10 On myth and politics

In Robert Ellwood’s careful and balanced review of my Theorizing about Myth (as well as of Bruce Lincoln’s Theorizing Myth), he raises the key question of the political nature of myth. Ellwood shares with Lincoln the conviction that myth is political, as the title of Ellwood’s own recent book, The Politics of Myth, evinces. I part company with both Ellwood and Lincoln on this point. For me, some theories of myth are entirely apolitical. A theory could loosely be labeled political because the theorist held political opinions but tightly be so labeled because the theory itself views myth as a political vehicle. In deeming myth political, Ellwood shifts from one sense of political to another, though recognizing the shift. He considers the political opinions of William Jones, Nietzsche, Dumézil, Eliade, and Campbell but also asks, “to what extent can the political views—and sins—of a mythological scholar … be said to stain all the scholar’s work?” (Ellwood 2001, p. 679).

In my own efforts at organizing the array of theories of myth, I have distinguished between rationalist and romantic approaches. In Work on Myth (1985) Hans Blumenberg makes a similar distinction. Ellwood also uses this distinction but always emphasizes that both rationalists and romantics politicize myth, albeit in different ways: “Let us look again at Segal’s division of myth interpretation into the rationalist and the romantic styles. It is important to realize that both can have baleful consequences as justifications for colonialism and racist nationalism” (Ellwood 2001, p. 680).

The rationalist approach to myth

For rationalists, myth is the wholly “primitive” counterpart to science, which is exclusively modern. Myth and science, more than redundant, are outright incompatible: myth invokes the wills of gods to account for events in the world; science appeals to impersonal processes like meteorology. Because both purport to give direct accounts of events, one cannot stack a mythological account atop a scientific one. The rain god does not set up meteorological processes, as in Deism but, say, collects buckets of water and dumps them on a chosen spot. For rationalists, there can be no “modern myths,” and the phrase is self-contradictory. Any lingering myths are sheer relics, like tails on human babies. For Ellwood as well as for me (see Ellwood 1999, p. 171), the epitome of a rationalist is the Victorian anthropologist E. B. Tylor.

Just what is political about a rationalist approach to myth? According to Ellwood, myths for rationalists “represent premodern, pre-scientific ways of looking at the world that have now been superseded.” Science has “emancipated” us from “the shackles of ignorance, superstition, and despotism.” Progress means not only the replacement of personal explanations of the world by impersonal ones but also the replacement of particularistic explanations by generalizations: “this knowledge that emancipates is found through the generalized, abstract, rational ways of thinking characteristic of science and social science… . [T]he particular is subordinated to the abstract category; … the local submits to the universal” (Ellwood 2001, pp. 680–681).

How fully does this characterization of rationalism fit Tylor? While Tylor clearly associates myth with “primitive” peoples and associates science with moderns, the similarities rather than the differences between myth and science are what grab him. Like science, myth arises from observation and hypothesis. Myth is consummately rational, even if false. “Primitives” concoct myth rather than science only because they take the first explanation at hand: they analogize from human behavior to invent human-like agents to account for events in the world. “Primitives” are uncritical but hardly “superstitious.” Myths “rest upon a broad philosophy of nature, early and crude indeed, but thoughtful, consistent, and quite really and seriously meant” (Tylor 1871, vol. 1, p. 285). “Primitives” harbor the same intellectual curiosity as moderns (see Tylor 1871, vol. 1, pp. 368–369). Not to emotion but “to the human intellect” “may be assigned the origin and first development of myth” (Tylor 1871, vol. 1, p. 284).

For Tylor, myth is as generalizable as science: whenever it rains, the same god has decided to send rain, and for the same reason. Each kind of event in the world may be attributed to a different god with a different myth, but taken collectively, myths offer a uniform account of all physical events. Each culture may have its own “local” mythology, but Tylor’s insistence on a comparative approach “makes it possible to trace in mythology [worldwide] the operation of imaginative processes recurring with the evident regularity of mental law” (Tylor 1871, vol. 1, p. 282). Myths are similar because imagination is tethered to reason. Asks Tylor rhetorically, “What would be popularly [but incorrectly] thought more indefinite and uncontrolled than the products of the imagination, in myths and fables?” (Tylor 1871, vol. 1, p. 18).

Here Tylor anticipates Claude Lévi-Strauss, the grandest twentieth-century reviver of a rationalist approach to myth. Like Tylor, Lévi-Strauss observes that while “it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is likely to happen,” in fact “this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions” (Lévi-Strauss 1955, p. 83). For both Tylor and Lévi-Strauss, the demonstration of uniformity in myth, the seemingly least orderly of artifacts, proves that not only it but also its primitive creators are scrupulously rational. Lévi-Strauss ventures beyond Tylor to argue that mythic thinking is itself scientific, simply the science of the concrete. Abstractions get expressed through the concrete (see Lévi-Strauss 1966, ch. 1).

Ellwood—or Lincoln—could rightly reply that for all Tylor’s respect for myth, it remains for him wholly primitive, inferior to science, incompatible with science, and superseded by science. Tylor may not be contemptuous, but he is patronizing. To fill in a line of his already quoted in part, “to the human intellect in its early childlike state may be assigned the origin and first development of myth” (Tylor 1871, vol. 1, p. 284 [italics added]). Paternalism, it could be argued, provides sufficient “justifications for colonialism and racist nationalism.”

In response, I simply note that for Tylor myth comes close to science, so close that it is not even easy to figure out why it fails to be scientific (see Segal 1999, pp. 7–10). Certainly Tylor does not regard “primitives” as incapable of advancing beyond myth to science. Moreover, since there are no moderns until there is science, it can be only the last generation of “primitives” who create science. Juxtapose Tylor with his anti-rationalist critic Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1926), for whom “primitives” are driven by emotion rather than intellect, are incapable of recognizing even the law of noncontradiction, and use myth not to explain anything but to re-create the fading experience of mystical oneness with the world.

Furthermore, myth for Tylor is hopelessly apolitical in that it is almost entirely about the physical world. Myth explains why it rains, not why marriage exists. The creators of myth are “philosophers,” not kings. Myth is the counterpart to natural science, not to social science.

Some rationalist theorists do tie myth to politics. J. G. Frazer, whom Ellwood, like me, also considers a leading rationalist (see Ellwood 1999, p. 171), parallels intellectual change to political change. Magicians become kings and “gradually rise to wealth and power” (Frazer 1922, p. 104). Priests succeed magicians and themselves become kings, initially merely human but eventually divine, and “no class of the community has benefited so much as kings by this belief in the possible incarnation of a god in human form” (Frazer 1922, p. 105). Frazer even writes of “the great social revolution which thus begins with democracy and ends in despotism” (Frazer 1922, p. 104). At the same time the key activity now is the killing and replacement of the king to ensure the health of the god of vegetation residing in the incumbent. Indeed, the chief event in the king’s reign is his death, which is undertaken for the sake of the community.

The Frazerian Lord Raglan (1936) thus singles out the loss of the throne as the heart of his mythic pattern and pronounces the king heroic exactly because the king dies for the communal good. Myths celebrate the selfless heroism of past kings and inspire emulation. Still, myth for Raglan does not quite justify regicide, only the loss of the throne and subsequent death. For Frazer, the subject matter of myth is the death and rebirth of the god of vegetation. The killing and replacement of the king are a mere means (see Segal 1999, pp. 39–41, 130–134).

The theorist for whom myth would justify ritualistic regicide is Bronislaw Malinowski, but ironically Malinowski scorns the rationalist approach. For Malinowski, “primitives” have myth not in place of science but alongside science: “there is no doubt that even the lowest savage communities have the beginnings of science, however rudimentary” (Malinowski 1954, p. 34). “Primitives” use science, along with magic, both to explain and to control the physical world. They turn to myth when the world proves uncontrollable. Myths about natural phenomena like floods supplement primitive science. They serve no political function. Myths about social phenomena such as class divisions serve the incontestably political function of giving these phenomena, which are anything but unavoidable, a hoary origin and thereby the clout of tradition. But these myths run askew to science and not, as in rationalism, contrary to science.

Among rationalists, the theorist most keenly attuned to myth as political is the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, mentioned by neither Ellwood nor Lincoln. On the one hand Cassirer places myth, or mythic thinking, within his main forms of knowledge—science being another. While he takes unabashedly from Lévy-Bruhl the conception of myth as primitive, as emotional, and as projective, he claims to be breaking with Lévy-Bruhl in asserting that mythic thinking, rather than “prelogical,” has its own brand of logic and in asserting that mythic thinking, rather than inferior to science, is an autonomous brand of knowledge (see Cassirer 1955, p. 21). Myth so characterized can be studied philosophically.

On the other hand Cassirer comes to see myth as not merely primitive but also modern. Now he turns to political myths, notably those of Nazism. Myth here amounts to ideology, and very much fits Lincoln’s provocative definition of all myth as “ideology in narrative form.” Having previously concentrated on sublime, epistemological issues, Cassirer now turns to brute, social scientific ones: how do political myths take and keep hold? Having previously scorned Lévy-Bruhl’s supposed stress on the irrationality of myth, Cassirer now embraces it: “in all critical moments of man’s social life, the rational forces that resist the rise of the old mythical conceptions are no longer sure of themselves. In these moments the time for myth has come again” (Cassirer 1946, p. 280). Tying myth to magic and magic to a desperate effort to control the world—here the social, not the physical, world—Cassirer applies to modern myths Malinowski’s analysis of primitive myths. Modern myths constitute an atavistic revival of, for Cassirer, primitivism.

Yet Cassirer still does not fit Ellwood’s rationalist bill because in deeming political myths irrational, he cuts them off from philosophy. Myth now is anything but a form of knowledge with a distinctive logic to be teased out. The marginalized role left to philosophy is to combat political myths: “It is beyond the power of philosophy to destroy the political myths. A myth … is impervious to rational arguments… . But philosophy can do us another important service. It can make us understand the adversary” (Cassirer 1946, p. 296).

The romantic approach to myth

According to the romantic theorists of myth, myth, rather than merely primitive, is an eternal possession. Nothing can supersede it. Where for rationalists science better serves the explanatory function than does myth, for romantics nothing duplicates the psychological or metaphysical content of myth. Where for rationalists science renders myth at once unnecessary and impossible for moderns, for romantics science and myth run askew, so that moderns can have and indeed must have myth. Where for rationalists the function served by myth may be indispensable, for romantics myth itself is indispensable for the serving of its function. Myth is revelatory. For me, and for Ellwood as well, the exemplars of a romantic approach to myth are C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell. To the three of them Ellwood devotes his Politics of Myth.

As with rationalism, so with romanticism: what is political about this approach to myth? According to Ellwood, romanticism accords every race or nation “its own defining myth or ‘myth cycle’.” “[O]ne finds a rediscovery of founding myths and national heroes, an idealization of rural ‘rootedness’ located in peasants or pioneers, and a sense that the nation is not just a political entity but a spiritual reality as well.” Mythology serves the group, not the individual. This view might seem egalitarian, crediting the mythology of each culture with “still-valid messages from the timeless beginnings of humanity.” But the mythology of one nation can be vaulted over others as that “of a superior people.” Moreover, while some mythologies “were certainly brought into the service of legitimate independence movements and democratic reform,” others strove to revive a nondemocratic, idealized past. And outsiders could be targeted as aliens (Ellwood 2001, pp. 682–683).

Ellwood maintains that Jung, Eliade, and Campbell, while conspicuously modern as academics, “can rightly be labeled anti-modern,” emphasizing as they do “the illness of the modern world, for which they contended myth could serve as sovereign elixir” (Ellwood 2001, p. 681). At the same time Ellwood divides the romantic camp into political activists, of whom the locus classicus is indisputably Georges Sorel, and “contemplatives,” who in “gnostic” fashion sought escape from the flawed everyday world into “a dreamy escapist inner world” (Ellwood 2001, p. 684). Ellwood’s trio falls here.

How well does this characterization of romanticism fit the three? Undeniably, modernity for Jung represents the triumph of rationalism and science over religion and myth, and Jung urges the recovery of myth. But that recovery is not to be at the price of modernity. Jung sees himself as part of the modern world and proudly dubs himself a “scientist” of the mind. Modernity marks progress, not degeneration. The aim is to continue forward, not to go backward. Psychologically, modernity represents the attainment of ego consciousness, or consciousness of the external world. The development of ego consciousness has necessarily required a break with the primordial unconscious. The goal now is to return to the unconscious, but as a means to forging a balance between it and ego consciousness. Modern consciousness is more, not less, advanced than that of “primitives,” who psychologically, as for Tylor intellectually, are childlike: “These considerations tempt us to draw a parallel between the mythological thinking of ancient man and the similar thinking found in children, ‘primitives,’ and in dreams” (Jung 1967, pp. 22–23). Modernity properly involves the withdrawal of primitive projections of gods onto the world.

The Jungian aim is to live in the outer world as well as the inner world—with the two simply kept distinct. The outer world is not evil. It is just not the only world. As the editor of The Gnostic Jung, I would never downplay Jung’s fascination with Gnosticism. But ironically, Jung misinterprets Gnosticism to be seeking, like Jungian psychology, to remain in the outer world rather than to escape from it (see Segal 1992b, pp. 19–33). Because Jungian psychology stays tied to the outer world, it is open to political activism, as books like Jung and Politics and The Political Psyche, both cited by Ellwood, attest.

In The Politics of Myth Ellwood acknowledges some of these points. Commendably, he rejects the one-sided argument of Richard Noll in The Jung Cult (1994) and The Aryan Christ (1997) that Jung’s psychology derives from avowedly nationalistic, neo-pagan, anti-scientific, antisemitic cults that arose at the turn of the century in German-speaking lands (see Ellwood 1999, p. 184 n. 36; Segal 1995). But Ellwood still links Jung to a reactionary impulse and in so doing surveys the evidence of Jung’s antisemitism.

What of the politics of myth? Jung does categorize mythologies along racial and national lines. But he categorizes myths in other ways as well, such as by the dominant archetypes. The fullest myths for him are personal ones, fitting most snugly the unique contour of each person’s unconscious. Far from losing the individual in the group, Jung touts the individual, as Ellwood himself stresses. Primitive mentality, by contrast, is that of the herd.

I characterize Jung’s position on myth as romantic but not reactionary. Myth for romantic Jung is not merely primitive, is not about the physical word, and is not superseded by science. Moderns as well as “primitives” have and maybe must have myths: “Has mankind ever really got away from myths? … [I]f all the world’s traditions were cut off at a single blow, the whole of mythology … would start all over again with the next generation” (Jung 1967, p. 25). Myth is a source of wisdom. But the key to interpreting myth is twentieth-century psychology. Myth and modernity are thus allies, not antagonists.

When, in both his article and his book, Ellwood turns to Eliade, he considers the theorist at least as much as the theory. Unlike Jung, Eliade has frequently been charged with trucking not merely with antisemitic sentiments but with an antisemitic movement, the Iron Guard. Typically, Ellwood, while ever balanced, tends to be charitable. But what of the theory? Eliade fits Ellwood’s reactionary romanticism more readily than Jung does. Eliade vaunts “primitives” over moderns and the sacred past over the profane present. Like a magic carpet, myth functions to carry one back to primordial time and thereby to the gods. Myth is universal and indispensable. “Primitives” are superior to moderns because they recognize their need for myth. Where the myths of “primitives” are public and conscious, those of moderns are private, camouflaged, and even degenerate: “In short, the majority of men ‘without religion’ still hold to pseudo religions and degenerated mythologies” (Eliade 1968, p. 209). Unlike Jung, Eliade favors group myths over individual ones.

Like Jung, Eliade bemoans the one-sided character of moderns and also like Jung attributes that one-sidedness to the rise of science and the demise of religion. But Eliade is more extreme. Where Jung seeks to reconcile myth with modernity, Eliade seeks to topple modernity in the name of myth. Where Jung can reconcile myth with modernity because myth, read symbolically, is not about the outer world and so is not in conflict with science, Eliade cannot reconcile myth with modernity because he reads myth literally. Instead, he argues for the continuing presence of myth amid modernity, and as more than a Tylorean relic, or “survival.” But myth and modernity remain at odds. If the sacred still exists in the modern profane, it does so paradoxically and defiantly. In his book Ellwood strikingly suggests that Eliade actually embraces modernity in celebrating new manifestations of the sacred (see Ellwood 1999, pp. 98, 119–120). But surely even those manifestations still exist paradoxically in modernity. Furthermore, Eliade’s relentless opposition to the scientific study of religion evinces a rejection of modernity that is antithetical to Jung’s participation in it. In short, Eliade is more reactionary for me than for Ellwood. Eliade’s position is more dualistic and therefore more gnostic-like than Jung’s, but in finding the sacred imbedded in the profane and not merely trapped in it, Eliade’s dualism is less radical than the gnostic variety.

What of the politics of myth? Like Jung, Eliade clearly categorizes mythologies by nations, but also like Jung, he characterizes myths in other ways as well, such as by religions. For Eliade, as for Malinowski, myth traces back the origin of present-day social phenomena and in that sense bolsters them. Myth thus brings the sacred forward to the present. But surely myth also takes one out of the present and back to the past. Eliade thus interprets political hopes for future paradise, including that of staunchly atheistic Marxism, as really a hoped-for return to a pre-political, prelapsarian past (see Eliade 1968, pp. 206–207).

When, in his book, Ellwood turns to Campbell, he again accords at least as much attention to the theorist as to the theory. In his article he notes that despite my having documented elsewhere Campbell’s antisemitism (see Segal 1992a), in my book I sidestep the issue. I do so because, despite Ellwood’s efforts, I think it hard to tie Campbell’s or other theorists’ political positions to their positions on myth. In my book on Campbell (see Segal 1997) I trace Campbell’s changing assessments of peoples. Over the course of his writings he variously touts the East over the West, the West over the East, hunters over farmers, farmers over hunters, “primitives” over moderns, and moderns over “primitives.” He takes no consistent line.

But what of Campbell’s theory? For all his exasperatingly fluctuating views of the origin and function of myth (see Segal 1997, chs. 10–11), he consistently maintains that all myth preaches a world-affirming rather than world-rejecting message. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces the protagonist, having ventured forth to a strange, divine world, returns home to discover that the divine world had been there all along, if only one had had eyes to see. The sacred does not merely exist dialectically in the profane, as for Eliade, let alone lie trapped in the profane, as for Gnosticism. The sacred is the profane (see Campbell 1949, p. 217). Campbell espouses what the philosopher W. T. Stace calls extrovertive mysticism. Campbell’s own extrovertive quest for the sacred took the form not of meditation but of running and, later, swimming.

Where both Jung and Eliade seek to revive myth in the wake of the rise of science and the fall of religion, Campbell pits myth against religion—sometimes Western religions, sometimes all religions. The fall of religion spells the salvation of myth. Where for Jung and Eliade moderns must scamper to create new myths, for Campbell myths get created almost spontaneously. Science itself spurs the creation of myths. Where for Jung modern psychology provides the grid for understanding myth, for Campbell “primitives” themselves have been psychologists. Only benighted moderns need Jung to decipher myth (see Campbell 1949, p. vii). In these ways Campbell is even more anti-modern than Jung or Eliade.

Seemingly, myth for Campbell contains a blatantly political message: the hero, having set off for some personal reason, agrees to return from the divine world only for the sake of the community. But then Campbell’s Jungian-like psychologizing of myths turns the heroic quest into a solipsistic quest for self-knowledge. The community disappears. The extrovertive Campbell does not turn away from the outer world in any gnostic-like manner, but the goal is personal, not collective.

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