There were also those whom modern progress left behind in the byways of rural life and local folklore, and they had their advocates. The mythologists were persons of modern education, really more interested in literary mythology than local folklore. But their sympathies were understandably often with those outside the progressive mainstream, from Native Americans to Romanian peasants.
The ruralrootsversusmodernindustry divide paralleled a more strictly inhouse mythological chasm. Some students of myth, heirs of the Enlightenment, saw the mythical world as quaint and interesting, but long since superseded as a serious intellectual force. Others, including our three mythologists, protested that myth contained a powerful critique of modernity, one to which the world must listen. The divide was clearly between the Enlightenment spirit and romanticism.
Romanticism is as slippery a term as any to define precisely. As a school of thought and literary or artistic expression, it is based on the conviction that what excites the feelings and inspires the imagination is as valid, and even as true, as factual or rational knowledge. Its political expressions have ranged from romantic revolutionary ardor to reaction
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ary dreams of an idealized medieval past. What both have in common is the characteristic romantic sentiment that political truth, like artistic truth, is known less by rational considerations than by its capacity to fire the passions and configure awesome visions of the heavenly city in the imagination. Political truth, along with artistic and spiritual truth, is therefore very apt to be found, at least in its ideal type, in the distant and the past, or the future, for that which is other serves well to charge the visionary imagination of the romantic temperament. Romanticism is not quite modern gnosticism. While it has a feeling for the reception of truth from the distant and the past, unlike the gnostic the romantic does not necessarily have a definite social or intrapsychic message from far away or long ago; sufficient is the sense of wonder evoked by that which is far away and long ago. Pure romantics would be more in tune with the musings of Henry David Thoreau: While the commentators are disputing about the meaning of this word and that, I hear only the resounding of the ancient sea, and put into it all the meaning I am possessed of, the deepest murmurs I can recall, for I do not in the least care where I get my ideas, or what suggests them. 18
The Romantic Roots of Modern Mythology
This is the source from which modern mythology sprang. The three mythologists arrived well after the first and most powerful wave of the romantic movement, but they were heirs of its spirit and, indeed, benefited from being able to receive from it living but mature doctrine, already hardening into partisan positions over against the confident progressive, scientific world of late Victorianism.
The modern revival of interest in myth began in the study of classical Greek and Roman texts, which was foundational to the early modern university. That in itself reminds us that myth in the European mind has never been free from ideological agenda. The medieval and early modern divide was between biblical "truth," and the human and divine worlds of myth "back then" in the classical writers or "out there" in India or elsewhere. Distinguishing myth from accepted belief enabled one to fabricate from myth an "Other" offering context, contrast, and profound corrective to the foreground spiritual patterns. Patristic and medieval religionists set the inferior temper of the pagan gods over against the claims of Christ.
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The renaissance brought a major shift in the politics of myth, one that really laid the foundations of something like Joseph Campbell's view of myth. Unlike the serious Christians of the middle ages, the renaissance humanists who busily revived mythological learning often hardly bothered to conceal their enthusiasm for the robust sensuality and passion of the Greek gods and heroes, and their disdain for the asceticism of the saints except as an occasional subject of pious art. The tension between the sensual and the ascetic impulse was next expressed in the Puritan's inner asceticism versus outer prosperity, and the romantic poet's proverbial inner spiritual abundance versus outer deprivation. The energies generated by tensions like these were among the wellsprings of modernity.
The romantic mythological revival of the nineteenth century, insofar as it held up the romantic/mythological way of thinking as an antithesis to modernity, often continued the Christian/classic conflict by viewing much of the Christian past as antagonist, just as it saw the modern present in the same adversarial role. Both cross and smokestack seemed repressive and hard compared to the simple, joyous and free life promised by pagan myth. Mythology's pilgrimage might nonetheless pause to admire the middle ages, whose art and knightly spirit they often appreciated when presented in the spirit of Sir Walter Scott romanticism. But then the quest drove still deeper into the mists of lost Edens. During the Enlightenment religion as a major unifying cultural reality had steadily disappeared to become either philosophy or superstition. Romanticism, and the romantic view of myth, endeavored to salvage the inner and cultural meaning of religion under other names, as art, as nationalism, as mythology. This whole enterprise very much lived on the three mythologists here under study; Joseph Campbell, for example, was full of praise for both primal and medieval myths. He liked above all the quest for the Holy Grail, while scarcely hiding his dislike of much of Judaism and Christianity. But where he, and others, looked for the best of any religion was not in its preaching or rites, but in its art and stories.
The romantic founders of modern mythology took the quest behind the Renaissance by seeking out not only "classical" Greek and Roman myth, but increasingly myth from Germanic, Asian, and "primitive" sources. They accepted the romantic view of myth of German thinkers like Johann Gottfried von Herder, Friedrich W. J.
Schelling, and the "folk psychology" of Wilhelm Wundt. That position, often
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embraced far too uncritically, insisted that myths stand apart in an entirely different category from other styles of folklore, such as legends, fables, or allegories. Those were stories; myths were collective creations of an entire people, and expressed in story form the basic worldview, and view of human nature, of that people.
It is important to realize that the categorization of myth as different from folklore and fairy tale is modern. It comes out of a modern need to see, in the archaic world, societies unified by common foundational stories believed by all. Unlike mere fables, these stories present a comprehensive cosmogony and model of the social order.
Moderns yearned to believe that their ancestors perceived unity between the human and natural orders, a symbiosis pregnant with symbols and alive with significance—all unlike the painful modern schisms they sensed between the city and nature, or the human and the "dead" cosmos. In this belief in the uniqueness of myth they were influenced by Kant, for whom faith lay in the realm of emotion, not of reason. Faith and knowledge were therefore separate, as they were for Luther, at least as his beliefs were understood in nineteenthcentury interpretations of the great reformer.
Thus faith could have its own nonrational but emotively powerful means of expression: myth. As interpreted by Jan de Vries, the romantic mythologists considered that
"the spiritual power of myth over the human soul is precisely what makes it impossible to see in myth something invented or thought up by poets or philosophers." 19
Myth, now a powerful instrument of romantic consciousness, became a magic potion by which one could again drink of the rejuvenating power of humanity's primal vision. A secondrank representative of this perception, Joseph von Görres (1776–1848) offered this rhapsodic if confused recovery of the first humans admiring the wonders of their cosmos; he placed this scene in India, on the banks of the Ganges and Indus: They looked from the earth upward. There in heaven was the real realm of fire. There was the sun burning continually. There the stars, the planets and the fixed stars both, pierced through the darkness like flames. There the fires which only shine sparsely on earth were burning for ever unconquerable. Then the cult of fire became a cult of stars and the religion became pantheism. . . . And because all the nations were together in this great primordial state, these world views . . . form the inheritance which they bore with them on their long, later journeys. 20