21 Years On, Revisiting Ellwood’s The Politics of Myth
I don’t mention this often, but technically my PhD is in Folklore AND Mythology. I don’t like to call attention to it because I feel like it makes a fluffy sounding degree sound even fluffier, and frankly, I am a shitty mythologist.
It was technically one of my specializations in graduate school, and even though I have taught university courses in “Mythology”, my command of world mythologies is generally piss poor. I have had to come to the conclusion that this is because at the heart of it, I am just not a fan of fiction and fantasy and while most people love mythological tales for the telling of the weird and wonderful, I never found a lot of myths all that…interesting. No judgment, it’s just how I am wired. What I did love about the category of myth is that it had always been presented to me as more than just stories, or even more than great and sacred stories. Myths, as I was told, propel people to action. These stories are so great and powerful, that they get inside people. They are reenacted as ritual, and as history. Cultural myths describe who we are as people or who we long to be as heroes. I was never that interested in myth as story, I was interested in how this category of stories changed history and shaped lives.
Yet in graduate school, we primarily studied myth as literature and did little to unpack or deconstruct the development of this category. We looked at different approaches, but there was an underlying assumption that there was a category of story called “myth” and that all cultures had them. To be honest, after I left graduate school I didn’t think all that much about mythology in any professional sense, yet I have certainly written about the impact that legendary and mythic narratives have had on nationalist politics. Having written about the New Right and the Alt Right for a number of years now, I was amazed and a bit embarrassed to have only now discovered Robert Ellwood’s 1999 The Politics of Myth: A Study of CG Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell a book which has attained new contextual relevance in the over 20 years since its initial release and it definitely worth a read or a revisiting if you are already familiar with it.
This is not intended as a book review, but by way of a short summary, Ellwood’s book covers the political leanings of Jung, Eliade and Campbell considered in the context of the boom of popular interest in the study of mythology in the wake of World War Two. He addresses the conservative proclivities and activities of the theorists in question while in no way suggesting that their intellectual work was in any way explicitly in service to a political agenda. This decoupling on Ellwood’s part is crucial, yet he concludes that the mid-century mythological enterprise was in fact, deeply conservative, with its emphasis on “primitivism” and the longing for a Romantic, ahistoric, Golden Age. While the study of mythology obviously existed well before this time, there was something about the backward, timeless yearning fostered by these thinkers that contrasted intensely with the discourses of progress that so dominated post World War Two cultures, particularly in the US. As Ellwood shows, the popular interest in mythology during this time provided push back and a counter-narrative to the eternal march forward onward and upward that was clearly intensely comforting.
The difficulty for some will be that all three thinkers have also been deeply impactful to the countercultural Left as well. Many of us can see in our mind’s eye the bumperstickers on well-loved hippie vans reminding us of Joseph Campbell’s oft-quoted directive to “follow our bliss”, punctuated with rainbow-colored peace signs. This is a suggestion few would associate with goose-stepping authoritarians, yet the romantic appeal of mythology as a topic of study among segments of the Right can’t be denied. The primary hook is that of Perennialism, and the idea that at sometime in the past people lived at one with nature and spirit, a time of myth before Eliade’s “terror of history”, a cyclical age of sacrality to which we should return. In truth, Eliade’s Homo Religiosus and the axis mundi are probably more cited as inspirational to the anti-establishment Right than Jung or Campbell, but the “truths” of human nature which each professes supports the deeply structural, anti-modern romanticism of segments of the radical Right. They are even more foundational to the European New Right and it’s bizarro world progeny the Alt-Right.
I have had people get very upset with me when I write about or mention the right-wing adoption of beloved Leftie ideas and icons. I have lost friends over it. When one writes about the values and aesthetics of the Right, people get angry thinking that there is some measure of causality and intention between the inspiration and the politics, and that notion is not only distressing, for some, it shakes their personal foundations to the core. The idea that Eliade may have been intentionally fueling extreme Right politics with scholarship that many find compelling and uplifting is deeply upsetting. It is critical that in looking at the works and ideas that inspire ugly politics that we don’t like, that we can distinguish between how the ideas are used, the contexts in which they arise, and the political leanings of the people who develop them. In this instance I’m just glad that Ellwood is the messenger and not me, because if you are concerned about potentially foul political leanings of your mythologist heroes, he will do nothing to comfort you.
All three of these writers, as it turns out, had brushes with the Right and Eliade and Campbell in particular espoused deeply conservative ideologies. I think Jung comes out the best here of the three, despite his volkish proclivities and persistent claims that he held some sympathies with Anti- Semitic positions. Eliade, though, had a straight-up fascist period, being a disciple of the anti-Semite philosopher Nae Ionecsu and showing admiration for the Romanian Iron Guard, which he never fully renounced. For me, the revelations about Campbell were probably the most difficult. I joined the graduate Folklore program at UCLA just after his wildly popular television series with American journalist Bill Moyers aired in the early 1990s and sparked a national obsession with all things mythological. Apparently, the Folklore program had an avalanche of applicants that year, and I was lucky to have been selected. So to read about Campbell’s overt racism, extreme anti-communism and pro Vietnam War position was less than pleasant. Like most Folklorists I am not a subscriber to his methods or conclusions, but I figured he was probably a nice enough guy. Eeesh!
Ellwood’s summary of the ideological issues in the Hero’s Journey very clearly synthesized Campbell’s ideological connection with neoliberal conservatism. Campbell was obsessed with the triumph of the individual and he assembled a narrative framework from selective stories of the world that reinforced a truly American morality story, a mythic imperative that is currently biting us in the ass, and hard. Ellwood presents Campbell as centrally focused on the relationship between the story and individual greatness. For Campbell, the best class of story is the one which nurtures the spirit of the individual to arise, to enable the individual to do its will. This is a very different view than “myth” being the repository of collective wisdom and values. For Campbell, every man (and I do mean man) has the responsibility to pull himself up by his bootstraps and become the Hero of his own story. In this way men become self-actualized and take their rightful place in the pantheon of heroes from around the world. Whereas Jung ultimately wanted to bring people to fullness, Campbell wanted to help men to see their own greatness. In many ways Campbell showed flexibility about what culturally meaningful stories and symbols can be, but they are at heart a libertarian, particularly male, fantasy-driven by the completely imagined idealistic meritocracy of the American Dream. Having said that, we can of course see the mirror of this ideology in New Age and other anti-establishment cultural movements driven by ideas of human potential in decidedly non-right-wing settings, which makes following our bliss seemingly more benign. But is it, really?
A repeated theme of Ellwood’s book which, in the current political climate is begging for further consideration, is the assertion by both Eliade and Campbell that they were “nonpolitical”, somehow existing in intellectual realms beyond all earthly nonsense. Ellwood describes how when Eliade moved to the States from Romania that he just ducked out of politics and chose to influence through “culture” and scholarship. He believed he was stepping out of the historical timeline to exist above it all, as he believed a true intellectual should. But we all know that is an impossibility and Ellwood doesn’t seem to present any challenge by not explicitly accounting for the implicit political stance of his work. Scholarship is persuasion and argument. It is in no way neutral. Of course, in the past decade, “apoliteia” has become a significant rhetorical tactic in the arsenal of the New Right and Alt-Right, using culture and media to influence political and popular direction while assuming the veneer of not being directly political. While I don’t believe this is what Eliade was going for himself, there is no true neutral, and if you are in the classroom you should at least take responsibility for your impact.
I had the same response to Eliade’s questioning of the American focus on methodology in the scholarship of religion as though this is a weird cultural trait associated with the American historical narrative about progress and continual improvement. In not addressing the question of having, or not having, a methodology, Eliade punts and on this point so does Ellwood. Methodology provides your frame, your bias, your starting point. Ellwood’s conclusion about Eliade, that he was really more of an essayist and polemicist than a scholar affirms this point, and suggests a further weakness in Eliade’s approach. It’s not even the issue that Eliade may have been generally unconcerned with issues of methodology, but that he is so absolute in the rightness of his ideas as to not even think in those terms. At the heart of scholarship should be the spirit of inquiry, and how we do things is as important as what we conclude.
This book does a great job of calling into question the whole paradigm of “myth”, which is a category I, and most people, have completely taken for granted as a universal category of “sacred” narrative. Ellwood shows that the study of what we call myth today is culturally conditioned by a need to view ancient and preliterate/nonliterate peoples as romantic yet accessible Others, and that we can bridge history and difference through universal, value-laden stories. Deconstructing the historical study of myth and the category itself is an important enterprise. Anyone who has studied myth as a class of narrative knows that it is hopelessly messy, and highly contextual. And it is this messiness that sits in contrast with the certainty of the politics on the Right, a set of ideologies where everyone and everything has their proper place. This is why the work of our mythologists here is so attractive to these movements. They describe a world of universals where the past was much better than the present, where people were less corrupt and closer to the numinous and to “nature”. Although Campbell believed in the certainty of progress and that future worlds would create sacred stories, he was still characterizing what he believed was a primal and unshakable impulse toward individual greatness and heroism that he believed was celebrated through time and space.
I am not sure in 1999 that Robert Ellwood was prescient enough to know that the world would become as utterly weird in the ways that it has. In the US, and increasingly elsewhere, the Right is generally associated with materialist values, capitalism, exploitation and greed. Comparatively, the anti-modernist and Romantic roots of right-wing thought under discussion here come off as, frankly, charming and antiquated. Although the role of mythology in influencing the ideologies of Nazi Germany is well known, I am not sure that anyone would have predicted a global repeat of the way in which new radical right-wing anti-establishment movements now deploy myth, heroism, and rhetoric about great cycles of time to disillusioned and hopeful activists. Perhaps the most valuable thing I took from Ellwood’s book is it is absolutely worth reconsidering what “mythology” is and why we love it so much, although I can anticipate that this will not be a popular suggestion. What sort of soulless monster wants to have a go at mythology? Is nothing sacred? Yet unpacking myth as a category forces us to ask good questions about the ways in which we structure power, how we impose meaning onto the stories of others and how we see ourselves, which may well be the whole point of the mid-century mythological project. Within the academic study of these matters, this sort of analysis has been standard for years, but these three thinkers, in particular, have an incredible popular foothold because their messages speak to wider issues of humanity, unity and a connection with the distant past, even if imagined through very romantic lenses. I wonder if there is a way that we can restart a popular conversation about peoples’ stories that reframes “mythology” outside these paradigms yet which still inspires and uplifts?
