The Politics of Myth: A Study of C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell

159 Pages·1999·0.7 MB·English

by  Robert Ellwood

The Politics of Myth
SUNY series, Issues in the Study of Religion
Bryan Rennie, Editor
The Politics of Myth

A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell

Robert Ellwood

State University of New York Press
Published by 
State University of New York Press, Albany 

© 1999 State University of New York 

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Acknowledgment 
Portions of this book previously appeared in Robert Ellwood, "Why Are Mythologists Political 
Reactionaries?" published in Jacob Neusner, ed., Religion and the Social Order: What Kinds of Lessons 
Does History Teach? © 1994 by the University of South Florida and published by Scholars Press for the 
University of South Florida, the University of Rochester, and Saint Louis University, and reprinted here 
by kind permission of Scholars Press, Atlanta. 

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data 

Ellwood, Robert S., 1933– 
The politics of myth : a study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and 
Joseph Campbell / Robert Ellwood. 
p. cm. — (SUNY series, issues in the study of religion) 
Includes index. 
ISBN 0791443051 
(hc. : alk. paper). — ISBN 079144306X 
(pbk. 
: alk. paper) 
1. Eliade, Mircea, 1907— Views on politics. 2. Campbell, Joseph, 1904— Views on politics. 3. Jung, C. G. 
(Carl Gustav), 1875–1961—Views on politics. 4. Mythologists—Attitudes— History—20th century. 
 I. Title. II. Series. 
BL303.5.E44 1999 
291.1'3'0922—dc21  
98‐54277 
CIP
Contents

Preface vii

1
Myth, Gnosis, and Modernity 1

2
Carl Gustav Jung and Wotan's Return 37

3
Mircea Eliade and Nostalgia for the Sacred 79

4
Joseph Campbell and the New Quest for the Holy Grail 127

5
Conclusion: The Myth of Myth 171

Notes 179

Index 203
Preface

Amid the horrors of world war and the exponential expansion of technologies and economies, the
mid-twentieth century saw also a late modern upsurge of popular and academic interest in
mythology. Three persons were primarily associated with this development: the analytic
psychologist C. G. Jung, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, and the widely read public
mythologist Joseph Campbell. The interest was not merely aesthetic: these interpreters of ancient
myth said much to lead their public to believe that a rediscovery of meaning in myth could
contribute to solving the personal and social problems of those tumultuous times. At the same
time, all three mythologists have at times been associated with the politics of the extreme right,
even, according to some charges, with sympathy for fascism and anti-Semitism. The present book
refers to these serious accusations, while chiefly endeavoring to extract the political and social
philosophy presented explicitly and implicitly in the entire lifework and published corpus of the
three persons.

The introductory chapter, "Myth, Gnosis, and Modernity," treats of the nature of "modern" belief
in progress and the unity of knowledge. It portrays the mythological movement as, like fascism
and communism, representing an extreme case of modernism even as it was highly critical of
many aspects of it: of materialism, "mass man," and the uprooting of traditional societies. For the
modern mythologists could only critique the modern from out of the context of modern sciences,
academic institutions, and means of communication. The ambivalence of their "reaction" and
their "gnosticism''— seeking a "hidden" wisdom in the remote past—is sought for, as is the
relation of modern mythology to romanticism and German "volkish" thought.

C. G. Jung presents a paradigmatic case of this paradox, for though he was a modern medical
doctor he came increasingly to believe that his patients—and the modern world generally—
needed to get in touch with the "archetypal" powers that lay beneath its rational surface, powers
both individual and collective. It is here that Jung came dangerously close to enthusiasm for the
German National Socialist revolution. In the end, though, the political stance of this difficult and
sometimes contradictory thinker was closer to Burkean conservatism than to fascism.

The Romanian Mircea Eliade, a brilliant young intellectual in his homeland in the 1930s, and for
a time an admirer of its fascist Iron Guard, suffered exile and a radical disjuncture in his life after
1945. Despite the early context, in the end it was the experience of exile that shaped what there
was of political thought in Eliade: it gave him the freedom to be nostalgic for the unities of the
distant past, while allowing him to see the sacred in the secular of the modern world in diverse
places, and to appreciate guardedly the kind of institutions he found in his adopted homeland, the
United States.

Joseph Campbell, the only of the three born in America, came to extol the heroic radical
individualism he perceived in the American past and its traditions. A student in Germany during
the Weimar period, he absorbed the influence of such thinkers and writers of that era as Spengler,
Frobenius, and Mann, as well as the psychoanalysts Freud and Jung, with their pessimistic view
of the future of civilization as the modern world knew it. Like the other two, while supporting the
political right he chiefly saw the saving of the world not in "collective" institutions, but in the
transformation of individuals with the help of the power of myth.

The book's conclusion points to the way in which the whole concept of myth which underlay the
work of these three mythologists is a modern construct. We can, it will be said, certainly listen to
their wisdom, but we need not hold that it contains a unique "gnosis" that will save us from the
obligation to chart our own human future.

It is important to make clear what the book is and is not about. The Politics of Myth is not
primarily an assessment of charges that Jung, Eliade, and Campbell were sympathizers with, and
involved in, Nazism, fascism, or anti-Semitism. To deal with all the charges that have been made
would require book-length studies in themselves, and that is not the task to which I have set
myself. Rather, my real purpose is to discuss somewhat more abstractly the political philosophy
that seems to emerge from the published writings of the three on mythology; I view the
aforementioned inflammatory charges essentially as matters that must be faced and dealt with in
the course of proceeding on to the real agenda. Thus I do not claim that my treatment of those
issues is exhaustive or final; what I hope to do, at best, is to put the 1930s and 1940s in the
context of each man's total life and work, and see where that leads. In the course of this project it
will be necessary to confront the difficult and often highly charged issue of asking precisely in
what way are such accusations, and evidence, important—as they certainly are—to assessing the
overall work, even the overall political philosophy, of any intellectual figure, including Jung,
Eliade, and Campbell.

A task like this involves careful definitions of terms. anti-Semitism, for example, cannot be
imputed to one who simply differs theologically with Judaism in the same way that a Catholic
might differ with a Baptist, or a Christian or Jew with a Buddhist. The pejorative label anti-
Semitic is rightly used when it is clear that the feeling of difference extends to Jews as persons as
well as to their supposed beliefs: when Jews appear to be held in some generic sense to be
unchangeably different psychologically and even biologically from others, so that they could
never "fit in" to the rest of a society, and their influence and even mere presence is therefore
destructive to the unity of society. This anti-Semitic way of thinking involves stereotyping in
terms of a generic quality that all Jews, regardless of individual differences, are supposed to have.
Therefore the anti-Semite presumes that his antipathy toward Jews requires words—and
actions—that are directed toward Jews as a whole.

We must acknowledge that it is possible to use terms like fascist, anti-Semitic, or rightist
(especially in the European sense) as though they enabled a blanket condemnation of a person
and all his work, sometimes even when the condemnation is really for other ideological reasons.
Without denying the moral seriousness of the issues raised by such terms, one must still be
prepared to examine honestly the quantitative and qualitative importance of that which evokes the
charges relative to a writer's total corpus. The critic must then come to clarity on just how those
accusatory words may be connected to other aspects of the person's intellectual work. Certainly
there are unities in all of a major thinker's endeavors—deep structures, paradigms, polarities,
values that run through them. A tendency to think in generic terms of peoples, races, religions, or
parties, which as we shall see is undoubtedly the profoundest flaw in mythological thinking,
including that of such modern mythologists as our three, can connect with nascent anti-Semitism,
or the connection may be the other way. A negativity toward Judaism, for example, seen as a
religion of a personal monotheistic deity acting in the history of a particular people, may well
resonate elsewhere in the writer's pages with a general negativity toward divine personality,
toward the notion of history as the defining framework of human experience, toward historical
ways of thinking in general, and toward any sense of religious mission by any particularized
group. But it is important that such intellectual continuities not be just assumed, but—as difficult
as that may be in this case after Auschwitz—assessed freely and fairly on their own terms, not
only by a kind of intellectual guilt by association unless the association is clearly evident. Some
structures, some generic categories, are probably necessary to any intellectual work and can be
found in writing, including writing about Judaism, far removed from anti-Semitism. These are
hard things of which to write and speak; I can only hope that the remainder of this book will
make my meaning in respect to them clear.

For there is no doubt that the three mythologists here under consideration have intellectual roots
in the same spiritual climate as that in which early fascism and sometimes anti-Semitism
flourished: Nietzsche, Sorel, Ortega y Gasset, Spengler, Frobenius, Heidegger, the lesser
Romanian nationalists and German "volkish" writers and, before his courageous rejection of
Nazism and exile, Thomas Mann. Most of these just named were not full-blown partisans of their
respective national fascist parties; some, such as Nietzsche, would have condemned political
fascism as utterly contrary to the heroic individualism for which they stood. So also, by their own
later testimony, did the three mythologists. Yet there is in that climate and the three mythologists
an unmistakable common intellectual tone: anti-modernism and anti-rationalism tinged with
romanticism and existentialism. This subset of modern thought is deeply suspicious of the larger
modern world, as that world was created fundamentally by the Enlightenment (despite, as we
shall see, their embracing of some themes, like nationalism and the purifying revolution idea,
carried over from the Age of Reason's turbulent finale). Above all, the romantic anti-moderns
decried modernity's exaltation of reason, "materialistic" science, "decadent" democracy
dependent on the rootless "mass man'' its leveling fosters.

In contrast, they lauded traditional "rooted" peasant culture, including its articulation in myths
that came not from writers but from "the people," and they no less praised the charismatic heroes
ancient and modern who allegedly personified that culture's supreme values. Above all, one felt
in these writers a distinctive mood of world-weariness, a sense that all has gone gray—and, just
beneath the surface, surging, impatient eagerness for change: for some tremendous spasm,
emotional far more than intellectual, based far more on existential choice than on reason, that
would recharge the world with color and the blood with vitality. Perhaps a new elite, or a new
leader capable of making "great decisions" in the heroic mold of old, would be at the helm.

This flavor was in the air to a remarkable extent in the United States during the ten years or so
after 1945. Any overtly fascist overtones were, needless to say, well disguised in those years after
the great victory over that lost cause. But in a sense it was not so much that the larger anti-modern
intellectual context in which fascism flourished was lost, as that, willingly shedding its bastard
fascist form and redressed in new apparel, it came back to haunt a world weary from the struggle
against fascism. For the root dissatisfactions of the modern mind were far from laid. Reformatted,
wistful versions of Spengler and Nietzsche and Heidegger and the mythological mood suited the
spiritual and intellectual fatigue many felt after the great war and the ideological battles of the
1930s. Traditional religions were on the rise. Purposeless amidst abundance, people felt
"decadent" and alienated from something crucial, which had probably been better known in the
remote past. This spirit also consorted well with the emerging anticommunism of the 1950s, since
Marxism presented itself as quintessential modern and "scientific" politics at the opposite pole
from such reactionary nostalgia; and much in the reactionary mood also fitted well with the anti-
rational discourse of then fashionable existentialism, despite the fact that many existentialists,
especially the French, claimed to be politically left. Above all, nostalgia for lost values provided a
platform for those of both the elite right and the elite left critical of emergent 1950s "mass
culture": the new world of television, the automobile, and suburban tract houses. The 1950s
"Beats" liked Spengler, and the same sort of ideas at least were savored by rightist critics in the
mold of William Buckley, Russell Kirk, and B. I. Bell. It was also around 1950 that the vogue for
Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell began to accelerate in the United States.

In dealing with these matters, as well as what might be called the cumulative political philosophy
of these three figures, much will have to be taken into account. I will plead guilty to the charge
that the three main chapters of this book, one on each of the three figures, cover several domains:
the mythologist's personal and intellectual biography, a consideration of his late modern times, a
summary of his view of myth and its explicit and implicit political ramifications, and here and
there my own critical response. But to my mind this is simply unavoidable. These are complex
persons and issues. None of these strands can be separated out from a study such as this is
intended to be because they are all profoundly interlinked. Whatever they may have thought, the
mythology of the three was not from the perspective of eternity, but as much a product of its
times as any intellectual endeavor, and was interwoven with the subject's own life and political
context. To bring this out is very much the point of this book.

Even the terms that force themselves into a discussion like this may be controversial. For
convenience, I have repeatedly referred to Jung, Eliade, and Campbell as mythologists. Some will
no doubt protest that the three were not really mythologists (or folklorists) in a strict academic
sense. They did little field work, it will be said, or serious textual and philological work on myth;
rather, depending largely on the labors of others, they employed myth—sometimes selectively
and cavalierly—in the service of other agenda: promoting a school of analytic psychology,
establishing a history of religion academic discipline, addressing the spiritual problems of the
day. It will be pointed out that there are other "working" mythologists, including some now active
in the scholarly world, who undoubtedly do not share the politics of Jung, Eliade, or Campbell. I
take the point, but will have to ask that for the purposes of this book we accept the term
mythologist on the grounds of their intense interest in myth and their avid concern for promoting
awareness of it.