessarily to be received on the same level as lovesuffused stories of Krishna or Jesus.
Moreover myth, unlike much later "civilized" literature, has one peculiar characteristic: it deals almost entirely in generic, "archetypal" categories, reducing individuals (and races or peoples) to types and roles, stereotyping them as Hero or Trickster, as Good or Evil. To be sure, mythology teaches us that abstractions are not the solutions to problems, but merely their distancing, and that the real truth is in
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story. This should mean that one must also avoid the pseudoabstraction of story that is merely stereotyping didacticism, as myth can be when it is no more than archetypal. We need also the complex humanism of Thomas Mann.
Here lies the great danger in applying mythic categories to contemporary affairs, above all political. The mythologists were aware of the danger, but not always sufficiently. The problem was not only their occasionally succumbing to dubious political myths, or in thinking of collectives of people from Jews to Storm Troopers in generic "bloc" terms, but also in a more general tendency to think of the modern world in a stereotyping, homogeneous, and pessimistic way—as mass man. They thereby came to peremptorily dismiss the world as hopeless for any kind of salvation but individual, or through some (equally hopeless) corporate reversion to the mythic world in a healthy sense. It was too late for that, and the pseudomythic worlds were far more dangerous than the ailment. But both alternatives left the mythologists political conservatives in effect: the individualsalvation option being politically reactionary by default, the reversionary endeavor reactionary in concrete political terms.
In summation, then, we need to listen to the mythologists in their wisdom, and make the world safe for myth and dream. But we need not expect to be saved by myth.
We ought also to read the signs of the times and extrapolate from them our own myths of the future, enjoying the same freedom as the people of the beginning to decide for ourselves what the best human future would be like.