1. So I have some thoughts on Jordan Peterson, vintage clothing, George Eliot, Carl Jung, comparative mythology, fascism, the Indiana Jones movies, ancient astronauts & Jack Kirby's New Gods.
2. As @NellieBowles noted in her brilliant profile, Jordan Peterson likes to cultivate an old-timey look on stage. This is a longstanding thing with him (he once went to visit a prison wearing Victorian cape). 
3. Peterson's preference for stagy vintage clothing is matched by his intellectual style. He's cast himself as a mythologist, a seer who discovers the underlying archetypes that guide human thought. This is something more common in 19th & 20th century than now
4. Remember Middlemarch? Dorothea Brooke falls for Mr. Casaubon, a venerable scholar who thinks he's discovered "the key to all mythology" but turns out to be a musty fraud. Already in 19th century, mythologists seemed a little quaint.
4. Despite George Eliot's attempt to deflate with wit, mythologists continued to gain speed in 20th century, in part because it was a tradition that seemed to offer alternative to fraying social order of modernity.
5. Many leading 20th century mythologists -- Jung, Eliade, Joseph Campbell -- leaned towards the far right (sometimes to fascism). This wasn't an accident: mythologist were searching for a replacement of natural theology to shore up hierarchy & fend off egalitarianism
6. The Nazi fascination with occultism & with myth (which provided fodder for some of the Indiana Jones movies) was a popular manifestation of the same tendency.
7. Of course, it's possible to take the same set of ideas & use them for other purposes. One of the achievements of Northrop Frye was that he took mythologist tradition of Jung & showed it could be progressive if you see myths as made culture, not timeless truths
8. As per Frye: we inherit myths & archetypes but we also remake them. Blake turned the Devil into a hero, feminists like Kristin J Sollee turned witches into heroines. In Frozen, the traditional Disney witch-character (Elsa) is most loved character.
9. Myths aren't static & univocal (as Paterson treats them) but, like all cultural artifacts, contested, fluid & polyphonic. Frye showed this on a theoretical level, Jack Kirby through his art.
10. Running through Kirby's work is a fascination with myths, not seen as simply inherited things but open to renovation: mythology fusing with science fiction in stories of Ancient Astronauts (taken as much from pulps as von Danikens pseudo-science)
11. It's the fusion of science fiction with mythology that saves Kirby from the musty, status-quo loving traditionalism of the older mythologists: the New God embody older archetypes but also, crucially, contemporary uncertainty & anxiety.
12. I have more thoughts along this line here: newrepublic.com/article/148473…
