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CHAPTER 2 The Romantic Aryans ROMANTIC MYTH THEORY The development of myth theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries primarily contributed two factors to general intellectual and scientific history. It initiated a gradual change in understanding aesthetics from objective and rational imitation to a more subjective and emotional principle of expression. Secondly, it contributed to the development of historiographical , philological, and theological hermeneutics, in other words, to the beginning of historical biblical criticism. During the Enlightenment, the source of myth was believed to reside in humanity’s subjective inwardness, imagination , and fantasy. Myths were seen as intentionally and arbitrarily invented by the individual. Created out of an arbitrary freedom of consciousness, myths were viewed as trans-empirical. The Romantics (beginning with Schelling and culminating with Bachofen) shifted the origin of myth from the individual sphere into the collective , from the conscious into the unconscious. Under the influence of the historical school and its founder and leader Karl von Savigny, myth was thought to emanate from unconscious necessity and the regulation of natural instinct, out of a general human need or within specific national Volksgeister (Grimm and Bachofen). Historically real and concrete myth traditions mediated the unconscious nature of humanity. Through myth, the greatest nations put their stamp upon all history. Although situated in geographical and time-specific points of empirical history, myth expressed itself as renewing repetitions of divine revelation. Just as Romantic Naturphilosophie valued nature as the emanation and objectification of the Divine, so too did Romantic myth theory represent myth as Naturpoesie, developing out of nature and returning to the Divine. By placing the source of myth in the collective unconscious, Romantic myth theorists such as Görres, Kanne, Grimm, and Bachofen presupposed a unified mythical Weltanschauung among all peoples, epochs, and generations that evidenced 27 28 Aryans, Jews, Brahmins objectively knowable and legitimate Truth. This mythological sensus communis developed unmistakably from the Enlightenment construction of natural religion and vision of common beliefs in a common humanity. For the Romantics, therefore, myth was viewed in the ethical sense as an internal embodiment of the summum bonum: uncontrived, original, and natural. This idealized conception of myth owed much to Rousseau and Sturm und Drang. It read myth as an index of internal and external life, a medium whereby modern society and culture could be analyzed. The childlike , pure, and innocent virtues found in myth appeared as a positive Gegenbild to the rotten and degenerative affectedness of modern civilization. The past was better than the present; the mythical past functioned as a model for an ideal form of present and future society. Romantic mythography presented a flight before worldly, artistic, and political difficulties and duties of the modern world into a sentimental romanticized and idealized past. Grounded as it was in historical traditions, the valorization of myth necessarily entailed the valorization (and mythologization) of national cultures as a favored worldly site of the Divine. In nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Germany, myth theorists, especially proponents of the Lebensgefühl ideology and their rationalist opponents, set the stage for the German myth of the Volk. This myth of the Volk, that contributed so significantly to the growth of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism, can thus be traced to Romantic mythography. FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF ROMANTIC LINGUISTICS In offering a vision of India in which myth triumphed over reason, chaos stood in place of Olympian calm, and the primitive impulse left system and structure scattered in its wake, Herder (at least in his Sturm und Drang period) instigated the cult of the primitive and the symbolic and, as such, was a precursor of Romantic mythographers. Since Herder’s time, however, the source material on India had changed. Many more Sanskrit texts had been translated, and the Asiatic Society of Bengal had published a number of groundbreaking articles. Friedrich Schlegel, a pioneer in the study of the Sanskrit language and author of the first direct translation from Sanskrit into German, maintained that mythology had been revitalized (Schlegel 1906: 1.136) and was now generally recognized as a largely untapped reservoir of poetic inspiration (Schlegel 1846: 4.174). Since the modern Occident had no mythology of its own, he noted that “one would have to be invented” (Schlegel 1846: 4.197). The inspiration for this new mythology and hence the new Romantic poetry was to be found in the Orient (Schlegel 1906: 2.362). By Orient, Schlegel meant India (Schlegel 1906: 2.357ff). [18.119.126.80] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 08:27...

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