What, to me, moves Nibley from the diffusionist camp to the psychologist camp is his writings on the Mantics. Now he is adopting a kind of platonism towards revelation in his conception of the Mantics. But frankly a lot of the psychologists of the era were adopting something similar. The kind of psychological reductionism we take for granted today was just developing then. (Remembers Skinner was just emerging and many of these folks didn’t like the behavioralists )

Now if you want something more beyond that I don’t have time to do too much research (beyond the reading club on Nibley on the Mantics from a few years back)

The main counterargument against my move is to argue that Nibley only thought revelation (and thus the Mantic) came within the Church. That is his gnosticism was tied up with LDS conceptions of authority. While I think there is an element of that I think it pretty clear he felt anyone could receive revelation.

It’s been a while since I’ve read any Nibley, but the odd thing is that I’ve never gotten the sense that he was a “psychological structuralist”, as you call it (perhaps I’d go with “cognitive realist”, others such as Edward Slingerland suggest “embodied realist”). Perhaps you, or anyone else, can provide something from Nibley to substantiate this. Coincidentally, my sense is that the kind thinking you refer to going on in the 40s-60s has reemerged in some aspects of cognitive science. I’m thinking here of Pinker, and Lakoff and Johnson (although in radically different ways).

When one moves to China and the surrounding locals things become more tricky because (1) there is no purported revelation of the temple there; (2) it is far more alien to the western tradition; and (3) we don’t know how many had the gospel as we understand it.

In addition to all this though are what for lack of a better term I’ll call the psychological structuralists. This would include Jung, Campbell, and others. (Roughly the scholarship from the 40’s through the 60’s) These people see the parallels because they believe they reflect some cognitive structure (ignoring for the moment what they considered the mind to be). I’ve long thought Nibley ought be taken in that category both because of the period of his training but also his methodology is similar. While I don’t think these figures are taken that seriously anymore – often due to big methadological problems (decontextualizing) there is something to be said for the stance. That is if there are common cognitive structures in human beings we ought expect those to be reflected in our oral narratives, rituals, etc.

From and LDS stance though if there is a spirit with some level of a veil of forgetfulness then the notion of this collective unconscious found in the psychological structuralists will manifest itself as a kind of repressed remembrance of a premortal life manifesting itself in human behavior. Now making the move from the general claim to the claim that this structure is significant will be much more problematic. But I think one should be careful here.

I should also note that while a lot see Nibley’s parallels as evidence a perhaps too naive and optimistic diffusionism I think this more Freudean like element is at least as present. Indeed if you look at his writings on the Manic vs. Sophist you’ll see that provides the philosophical ground for his structuralism and ends up being fairly similar to Freud or Jung with even more of a Platonic thrust. (Hardly uncommon in the structuralism of the era) Even if Nibley ultimately has a different ontology.

This isn’t really about comparing without contrasting. I think most “comparative” accounts either explicitly handle contrasting as well, or at least account for differences (even if the explanation is that they’ve “fallen away from the truth”). It’s more about examining the implications of our biases and working to make our unconscious “biases”, more conscious.

Would a simplified summary be; a couscous or unconscious bias on the part of the author that results in comparing without contrasting?

I take it this professor never heard of Non-Euclidean geometry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Euclidean_geometry