By Joseph Campbell
A collection of writings
Read Feb. 15-19, 2008
This is a recap of his teachings on mythology, about the universal character of everyman’s journey to be the hero of his/her life. He finds such evidence, both practical and fantastical, in every culture. These quotes skip forward, in passing, given in sensible short form. There is little said about the journey of females, until the dialogues in the last chapter.
When you have a deity as your model, your life becomes transparent to the transcendent…the energy flows through it to you.
Hindus see that we live within sheaths, the food sheath, the breathe sheath, then the mental sheath which is consciousness. Then there is a big gap. Next is the wisdom sheath, and more inward of that is the sheath of bliss.
We are really without guides in this time, yet even now you can find two guides: a personality who in your youth seems noble and great, whom you can use for a model. Or you can live for your bliss, which is a deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself. Your bliss can lead you to that transcendent mystery.
It’s a good thin to hang on to the myth that was put in when you were a child, because it is there whether you want it there or not. What you have to do is translate that myth into its eloquence. You have to hear its song. The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss.
Mythologies have four functions:
- to evoke in the individual a sense of grateful, affirmative awe.
- to present an image of the cosmos, a field in which to play the game, which makes sense
- to validate and maintain a certain sociological system, a shared set of rights and wrongs
- to carry the individual psychologically through the stages of life, to bring a child to maturity and then to help the aged become disengaged. Neurotics are simply people who have not crossed the thresholds completely.
Just about when you’ve learned what your instructors have told you to learn, suppressing all of the movements of the spirit that are incompatible with your local social order, just about the time when you begin to be informed, to govern and direct, you begin to lose your grip. The mind fails to remember things, the hands drop things, you find yourself more tired than you used to be at the end of the day, sleep becomes a much more congenial thought than action…you’re beginning to drop out. Furthermore, another very vigorous generation with a different hairdo has come along, and you think, Well, let them have it. The mythologies have to take care of this dropout situation.
Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now, of the human spirit, which is eternal… In our modern tradition science has disqualified the claims of our major religions, because the religions are insisting they are based in facts rather than mythically true. The cosmological and sociological functions have been taken away. But the basic psychological problems of youth, maturity, age, and death, and the mystical problem of the universe, however, remain essentially unchanged.
A culture’s rites repeats the underlying myths. Asia and India use the image of the great impersonal cycle. The Near East or Levant stresses the society, the group. But the culture zone of Europe stresses the individual. With this warrior people you have a masculine god at the center, a tribal deity, the only mythology in the world without a goddess, which then refers to goddesses as Abominations. This tradition does not emphasize the inner experience of identity with the devine, but rather it emphasizes achieving a relationship to the divine, through some rites and membership in a church.
The real important function of the church is to present the symbol, to perform the rite, to let you behold this divine message in such a way that you are capable of experiencing it, of feeling the Virgin Birth within you, the birth of the mystic, mythic being that is your own spiritual life.
So the father actually plays the educator to the spirit, he transmits the goals of the society, he informs the child of the adult role he or she is expected to assume. The mother gives birth to the physical body; the father to the spiritual being. These are motifs that occur over and over and over again in myths from the most sophisticated cultures and the most primitive. Until he/she can face a challenge without running back to his parents internally, he can never be a true adult.
In the West we celebrate the scientific mind, and the symbols of our inherited traditions lie broken around our feet. Do the rites work without you having any connection to the myth, or do they not? (He says yes, some do.) The symbol you are ready for evokes a response in you.
The way to find your own myth is to determine those traditional symbols that speak to you and use them as bases for meditation. Let them work on you. One can never exhaust its meaning, one can never exhaust its possibility. The best meditation is, of course, to take the religious symbol and not worry about whether it is historically true or not but know that it refers to an interior plane of experience. Choose the images you want to meditate on. When you have identified your life with consciousness, you will find the body can go. There’s nothing you can do that’s more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live and become a realization of your own personal myth.
The Self as Hero
There are several ways of discovering your destiny. One, our lives are directed by what Schopenhauer calls the will. Another way to try to discern your destiny: observe your dreams, observe your conscious choices, keep a journal, and see which images and stories surface and resurface. When the call isn’t answered, you experience a kind of drying up and a sense of life lost. You’ve got to bring out again that which you want to recover, the unrealized, unutilized potential in yourself, and integrate it in a rational life.
Dialogues
Campbell finds the woman’s role compromised by biology, which he calls “vocational destiny”. Women have a stronger biological demand to bear children, and thereby are deflected from passion in other realms of endeavor, though she can assume a male role. He favors for her the image of the goddess with the eighteen arms. Formerly, having children WAS the creative job. Sometimes the drudgery itself can become part of the hero deed. The point is not get stuck in the drudgery but to use it to free you. The simple tasks of our life, when you’re doing them because they’re a function or factor in the life that you love and have chosen and have given yourself, then they don’t weigh you down.
The adventure is always reckless. The young man’s journey is through space, the heroine’s is through time, so that endurance plays a major role. The male body lacks that recall to nature, to the female nature that there is automatically in the female body. I’m saying that a typical agony there that makes the actual achievement of the goal different, between a man and a woman, is the strength and weight of the call of the woman’s body to have a child…A man could go on without it.
In India the female principle is the sakti, she’s the serpent power that comes up the spine, she’s the whole damned flow of energy, in all of its aspects. Now, the great celebration of the goddess in India is the Durga Puja. She’s the eighteen-armed goddess with the swords… So it’s much easier, I think, for a woman to identify with the male than it would be for a male who is committed to his lie, to his particular form of abstraction… It’s really no problem for a woman, if the situation is one that calls for it, for her to assume the male role.
There is a way of interpreting childbirth as linking to the eternal life.. something the male will never experience. And somehow that changes the journey. Men then have to go out and look for that.
The man has to endure only moments of great pain and struggle and difficulty… The suffering overtakes women—it is part of the nature of womanhood. Whereas the man has to undertake suffering—it’s a big difference. A clinging mother is a terrible weight on the life of a young many in our culture.
Sometimes the drudgery itself becomes part of the hero deed. The point is not to get stuck in the drudgery but to use it to free you. ..The adventure is always reckless. You’ve got to hold the door open to do anything that hasn’t been done before. You have to do your thing, you have to hold all the criticism in abeyance… That is killing the dragon. Sometimes the dragon comes carrying a red pencil, and sometimes he comes clattering in with loads of dirty dishes in your place. But the simple tasks of our life, when you’re doing them because they’re a function or factor in the life that you love and have chosen and have given yourself, then they don’t weigh you down.
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