Myth and Community
The following is an excerpt from “Definitions” by Giorgio Locchi which is now available in English over at Arktos. Translated by F.C.
This text is in fact Giorgio Locchi’s final contribution to GRECE’s annual colloquium, from 1979. Indeed, it was around this time that the terms ‘myth’ and ‘community,’ understood in a somewhat different way to the usual, gained more and more popularity in many European circles — and that was certainly not unrelated to the rediscovery around that time of Ferdinand Tonnies. With his habitual concision, Locchi indicates how they ought to be used and what we ought to think of them.
Myth and Community
Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw almost every characteristic phenomenon of our age a good century in advance: the upsurge of anarchistic nihilism, the epidemic of neuroses, the remarkable ascendency of showbusiness debased to the level of everyday ‘circenses,’ the trade in self-indulgence. This vindication of Nietzschean prophecy ought to strike the mind, provoke it to contemplation. This has not happened. But that was fated. Nietzsche diagnosed Western societies with decadence and simply foresaw the normal progression of the sickness. Now, one effect of the social sickness called decadence is the sufferer’s blindness regarding his own condition. The sicker he grows, the healthier he thinks himself. So, the nearer a decadent society comes to its sickness’ fatal end, the more progressivist it becomes.
Look around. Everyone, from the more or less advanced liberal to the more or less retarded communist, believes viscerally in progress, thoroughly convinced that he lives in an era of progress, even the heights of progress. He surveys all kinds of phenomena which, in the long history of peoples, have always characterized a people’s or a culture’s final agonies. From feminism to the glittering rise of minstrels and theatrical types; from the disintegration of traditional social nuclei — in our case, families — to ephemeral but tireless attempts to replace them with some kind of commune or other; from masochistic universalism to the collapse of all individually restrictive social norms. But he is utterly incapable of learning history’s lesson, which sometimes leads him to suppose that history has no meaning.
Another characteristic of advanced decadence is mediocrity of feeling. We squabble spitefully but tolerate one another. We still make war, cold if possible, but in love’s name, in order to liberate the other. We oblige ourselves to hate an abstraction of the other, but never the reality of the other. Depending on the wing we occupy, we hate wicked Western capitalism or the beastly communist regime, but we love the Russian people or the good old American people. Decadent societies forget how to love and hate. They turn tepid as life deserts them; their vital force has all but dissipated. This vital force, which enlivens societies, organizes them and sets them on history’s perilous path, goes by many names. Dostoyevsky called it God, and said that, once a people loses its God, it can only agonize and die. Friedrich Nietzsche announced to Western societies that their God was dead and that they themselves would therefore die. Paul Valéry sensed the same truth in his own way. For me, ‘God’ is too tight, to Western a term for society’s vital force. The divine is only an element, an aspect of that vital force which I would rather call, in all its complexity, Myth.
Myth, as I understand it, enters history to create itself, creating and organizing its own elements. Myth is that historical force which enlivens a community, organizes it, launches it upon its destiny. Myth is, first of all, a world-feeling, but a shared world-feeing and, as such, objective, creating both social bonds and communal norms. It structures a community, styles its life, and also structures individual personalities. These world-feeling also originates a worldview and, therefore, coherent expressions of thought. History shows that each people, each civilization has its own Myth. From the perspective of contemporary society, we get the impression that Myths always belong to a primordial phase of human development which is now closed. That Myth belongs to mankind’s infancy is a commonplace of modern historical reflection. But this thought is the inevitable reflection of a civilization’s senescence. Once a Myth is dead and we examine it from without, it appears to be an assemblage of more or less delusive beliefs, a collection of fantastical tales, strangely confused, invariably contradictory. If one tries to relate a Myth, after the fact, to life or history, it seems to move against the current of one’s time, which led Mircea Eliade to say that Myth is a nostalgia for origins. But he found that one cannot study life with a corpse. A living Myth is recognizable by its harmony and fusion of opposites. This is simply to say that men who life within a Myth’s sphere of influence and who are organized by it do not experience as contradictory what seems contradictory from without. Myth is a living, creative force; and it proves itself such by its creativity, which indefatigably resolves contradictions. There was once a name for this resolutory power: it was called faith. Rationally, this leads us in a vicious circle, another form of contradiction. Myth is true only in faith; but faith lives only in Myth. Faith is created by Myth alone.
For those within a Myth, this vicious circle, this contradiction, is no such thing: for Myth lives within those it encompasses and is tirelessly created by and between them. Indeed, Myth is the tireless creation of oneself. It is, in every respect, a self-creation. This is true even at the linguistic level, which is the level at which man, as a social being, takes shape. Some illustrious structuralists inform us that one does not speak; that one is ‘spoken.’ Evidently they speak of and for themselves as eminent representatives of contemporary society. They are not wrong. Any language detached from the Myth — that is, the world-feeling — that created it can only be spoken, in the sense that those who use it do not speak but are spoken. As long as language is vitally attached to its mythic root, it remains in a process of self-creation, and those who use it still speak, and speak one to another, far from any Tower of Babel.
The language of Myth structures symbols. It creates things with words. Once Myth no longer speaks but is, at best, still spoken, symbolic harmony is displaced by the discord of two irreconcilably opposite ideas. This also means, tautologically, that the age of Myth is displaced by the age of ideologies, ideologies which, though springing from one source, are implacably opposed, and which vainly attempt an impossible synthesis in an ‘ultimate science’ which might recover the lost paradise guaranteed by Myth’s harmony.
Since this is a harmony of opposites, Myth is the social bond par excellence; and it is legitimate to speak, in this connection, of religion. As a social bond, Myth organizes society, guaranteeing its coherence in space and across time. Myth is more than a Weltanschauung (worldview). It is a world-feeling and, at the same time or, better still, by the same token, a value-feeling, an operative measure. It is the key that explains, that suggests an action and the norm of that action. Recall how Myth can organize a society, dictating the conduct of men confronted by an unforeseen problem, in this case the Hellenes. The Greeks were Indo-Europeans; their Myth was the Indo-European Myth on which basis they organized themselves into a patrilineal society founded on what we might call heroic values. When they migrated into the Greek peninsula, they ran into a matrilineal society. For possibly contingent reasons, they did not destroy this society. These peoples, these civilizations intermixed. This posed a grave problem: the irreconcilable opposition of two conceptions of society and of law. In matriarchal societies, women do not make war or hold power but men, as elsewhere. But legitimacy with respect to power passes through the woman. A man cannot rule unless he marry a woman who inherits power by matrilineal right. In such societies, power is always held by men chosen by women. Now, if we are right to consider the Hellenes to have acquired power, at the beginning of this process of intermixture, by virtue of marriage, then they must nonetheless have sought to legitimize this from the perspective of their own Myth, the perspective of patrilineal right. A whole host of mythical tales retell these conflicts and the thousand ways by which the Hellenes ensured their value-system would triumph. The adventures of Oedipus, Orestes, the myths of Theseus, Jason, Bellerophon, even the rape of Europa, are just a few of many examples. And in the Pantheon, which certainly derived from two mythic religions, the supremacy of paternal right is symbolized by Athena, the virgin, warrior goddess, but also the goddess of reflective thought. Athena has no mother; she claims to ‘have only a father,’ Zeus; and it is she who absolves Orestes who must kill his mother to avenge his father.
The intimate relationship between founding Myth, society, value-system and social norm permits us to speak of society as an organism and of organic society. Moreover, this term, society, is ill-fitting, as our having to qualify it with an adjective demonstrates. So, from now on, I use ‘community’ to mean organic society, and set community and society against one another, much as one opposes one limit-concept to another. This opposition between community and society is nothing new: it was made by certain German sociologists, notably Ferdinand Tönnies. Their intuition was correct; but they always followed it to erroneous conclusions or muddle theories, since the definition of community, as opposed to society, was only ever made implicitly.
A Myth is always nostalgia for origins, as Mircea Eliade said; but it is also always a cosmological vision of the future. It announces a world’s end, which can sometimes become the beginning of that world’s repetition or, in one well-known case, its regeneration.
Myth, we also say, has no time. It has none because it is time, historical time. The community it organizes is a historical organism which occupies, at every moment, the three dimensions of historical time. A community is a living organism, occupying past, present and future at once. A community has a common consciousness, which is at once memory, action and project. We call a community of this sort a people. Once a people loses the memory of its origins and, as Richard Wagner says, ceases to be moved by shared passion and suffering, then it is no longer a people. It becomes a mass; and community becomes society. I called community and society limit-concepts. There is always a little of the mass in the best of peoples and a trace of the people in the vilest and most degraded masses. There can be no doubt (after all, it is endlessly repeated) that we live in an age of masses, that we live in massified societies. The individual, whoever he may be, is divinized in the name of equality. Every individual in a society has the same value. On the other hand, in a community, human value, which always means social personality, is measured by its conformity with ideal types proposed by Myth which every member of the community internalizes as a sort of superego. Once Myth disintegrates, once these ideal archetypes are no longer experienced as such, there is no more communal bond, so that, ultimately, every individual is thought to be an ideal in himself by virtue of his mere individuality. Only the ever-precarious and contingent link created by the self-interested alliance of individuals into classes, parties, churches or sects remains to cobble what has become a society together. The authentically human dimension, the historical dimension, is lost. Mass society is no longer concerned with past or future: it lives in and for the present alone. Therefore, it no longer engages in politics: it merely sustains an economy, an economy of the worst kind, at that, which conditions all social reflexes. Symptomatically, a preoccupation with the future, the horizon of the year 2000, is aroused only to justify present economic failure and to make it palatable. Understand that we are speaking only of our Western societies. These societies, in which we are born and live, are derivatives of the great Christian oecumene, which was made and moulded by the Judaeo-Christian Myth. This Myth is long dead, and its God with it. Even religion, such as what the tatters of the Church still sustains, is ideologized, becoming just one ideology opposed to countless others flowing from the same mythic spring, now running dry. Where Myth organized, harmonized, united and thereby gave spiritual, that is, human meaning and content to the lives of men, ideologies oppose, disunify, disaggregate. Ideology rejects Myth as irrational and purports itself to be rational and rationally grounded. Fundamentally, every ideology claims, implicitly or explicitly, to be science, moreover the science of man. And in its quest for rationalization, every ideology ends up becoming an anti-ideology. Indeed, since one ideology is never without another, contrary ideology, this rivalry leads to a synthesis in a kind of illusory ideological neutrality sustained by the preposterous conviction that, in the end everything, even man, is quantifiable, that everything is calculable, and that a society’s life is reducible to questions of administration.
For example, Western societies imagine they can recover a lost harmony, the intimate fusion of opposites, by means of tolerance; but they thereby turn schizophrenic and render schizophrenic those individuals most sensitive to the social climate. The Western individual will always end up with a bad conscience, most of all when it comes to power, because he is harassed by two contrary needs which cannot simultaneously be justified: let us say, for the sake of simplicity, the need for individual freedom and the need for social justice. This dismemberment of society also affects individuals, sometimes comically, as with advanced liberals who imagine themselves socialists, or communists and socialists who fancy themselves liberals.1 And remember that when we mock Myth and spurn it as irrational, we will try instinctually to claw back its social benefits by proposing an Antimyth and a corresponding ideal, the Antihero, an ideal ably represented at the level of the mass-consumption of social pseudo-values by the disheveled artist, long-haired, a little dirty if possible.
Communist societies, also derivatives of the Judaeo-Christian myth, tried another solution. They chose intolerance in favour of a single ideology invoked in place of Myth. But since ideology is not Myth, and cannot operate on the souls of individuals, individuals will never conform to its ideological norm. The well-known consequence is that communist societies are societies of repression. To be precise, at every level of communist societies repression is an obligation, so that the purifier himself becomes purified, while in liberal-democratic societies, toleration is an obligation from which even delinquents benefit. Moreover, despite keeping up certain ‘anti-economic’ appearances, communist societies live only in the present. One periodic and striking demonstration is its condemnation of every bygone present, which takes on the aspect of ritual celebration. The present is always divinized, from Lenin to Stalin to Mao, until it cedes its place to another present by which it is infallibly condemned and excommunicated. So, all in all, we might say that the respective social equations of communist and liberal-democratic societies have the same value. Microscopically, at the individual level, liberal society is more attractive, which has led to dissent within and emigration from communist regimes and, in reaction, the Berlin Wall. But note that, at the macroscopic level of the mass as such, the migration has happened in the other direction and, since the War, socialist societies have multiplied.2
So, what to do? What to expect? Allow me to return to Nietzsche. Nietzsche was among the first to announce that Western civilization is beginning an agony, an agony of unforeseeable duration, and that she is going to die. European nations are condemned either to exit history, like the Bororós so dear to Mr. Lévi-Strauss, or to perish historically and see their biological substance dissolved into nations and peoples to come. Fundamentally, everyone in Europe more or less knows this; and for this reason, Europe has been a matter of debate for some time. But here Europe is understood to be the prolongation of current social realities, the last chance of saving she who agonizes, she who is doomed to dies, that is, Judaeo-Christian civilization. But if Europe is to see the light of a more or less distant future, she will have a meaning, historically, only if she is, as Friedrich Nietzsche desired her, sustained and organized by a new Myth, something radically foreign to everything contemporary.
We believe that this new Myth is already here, that it has already appeared. Of this there are signs, and signs behind the signs. At its origin, a Myth is always extremely fragile. Its life depends upon the few handfuls of men who already tell it. In a study of what I call European music from Johann Sebastian Bach to Richard Wagner, I tried to show how this New Myth and the historical conscience that sustains it were born, and to show by which path this New Myth has reached the present.3
If it still lives, it can only survive through the total fidelity of those who sustained it in its recent past.
Of course, it has not yet told all it has to tell. Perhaps it has only stammered.
Myth, for as long as it lives, is always being told.
Buy Definitions by Giorgio Locchi here.
Remember that Locchi’s speech here transcribed dates to a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, all this is truer than ever, and even taken for granted. — Ed.
Today, both tendencies have dissolved into liberal, Western society. — Ed.
See Wagner, Nietzsche et le mythe surhumaniste, also published in the Agora series (Paris: Institut Iliade–La Nouvelle Librairie, 2022). — Ed.
Great piece. Everything that is being said and done today feels as if it is missing the thumos of that mythic feeling, which would imbue the will to save Europe with a meaningful aim.