The Power of Myth 

by Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers

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Last annotated on January 19, 2017

Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from Campbell.

INTRODUCTION 

****  Campbell knew to be a principal theme of classic mythology. “The secret cause of all suffering,” he said, “is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed.”  Read more at location 73

“Who is Igjugarjuk?” I said, barely able to imitate the pronunciation. “Oh,” replied Campbell, “he was the shaman of a Caribou Eskimo tribe in northern Canada, the one who told European visitors that the only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others.’ ”  Read more at location 75

She held the familiar, modern opinion that “all these Greek gods and stuff” are irrelevant to the human condition today. What she did not know—what most do not know—is that the remnants of all that “stuff” line the walls of our interior system of belief, like shards of broken pottery in an archaeological site. But as we are organic beings, there is energy in all that “stuff.” Rituals evoke it.  Read more at location 91

If this position were just a role, the judge could wear a gray suit to court instead of the magisterial black robe. For the law to hold authority beyond mere coercion, the power of the judge must be ritualized, mythologized. So must much of life today, Campbell said, from religion and war to love and death.  Read more at location 95

*********  to Campbell the end of the hero’s journey is not the aggrandizement of the hero. “It is,” he said in one of his lectures, “not to identify oneself with any of the figures or powers experienced. The Indian yogi, striving for release, identifies himself with the Light and never returns. But no one with a will to the service of others would permit himself such an escape. The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.” One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero, he said, is that one lives only for self while the other acts to redeem society.  Read more at location 111

He gave up on the pursuit of a doctorate and went instead into the woods to read. He continued all his life to read books about the world: anthropology, biology, philosophy, art, history, religion. And he continued to remind others that one sure path into the world runs along the printed page.  Read more at location 117

she wrote, “we did stagger under the weight of his weekly reading assignments. Finally, one of our number stood up and confronted him (Sarah Lawrence style), saying: ‘I am taking three other courses, you know. All of them assigned reading, you know. How do you expect me to complete all this in a week?’ Campbell just laughed and said, ‘I’m astonished you tried. You have the rest of your life to do the reading.’ ”  Read more at location 122

Preachers err, he told me, by trying “to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.” How he did reveal a joy for learning and living!  Read more at location 144

****  He agreed that the “guiding idea” of his work was to find “the commonality of themes in world myths, pointing to a constant requirement in the human psyche for a centering in terms of deep principles.” “You’re talking about a search for the meaning of life?” I asked. “No, no, no,” he said. “For the experience of being alive.”  Read more at location 149

To him mythology was “the song of the universe,” “the music of the spheres”—music we dance to even when we cannot name the tune.  Read more at location 153

Campbell surmised “a magical, wonderful accord” growing between the hunter and the hunted, as if they were locked in a “mystical, timeless” cycle of death, burial, and resurrection. Their art—the paintings on cave walls—and oral literature gave form to the impulse we now call religion. As these primal folk turned from hunting to planting, the stories they told to interpret the mysteries of life changed, too. Now the seed became the magic symbol of the endless cycle. The plant died, and was buried, and its seed was born again. Campbell was fascinated by how this symbol was seized upon by the world’s great religions as the revelation of eternal truth—that from death comes life, or as he put it: “From sacrifice, bliss.” “Jesus had the eye,” he said. “What a magnificent reality he saw in the mustard seed.”  Read more at location 163

One story he especially liked told of the trouble woman who came to the Indian saint and sage Ramakrishna, saying, “O Master, I do not find that I love God.” And he asked, “Is there nothing, then, that you love?” To this she answered, “My little nephew.” And he said to her, “There is your love and service to God, in your love and service to that child.” “And there,” said Campbell, “is the high message of religion: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these …’ ” A spiritual man, he found in the literature of faith those principles common to the human spirit. But they had to be liberated from tribal lien,  Read more at location 174

The images of God are many, he said, calling them “the masks of eternity” that both cover and reveal “the Face of Glory.”  Read more at location 180

**********  comparable stories can be found in these divergent traditions—stories of creation, of virgin births, incarnations, death and resurrection, second comings, and judgment days. He liked the insight of the Hindu scripture: “Truth is one; the sages call it by many names.” All our names and images for God are masks, he said, signifying the ultimate reality that by definition transcends language and art. A myth is a mask of God, too—a metaphor for what lies behind the visible world. However the mystic traditions differ, he said, they are in accord in calling us to a deeper awareness of the very act of living itself. The unpardonable sin, in Campbell’s book, was the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert, not quite awake.  Read more at location 182

He argued that it is not science that has diminished human beings or divorced us from divinity. On the contrary, the new discoveries of science “rejoin us to the ancients” by enabling us to recognize in this whole universe “a reflection magnified of our own most inward nature; so that we are indeed its ears, its eyes, its thinking, and its speech—or, in theological terms, God’s ears, God’s eyes, God’s thinking, and God’s Word.”  Read more at location 199

He was a man of a thousand stories. This was one of his favorites. In Japan for an international conference on religion, Campbell overheard another American delegate, a social philosopher from New York, say to a Shinto priest, “We’ve been now to a good many ceremonies and have seen quite a few of your shrines. But I don’t get your ideology. I don’t get your theology.” The Japanese paused as though in deep thought and then slowly shook his head. “I think we don’t have ideology,” he said. “We don’t have theology. We dance.” So did Joseph Campbell - to the music of the spheres.  -Bill Moyers

CHAPTER 1:  MYTH AND THE MODERN WORLD 

One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We’re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the spirit.

When you get to be older, and the concerns of the day have all been attended to, and you turn to the inner life - well, if you don’t know where it is or what it is, you’ll be sorry.

It is the imperfections of life that are lovable…. This is why some people have a very hard time loving God, because there’s no imperfection there. You can be in awe, but that would not be real love. It’s Christ on the cross that becomes lovable.

Suffering is imperfection. Is it not?

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

****  There’s no meaning. What’s the meaning of the universe? What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there. That’s it. And your own meaning is that you’re there. We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.  Read more at location 297

Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people’s myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts—but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive.  Read more at location 301

****  What is marriage? The myth tells you what it is. It’s the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is.  Read more at location 304

When people get married because they think it’s a long-time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity.  Read more at location 306

By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that’s what marriage is.  Read more at location 309

I would say that if the marriage isn’t a first priority in your life, you’re not married. The marriage means the two that are one, the two become one flesh.  Read more at location 318

the two really are one.

MOYERS: One not only biologically but spiritually.

CAMPBELL: Primarily spiritually. The biological is the distraction which may lead you to the wrong identification.

MOYERS: Then the necessary function of marriage, perpetuating ourselves in children, is not the primary one.

CAMPBELL: No, that’s really just the elementary aspect of marriage. There are two completely different stages of marriage. First is the youthful marriage following the wonderful impulse that nature has given us in the interplay of the sexes biologically in order to produce children.  Read more at location 320

Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. The Chinese image of the Tao, with the dark and light interacting—that’s the relationship of yang and yin, male and female, which is what a marriage is. And that’s what you have become when you have married. You’re no longer this one alone; your identity is in a relationship. Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.  Read more at location 330

the one isn’t just you, it’s the two together as one. And that’s a purely mythological image signifying the sacrifice of the visible entity for a transcendent good. This is something that becomes beautifully realized in the second stage of marriage, what I call the alchemical stage, of the two experiencing that they are one. If they are still living as they were in the primary stage of marriage, they will go apart when their children leave.  Read more at location 336

That’s the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don’t have your little baby body anymore, you’re something else entirely.  Read more at location 362

What we have today is a demythologized world. And, as a result, the students I meet are very much interested in mythology because myths bring them messages.  Read more at location 387

What we’re learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We’re learning technologies, we’re getting information.  Read more at location 394

Specialization tends to limit the field of problems that the specialist is concerned with. Now, the person who isn’t a specialist, but a generalist like myself, sees something over here that he has learned from one specialist, something over there that he has learned from another specialist—and neither of them has considered the problem of why this occurs here and also there. So the generalist—and that’s a derogatory term, by the way, for academics—gets into a range of other problems that are more genuinely human, you might say, than specifically cultural.  Read more at location 400

one of the great advantages of being brought up a Roman Catholic is that you’re taught to take myth seriously and to let it operate on your life and to live in terms of these mythic motifs. I was brought up in terms of the seasonal relationships to the cycle of Christ’s coming into the world, teaching in the world, dying, resurrecting, and returning to heaven. The ceremonies all through the year keep you in mind of the eternal core of all that changes in time. Sin is simply getting out of touch with that harmony.  Read more at location 411

The themes are timeless, and the inflection is to the culture.  Read more at location 437

Mythology has a great deal to do with the stages of life, the initiation ceremonies as you move from childhood to adult responsibilities, from the unmarried state into the married state. All of those rituals are mythological rites. They have to do with your recognition of the new role that you’re in, the process of throwing off the old one and coming out in the new, and entering into a responsible profession.  Read more at location 445

******  (Note:   exactly why Trump is not President)  When someone becomes a judge, or President of the United States, the man is no longer that man, he’s the representative of an eternal office; he has to sacrifice his personal desires and even life possibilities to the role that he now signifies.  Read more at location 452

Joining the army, putting on a uniform, is another. You’re giving up your personal life and accepting a socially determined manner of life in the service of the society of which you are a member. This is why I think it is obscene to judge people in terms of civil law for performances that they rendered in time of war.  Read more at location 457

****  myths offer life models. But the models have to be appropriate to the time in which you are living, and our time has changed so fast that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. The virtues of the past are the vices of today. And many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. The moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now.  Read more at location 474

The old-time religion belongs to another age, another people, another set of human values, another universe. By going back you throw yourself out of sync with history.  Read more at location 477

MOYERS: Often with the help of a drug.

CAMPBELL: Yes. The mechanically induced mystical experience is what you have there. I have attended a number of psychological conferences dealing with this whole problem of the difference between the mystical experience and the psychological crack-up. The difference is that the one who cracks up is drowning in the water in which the mystic swims. You have to be prepared for this experience.  Read more at location 479

**************   It is a part of the Cartesian mode to think of consciousness as being something peculiar to the head, that the head is the organ originating consciousness. It isn’t. The head is an organ that inflects consciousness in a certain direction, or to a certain set of purposes. But there is a consciousness here in the body. The whole living world is informed by consciousness. I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow. Where you really see life energy, there’s consciousness.  Read more at location 512

There is a plant consciousness and there is an animal consciousness, and we share both these things. You eat certain foods, and the bile knows whether there’s something there for it to go to work on. The whole process is consciousness. Trying to interpret it in simply mechanistic terms won’t work.  Read more at location 517

All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional. A lot of people spend most of life in meditating on where their money is coming from and where it’s going to go. If you have a family to bring up, you’re concerned for the family. These are all very important concerns, but they have to do with physical conditions, mostly. But ************   how are you going to communicate spiritual consciousness to the children if you don’t have it yourself? How do you get that? What the myths are for is to bring us into a level of consciousness that is spiritual.  Read more at location 521

Certain prayers or meditations are designed to hold your consciousness on that level instead of letting it drop down here all the way. And then what you can finally do is to recognize that this is simply a lower level of that higher consciousness.  Read more at location 529

All money is congealed energy. I think that that’s the clue to how to transform your consciousness.  Read more at location 532

(Note: Akin to Jung)  They are the world’s dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with great human problems. I know when I come to one of these thresholds now. The myth tells me about it, how to respond to certain crises of disappointment or delight or failure or success. The myths tell me where I am.  Read more at location 536

****  When a person becomes a model for other people’s lives, he has moved into the sphere of being mythologized.  Read more at location 540

There is something magical about films. The person you are looking at is also somewhere else at the same time. That is a condition of the god. If a movie actor comes into the theater, everybody turns and looks at the movie actor. He is the real hero of the occasion. He is on another plane. He is a multiple presence.  Read more at location 549

when you come to the end of one time and the beginning of a new one, it’s a period of tremendous pain and turmoil. The threat we feel, and everybody feels—well, there is this notion of Armageddon coming, you know.  Read more at location 569

(Note: Serpent as symbolic ... interesting re: Garden if eden, materialism)  Well, automobiles have gotten into mythology. They have gotten into dreams. And airplanes are very much in the service of the imagination. The flight of the airplane, for example, is in the imagination as the release from earth. This is the same thing that birds symbolize, in a certain way. The bird is symbolic of the release of the spirit from bondage to the earth, just as the serpent is symbolic of the bondage to the earth.  Read more at location 589

Certainly Star Wars has a valid mythological perspective. It shows the state as a machine and asks, “Is the machine going to crush humanity or serve humanity? Humanity comes not from the machine but from the heart.  Read more at location 603

(Note: Funny)  I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine—it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.  Read more at location 611

I have had a revelation from my computer about mythology. You buy a certain software, and there is a whole set of signals that lead to the achievement of your aim. If you begin fooling around with signals that belong to another system of software, they just won’t work. Similarly, in mythology—if you have a mythology in which the metaphor for the mystery is the father, you are going to have a different set of signals from what you would have if the metaphor for the wisdom and mystery of the world were the mother. And they are two perfectly good metaphors. Neither one is a fact. These are metaphors.  Read more at location 622

****  You must understand that each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work.  Read more at location 630

If a person is really involved in a religion and really building his life on it, he better stay with the software that he has got. But a chap like myself, who likes to play with the software—well, I can run around, but I probably will never have an experience comparable to that of a saint.  Read more at location 631

my notion of the real horror today is what you see in Beirut. There you have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical god, they can’t get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don’t realize its reference. They haven’t allowed the circle that surrounds them to open. It is a closed circle. Each group says, “We are the chosen group, and we have God.”  Read more at location 642

Mythology is the song. It is the song of the imagination, inspired by the energies of the body. Once a Zen master stood up before his students and was about to deliver a sermon. And just as he was about to open his mouth, a bird sang. And he said, “The sermon has been delivered.”  Read more at location 666

The main motifs of the myths are the same, and they have always been the same. If you want to find your own mythology, the key is with what society do you associate? Every mythology has grown up in a certain society in a bounded field.  Read more at location 670

****  today there are no boundaries. The only mythology that is valid today is the mythology of the planet—and we don’t have such a mythology. The closest thing I know to a planetary mythology is Buddhism, which sees all beings as Buddha beings. The only problem is to come to the recognition of that. There is nothing to do.  Read more at location 672

Now brotherhood in most of the myths I know of is confined to a bounded community. In bounded communities, aggression is projected outward. For example, the ten commandments say, “Thou shalt not kill.” Then the next chapter says, “Go into Canaan and kill everybody in it.” That is a bounded field. The myths of participation and love pertain only to the in-group, and the out-group is totally other. This is the sense of the word “gentile”—the person is not of the same order.  Read more at location 677

****  Now, what is a myth? The dictionary definition of a myth would be stories about gods. So then you have to ask the next question: What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe—the powers of your own body and of nature. The myths are metaphorical of spiritual potentiality in the human being, and the same powers that animate our life animate the life of the world. But also there are myths and gods that have to do with specific societies or the patron deities of the society. In other words, there are two totally different orders of mythology. There is the mythology that relates you to your nature and to the natural world, of which you’re a part. And there is the mythology that is strictly sociological, linking you to a particular society. You are not simply a natural man, you are a member of a particular group.  Read more at location 682

the biblical tradition is a socially oriented mythology. Nature is condemned. In the nineteenth century, scholars thought of mythology and ritual as an attempt to control nature. But that is magic, not mythology or religion. Nature religions are not attempts to control nature but to help you put yourself in accord with it. But when nature is thought of as evil, you don’t put yourself in accord with it, you control it, or try to, and hence the tension,  Read more at location 691

****  I will never forget the experience I had when I was in Japan, a place that never heard of the Fall and the Garden of Eden. One of the Shinto texts says that the processes of nature cannot be evil. Every natural impulse is not to be corrected but to be sublimated, to be beautified. There is a glorious interest in the beauty of nature and cooperation with nature,  Read more at location 697

When you go inside the buildings, then you are back in Japan. It is the outside that looks like New York.  Read more at location 705

We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet. A model for that is the United States. Here were thirteen different little colony nations that decided to act in the mutual interest,  Read more at location 717

That’s what the Great Seal is all about. I carry a copy of the Great Seal in my pocket in the form of a dollar bill. Here is the statement of the ideals that brought about the formation of the United States. Look at this dollar bill.  Read more at location 721

When you’re down on the lower levels of this pyramid, you will be either on one side or on the other. But when you get up to the top, the points all come together, and there the eye of God opens.  Read more at location 724

This is the first nation in the world that was ever established on the basis of reason instead of simply warfare. These were eighteenth-century deists, these gentlemen. Over here we read, “In God We Trust.” But that is not the god of the Bible. These men did not believe in a Fall. They did not think the mind of man was cut off from God. The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God. Reason puts you in touch with God.  Read more at location 727

The Hindus, for example, don’t believe in special revelation. They speak of a state in which the ears have opened to the song of the universe. Here the eye has opened to the radiance of the mind of God. And that’s a fundamental deist idea. Once you reject the idea of the Fall in the Garden, man is not cut off from his source.  Read more at location 737

(Note: Dollar bill)  back to the Great Seal. When you count the number of ranges on this pyramid, you find there are thirteen. And when you come to the bottom, there is an inscription in Roman numerals. It is, of course, 1776. Then, when you add one and seven and seven and six, you get twenty-one, which is the age of reason, is it not? It was in 1776 that the thirteen states declared independence. The number thirteen is the number of transformation and rebirth. At the Last Supper there were twelve apostles and one Christ, who was going to die and be reborn. Thirteen is the number of getting out of the field of the bounds of twelve into the transcendent. You have the twelve signs of the zodiac and the sun. These men were very conscious of the number thirteen as the number of resurrection and rebirth and new life, and they played it up here all the way through. MOYERS: But, as a practical matter, there were thirteen states. CAMPBELL: Yes, but wasn’t that symbolic? This is not simply coincidental.  Read more at location 740

Now look at the right side of the dollar bill. Here’s the eagle, the bird of Zeus. The eagle is the downcoming of the god into the field of time. The bird is the incarnation principle of the deity. This is the bald eagle, the American eagle. This is the American counterpart of the eagle of the highest god, Zeus. He comes down, descending into the world of the pairs of opposites, the field of action. One mode of action is war and the other is peace. So in one of his feet the eagle holds thirteen arrows—that’s the principle of war. In the other he holds a laurel leaf with thirteen leaves—that is the principle of peaceful conversation.  Read more at location 758

there were nine feathers in his tail. Nine is the number of the descent of the divine power into the world. When the Angelus rings, it rings nine times. Now, over on the eagle’s head are thirteen stars arranged in the form of a Star of David.  Read more at location 770

I noticed the Solomon’s Seal here, composed of thirteen stars, and then I saw that each of the triangles was a Pythagorean tetrakys.  Read more at location 777

This is the primary symbol of Pythagorean philosophy, susceptible of a number of interrelated mythological, cosmological, psychological, and sociological interpretations, one of which is the dot at the apex as representing the creative center out of which the universe and all things have come.  Read more at location 780

The initial sound (a Christian might say, the creative Word), out of which the whole world was precipitated, the big bang, the pouring of the transcendent energy into and expanding through the field of time. As soon as it enters the field of time, it breaks into pairs of opposites, the one becomes two.  Read more at location 783

in Lao-tzu’s Tao-te Ching which states that out of the Tao, out of the transcendent, comes the One. Out of the One come Two; out of the Two come Three; and out of the Three come all things.  Read more at location 788

when I recognized that in the Great Seal of the United States there were two of these symbolic triangles interlocked was that we now had thirteen points, for our thirteen original states, and that there were now, furthermore, no less than six apexes, one above, one below, and four (so to say) to the four quarters. The sense of this, it seemed to me, might be that from above or below, or from any point of the compass, the creative Word might be heard, which is the great thesis of democracy. Democracy assumes that anybody from any quarter can speak, and speak truth, because his mind is not cut off from the truth. All he has to do is clear out his passions and then speak. So what you have here on the dollar bill is the eagle representing this wonderful image of the way in which the transcendent manifests itself in the world. That’s what the United States is founded on.  Read more at location 790

****  we held on to his words until the First World War. And then we canceled the Declaration of Independence and rejoined the British conquest of the planet. And so we are now on one side of the pyramid. We’ve moved from one to two. We are politically, historically, now a member of one side of an argument. We do not represent that principle of the eye up there. And all of our concerns have to do with economics and politics and not with the voice and sound of reason.  Read more at location 800

****  the important transition that took place about 500 B.C. This is the date of the Buddha and of Pythagoras and Confucius and Lao-tzu, if there was a Lao-tzu. This is the awakening of man’s reason. No longer is he informed and governed by the animal powers.  Read more at location 805

what destroys reason is passion. The principal passion in politics is greed. That is what pulls you down.  Read more at location 810

They are Masonic signs, and the meaning of the Pythagorean tetrakys has been known for centuries. The information would have been found in Thomas Jefferson’s library. These were, after all, learned men.  Read more at location 819

These founding fathers who were Masons actually studied what they could of Egyptian lore. In Egypt, the pyramid represents the primordial hillock. After the annual flood of the Nile begins to sink down, the first hillock is symbolic of the reborn world.  Read more at location 826

your reason is one kind of thinking. But thinking things out isn’t necessarily reason in this sense. Figuring out how you can break through a wall is not reason.  Read more at location 834

****  Reason has to do with finding the ground of being and the fundamental structuring of order of the universe.  Read more at location 837

Things are changing too fast to become mythologized.  Read more at location 846

**********   The individual has to find an aspect of myth that relates to his own life. Myth basically serves four functions. The first is the mystical function—that is the one I’ve been speaking about, realizing what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are, and experiencing awe before this mystery. Myth opens the world to the dimension of mystery, to the realization of the mystery that underlies all forms. If you lose that, you don’t have a mythology. If mystery is manifest through all things, the universe becomes, as it were, a holy picture. You are always addressing the transcendent mystery through the conditions of your actual world.  Read more at location 848

The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is concerned—showing you what the shape of the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through.  Read more at location 853

The third function is the sociological one—supporting and validating a certain social order. And here’s where the myths vary enormously from place to place.  Read more at location 857

It is this sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world—and it is out of date.  Read more at location 859

But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to—and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. Myths can teach you that.  Read more at location 863

God is separate from nature, and nature is condemned of God. It’s right there in Genesis: we are to be the masters of the world. But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.  Read more at location 877

Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form.  Read more at location 884

Chief Seattle wrote a marvelous letter in reply. His letter expresses the moral, really, of our whole discussion. “The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people.  Read more at location 900

****  “This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. “One thing we know: our god is also your god. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.  Read more at location 916

CHAPTER II: THE JOURNEY INWARD 

You’ve got the same body, with the same organs and energies, that Cro-Magnon man had thirty thousand years ago. Living a human life in New York City or living a human life in the caves, you go through the same stages of childhood, coming to sexual maturity, transformation of the dependency of childhood into the responsibility of manhood or womanhood, marriage, then failure of the body, gradual loss of its powers, and death. You have the same body, the same bodily experiences, and so you respond to the same images.  Read more at location 937

a constant image is that of the conflict of the eagle and the serpent. The serpent bound to the earth, the eagle in spiritual flight—isn’t that conflict something we all experience? And then, when the two amalgamate, we get a wonderful dragon, a serpent with wings. All over the earth people recognize these images. Whether I’m reading Polynesian or Iroquois or Egyptian myths, the images are the same,  Read more at location 940

When you start thinking about these things, about the inner mystery, inner life, the eternal life, there aren’t too many images for you to use. You begin, on your own, to have the images that are already present in some other system of thought.  Read more at location 951

************  One thing that comes out in myths, for example, is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.  Read more at location 956

This is the problem that can be metaphorically understood as identifying with the Christ in you. The Christ in you doesn’t die. The Christ in you survives death and resurrects. Or you can identify that with Shiva.  Read more at location 960

****  Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other.  Read more at location 964

*********  The ground of being is the ground of our being, and when we simply turn outward, we see all of these little problems here and there. But, if we look inward, we see that we are the source of them all.  Read more at location 972

Freud says even the most fully expounded dream is not really fully expounded. The dream is an inexhaustible source of spiritual information about yourself.  Read more at location 979

the problem of passing an exam is not simply a personal problem. Everyone has to pass a threshold of some kind. That is an archetypal thing. So there is a basic mythological theme there even though it is a personal dream. These two levels—the personal aspect and then the big general problem of which the person’s problem is a local example—are found in all cultures.  Read more at location 981

(Note: Advice for dream interpretation)  All you have to do is remember your dream in the first place, and write it down. Then take one little fraction of the dream, one or two images or ideas, and associate with them. Write down what comes to your mind, and again what comes to your mind, and again. You’ll find that the dream is based on a body of experiences that have some kind of significance in your life and that you didn’t know were influencing you. Soon the next dream will come along, and your interpretation will go further.  Read more at location 988

***********  a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.  Read more at location 998

They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself.  Read more at location 1007

Jung speaks of two orders of dream, the personal dream and the archetypal dream, or the dream of mythic dimension. You can interpret a personal dream by association, figuring out what it is talking about in your own life, or in relation to your own personal problem. But every now and then a dream comes up that is pure myth, that carries a mythic theme, or that is said, for example, to come from the Christ within.  Read more at location 1018

Now there is another, deeper meaning of dreamtime—which is of a time that is no time, just an enduring state of being.  Read more at location 1023

an important myth from Indonesia that tells of this mythological age and its termination. In the beginning, according to this story, the ancestors were not distinguished as to sex. There were no births, there were no deaths. Then a great public dance was celebrated, and in the course of the dance one of the participants was trampled to death and torn to pieces, and the pieces were buried. At the moment of that killing the sexes became separated, so that death was now balanced by begetting, begetting by death, while from the buried parts of the dismembered body food plants grew. Time had come into being, death, birth, and the killing and eating of other living beings, for the preservation of life. The timeless time of the beginning had been terminated by a communal crime, a deliberate murder or sacrifice.  Read more at location 1024

********  one of the main problems of mythology is reconciling the mind to this brutal precondition of all life, which lives by the killing and eating of lives. You don’t kid yourself by eating only vegetables, either, for they, too, are alive. So the essence of life is this eating of itself!  Read more at location 1030

MOYERS: Genesis 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

CAMPBELL: This is from “The Song of the World,” a legend of the Pima Indians of Arizona: “In the beginning there was only darkness everywhere—darkness and water. And the darkness gathered thick in places, crowding together and then separating, crowding and separating.…”

MOYERS: Genesis 1: “And the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.”  Read more at location 1037

***********  (Note:   I am as image of God)  CAMPBELL: And this is from the Hindu Upanishads, from about the eighth century B.C.: “In the beginning, there was only the great self reflected in the form of a person. Reflecting, it found nothing but itself. Then its first word was, ‘This am I.’ ”

MOYERS: Genesis 1: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ ”  Read more at location 1044

MOYERS: Genesis 2: “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done.…”

CAMPBELL: And now again from the Pima Indians: “I make the world and lo, the world is finished. Thus I make the world, and lo! The world is finished.”

MOYERS: And Genesis 1: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”

CAMPBELL: And from the Upanishads: “Then he realized, I indeed, I am this creation, for I have poured it forth from myself. In that way he became this creation. Verily, he who knows this becomes in this creation a creator.” That is the clincher there. When you know this, then you have identified with the creative principle, which is the God power in the world, which means in you. It is beautiful.  Read more at location 1052

 MOYERS: Genesis continues: “ ‘Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ The man said, ‘The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.’ Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent beguiled me, and I ate.’ ” You talk about buck passing, it starts very early.

CAMPBELL: Yes, it has been tough on serpents. The Bassari legend continues in the same way. “One day Snake said, ‘We too should eat these fruits. Why must we go hungry?’ Antelope said, ‘But we don’t know anything about this fruit.’ Then Man and his wife took some of the fruit and ate it. Unumbotte came down from the sky and asked, ‘Who ate the fruit?’ They answered, ‘We did.’ Unumbotte asked, ‘Who told you that you could eat that fruit?’ They replied, ‘Snake did.’ ” It is very much the same story.

 MOYERS: What do you make of it—that in these two stories the principal actors point to someone else as the initiator of the Fall?

CAMPBELL: Yes, but it turns out to be the snake. In both of these stories the snake is the symbol of life throwing off the past and continuing to live.  Read more at location 1061

************  The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon its shadow to be born again. They are equivalent symbols. Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again.  Read more at location 1074

the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life. Furthermore, the serpent represents the primary function of life, mainly eating. Life consists in eating other creatures. You don’t think about that very much when you make a nice-looking meal. But what you’re doing is eating something that was recently alive. And when you look at the beauty of nature, and you see the birds picking around—they’re eating things. You see the cows grazing, they’re eating things. The serpent is a traveling alimentary canal, that’s about all it is.  Read more at location 1077

***********  Life lives by killing and eating itself, casting off death and being reborn, like the moon. This is one of the mysteries that these symbolic, paradoxical forms try to represent.  Read more at location 1082

****  the snake in most cultures is given a positive interpretation. In India, even the most poisonous snake, the cobra, is a sacred animal, and the mythological Serpent King is the next thing to the Buddha. The serpent represents the power of life engaged in the field of time, and of death, yet eternally alive. The world is but its shadow—the falling skin.  Read more at location 1084

The interplay of man and nature is illustrated in this relationship with the serpent. A serpent flows like water and so is watery, but its tongue continually flashes fire. So you have the pair of opposites together in the serpent.  Read more at location 1089

**************  MOYERS: In the Christian story the serpent is the seducer.

CAMPBELL: That amounts to a refusal to affirm life. In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised or baptized. The serpent was the one who brought sin into the world. And the woman was the one who handed the apple to man. This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist that has been given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of the Fall.  Read more at location 1091

MOYERS: Does the idea of woman as sinner appear in other mythologies?

CAMPBELL: No, I don’t know of it elsewhere. The closest thing to it would be perhaps Pandora with Pandora’s box, but that’s not sin, that’s just trouble. The idea in the biblical tradition of the Fall is that nature as we know it is corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a corrupter. Why was the knowledge of good and evil forbidden to Adam and Eve? Without that knowledge, we’d all be a bunch of babies still in Eden, without any participation in life. Woman brings life into the world. Eve is the mother of this temporal world. Formerly you had a dreamtime paradise there in the Garden of Eden—no time, no birth, no death—no life. The serpent, who dies and is resurrected, shedding its skin and renewing its life, is the lord of the central tree, where time and eternity come together. He is the primary god, actually, in the Garden of Eden. Yahweh, the one who walks there in the cool of the evening, is just a visitor. The Garden is the serpent’s place. It is an old, old story. We have Sumerian seals from as early as 3500 B.C. showing the serpent and the tree and the goddess, with the goddess giving the fruit of life to a visiting male. The old mythology of the goddess is right there.  Read more at location 1096

The principal divinity of the people of Canaan was the Goddess, and associated with the Goddess is the serpent. This is the symbol of the mystery of life. The male-god-oriented group rejected it. In other words, there is a historical rejection of the Mother Goddess implied in the story of the Garden of Eden.  Read more at location 1112

Why are women the ones held responsible for the downfall? CAMPBELL: They represent life. Man doesn’t enter life except by woman, and so it is woman who brings us into this world of pairs of opposites and suffering.  Read more at location 1115

********  they eat the apple, the knowledge of the opposites. And when they discover they are different, the man and woman cover their shame. You see, they had not thought of themselves as opposites. Male and female is one opposition. Another opposition is the human and God. Good and evil is a third opposition. The primary oppositions are the sexual and that between human beings and God. Then comes the idea of good and evil in the world. And so Adam and Eve have thrown themselves out of the Garden of Timeless Unity, you might say, just by that act of recognizing duality. To move out into the world, you have to act in terms of pairs of opposites.  Read more at location 1121

*********  There is the plane of consciousness where you can identify yourself with that which transcends pairs of opposites.  Read more at location 1132

************  Unnameable. It is transcendent of all names.

MOYERS: God?

CAMPBELL: “God” is an ambiguous word in our language because it appears to refer to something that is known. But the transcendent is unknowable and unknown. God is transcendent, finally, of anything like the name “God.” God is beyond names and forms. Meister Eckhart said that the ultimate and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God, leaving your notion of God for an experience of that which transcends all notions. The mystery of life is beyond all human conception.  Read more at location 1134

But mythology suggests that behind that duality there is a singularity over which this plays like a shadow game. “Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” says the poet Blake.  Read more at location 1147

The source of temporal life is eternity. Eternity pours itself into the world. It is a basic mythic idea of the god who becomes many in us. In India, the god who lies in me is called the “inhabitant” of the body. To identify with that divine, immortal aspect of yourself is to identify yourself with divinity. Now, eternity is beyond all categories of thought. This is an important point in all of the great Oriental religions. We want to think about God. God is a thought. God is a name. God is an idea. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought.  Read more at location 1150

The ultimate word in our English language for that which is transcendent is God. But then you have a concept, don’t you see? You think of God as the father. Now, in religions where the god or creator is the mother, the whole world is her body. There is nowhere else. The male god is usually somewhere else. But male and female are two aspects of one principle. The division of life into sexes was a late division. Biologically, the amoeba isn’t male and female. The early cells are just cells. They divide and become two by asexual reproduction. I don’t know at what levels sexuality comes in, but it’s late. That’s why it’s absurd to speak of God as of either this sex or that sex. The divine power is antecedent to sexual separation.  Read more at location 1160

*******  The he or a she is a springboard to spring you into the transcendent, and transcendent means to “transcend,” to go past duality. Everything in the field of time and space is dual. The incarnation appears either as male or as female, and each of us is the incarnation of God. You’re born in only one aspect of your actual metaphysical duality, you might say. This is represented in the mystery religions, where an individual goes through a series of initiations opening him out inside into a deeper and deeper depth of himself, and there comes a moment when he realizes that he is both mortal and immortal, both male and female.  Read more at location 1168

The Garden of Eden is a metaphor for that innocence that is innocent of time, innocent of opposites, and that is the prime center out of which consciousness then becomes aware of the changes.  Read more at location 1174

There is a wonderful story of the deity, of the Self that said, “I am.” As soon as it said “I am,” it was afraid.  Read more at location 1177

It was an entity now, in time. Then it thought, “What should I be afraid of, I’m the only thing that is.” And as soon as it said that, it felt lonesome, and wished that there were another, and so it felt desire. It swelled, split in two, became male and female, and begot the world. Fear is the first experience of the fetus in the womb.  Read more at location 1179

****  There’s a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist, Stanislav Grof, now living in California, who for years treated people with LSD. And he found that some of them re-experienced birth and, in the re-experiencing of birth, the first stage is that of the fetus in the womb, without any sense of “I” or of being. Then shortly before birth the rhythm of the uterus begins, and there’s terror! Fear is the first thing, the thing that says “I.” Then comes the horrific stage of getting born, the difficult passage through the birth canal, and then—my God, light!  Read more at location 1182

****  There is a standard folk tale motif called The One Forbidden Thing. Remember Bluebeard, who says to his wife, “Don’t open that closet”? And then one always disobeys. In the Old Testament story God points out the one forbidden thing. Now, God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of his own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience.  Read more at location 1192

One explanation is that the human psyche is essentially the same all over the world. The psyche is the inward experience of the human body, which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears. Out of this common ground have come what Jung has called the archetypes, which are the common ideas of myths.  Read more at location 1197

Archetypes are biologically grounded, whereas the Freudian unconscious is a collection of repressed traumatic experiences from the individual’s lifetime. The Freudian unconscious is a personal unconscious, it is biographical. The Jungian archetypes of the unconscious are biological.  Read more at location 1204

a mythology that has to do with fertilizing the earth, with planting and bringing up the food plants—some such myth as that just described, of killing a deity, cutting it up, burying its members, and having the food plants grow. Such a myth will accompany an agricultural or planting tradition. But you won’t find it in a hunting culture. So there are historical as well as psychological aspects of this problem of the similarity of myths.  Read more at location 1211

In India there is a beautiful greeting, in which the palms are placed together, and you bow to the other person. Do you know what that means? MOYERS: No. CAMPBELL: The position of the palms together—this we use when we pray, do we not? That is a greeting which says that the god that is in you recognizes the god in the other. These people are aware of the divine presence in all things. When you enter an Indian home as a guest, you are greeted as a visiting deity.  Read more at location 1222

In most cultures there are two or three creation stories, not just one. There are two in the Bible, even though people treat them as one story.  Read more at location 1252

God thinks of this grand idea of drawing the soul of woman out of Adam’s own body—which is a very different creation story from Chapter 1 of Genesis, where God created Adam and Eve together in the image of himself as male and female. There God is himself the primordial androgyne. Chapter 2 is by far the earlier story, coming from perhaps the eighth century or so B.C., whereas Chapter 1 is of a so-called priestly text, of about the fourth century B.C., or later.  Read more at location 1257

In the Hindu story of the Self that felt fear, then desire, then split in two, we have a counterpart of Genesis 2. In Genesis, it is man, not the god, who splits in two.  Read more at location 1261

in Plato’s Symposium is another of this kind. Aristophanes says that in the beginning there were creatures composed of what are now two human beings. And those were of three sorts: male/female, male/male, and female/female. The gods then split them all in two. But after they had been split apart, all they could think of to do was to embrace each other again in order to reconstitute the original units. So we all now spend our lives trying to find and re-embrace our other halves.  Read more at location 1263

MOYERS: You say that mythology is the study of mankind’s one great story. What is that one great story? *******  CAMPBELL: That we have come forth from the one ground of being as manifestations in the field of time. The field of time is a kind of shadow play over a timeless ground. And you play the game in the shadow field, you enact your side of the polarity with all your might.  Read more at location 1267

To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.  Read more at location 1277

********  The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong. There is an often-quoted verse in Sanskrit, which appears in the Chinese Tao-te Ching as well: “He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows. For in this context, to know is not to know. And not to know is to know.”  Read more at location 1282

MOYERS: Are some myths more or less true than others?

CAMPBELL: They are true in different senses. Every mythology has to do with the wisdom of life as related to a specific culture at a specific time. It integrates the individual into his society and the society into the field of nature. It unites the field of nature with my nature. It’s a harmonizing force. Our own mythology, for example, is based on the idea of duality: good and evil, heaven and hell. And so our religions tend to be ethical in their accent. Sin and atonement. Right and wrong.  Read more at location 1288

Ramakrishna once said that if all you think of are your sins, then you are a sinner.  Read more at location 1294

religion is really a kind of second womb. It’s designed to bring this extremely complicated thing, which is a human being, to maturity, which means to be self-motivating, self-acting. But the idea of sin puts you in a servile condition throughout your life.  Read more at location 1297

(Note: Re: christianity)  Dr. D. T. Suzuki. He stood up with his hands slowly rubbing his sides and said, “God against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature—very funny religion!”  Read more at location 1301

in the religious system of the Near East, you identify with the good and fight against the evil. The biblical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all speak with derogation of the so-called nature religions. The shift from a nature religion to a sociological religion makes it difficult for us to link back to nature.  Read more at location 1306

********  Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.  Read more at location 1310

(Note: Funny. Fundamentalism)  The reference of the metaphor in religious traditions is to something transcendent that is not literally any thing. If you think that the metaphor is itself the reference, it would be like going to a restaurant, asking for the menu, seeing beefsteak written there, and starting to eat the menu. For example, Jesus ascended to heaven. The denotation would seem to be that somebody ascended to the sky. That’s literally what is being said. But if that were really the meaning of the message, then we have to throw it away, because there would have been no such place for Jesus literally to go. We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy. Astronomy and physics have simply eliminated that as a literal, physical possibility.  Read more at location 1314

************  if you read “Jesus ascended to heaven” in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward—not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega,  Read more at location 1320

MOYERS: Aren’t you undermining one of the great traditional doctrines of the classic Christian faith—that the burial and the resurrection of Jesus prefigures our own? CAMPBELL: That would be a mistake in the reading of the symbol. That is reading the words in terms of prose instead of in terms of poetry, reading the metaphor in terms of the denotation instead of the connotation.  Read more at location 1325

The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.  Read more at location 1331

*******  in the Thomas gospel that was dug up in Egypt some forty years ago, Jesus says, “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I shall be he.” Now, that is exactly Buddhism. We are all manifestations of Buddha consciousness, or Christ consciousness, only we don’t know it. The word “Buddha” means “the one who waked up.”  Read more at location 1340

“Reincarnation, like heaven, is a metaphor.”  Read more at location 1346

****  Sin is simply a limiting factor that limits your consciousness and fixes it in an inappropriate condition.  Read more at location 1349

The reincarnating monad is the principal hero of Oriental myth. The monad puts on various personalities, life after life. Now the reincarnation idea is not that you and I as the personalities that we are will be reincarnated. The personality is what the monad throws off. Then the monad puts on another body, male or female, depending on what experiences are necessary for it to clear itself of this attachment to the field of time.  Read more at location 1351

****  Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth. But you can live in terms of that depth. And when you can experience it, you suddenly see that all the religions are talking of that.  Read more at location 1357

the idea of life as an ordeal through which you become released from the bondage of life belongs to the higher religions. I don’t think I see anything like that in aboriginal mythology.  Read more at location 1360

(Note: Inspired by God)  MOYERS: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

CAMPBELL: There has to be a training to help you open your ears so that you can begin to hear metaphorically instead of concretely. Freud and Jung both felt that myth is grounded in the unconscious. Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become the carrier of something that is given to you from what have been called the Muses—or, in biblical language, “God.”  Read more at location 1370

the folk tale is for entertainment. The myth is for spiritual instruction. There’s a fine saying in India with respect to these two orders of myths, the folk idea and the elementary idea. The folk aspect is called desi, which means “provincial,” having to do with your society. That is for young people.  Read more at location 1381

But there’s also the elementary idea. The Sanskrit name for that is marga, which means “path.” It’s the trail back to yourself. The myth comes from the imagination, and it leads back to it. The society teaches you what the myths are, and then it disengages you so that in your meditations you can follow the path right in.  Read more at location 1385

Civilizations are grounded on myth. The civilization of the Middle Ages was grounded on the myth of the Fall in the Garden, the redemption on the cross, and the carrying of the grace of redemption to man through the sacraments. The cathedral was the center of the sacrament, and the castle was the center protecting the cathedral. There you have the two forms of government—the government of the spirit and the government of the physical life, both in accord with the one source, namely the grace of the crucifixion.  Read more at location 1388

The cathedral, the castle, and the cottage—you go to any of the areas of high civilization, and you will see the same—the temple, the palace, and the town. They are different generating centers, but in so far as this is one civilization, they are all operating in the same symbolic field.  Read more at location 1395

****  Poetry is a metaphorical language.  Read more at location 1402

The difference between a priest and a shaman is that the priest is a functionary and the shaman is someone who has had an experience. In our tradition it is the monk who seeks the experience, while the priest is the one who has studied to serve the community. I had a friend who attended an international meeting of the Roman Catholic meditative orders, which was held in Bangkok. He told me that the Catholic monks had no problems understanding the Buddhist monks, but that it was the clergy of the two religions who were unable to understand each other.  Read more at location 1409

****  The person who has had a mystical experience knows that all the symbolic expressions of it are faulty. The symbols don’t render the experience, they suggest it. If you haven’t had the experience, how can you know what it is?  Read more at location 1413

****  (Note:   why myth and metaphor is richer)  Our thinking is largely discursive, verbal, linear. There is more reality in an image than in a word.  Read more at location 1419

(Note: For mom)  MOYERS: Do you ever think that it is this absence of the religious experience of ecstasy, of joy, this denial of transcendence in our society, that has turned so many young people to the use of drugs? CAMPBELL: Absolutely. That is the way in.  Read more at location 1420

Religions are addressing; social problems and ethics instead of the mystical experience.  Read more at location 1426

****  “transcendent” properly means that which is beyond all concepts. Kant tells us that all of our experiences are bounded by time and space. They take place within space, and they take place in the course of time. Time and space form the sensibilities that bound our experiences. Our senses are enclosed in the field of time and space, and our minds are enclosed in a frame of the categories of thought. But the ultimate thing (which is no thing) that we are trying to get in touch with is not so enclosed. We enclose it as we try to think of it.  Read more at location 1447

**********  (Note:   paradox)  The transcendent transcends all of these categories of thinking. Being and nonbeing—those are categories. The word “God” properly refers to what transcends all thinking, but the word “God” itself is something thought about.  Read more at location 1451

One problem with Yahweh, as they used to say in the old Christian Gnostic texts, is that he forgot he was a metaphor. He thought he was a fact. And when he said, “I am God,” a voice was heard to say, “You are mistaken, Samael.” “Samael” means “blind god”: blind to the infinite Light of which he is a local historical manifestation. This is known as the blasphemy of Jehovah—that he thought he was God.  Read more at location 1455

As the Buddha is reported to have said: “It both is and is not; neither is, nor is not.” God as the ultimate mystery of being is beyond thinking.  Read more at location 1460

That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don’t teach until you are asked. You don’t force your mission down people’s throats.)  Read more at location 1487

CAMPBELL: Only death is no trouble. People ask me, “Do you have optimism about the world?” And I say, “Yes, it’s great just the way it is. And you are not going to fix it up. Nobody has ever made it any better. It is never going to be any better. This is it, so take it or leave it. You are not going to correct or improve it.”  Read more at location 1525

*******  Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.  Read more at location 1530

MOYERS: What about this idea of good and evil in mythology, of life as a conflict between the forces of darkness and the forces of light?

CAMPBELL: That is a Zoroastrian idea, which has come over into Judaism and Christianity. In other traditions, good and evil are relative to the position in which you are standing. What is good for one is evil for the other.  Read more at location 1531

****  “All life is sorrowful” is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow—loss, loss, loss. You’ve got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it.  Read more at location 1535

James Joyce has a memorable line: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” And the way to awake from it is not to be afraid, and to recognize that all of this, as it is, is a manifestation of the horrendous power that is of all creation. The ends of things are always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all.  Read more at location 1540

will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera—except that it hurts.” Affirmation is difficult. We always affirm with conditions.  Read more at location 1549

****  The hero’s sphere of action is not the transcendent but here, now, in the field of time, of good and evil—of the pairs of opposites. Whenever one moves out of the transcendent, one comes into a field of opposites. One has eaten of the tree of knowledge, not only of good and evil, but of male and female, of right and wrong, of this and that, and of light and dark. Everything in the field of time is dual: past and future, dead and alive, being and nonbeing. But the ultimate pair in the imagination are male and female, the male being aggressive, and the female being receptive, the male being the warrior, the female the dreamer.  Read more at location 1554

Heraclitus said that for God all things are good and right and just, but for man some things are right and others are not.  Read more at location 1559

**********  Jesus says, “Judge not that you may not be judged.” That is to say, put yourself back in the position of Paradise before you thought in terms of good and evil.  Read more at location 1564

There are two aspects to a thing of this kind. One is your judgment in the field of action, and the other is your judgment as a metaphysical observer.  Read more at location 1568

********  Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.  Read more at location 1598

CHAPTER III: THE FIRST STORYTELLERS 

The ancient myths were designed to harmonize the mind and the body. The mind can ramble off in strange ways and want things that the body does not want. The myths and rites were means of putting the mind in accord with the body and the way of life in accord with the way that nature dictates.  Read more at location 1621

The stages of human development are the same today as they were in the ancient times. As a child, you are brought up in a world of discipline, of obedience, and you are dependent on others. All this has to be transcended when you come to maturity, so that you can live not in dependency but with self-responsible authority. If you can’t cross that threshold, you have the basis for neuroses. Then comes the one after you have gained your world, of yielding it—the crisis of dismissal, disengagement.  Read more at location 1624

ultimately death. That’s the ultimate disengagement. So myth has to serve both aims, that of inducting the young person into the life of his world—that’s the function of the folk idea—then disengaging him.  Read more at location 1629

****  (Note:  life seasons)  The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?  Read more at location 1640

People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another—but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment.  Read more at location 1644

When we think about mythology, we usually think either of the Greek mythology or of the biblical mythology. There is a kind of humanization of the myth material in both of these cultures. There is a very strong accent on the human, and in the Greek myths, especially, on the humanity and glory of the beautiful youth.  Read more at location 1649

The earliest evidence of anything like mythological thinking is associated with graves.  Read more at location 1655

we do know that burials always involve the idea of the continued life beyond the visible one, of a plane of being that is behind the visible plane, and that is somehow supportive of the visible one to which we have to relate. I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology—that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one.  Read more at location 1670

Society was there before you, it is there after you are gone, and you are a member of it. The myths that link you to your social group, the tribal myths, affirm that you are an organ of the larger organism. Society itself is an organ of a larger organism, which is the landscape, the world in which the tribe moves. The main theme in ritual is the linking of the individual to a larger morphological structure than that of his own physical body.  Read more at location 1674

You see, the basic hunting myth is of a kind of covenant between the animal world and the human world. The animal gives its life willingly, with the understanding that its life transcends its physical entity and will be returned to the soil or to the mother through some ritual of restoration. And this ritual of restoration is associated with the main hunting animal.  Read more at location 1680

MOYERS: Do you think that the animal became the father image of God?

CAMPBELL: Yes. It is a fact that the religious attitude toward the principal animal is one of reverence and respect, and not only that—submission to the inspiration of that animal. The animal is the one that brings the gifts—tobacco, the mystical pipe, and so on.

MOYERS: Do you think this troubled early man—to kill the animal that is a god, or the messenger of a god?

CAMPBELL: Absolutely—that is why you have the rites.

MOYERS: What kind of rites?

CAMPBELL: Rituals of appeasement and of thanks to the animal.  Read more at location 1723

You find among hunting people all over the world a very intimate, appreciative relationship to the principal food animal. Now, when we sit down to a meal, we thank God for giving us the food. These people thanked the animal.  Read more at location 1738

**************  The Indians addressed all of life as a “thou”—the trees, the stones, everything. You can address anything as a “thou,” and if you do it, you can feel the change in your own psychology. The ego that sees a “thou” is not the same ego that sees an “it.” And when you go to war with people, the problem of the newspapers is to turn those people into “its.”  Read more at location 1816

The Indian relationship to animals is in contrast to our relationship to animals, where we see animals as a lower form of life. In the Bible we are told that we are the masters. For hunting people, as I said, the animal is in many ways superior. A Pawnee Indian said: “In the beginning of all things, wisdom and knowledge were with the animal. For Tirawa, the One Above, did not speak directly to man. He sent certain animals to tell mankind that he showed himself through the beast. And that from them, and from the stars and the sun and the moon, man should learn.”  Read more at location 1822

****  How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive? How much of it is conscious and intentional? That is a big question.  Read more at location 1838

A temple is a landscape of the soul. When you walk into a cathedral, you move into a world of spiritual images. It is the mother womb of your spiritual life—mother church. All the forms around are significant of spiritual value. Now, in a cathedral, the imagery is in anthropomorphic form. God and Jesus and the saints and all are in human form. And in the caves the images are in animal form. But it’s the same thing, believe me. The form is secondary. The message is what is important.  Read more at location 1849

Scholars speculate that they had to do with the initiation of boys into the hunt. Boys had to learn not only to hunt but how to respect the animals, and what rituals to perform, and how in their own lives no longer to be little boys but to be men. Those hunts, you see, were very, very dangerous. These caves are the original men’s rite sanctuaries where the boys became no longer their mothers’ sons but their fathers’ sons.  Read more at location 1857

we know what the aborigines do in Australia. Now, when a boy gets to be a little bit ungovernable, one fine day the men come in, and they are naked except for stripes of white bird down that they’ve stuck on their bodies using their own blood for glue. They are swinging the bull-roarers, which are the voices of spirits, and the men arrive as spirits. The boy will try to take refuge with his mother, and she will pretend to try to protect him. But the men just take him away. A mother is no good from then on, you see. You can’t go back to Mother, you’re in another field. Then the boys are taken out to the men’s sacred ground, and they’re really put through an ordeal—circumcision, subincision, the drinking of men’s blood, and so forth. Just as they had drunk mother’s milk as children, so now they drink men’s blood. They’re being turned into men. While this is going on, they are being shown enactments of mythological episodes from the great myths. They are instructed in the mythology of the tribe. Then, at the end of this, they are brought back to the village, and the girl whom each is to marry has already been selected. The boy has now come back as a man. He has been removed from his childhood, and his body has been scarified, and circumcision and subincision have been enacted. Now he has a man’s body. There’s no chance of relapsing back to boyhood after a show like that.  Read more at location 1862

MOYERS: We have none of those rites today, do we?

CAMPBELL: I’m afraid we don’t. So the youngsters invent them themselves, and you have these raiding gangs, and so forth—that is self-rendered initiation.  Read more at location 1883

A ritual is the enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth.  Read more at location 1888

As a Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name, the name you are going to be confirmed by. But instead of scarifying you and knocking your teeth out and all, the bishop gives you a smile and a slap on the cheek. It has been reduced to that. Nothing has happened to you. The Jewish counterpart is the bar mitzvah. Whether it actually works to effect a psychological transformation will depend on the individual case, I suppose. But in those old days there was no problem. The boy came out with a different body, and he had really gone through something.  Read more at location 1890

the girl becomes a woman with her first menstruation. It happens to her. Nature does it to her.  Read more at location 1898

A woman is a vehicle of life. Life has overtaken her. Woman is what it is all about—the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment.  Read more at location 1901

****  The mystery of death is one of them—which balances the theme of the mystery of life. It is the same mystery in its two aspects. The next theme is the relationship of this to the animal world, which dies and lives again. Then there is the motif of procuring food. The relationship of the woman to the nature of the outer world is there. Then we have to take into account the problem of the transformation of children into adults. That transformation is a fundamental concern throughout the ritual life of people.  Read more at location 1907

With respect to ritual, it must be kept alive. So much of our ritual is dead. It’s extremely interesting to read of the primitive, elementary cultures—how they transform the folk tales, the myths, all the time in terms of the circumstances.  Read more at location 1937

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.  Read more at location 1948

They come out of an elite experience, the experience of people particularly gifted, whose ears are open to the song of the universe. These people speak to the folk, and there is an answer from the folk, which is then received as an interaction. But the first impulse in the shaping of a folk tradition comes from above, not from below.  Read more at location 1954

****  The shaman is the person, male or female, who in his late childhood or early youth has an overwhelming psychological experience that turns him totally inward. It’s a kind of schizophrenic crack-up. The whole unconscious opens up, and the shaman falls into it. This shaman experience has been described many, many times. It occurs all the way from Siberia right through the Americas down to Tierra del Fuego.  Read more at location 1958

Now, there’s a fantastic example of something. The Bushmen live in a desert world. It’s a very hard life, a life of great, great tension. The male and female sexes are, in a disciplined way, separate. Only in the dance do the two come together. And they come together this way. The women sit in a circle or in a little group and beat their thighs, setting a pace for the men dancing around them. The women are the center around which the men dance. And they control the dance and what goes on with the men through their own singing and beating of the thighs.

MOYERS: What’s the significance, that the woman is controlling the dance?

CAMPBELL: Well, the woman is life, and the man is the servant of life. That’s the basic idea in these things. During the course of the circling, which they do all night long, one of the men will suddenly pass out. He experiences what we might call a possession. But it is described as a flash, a kind of thunderbolt or lightning bolt, which passes from the pelvic area right up the spine into the head.  Read more at location 1964

MOYERS: It is described in your book The Way of the Animal Powers—here:

CAMPBELL: “When people sing, I dance. I enter the earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far.” He’s entranced now, and this is a description of an experience. “When I emerge, I am already climbing. I’m climbing threads, the threads that lie over there in the south. I climb one and leave it, then I climb another one. Then I leave it and climb another.… And when you arrive at God’s place, you make yourself small. You have become small. You come in small to God’s place. You do what you have to do there. Then you return to where everyone is, and you hide your face. You hide your face so you won’t see anything. You come and come and come and finally you enter your body again. All the people who have stayed behind are waiting for you—they fear you. You enter, enter the earth, and you return to enter the skin of your body.… And you say ‘he-e-e-e!’ That is the sound of your return to your body. Then you begin to sing. The ntum-masters are there around.” Ntum is the supernatural power. “They take powder and blow it—Phew! Phew!—in your face. They take hold of your head and blow about the sides of your face. This is how you manage to be alive again. Friends, if they don’t do that to you, you die.… You just die and are dead. Friends, this is what it does, this ntum that I do, this ntum here that I dance.” My God! This guy’s had an experience of another whole realm of consciousness!.  Read more at location 1973

MOYERS: Have you ever seen such a rite? Such a happening? Have you ever known that kind of ecstasy or witnessed it?

CAMPBELL: No, I have not.  Read more at location 1995

I think it was Nietzsche who said, “Be careful lest in casting out the devils you cast out the best thing that’s in you.” Here, the deities who have been encountered—powers, let’s call them—are retained. The connection is maintained, not broken. And these men then become the spiritual advisers and gift-givers to their people. Well, what happened with this young boy was that he had a prophetic vision of the terrible future of his tribe. It was a vision of what he called “the hoop” of the nation. In the vision, Black Elk saw that the hoop of his nation was one of many hoops, which is something that we haven’t learned at all well yet. He saw the cooperation of all the hoops, all the nations in grand procession. But more than that, the vision was an experience of himself as going through the realms of spiritual imagery that were of his culture and assimilating their import.  Read more at location 2011

**********  The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience—this is the mythological experience.  Read more at location 2023

***************  There is a definition of God which has been repeated by many philosophers. God is an intelligible sphere—a sphere known to the mind, not to the senses—whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. And the center, Bill, is right where you’re sitting. And the other one is right where I’m sitting. And each of us is a manifestation of that mystery. That’s a nice mythological realization that sort of gives you a sense of who and what you are.  Read more at location 2029

What you have here is what might be translated into raw individualism, you see, if you didn’t realize that the center was also right there facing you in the other person. This is the mythological way of being an individual.  Read more at location 2034

CHAPTER IV:  SACRIFICE AND BLISS 

The sanctification of the local landscape is a fundamental function of mythology.  Read more at location 2045

The landscape, the dwelling place, becomes an icon, a holy picture. Wherever you are, you are related to the cosmic order.  Read more at location 2048

I think it’s Cicero who says that when you go into a great tall grove, the presence of a deity becomes known to you. There are sacred groves everywhere. Going into the forest as a little boy, I can remember worshiping a tree, a great big old tree, thinking, “My, my, what you’ve known and been.” I think this sense of the presence of creation is a basic mood of man. But we live now in a city. It’s all stone and rock, manufactured by human hands. It’s a different kind of world to grow up in when you’re out in the forest with the little chipmunks and the great owls. All these things are around you as presences, representing forces and powers and magical possibilities of life that are not yours and yet are all part of life, and that opens it out to you. Then you find it echoing in yourself, because you are nature.  Read more at location 2055

****  You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.  Read more at location 2066

Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it. Get a phonograph and put on the music that you really love, even if it’s corny music that nobody else respects. Or get the book you like to read. In your sacred place you get the “thou” feeling of life that these people had for the whole world in which they lived.  Read more at location 2074

People claim the land by creating sacred sites, by mythologizing the animals and plants—they invest the land with spiritual powers. It becomes like a temple, a place for meditation.  Read more at location 2078

In the Navaho sand paintings, you see these little animals, each with its own value. Now, these animals are not shown naturalistically. They are stylized. And the stylization refers to their spiritual, not to their merely physical, characteristics.  Read more at location 2080

There are a few historical spots where people may go to think about something important that happened there. For example, we may go visit the Holy Land, because that’s the land of our religious origins. But every land should be a holy land. One should find the symbol in the landscape itself of the energies of the life there. That’s what all early traditions do. They sanctify their own landscape.  Read more at location 2104

**********  You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach an eighteenth-century town, it is the political palace that’s the tallest thing in the place. And when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centers of economic life.  Read more at location 2127

The cathedral is in the form of a cross, with the altar in the middle there. It’s a symbolic structure. Now many churches are built as though they were theaters. Visibility is important. In the cathedral, there is no interest in visibility at all. Most of what goes on goes on out of your sight. But the symbol is what’s important there, not just watching the show. Everybody knows the show by heart. You’ve seen it ever since you were a six-year-old child.  Read more at location 2143

The goal of early life was to live in constant consciousness of the spiritual principle. In the Assyrian palaces, you’ll see a composite beast with the head of a man, the body of a lion, the wings of the eagle, and the feet of a bull: four signs of the zodiac that have been put together and made into door guardians. Those same four beasts, which are associated with the vision of Ezekiel, become the four evangelists in the Christian tradition. You remember the prayer: “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, bless the bed that I sleep on.” In this prayer, you are in the middle, where Christ is, and the four points of the compass around you are the four posts of your bed. Now, this mandala represents the Christ appearing from beyond Space-Time. Those four beasts represent the veil of Space-Time, veiling eternity, and the Christ in the center is the breakthrough, the second birth, the coming of the Lord of the World from the womb of the universal goddess, Space-Time.  Read more at location 2151

*********  All final spiritual reference is to the silence beyond sound. The word made flesh is the first sound. Beyond that sound is the transcendent unknown, the unknowable. It can be spoken of as the great silence, or as the void, or as the transcendent absolute.  Read more at location 2161

****  The idea of the supernatural as being something over and above the natural is a killing idea.  Read more at location 2166

The spirit is really the bouquet of life. It is not something breathed into life, it comes out of life. This is one of the glorious things about the mother-goddess religions, where the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity isn’t something ruling over and above a fallen nature. There was something of this spirit in the medieval cult of the Virgin, out of which all the beautiful thirteenth-century French cathedrals arose. However, our story of the Fall in the Garden sees nature as corrupt; and that myth corrupts the whole world for us. Because nature is thought of as corrupt, every spontaneous act is sinful and must not be yielded to. You get a totally different civilization and a totally different way of living according to whether your myth presents nature as fallen or whether nature is in itself a manifestation of divinity, and the spirit is the revelation of the divinity that is inherent in nature.  Read more at location 2171

***********  (Note:   though panentheism is common, is that not monotheistic?)  MOYERS: Is the idea “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” purely a Hebraic idea?

CAMPBELL: I’ve not found it anywhere else.

MOYERS: Why only one god?

CAMPBELL: This I do not understand. I do understand the accent on the local social deity for people who are living in a desert. Your whole commitment is to the society which is protecting you. Society is always patriarchal. Nature is always matrilineal.  Read more at location 2237

MOYERS: So these differing approaches to myth are what you mean by the “way of the animal powers,” the “way of the seeded earth,” the “way of the celestial lights,” and the “way of man.”

CAMPBELL: These have to do with the symbolic system through which the normal human condition of the time is symbolized and organized and given knowledge of itself.

MOYERS: And what it values?

CAMPBELL: The values will be a result of the conditions that govern life. For instance, the hunter is always directed outward to the animal. His life depends on the relationship to the animals. His mythology is outward turned. But the planting mythology, which has to do with the cultivation of the plant, the planting of the seed, the death of the seed, so to say, and the coming of the new plant, is more inward turned. With the hunters, the animals inspired the mythology. When a man wanted to gain power and knowledge, he would go into the forest and fast and pray, and an animal would come and teach him. With the planters, the plant world is the teacher. The plant world is identical in its life sequences with the life of man. So you see, there’s an inward relationship there.

MOYERS: What happened to the mythic imagination as human beings turned from the hunting of animals to the planting of seeds?

CAMPBELL: There is a dramatic and total transformation, not just of the myths but of the psyche itself, I think. You see, an animal is a total entity, he is within a skin. When you kill that animal, he’s dead—that’s the end of him. There is no such thing as a self-contained individual in the vegetal world. You cut a plant, and another sprout comes. Pruning is helpful to a plant. The whole thing is just a continuing inbeingness.  Read more at location 2250

So in the forest and planting cultures, there is a sense of death as not death somehow, that death is required for new life. And the individual isn’t quite an individual, he is a branch of a plant. Jesus uses this image when he says, “I am the vine, and you are the branches.” That vineyard image is a totally different one from the separate animals.  Read more at location 2269

Every people is a chosen people in its own mind. And it is rather amusing that their name for themselves usually means mankind. They have odd names for the other people—like Funny Face, or Twisted Nose.  Read more at location 2314

In the Iroquois story, one twin is Sprout or Plant Boy, and the other is named Flint. Flint so damages his mother when he is born that she dies. Now, Flint and Plant Boy represent the two traditions. Flint is used for the blade to kill animals, so the twin named Flint represents the hunting tradition, and Plant Boy, of course, represents the planting principle. In the biblical tradition, the plant boy is Cain and the flint boy is Abel, who is really a herder rather than a hunter. So in the Bible, you have the herder against the planter, and the planter is the one who is abominated. This is the myth of hunting people or herding people who have come into a planting-culture world and denigrate the people whom they have conquered.  Read more at location 2320

In the biblical tradition, it is always the second son who is the winner, the good one. The second son is the newcomer—namely the Hebrews. The older son, or the Canaanites, were living there before. Cain represents the agriculturally based city position.  Read more at location 2327

The death and resurrection of a savior figure is a common motif in all of these legends. For example, in the story of the origin of maize, you have this benign figure who appears to the young boy in a vision, and gives him maize, and dies. The plant comes from his body. Somebody has had to die in order for life to emerge. I begin to see this incredible pattern of death giving rise to birth, and birth giving rise to death. Every generation has to die in order that the next generation can come.  Read more at location 2335

There is a ritual associated with the men’s societies in New Guinea that actually enacts the planting-society myth of death, resurrection, and cannibalistic consumption. There is a sacred field with drums going, and chants going, and then pauses. This goes on for four or five days, on and on. Rituals are boring, you know, they just wear you out, and then you break through to something else. At last comes the great moment. There has been a celebration of real sexual orgy, the breaking of all rules. The young boys who are being initiated into manhood are now to have their first sexual experience. There is a great shed of enormous logs supported by two uprights. A young woman comes in ornamented as a deity, and she is brought to lie down in this place beneath the great roof. The boys, six or so, with the drums going and chanting going, one after another, have their first experience of intercourse with the girl. And when the last boy is with her in full embrace, the supports are withdrawn, the logs drop, and the couple is killed. There is the union of male and female again, as they were in the beginning, before the separation took place. There is the union of begetting and death. They are both the same thing. Then the little couple is pulled out and roasted and eaten that very evening. The ritual is the repetition of the original act of the killing of a god followed by the coming of food from the dead savior. In the sacrifice of the Mass, you are taught that this is the body and blood of the Savior. You take it to you, and you turn inward, and there he works within you.  Read more at location 2343

****  The nature of life itself has to be realized in the acts of life. In the hunting cultures, when a sacrifice is made, it is, as it were, a gift or a bribe to the deity that is being invited to do something for us or to give us something. But when a figure is sacrificed in the planting cultures, that figure itself is the god. The person who dies is buried and becomes the food. Christ is crucified, and from his body the food of the spirit comes. The Christ story involves a sublimation of what originally was a very solid vegetal image. Jesus is on Holy Rood, the tree, and he is himself the fruit of the tree. Jesus is the fruit of eternal life, which was on the second forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. When man ate of the fruit of the first tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was expelled from the Garden. The Garden is the place of unity, of nonduality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings. You eat the duality, and you are on the way out. The tree of coming back to the Garden is the tree of immortal life, where you know that J and the Father are one. Getting back into that Garden is the aim of many a religion.  Read more at location 2355

****  In the Christian tradition, Jesus on the cross is on a tree, the tree of immortal life, and he is the fruit of the tree. Jesus on the cross, the Buddha under the tree—these are the same figures. And the cherubim at the gate—who are they? At the Buddhist shrines you’ll see one has his mouth open, the other has his mouth closed—fear and desire, a pair of opposites. If you’re approaching a garden like that, and those two figures there are real to you and threaten you, if you have fear for your life, you are still outside the garden. But if you are no longer attached to your ego existence, but see the ego existence as a function of a larger, eternal totality, and you favor the larger against the smaller, then you won’t be afraid of those two figures, and you will go through. We’re kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.  Read more at location 2366

*************  transcendence. This is an essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is the carrier. That is the God.  Read more at location 2378

****  What you get in the vegetation traditions is this notion of identity behind the surface display of duality. Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object.  Read more at location 2380

***********  That you have to balance between death and life—they are two aspects of the same thing, which is being, becoming.  Read more at location 2385

I know no story in which death is rejected. The old idea of being sacrificed is not what we think at all. The Mayan Indians had a kind of basketball game in which, at the end, the captain of the winning team was sacrificed on the field by the captain of the losing team. His head was cut off. Going to your sacrifice as the winning stroke of your life is the essence of the early sacrificial idea.  Read more at location 2388

There is a report by the seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries in eastern Canada of a young Iroquois brave who has just been captured by an enemy tribe. He is being brought to be tortured to death. The Northeastern Indians had a custom of systematic torture of their male captives. The ordeal was to be suffered without flinching. That was the final test of real manhood. And so this young Iroquois is being brought in to endure this horrible ordeal; but, to the Jesuits’ amazement, it is as though he were coming to celebrate his wedding. He is decorated and loudly singing. His captors are treating him as though they were his welcoming hosts and he their honored guest. And he is playing the game along with them, knowing all the while to what end he is being conducted. The French priests describing the occasion are simply appalled by what they interpret as the heartless mockery of such a reception, characterizing the youth’s captors as a company of savage brutes. But no! Those people were to be the young brave’s sacrificial priests. This was to be a sacrifice of the altar and, by analogy, that boy was the like of Jesus. The French priests themselves, every day, were celebrating Mass, which is a replication of the brutal sacrifice of the cross. There is an equivalent scene described in the apocryphal Christian Acts of John, immediately before Jesus goes to be crucified.  Read more at location 2397

When you go to your death that way, as a god, in the knowledge of the myth, you are going to your eternal life. So what is there in that to be sad about? Let us make it magnificent—as it is. Let us celebrate it.  Read more at location 2419

after another, you discover these gods who are at once of death and of generation. The death god, Ghede, of the Haitian Voodoo tradition, is also the sex god. The Egyptian god Osiris was the judge and lord of the dead, and the lord of the regeneration of life. It is a basic theme—that which dies is born. You have to have death in order to have life.  Read more at location 2424

There is a magnificent essay by Schopenhauer in which he asks, how is it that a human being can so participate in the peril or pain of another that without thought, spontaneously, he sacrifices his own life to the other? How can it happen that what we normally think of as the first law of nature and self-preservation is suddenly dissolved?  Read more at location 2434

********  Schopenhauer’s answer is that such a psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization, which is that you and that other are one, that you are two aspects of the one life, and that your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. This is a metaphysical truth which may become spontaneously realized under circumstances of crisis. For it is, according to Schopenhauer, the truth of your life.  Read more at location 2447

****  At the very end of the Divine Comedy, Dante realizes that the love of God informs the whole universe down to the lowest pits of hell. That’s very much the same image. The bodhisattva represents the principle of compassion, which is the healing principle that makes life possible. Life is pain, but compassion is what gives it the possibility of continuing. The bodhisattva is one who has achieved the realization of immortality yet voluntarily participates in the sorrows of the world. Voluntary participation in the world is very different from just getting born into it. That’s exactly the theme of Paul’s statement about Christ in his Epistle to the Philippians: that Jesus “did not think God-hood something to be held to but took the form of a servant here on the earth, even to death on the cross.” That’s a voluntary participation in the fragmentation of life.  Read more at location 2459

*********  The New Testament teaches dying to one’s self, literally suffering the pain of death to the world and its values. This is the vocabulary of the mystics.  Read more at location 2484

suicide is also a symbolic act. It casts off the psychological posture that you happen to be in at the time, so that you may come into a better one. You die to your current life in order to come to another of some kind. But, as Jung says, you’d better not get caught in a symbolic situation. You don’t have to die, really, physically. All you have to do is die spiritually and be reborn to a larger way of living.  Read more at location 2485

Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don’t get that experience, but suddenly, in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror—but, by God, you are alive. Those young men in Vietnam were truly alive in braving death for their fellows.  Read more at location 2496

Very often one of the things that one learns as a member of the mystery religions is that the labyrinth, which blocks, is at the same time the way to eternal life. This is the final secret of myth—to teach you how to penetrate the labyrinth of life in such a way that its spiritual values come through. That is the problem of Dante’s Divine Comedy, too. The crisis comes in the “middle of the way of our life,” when the body is beginning to fade, and another whole constellation of themes comes breaking into your dream world. Dante says that, in the middle year of his life, he was lost in a dangerous wood. And he was threatened there by three animals, symbolizing pride, desire, and fear. Then Virgil, the personification of poetic insight, appeared and conducted him through the labyrinth of hell, which is the place of those fixed to their desires and fears, who can’t pass through to eternity. Dante was carried through to the beatific vision of God.  Read more at location 2518

There is a mystical notion there of the spiritual function of suffering in this world. The one who suffers is, as it were, the Christ, come before us to evoke the one thing that turns the human beast of prey into a valid human being. That one thing is compassion.  Read more at location 2535

One of the great heresies in the West is the heresy that Christ pronounced when he said, “I and the Father are one.” He was crucified for saying that. In the Middle Ages, nine hundred years after Christ, a great Sufi mystic said, “I and my beloved are one,” and he, too, was crucified. As he was going to the cross, he prayed, “O my Lord, if you had taught these people what you have taught me, they would not be doing this to me. And if you had not taught me, this would not be happening to me. Blessed is the Lord and all his works.” Another of the Sufi mystics said, “The function of the orthodox community is to give the mystic his desire, which is a union with God, through mortification and death.”  Read more at location 2562

“I have never done the thing that I wanted to in all my life.” That is a man who never followed his bliss.  Read more at location 2575

*****  (Note:   great metaphor)  In the Middle Ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There’s the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel. For example, if you are attached to the rim of the wheel of fortune, you will be either above going down or at the bottom coming up. But if you are at the hub, you are in the same place all the time. That is the sense of the marriage vow—I take you in health or sickness, in wealth or poverty: going up or going down. But I take you as my center, and you are my bliss, not the wealth that you might bring me, not the social prestige, but you. That is following your bliss.  Read more at location 2589

A boy would come to me and ask, “Do you think I can do this? Do you think I can do that? Do you think I can be a writer?” “Oh,” I would say, “I don’t know. Can you endure ten years of disappointment with nobody responding to you, or are you thinking that you are going to write a best seller the first crack? If you have the guts to stay with the thing you really want, no matter what happens, well, go ahead.” Then Dad would come along and say, “No, you ought to study law because there is more money in that, you know.” Now, that is the rim of the wheel, not the hub, not following your bliss. Are you going to think of fortune, or are you going to think of your bliss?  Read more at location 2613

**********  Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked.  Read more at location 2628

Each person can have his own depth, experience, and some conviction of being in touch with his own sat-chit-ananda, his own being through consciousness and bliss.  Read more at location 2634

MOYERS: The waters of eternal life are right there? Where?

CAMPBELL: Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.  Read more at location 2649

CHAPTER V:  THE HERO’S ADVENTURE 

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.  Read more at location 2661

there are two types of deed. One is the physical deed, in which the hero performs a courageous act in battle or saves a life. The other kind is the spiritual deed, in which the hero learns to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life and then comes back with a message.  Read more at location 2664

The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there’s something lacking in the normal experiences available or permitted to the members of his society. This person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It’s usually a cycle, a going and a returning.  Read more at location 2666

***********  the structure and something of the spiritual sense of this adventure can be seen already anticipated in the puberty or initiation rituals of early tribal societies, through which a child is compelled to give up its childhood and become an adult—to die, you might say, to its infantile personality and psyche and come back as a responsible adult. This is a fundamental psychological transformation that everyone has to undergo. We are in childhood in a condition of dependency under someone’s protection and supervision for some fourteen to twenty-one years—and if you’re going on for your Ph. D., this may continue to perhaps thirty-five. You are in no way a self-responsible, free agent, but an obedient dependent, expecting and receiving punishments and rewards. To evolve out of this position of psychological immaturity to the courage of self-responsibility and assurance requires a death and a resurrection. That’s the basic motif of the universal hero’s journey—leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition.  Read more at location 2669

Otto Rank in his important little book The Myth of the Birth of the Hero declares that everyone is a hero in birth, where he undergoes a tremendous psychological as well as physical transformation, from the condition of a little water creature living in a realm of amniotic fluid into an air-breathing mammal which ultimately will be standing. That’s an enormous transformation, and had it been consciously undertaken, it would have been, indeed, a heroic act.  Read more at location 2679

among the Aztecs, for example, who had a number of heavens to which people’s souls would be assigned according to the conditions of their death, the heaven for warriors killed in battle was the same for mothers who died in childbirth. Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another.  Read more at location 2685

the trials are designed to see to it that the intending hero should be really a hero.  Read more at location 2705

If you realize what the real problem is—losing yourself, giving yourself to some higher end, or to another—you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial. When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. And what all the myths have to deal with is transformations of consciousness of one kind or another.  Read more at location 2712

Napoleon is the nineteenth-century counterpart of Hitler in the twentieth. Napoleon’s ravaging of Europe was horrific.  Read more at location 2730

you could be a local god, but for the people whom that local god conquered, you could be the enemy. Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.  Read more at location 2733

****  The moral objective is that of saving a people, or saving a person, or supporting an idea. The hero sacrifices himself for something—that’s the morality of it.  Read more at location 2741

you might say that the idea for which he sacrificed himself was something that should not have been respected. That’s a judgment from the other side, but it doesn’t destroy the intrinsic heroism of the deed performed.  Read more at location 2742

****  There’s a certain type of myth which one might call the vision quest, going in quest of a boon, a vision, which has the same form in every mythology. That is the thing that I tried to present in the first book I wrote, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you’re in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as you move back into your social world again. That’s not an easy thing to do.  Read more at location 2759

In one kind of adventure, the hero sets out responsibly and intentionally to perform the deed.  Read more at location 2766

Then there are adventures into which you are thrown—  Read more at location 2770

The adventure is symbolically a manifestation of his character. Even the landscape and the conditions of the environment match his readiness.  Read more at location 2778

Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That’s why it’s good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower. “Lead us not into temptation.”  Read more at location 2787

Now it has become to such ah extent a sheerly mechanistic world, as interpreted through our physical sciences, Marxist sociology, and behavioristic psychology, that we’re nothing but a predictable pattern of wires responding to stimuli. This nineteenth-century interpretation has squeezed the freedom of the human will out of modern life.  Read more at location 2796

Something that’s characteristic of our sedentary lives is that there is or may be intellectual excitement, but the body is not in it very much. So you have to engage intentionally in mechanical exercises, the daily dozen and so forth. I find it very difficult to enjoy such things, but there it is. Otherwise, your whole body says to you, “Look, you’ve forgotten me entirely. I’m becoming just a clogged stream.  Read more at location 2809

MOYERS: One of the intriguing points of your scholarship is that you do not believe science and mythology conflict.

CAMPBELL: No, they don’t conflict. Science is breaking through now into the mystery dimensions. It’s pushed itself into the sphere the myth is talking about. It’s come to the edge.  Read more at location 2833

****  There’s a transcendent energy source. When the physicist observes subatomic particles, he’s seeing a trace on a screen. These traces come and go, come and go, and we come and go, and all of life comes and goes. That energy is the informing energy of all things. Mythic worship is addressed to that.  Read more at location 2840

John Lennon’s  Read more at location 2860

In the mythological sense, he was an innovator. The Beatles brought forth an art form for which there was a readiness. Somehow, they were in perfect tune with their time.  Read more at location 2863

MOYERS: Don’t many of the heroes in mythology die to the world? They suffer, they’re crucified.

CAMPBELL: Many of them give their lives. But then the myth also says that out of the given life comes a new life. It may not be the hero’s life, but it’s a new life, a new way of being or becoming.  Read more at location 2893

Moses is a hero figure, for example. He ascends the mountain, he meets with Yahweh on the summit of the mountain, and he comes back with rules for the formation of a whole new society. That’s a typical hero act—departure, fulfillment, return.  Read more at location 2902

The Buddha follows a path very much like that of Christ; only of course the Buddha lived five hundred years earlier. You can match those two savior figures right down the line, even to the roles and characters of their immediate disciples or apostles. You can parallel, for example, Ananda and St. Peter.  Read more at location 2905

****  there is a certain typical hero sequence of actions which can be detected in stories from all over the world and from many periods of history. Essentially, it might even be said there is but one archetypal mythic hero whose life has been replicated in many lands by many, many people. A legendary hero is usually the founder of something—the founder of a new age, the founder of a new religion, the founder of a new city, the founder of a new way of life. In order to found something new, one has to leave the old and go in quest of the seed idea, a germinal idea that will have the potentiality of bringing forth that new thing.  Read more at location 2909

The founders of all religions have gone on quests like that. The Buddha went into solitude and then sat beneath the bo tree, the tree of immortal knowledge, where he received an illumination that has enlightened all of Asia for twenty-five hundred years. After baptism by John the Baptist, Jesus went into the desert for forty days; and it was out of that desert that he came with his message. Moses went to the top of a mountain and came down with the tables of the law.  Read more at location 2914

You’ve got to distinguish between the myths that have to do with the serious matter of living life in terms of the order of society and of nature, and stories with some of those same motifs that are told for entertainment. But even though there’s a happy ending for most fairy tales, on the way to the happy ending, typical mythological motifs occur  Read more at location 2927

The rituals of primitive initiation ceremonies are all mythologically grounded and have to do with killing the infantile ego and bringing forth an adult, whether it’s the girl or the boy. It’s harder for the boy than for the girl, because life overtakes the girl. She becomes a woman whether she intends it or not, but the little boy has to intend to be a man.  Read more at location 2934

The boy first has to disengage himself from his mother, get his energy into himself, and then start forth. That’s what the myth of “Young man, go find your father” is all about.  Read more at location 2938

****  A fairy tale is the child’s myth. There are proper myths for proper times of life. As you grow older, you need a sturdier mythology. Of course, the whole story of the crucifixion, which is a fundamental image in the Christian tradition, speaks of the coming of eternity into the field of time and space, where there is dismemberment. But it also speaks of the passage from the field of time and space into the field of eternal life. So we crucify our temporal and earthly bodies, let them be torn, and through that dismemberment enter the spiritual sphere which transcends all the pains of earth.  Read more at location 2941

I remember the time Heinrich Zimmer was lecturing at Columbia on the Hindu idea that all life is as a dream or a bubble; that all is maya, illusion. After his lecture a young woman came up to him and said, “Dr. Zimmer, that was a wonderful lecture on Indian philosophy! But maya—I don’t get it—it doesn’t speak to me.” “Oh,” he said, “don’t be impatient! That’s not for you yet, darling.” And so it is: when you get older, and everyone you’ve known and originally lived for has passed away, and the world itself is passing, the maya myth comes in. But, for young people, the world is something yet to be met and dealt with and loved and learned from and fought with—and so, another mythology.  Read more at location 2949

there is an old story that is still good, and that is the story of the spiritual quest. The quest to find the inward thing that you basically are is the story that I tried to render in that little book of mine written forty-odd years ago—The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  Read more at location 2961

****  So if you put aside for a while the myth of the origin of the world—scientists will tell you what that is, anyway—and go back to the myth of what is the human quest, what are its stages of realization, what are the trials of the transition from childhood to maturity and what does maturity mean, the story is there, as it is in all the religions.  Read more at location 2965

The story of Jesus, for example—there’s a universally valid hero deed represented in the story of Jesus. First he goes to the edge of the consciousness of his time when he goes to John the Baptist to be baptized. Then he goes past the threshold into the desert for forty days. In the Jewish tradition the number forty is mythologically significant. The children of Israel spent forty years in the wilderness, Jesus spent forty days in the desert. In the desert, Jesus underwent three temptations. First there was the economic temptation,  Read more at location 2967

And then next we have the political temptation.  Read more at location 2973

This is what is known as spiritual inflation. I’m so spiritual, I’m above concerns of the flesh and this earth. But Jesus is incarnate, is he not? So he says, “You shall not tempt the Lord, your God.” Those are the three temptations of Christ, and they are as relevant today as they were in the year A.D. 30. The Buddha, too, goes into the forest and has conferences there with the leading gurus of his day. Then he goes past them and, after a season of trials and search, comes to the bo tree, the tree of illumination, where he, likewise, undergoes three temptations. The first is of lust, the second of fear, and the third of submission to public opinion, doing as told.  Read more at location 2977

Then the voice of the goddess mother of the universe was heard, like thunder rolling on the horizon, saying, “This, my beloved son, has already so given of himself to the world that there is no one here to be ordered about. Give up this nonsense.” Whereupon the elephant on which the Lord of Social Duty was riding bowed in worship of the Buddha, and the entire company of the Antagonist dissolved like a dream. That night, the Buddha achieved illumination, and for the next fifty years remained in the world as teacher of the way to the extinction of the bondages of egoism.  Read more at location 2989

those first two temptations—of desire and of fear—are the same that Adam and Eve are shown to have experienced in the extraordinary painting by Titian (now in the Prado), conceived when he was ninety-four years old. The tree is, of course, the mythological world axis, at the point where time and eternity, movement and rest, are at one, and around which all things revolve. It is here represented only in its temporal aspect, as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, profit and loss, desire and fear. At the right is Eve, who sees the tempter in the form of a child, offering the apple, and she is moved by desire. Adam, however, from the opposite point of view, sees the serpent-legs of the ambiguous tempter and is touched with fear. Desire and fear: these are the two emotions by which all life in the world is governed. Desire is the bait, death is the hook. Adam and Eve were moved; the Buddha was not. Eve and Adam brought forth life and were cursed of God; the Buddha taught release from life’s fear.  Read more at location 2993

The messages of the great teachers—Moses, the Buddha, Christ, Mohammed—differ greatly. But their visionary journeys are much the same. At the time of his election, Mohammed was an illiterate camel-caravan master. But every day he would leave his home in Mecca and go out to a mountain cave to meditate. One day a voice called to him, “Write!” and he listened, and we have the Koran. It’s an old, old story.  Read more at location 3005

*******   Mythology is very fluid. Most of the myths are self-contradictory. You may even find four or five myths in a given culture, all giving different versions of the same mystery. Then theology comes along and says it has got to be just this way. Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible. Religion turns poetry into prose. God is literally up there, and this is literally what he thinks, and this is the way you’ve got to behave to get into proper relationship with that god up there.  Read more at location 3028

There’s a whole body of miracles that float, like particles in the air, and a man of a certain type of achievement comes along, and all these things cluster around him. These stories of miracles let us know simply that this remarkable man preached of a spiritual order that is not to be identified with the merely physical order, so he could perform spiritual magic. It doesn’t follow that he actually did any of these things, although of course it’s possible. Three or four times I’ve seen what appear to be magical effects occur: men and women of power can do things that you wouldn’t think possible. We don’t really know what the limits of the possible might be. But the miracles of legend need not necessarily have been facts. The Buddha walked on water, as did Jesus. The Buddha ascended to heaven and returned.  Read more at location 3034

Plato has said somewhere that the soul is a circle. I took this idea to suggest on the blackboard the whole sphere of the psyche. Then I drew a horizontal line across the circle to represent the line of separation of the conscious and unconscious. The center from which all our energy comes I represented as a dot in the center of the circle, below the horizontal line.  Read more at location 3042

Now, above the horizontal line there is the ego, which I represent as a square: that aspect of our consciousness that we identify as our center. But, you see, it’s very much off center. We think that this is what’s running the show, but it isn’t.  Read more at location 3047

What’s running the show is what’s coming up from way down below. The period when one begins to realize that one isn’t running the show is adolescence, when a whole new system of requirements begins announcing itself from the body.  Read more at location 3050

The infant knows what to do when a nipple’s in its mouth. There is a whole system of built-in action which, when we see it in animals, we call instinct. That is the biological ground. But then certain things can happen that make it repulsive or difficult or frightening or sinful to do some of the things that one is impelled to do, and that is when we begin to have our most troublesome psychological problems. Myths primarily are for fundamental instruction in these matters.  Read more at location 3055

The monster masks that are put on people in Star Wars represent the real monster force in the modern world.  Read more at location 3091

Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He’s a robot. He’s a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?  Read more at location 3094

When Ben Kenobi says, “May the Force be with you,” he’s speaking of the power and energy of life, not of programmed political intentions.  Read more at location 3108

Certainly Lucas was using standard mythological figures. The old man as the adviser made me think of a Japanese sword master.  Read more at location 3118

The belly is the dark place where digestion takes place and new energy is created. The story of Jonah in the whale is an example of a mythic theme that is practically universal, of the hero going into a fish’s belly and ultimately coming out again, transformed.  Read more at location 3131

It’s a descent into the dark. Psychologically, the whale represents the power of life locked in the unconscious. Metaphorically, water is the unconscious, and the creature in the water is the life or energy of the unconscious, which has overwhelmed the conscious personality and must be disempowered, overcome and controlled.  Read more at location 3134

consciousness thinks it’s running the shop. But it’s a secondary organ of a total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body.  Read more at location 3146

All religions have been true for their time. If you can recognize the enduring aspect of their truth and separate it from the temporal applications, you’ve got it. We’ve spoken about it right here: the sacrifice of the physical desires and fears of the body to that which spiritually supports the body; is the body learning to know and express its own deepest life in the field of time? One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.  Read more at location 3160

Myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength, and the bringing of solar light into the world. Slaying monsters is slaying the dark things. Myths grab you somewhere down inside.  Read more at location 3175

********  Myths are infinite in their revelation.  Read more at location 3179

*************  My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.  Read more at location 3181

*****************  The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.  Read more at location 3189

*****  ultimately, the last deed has to be done by oneself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.  Read more at location 3194

Our Western dragons represent greed. However, the Chinese dragon is different. It represents the vitality of the swamps and comes up beating its belly and bellowing, “Haw ha ha haww.” That’s a lovely kind of dragon, one that yields the bounty of the waters, a great, glorious gift. But the dragon of our Western tales tries to collect and keep everything to himself. In his secret cave he guards things: heaps of gold and perhaps a captured virgin. He doesn’t know what to do with either, so he just guards and keeps.  Read more at location 3200

When you choose your vocation, you have actually chosen a model, and it will fit you in a little while. After middle life, for example, you can pretty well tell what a person’s profession is. Wherever I go, people know I’m a professor. I don’t know what it is that I do, or how I look, but I, too, can tell professors from engineers and merchants. You’re shaped by your life.  Read more at location 3229

This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s. In the traditional Orient, on the other hand, and generally in all traditionally grounded societies, the individual is cookie-molded. His duties are put upon him in exact and precise terms, and there’s no way of breaking out from them. When you go to a guru to be guided on the spiritual way, he knows just where you are on the traditional path, just where you have to go next, just what you must do to get there.  Read more at location 3238

You don’t understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death. I would say that the story of Christ assuming the form of a human servant, even to death on the cross, is the principal lesson for us of the acceptance of death.  Read more at location 3250

the riddle that she presents: “What is it that walks on four legs, then on two legs, and then on three?” The answer is “Man.” The child creeps about on four legs, the adult walks on two, and the aged walk with a cane. The riddle of the Sphinx is the image of life itself through time—childhood, maturity, age, and death.  Read more at location 3254

***********  The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life hut as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure—fearlessness and achievement.  Read more at location 3257

That is one of the great messages of mythology. I, as I now know myself, am not the final form of my being. We must constantly die one way or another to the selfhood already achieved.  Read more at location 3262

Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra. In a kind of parable, Nietzsche describes what he calls the three transformations of the spirit. The first is that of the camel, of childhood and youth. The camel gets down on his knees and says, “Put a load on me.” This is the season for obedience, receiving instruction and the information your society requires of you in order to live a responsible life. But when the camel is well loaded, it struggles to its feet and runs out into the desert, where it is transformed into a lion—the heavier the load that had been carried, the stronger the lion will be. Now, the task of the lion is to kill a dragon, and the name of the dragon is “Thou shalt.” On every scale of this scaly beast, a “thou shalt” is imprinted: some from four thousand years ago; others from this morning’s headlines. Whereas the camel, the child, had to submit to the “thou shalts,” the lion, the youth, is to throw them off and come to his own realization. And so, when the dragon is thoroughly dead, with all its “thou shalts” overcome, the lion is transformed into a child moving out of its own nature, like a wheel impelled from its own hub. No more rules to obey. No more rules derived from the historical needs and tasks of the local society, but the pure impulse to living of a life in flower.  Read more at location 3307

****  (Note:   assimilate and learn, them forget and create)  Something of this kind has to be recognized and dealt with by any serious student of art. If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them. That is the time for the lion-deed. You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist.  Read more at location 3323

The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy—not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call “following your bliss.”  Read more at location 3352

You can’t have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.  Read more at location 3366

In 1959, this life ended. The Chinese Communist military station in Lhasa bombed the summer palace of the Dalai Lama and a season of massacres began. There were monasteries around Lhasa of as many as six thousand monks—all were destroyed, and their monks and abbots were killed and tortured. Many fled, together with hundreds of other refugees, across the almost impassable Himalayas to India. It is a terrible story—largely untold. Finally all these shattered people arrived in India, which can hardly take care of its own population, and among the refugees were the Dalai Lama himself and a number of the leading officers and abbots of the great monasteries now destroyed.  Read more at location 3425

compassion condones suffering in that it recognizes, yes, suffering is life.  Read more at location 3477

There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, the “love of your fate,” which is in fact your life. As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing. Furthermore, the more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimilated and affirmed, the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it. The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply. My friend had thought, “God did this to me.” I told her, “No, you did it to yourself. The God is within you. You yourself are your creator. If you find that place in yourself from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.”  Read more at location 3491

Chance, or what might seem to be chance, is the means through which life is realized. The problem is not to blame or explain but to handle the life that arises.  Read more at location 3507

The place to find is within yourself. I learned a little about this in athletics. The athlete who is in top form has a quiet place within himself, and it’s around this, somehow, that his action occurs. If he’s all out there in the action field, he will not be performing properly.  Read more at location 3513

****  The Buddhist Nirvana is a center of peace of this kind. Buddhism is a psychological religion. It starts with the psychological problem of suffering: all life is sorrowful; there is, however, an escape from sorrow; the escape is Nirvana—which is a state of mind or consciousness, not a place somewhere, like heaven. It is right here, in the midst of the turmoil of life.  Read more at location 3517

Voluntary action out of this center is the action of the bodhisattvas—joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. You are not grabbed, because you have released yourself from the grabbers of fear, lust, and duties. These are the rulers of the world.  Read more at location 3521

****  The illumination is the recognition of the radiance of one eternity through all things, whether in the vision of time these things are judged as good or as evil.  Read more at location 3534

The real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render what Joyce has called the “radiance” of all things, as an epiphany or showing forth of their truth.  Read more at location 3541

Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it.  Read more at location 3544

Art and religion are the two recommended ways. I don’t think you get it through sheer academic philosophy, which gets all tangled up in concepts.  Read more at location 3548

************  mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told. So this is the penultimate truth. It’s important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor.  Read more at location 3561

CHAPTER VI:  THE GIFT OF THE GODDESS 

There have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source. The mother is really a more immediate parent than the father because one is born from the mother, and the first experience of any infant is the mother. I have frequently thought that mythology is a sublimation of the mother image.  Read more at location 3577

The idea of the Goddess is related to the fact that you’re born from your mother, and your father may be unknown to you, or the father may have died. Frequently, in the epics, when the hero is born, his father has died, or his father is in some other place, and then the hero has to go in quest of his father.  Read more at location 3584

********   In the story of the incarnation of Jesus, the father of Jesus was the father in heaven, at least in terms of the symbology. When Jesus goes to the cross, he is on the way to the father, leaving the mother behind. And the cross, which is symbolic of the earth, is the mother symbol. So on the cross, Jesus leaves his body on the mother, from whom he has acquired his body, and he goes to the father, who is the ultimate transcendent mystery source.  Read more at location 3587

the finding of the father has to do with finding your own character and destiny. There’s a notion that the character is inherited from the father, and the body and very often the mind from the mother. But it’s your character that is the mystery, and your character is your destiny. So it is the discovery of your destiny that is symbolized by the father quest.  Read more at location 3602

We have the word in English, “at-one-ment” with the father. You remember the story of Jesus lost in Jerusalem  Read more at location 3606

he says, “Didn’t you know I had to be about my father’s business?” He’s twelve years old—that’s the age of the adolescent initiations, finding who you are.  Read more at location 3608

The human woman gives birth just as the earth gives birth to the plants. She gives nourishment, as the plants do. So woman magic and earth magic are the same. They are related. And the personification of the energy that gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female. It is in the agricultural world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Nile, and in the earlier planting-culture systems that the Goddess is the dominant mythic form.  Read more at location 3613

And when you have a Goddess as the creator, it’s her own body that is the universe. She is identical with the universe.  Read more at location 3618

when you move to a philosophical point of view, as in the Goddess religions of India—where the Goddess symbology is dominant to this day—the female represents maya. The female represents what in Kantian terminology we call the forms of sensibility. She is time and space itself, and the mystery beyond her is beyond all pairs of opposites. So it isn’t male and it isn’t female. It neither is nor is not. But everything is within her, so that the gods are her children. Everything you can think of, everything you can see, is a production of the Goddess.  Read more at location 3625

********  from the Upanishads: “Thou art the dark blue bird, and the green parrot with red eyes. Thou hast the lightning as thy child. Thou art the season and the seas. Having no beginning, thou dost abide with immanence, whereof all things are born.”  Read more at location 3636

****  Well, it means to find what is the source of your own life, and what is the relationship of your body, your physical form, to this energy that animates it. The body without the energy isn’t alive, is it? So you distinguish in your own life that which is of the body and that which is of energy and consciousness.  Read more at location 3644

****  In India, the most common ultimate symbol is of the phallus, or lingam, as they call it, of the generating god penetrating the vagina, or the yoni, as they call it, of the Goddess. In contemplating this symbol, you are contemplating the generating moment itself of all life. The entire mystery of the generation of life is symbolically contemplated in that sign. You see, the sexual mystery in India, and in most of the world, is a holy mystery. It is the mystery of the generation of life. The act of generating a child is a cosmic act and is to be understood as holy.  Read more at location 3646

the basic birth of Western civilization occurred in the great river valleys—the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, and later the Ganges. That was the world of the Goddess. The name of the river Ganges (Ganga) is the name of a goddess, for example. And then there came the invasions. Now, these started seriously in the fourth millennium B.C. and became more and more devastating.  Read more at location 3655

The Semite invaders were herders of goats and sheep, the Indo-Europeans of cattle. Both were formerly hunters, and so the cultures are essentially animal-oriented. When you have hunters, you have killers. And when you have herders, you have killers, because they’re always in movement, nomadic, coming into conflict with other people and conquering the areas into which they move. And these invasions bring in warrior gods, thunderbolt hurlers, like Zeus, or Yahweh.  Read more at location 3660

The Semitic people were invading the world of the Mother Goddess systems, and so the male-oriented mythologies became dominant, and the Mother Goddess becomes, well—sort of Grandmother Goddess, way, way back. It was in the time of the rise of the city of Babylon. And each of these early cities had its own protective god or goddess. The characteristic of an imperialistic people is to try to have its own local god dubbed big boy of the whole universe, you see. No other divinity counts. And the way to bring this about is by annihilating the god or goddess who was there before. Well, the one that was here before the Babylonian god Marduk was the All-Mother Goddess.  Read more at location 3669

when Tiamat opens her mouth, the young god Marduk of Babylon sends winds into her throat and belly that blow her to pieces, and he then dismembers her and fashions the earth and heavens out of the parts of her body. This motif of dismembering a primordial being and turning its body into the universe appears in many mythologies in many forms. In India it comes up with the figure of Purusha, the reflection of whose body is the universe. Now, the mother goddess in old mother-goddess mythologies was herself already the universe, so the great creative deed of Marduk was a supererogatory act. There was no need for him to cut her up and make the universe out of her, because she was already the universe. But the male-oriented myth takes over, and he becomes—apparently—the creator.  Read more at location 3677

MOYERS: There’s this ethical contradiction mentioned in your book, quoting Exodus: “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife—except abroad. Then you should put all males to the sword, and the women you shall take as booty to yourself.” That’s right out of the Old Testament.  Read more at location 3704

CAMPBELL: They say more about Deuteronomy than about women. The Hebrews were absolutely ruthless with respect to their neighbors. But this passage is an extreme statement of something that is inherent in most sociologically oriented mythologies. That is to say, love and compassion are reserved for the in-group, and aggression and abuse are projected outward on others. Compassion is to be reserved for members of your own group. The out-group is to be treated in a way described there in Deuteronomy. Now, today there is no out-group anymore on the planet. And the problem of a modern religion is to have such compassion work for the whole of humanity. But then what happens to the aggression? This is a problem that the world is going to, have to face—because aggression is a natural instinct just as much as, and more immediate than, compassion, and it is always going to be there. It’s a biological fact.  Read more at location 3708

In the history of Western religions, this is an extremely interesting development. In the Old Testament, you have a God who creates a world without a goddess. Then when you come to Proverbs, there she is, Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom, who says, “When He created the world, I was there, and I was His greatest joy.” But in the Hebrew tradition the idea of a son of God is repulsive, it is not considered at all. The Messiah as the son of God is not actually God’s son. He is one who in his character and dignity is worthy to be likened to the son of God. I’m sure there’s no idea of a virgin birth in that tradition. The virgin birth comes into Christianity by way of the Greek tradition. When you read the four gospels, for example, the only one in which the virgin birth appears is the Gospel According to Luke, and Luke was a Greek.  Read more at location 3729

Leda and the swan, Persephone and the serpent, and this one and that one and the other one. The virgin birth is represented throughout.  Read more at location 3737

What is symbolically referred to is not Jesus’ physical birth but his spiritual significance. That’s what the virgin birth represents. Heroes and demigods are born that way as beings motivated by compassion and not mastery, sexuality, or self-preservation. This is the sense of the second birth, when you begin to live out of the heart center. The lower three centers are not to be refuted but transcended, when they become subject to and servant to the heart.  Read more at location 3783

Isis and her husband Osiris were twins, born of the Goddess Nut. And their younger relatives were Seth and Nephthys, who were also twins born from Nut. One night, Osiris slept with Nephthys, thinking she was Isis—a kind of inattention to details, you might say. From that night’s event, Anubis was born, Osiris’ oldest son, but by the wrong wife. Seth, her husband, took this badly and planned to kill his older brother, Osiris. Secretly he took Osiris’ measurements and had a beautiful sarcophagus made that would exactly fit him. And then, one evening, when there was a lively party in progress among the gods, Seth came in with his sarcophagus and declared that anyone whom it perfectly fitted could have it as a gift for his tomb. Everyone at the party tried, and of course when Osiris got in, the sarcophagus fitted him perfectly. Immediately seventy-two accomplices came rushing out, and they clapped the lid on, strapped it together, and threw it into the Nile. So what we have here is the death of a god. And whenever you have the death of such a god as this, you may next expect a resurrection. The death of Osiris was symbolically associated with the annual rising and flooding of the river Nile, by which the soil of Egypt was annually fertilized. It was as though the rotting of the body of Osiris fertilized and vitalized the land. Osiris went floating down the Nile and was washed ashore on a beach in Syria. A beautiful tree with a wonderful aroma grew up and incorporated the sarcophagus in its trunk. The local king had just had a son born to him and happened at the time to be about to build a palace. And because the aroma of that tree was so wonderful, he had it cut down and brought in to become the central pillar in the main room of the palace. Meanwhile the poor goddess Isis, whose husband had been thrown into the Nile, started off on a search for his body. This theme of the search for the God who is the spouse of the soul is a prime mythological theme of the period: of the Goddess who goes in quest of her lost spouse or lover and, through loyalty and a descent into the realm of death, becomes his redeemer. Isis comes in time to the palace and there learns of the aromatic column in the royal palace. She suspects this may have something to do with Osiris, and she gets a job as nurse to the newborn child. Well, she lets the child nurse from her finger—after all, she’s a goddess, and there’s a limit to the degree of stooping to conquer. But she loves the little boy and decides to give him immortality by placing him in the fireplace to burn his mortal body away. As a goddess, she could prevent the fire from killing him, you understand. And every evening, while the child is in the fire, she transforms herself into a swallow and goes flying mournfully around the column in which her husband is enclosed. One evening the child’s mother comes into the room while this little scene is in progress, sees her infant in the fireplace, lets out a scream, which breaks the spell, and the child has to be rescued from incineration. The swallow, meanwhile, has turned back into the gorgeous nurse and goddess, who explains the situation and says to the queen, “By the way, it’s my husband there in that column, and I’d be grateful if you would just let me take him home.” So the king, who has appeared on the scene, says, “Why, yes! Certainly.” He has the column removed, turns it over to Isis, and the beautiful sarcophagus containing Osiris is placed on a royal barge. On the way back to the Nile Delta, Isis removes the lid of the coffin, lies upon her dead husband, and conceives. This is a motif that appears in the ancient mythologies all the time under many symbolic forms—out of death comes life. When the barge has landed, the Goddess gives birth in the papyrus swamp to her child, Horus; and it was the figure of this divine mother with her child conceived of God that became the model for the Madonna.  Read more at location 3791

the dove, the bird in flight, is a pretty nearly universal symbol of the spirit, as in Christianity, of the Holy Ghost—  Read more at location 3821

But one more little detail here. The jealous younger brother, Seth, meanwhile, has usurped the throne of Osiris. However, properly to represent the throne, he should marry Isis. In Egyptian iconography, Isis represents the throne. The Pharaoh sits on the throne, which is Isis, as a child on its mother’s lap. And so, when you stand before the cathedral of Chartres, you will see over one of the portals of the western front an image of the Madonna as the throne upon which the child Jesus sits and blesses the world as its emperor. That is precisely the image that has come down to us from most ancient Egypt. The early fathers and the early artists took over these images intentionally.

MOYERS: The Christian fathers took the image of Isis?

CAMPBELL: Definitely. They say so themselves. Read the text where it is declared that “those forms which were merely mythological forms in the past are now actual and incarnate in our Savior.” The mythologies here referred to were of the dead and resurrected god: Attis, Adonis, Gilgamesh, Osiris, one after the other. The death and resurrection of the god is everywhere associated with the moon, which dies and is resurrected every month. It is for two nights, or three days dark, and we have Christ for two nights, or three days in the tomb. No one knows what the actual date of the birth of Jesus might have been, but it has been put on what used to be the date of the winter solstice, December 25, when the nights begin to be shorter and the days longer. That is the moment of the rebirth of light. That was exactly the date of the birth of the Persian God of light, Mithra, Sol, the Sun.  Read more at location 3823

****  there’s an idea of death to the past and birth to the future in our lives and our thinking: death to the animal nature and birth to the spiritual. These symbols are talking about this one way or another.  Read more at location 3837

Well, what you have then in the Catholic tradition is a coming together of the patriarchal, monotheistic Hebrew idea of the Messiah as one who is to unite the spiritual and temporal powers, and the Hellenistic, classical idea of the Savior as the dead and resurrected son of the Great Goddess by a virgin birth. There were plenty of such saviors reborn. In the Near East, the god who descended into the field of time was originally a goddess. Jesus took over what is really the Goddess’ role in coming down in compassion. But when the Virgin acquiesces in being the vessel of the incarnation, she has herself already affected the redemption.  Read more at location 3858

The Indian name for that Being of all beings is brahman, which is a neuter noun, neither male nor female.  Read more at location 3883

in that yin/yang figure from China, in the dark fish, or whatever you want to call it, there is the light spot. And in the light one, there’s a dark spot. That’s how they can relate. You couldn’t relate at all to something in which you did not somehow participate. That’s why the idea of God as the Absolute Other is a ridiculous idea. There could be no relationship to the Absolute Other.  Read more at location 3898

****  So the feminine represents, in a way, the inclusive love for progeny. The father is more disciplinarian. He’s associated much more with the social order and the social character. This is actually the way it works in societies. The mother gives birth to his nature, and the father gives birth to his social character, you might say, how he is to function.  Read more at location 3905

How do we learn to live spiritually? CAMPBELL: In ancient times, that was the business of the teacher. He was to give you the clues to a spiritual life. That is what the priest was for. Also, that was what ritual was for. A ritual can be defined as an enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are actually experiencing a mythological life. And it’s out of that participation that one can learn to live spiritually.  Read more at location 3920

When Yahweh creates, he creates man of the earth and breathes life into the formed body. He’s not himself there present in that form. But the Goddess is within as well as without. Your body is of her body. There is in these mythologies a recognition of that kind of universal identity.  Read more at location 3929

CHAPTER VII:  TALES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE

The period for the troubadours is the twelfth century. The whole troubadour tradition was extinguished in Provence in the so-called Albigensian Crusade of 1209, which was launched by Pope Innocent III, and which is regarded as one of the most monstrous crusades in the history of Europe. The troubadours became associated with the Manichean heresy of the Albigensians that was rampant at that time—though the Albigensian movement was really a protest against the corruption of the medieval clergy. So the troubadours and their transformation of the idea of love got mixed up in religious life in a very complicated way.  Read more at location 3962

The troubadours were very much interested in the psychology of love. And they’re the first ones in the West who really thought of love the way we do now—as a person-to-person relationship.  Read more at location 3968

Before that, love was simply Eros, the god who excites you to sexual desire. This is not the experience of falling in love the way the troubadours understood it. Eros is much more impersonal than falling in love. You see, people didn’t know about Amor. Amor is something personal that the troubadours recognized. Eros and Agape are impersonal loves.  Read more at location 3970

Eros is a biological urge.  Read more at location 3974

Agape is love thy neighbor as thyself—spiritual love. It doesn’t matter who the neighbor is.  Read more at location 3976

But with Amor we have a purely personal ideal. The kind of seizure that comes from the meeting of the eyes, as they say in the troubadour tradition, is a person-to-person experience.  Read more at location 3986

That’s completely contrary to everything the Church stood for. It’s a personal, individual experience, and I think it’s the essential thing that’s great about the West and that makes it different from all other traditions I know.  Read more at location 3989

****  It was important in that it gave the West this accent on the individual, that one should have faith in his experience and not simply mouth terms handed down to him by others. It stresses the validity of the individual’s experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the monolithic system.  Read more at location 3994

Since the marriages were all arranged by society, the love that came from the meeting of the eyes was of a higher spiritual value.  Read more at location 4018

the Roman Catholic Church, which was justifying marriages that were simply political and social in their character. And so came this movement validating individual choice, what I call following your bliss.  Read more at location 4031

Dante, like a social scientist, says, “Darling, how did this happen? What brought this about?” And then come the most famous lines in Dante. Francesca says that Paolo and she were sitting under a tree in the garden reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. “And when we read of their first kiss, we looked at each other and read no more in the book that day.” And that was the beginning of their fall. That this wonderful experience should be condemned as a sin is the thing the troubadour just says no to. Love is the meaning of life—it is the high point of life.  Read more at location 4058

The best part of the Western tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.  Read more at location 4080

The five main virtues of the medieval knight might be brought in here. One is temperance, another is courage, another is love, another is loyalty, and another is courtesy. Courtesy is respect for the decorum of the society in which you are living.  Read more at location 4092

There was an essential requirement—that one must have a gentle heart, that is, a heart capable of love, not simply of lust. The woman would be testing to find whether the candidate for her love had a gentle heart, whether he was capable of love.  Read more at location 4117

the key word for me is compassion.  Read more at location 4123

Suffering with. “Passion” is “suffering,” and “com-” is “with.” The German word really gives it in a clearer way: mitleid, “with” (mit) “sorrow or suffering” (leid). The essential idea was to test this man to make sure that he would suffer things for love, and that this was not just lust.  Read more at location 4125

The troubadours celebrate the agony of the love, the sickness the doctors cannot cure, the wounds that can be healed only by the weapon that delivered the wound.  Read more at location 4155

There’s a very interesting statement about the origin of the Grail. One early writer says that the Grail was brought from heaven by the neutral angels. You see, during the war in heaven between God and Satan, between good and evil, some angelic hosts sided with Satan and some with God. The Grail was brought down through the middle by the neutral angels. It represents that spiritual path that is between pairs of opposites, between fear and desire, between good and evil.  Read more at location 4165

The Grail becomes the—what can we call it?—that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. The Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness.  Read more at location 4174

What that means is that the Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the realm of the spirit, of natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature. And the European mind, the European life, has been, as it were, emasculated by this separation. The true spirituality, which would have come from the union of matter and spirit, has been killed.  Read more at location 4180

**********  Spiritual life is the bouquet, the perfume, the flowering and fulfillment of a human life, not a supernatural virtue imposed upon it.  Read more at location 4184

The Grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that is lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, that carries itself between the pairs of opposites of good and evil, light and dark.  Read more at location 4191

**********  We’re in our own world, and we’re in the world that has been given us outside, and the problem is to achieve a harmonious relationship between the two. I come into this society, so I’ve got to live in terms of this society. It’s ridiculous not to live in terms of this society because, unless I do, I’m not living. But I mustn’t allow this society to dictate to me how I should live. One has to build up one’s own system that may violate the expectations of the society, and sometimes society doesn’t accept that. But the task of life is to live within the field provided by the society that is really supporting you.  Read more at location 4215

You know, it’s very interesting to think of the history of Christianity. During the first five centuries, there were lots of Christianities, lots of ways of being Christian. And then, in the period of Theodosius in the fourth century, the only religion allowed in the Roman Empire was the Christian religion, and the only form of Christianity allowed in the Roman Empire was the Christianity of Byzantium’s throne. The vandalism involved in the destruction of the pagan temples of antiquity is hardly matched in world history.  Read more at location 4231

I think the power impulse is the fundamental impulse in European history. And it got into our religious traditions.  Read more at location 4239

Around the end of the twelfth century, the Abbot Joachim of Floris wrote of the three ages of the spirit. After the Fall in the Garden, he said, God had to compensate for the disaster and reintroduce the spiritual principle into history. He chose a race to become the vehicle of this communication, and that is the age of the Father and of Israel. And then this race, having been prepared as a priestly race, competent to become the vessel of the Incarnation, produces the Son. Thus, the second age is of the Son and the Church, when not a single race but the whole of humanity is to receive the message of the spiritual will of God. The third age, which this philosopher in around 1260 said was now about to begin, is the age of the Holy Spirit, who speaks directly to the individual. Anyone who incarnates or brings into his life the message of the Word is equivalent to Jesus—that’s the sense of this third age. Just as Israel has been rendered archaic by the institution of the Church, so the Church is rendered archaic by the individual experience. That began a whole movement of hermits going into the forests to receive the experience. The saint who is regarded as the first representative of this was St. Francis of Assisi, who represented the equivalent of Christ, and who was himself a manifestation in the physical world of the Holy Spirit.  Read more at location 4241

But marriage is marriage, you know. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn’t that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it’s off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you’re not married.  Read more at location 4266

Like the yin/yang symbol, you see. Here I am, and here she is, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I’m not sacrificing to her, I’m sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life is in the relationship, that’s where your life now is. That’s what a marriage is—whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable.  Read more at location 4280

Marriage is the symbolic recognition of our identity—two aspects of the same being.  Read more at location 4287

MOYERS: But what happens to this self-discovery in love when you meet someone else, and you suddenly feel, “I know that person,” or “I want to know that person”?

CAMPBELL: That’s very mysterious.  Read more at location 4308

It’s almost as though you were reacting to the future. It’s talking to you from what is to be. This has to do with the mystery of time and the transcendence of time. But I think we’re touching a very deep mystery here.  Read more at location 4314

Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in terms of the socially approved manners of life. That’s why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order. It is a higher spiritual experience than that of socially organized marriage.  Read more at location 4338

Love was a divine visitation, and that’s why it was superior to marriage. That was the troubadour idea. If God is love, well then, love is God. Meister Eckhart said, “Love knows no pain.” And that’s exactly what Tristan meant when he said, “I’m willing to accept the pains of hell for my love.”  Read more at location 4342

****  that’s a basic Muslim idea about Satan being God’s greatest lover. There are a number of ways of thinking about Satan, but this is based on the question, Why was Satan thrown into hell? The standard story is that, when God created the angels, he told them to bow to none but himself. Then he created man, whom he regarded as a higher form than the angels, and he asked the angels to serve man. And Satan would not bow to man. Now, this is interpreted in the Christian tradition, as I recall from my boyhood instruction, as being the egotism of Satan. He would not bow to man. But in the Persian story, he could not bow to man because of his love for God—he could bow only to God.  Read more at location 4352

he could not bow to anyone but God, whom he loved. And then God says, “Get out of my sight.” Now, the worst of the pains of hell, insofar as hell has been described, is the absence of the Beloved, which is God. So how does Satan sustain the situation in hell? By the memory of the echo of God’s voice, when God said, “Go to hell.” That is a great sign of love.  Read more at location 4359

Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain.  Read more at location 4381

CHAPTER VIII:  MASKS OF ETERNITY 

*****  The circle, on the other hand, represents totality. Everything within the circle is one thing, which is encircled, enframed. That would be the spatial aspect. But the temporal aspect of the circle is that you leave, go somewhere, and always come back. God is the alpha and the omega, the source and the end. The circle suggests immediately a completed totality, whether in time or in space.  Read more at location 4573

Why do you suppose the circle became so universally symbolic? CAMPBELL: Because it’s experienced all the time—in the day, in the year, in leaving home to go on your adventure—hunting or whatever it may be—and coming back home. Then there is a deeper experience, too, the mystery of the womb and the tomb. When people are buried, it’s for rebirth. That’s the origin of the burial idea. You put someone back into the womb of mother earth for rebirth. Very early images of the Goddess show her as a mother receiving the soul back again.  Read more at location 4582

One person has one half, the other the other half, and then they come together. Recognition comes from putting the ring together, the completed circle. This is my marriage, this is the merging of my individual life in a larger life that is of two, where the two are one. The ring indicates that we are in one circle together.  Read more at location 4593

Jesus calling the apostles, who were fishermen. He said, “I will make you fishers of men.” This is an old motif that is earlier than Christianity. Orpheus is called “The Fisher,” who fishes men, who are living as fish in the water, out up into the light. It’s an old idea of the metamorphosis of the fish into man. The fish nature is the crudest animal nature of our character, and the religious line is intended to pull you up out of that.  Read more at location 4597

“Mandala” is the Sanskrit word for “circle,” but a circle that is coordinated or symbolically designed so that it has the meaning of a cosmic order. When composing mandalas, you are trying to coordinate your personal circle with the universal circle. In a very elaborate Buddhist mandala, for example, you have the deity in the center as the power source, the illumination source. The peripheral images would be manifestations or aspects of the deity’s radiance. In working out a mandala for yourself, you draw a circle and then think of the different impulse systems and value systems in your life. Then you compose them and try to find out where your center is. Making a mandala is a discipline for pulling all those scattered aspects of your life together, for finding a center and ordering yourself to it. You try to coordinate your circle with the universal circle.  Read more at location 4605

*****  The images of myth are reflections of the spiritual potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating these we evoke their powers in our own lives.  Read more at location 4634

we are all made in the image of God. That is the ultimate archetype of man.  Read more at location 4640

***********   When life comes into being, it is neither afraid nor desiring, it is just becoming. Then it gets into being, and it begins to be afraid and desiring. When you can get rid of fear and desire and just get back to where you’re becoming, you’ve hit the spot. Goethe says godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in what has already become and set fast.  Read more at location 4643

reason is concerned, he states, with striving toward the divine through the becoming and the changing, while intelligence makes use of the set fast, what is knowable, known, and so to be used for the shaping of a life.  Read more at location 4646

****  the goal of your quest for knowledge of yourself is to be found at that burning point in yourself, that becoming thing in yourself, which is innocent of the goods and evils of the world as already become, and therefore desireless and fearless. That is the condition of a warrior going into battle with perfect courage. That is life in movement.  Read more at location 4647

****  I think of grass—you know, every two weeks a chap comes out with a lawnmower and cuts it down. Suppose the grass were to say, “Well, for Pete’s sake, what’s the use if you keep getting cut down this way?” Instead, it keeps on growing. That’s the sense of the energy of the center. That’s the meaning of the image of the Grail, of the inexhaustible fountain, of the source. The source doesn’t care what happens once it gives into being. It’s the giving and coming into being that counts, and that’s the becoming life point in you. That’s what all these myths are concerned to tell you.  Read more at location 4650

********  (Note:   very true in my experience)  In the study of comparative mythology, we compare the images in one system with the images in another, and both become illuminated because one will accent and give clear expression to one aspect of the meaning, and another to another. They clarify each other.  Read more at location 4655

******  (Note:   excellent)  When I started teaching comparative mythology, I was afraid I might destroy my students’ religious beliefs, but what I found was just the opposite. Religious traditions, which didn’t mean very much to them, but which were the ones their parents had given them, suddenly became illuminated in a new way when we compared them with other traditions, where similar images had been given a more inward or spiritual interpretation. I had Christian students, Jewish students, Buddhist students, a couple of Zoroastrian students—they all had this experience. There’s no danger in interpreting the symbols of a religious system and calling them metaphors instead of facts. What that does is to turn them into messages for your own inward experience and life. The system suddenly becomes a personal experience.  Read more at location 4657

Heraclitus said strife is the creator of all great things. Something like that may be implicit in this symbolic trickster idea. In our tradition, the serpent in the Garden did the job. Just when everything was fixed and fine, he threw an apple into the picture. No matter what the system of thought you may have, it can’t possibly include boundless life. When you think everything is just that way, the trickster arrives, and it all blows, and you get change and becoming again.  Read more at location 4675

CAMPBELL: A key difference between mythology and our Judeo-Christian religion is that the imagery of mythology is rendered with humor. You realize that the image is symbolic of something. You’re at a distance from it. But in our religion, everything is prosaic, and very, very serious. You can’t fool around with Yahweh.  Read more at location 4681

The peak experience refers to actual moments of your life when you experience your relationship to the harmony of being. My own peak experiences, the ones that I knew were peak experiences after I had them, all came in athletics.  Read more at location 4686

What we call monsters can be experienced as sublime. They represent powers too vast for the normal forms of life to contain them. An immense expanse of space is sublime.  Read more at location 4714

By a monster I mean some horrendous presence or apparition that explodes all of your standards for harmony, order, and ethical conduct. For example, Vishnu at the end of the world appears as a monster. There he is, destroying the universe, first with fire and then with a torrential flood that drowns out the fire and everything else. Nothing is left but ash. The whole universe with all its life and lives has been utterly wiped out. That’s God in the role of destroyer. Such experiences go past ethical or aesthetic judgments. Ethics is wiped out. Whereas in our religions, with their accent on the human, there is also an accent on the ethical—God is qualified as good. No, no! God is horrific. Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army. The end of the world, think of it! But there is a Muslim saying about the Angel of Death: “When the Angel of Death approaches, he is terrible. When he reaches you, it is bliss.”  Read more at location 4726

MOYERS: Jesus did talk of bringing a sword, and I don’t believe he meant to use it against your fellow. He meant it in terms of opening the ego—I come to cut you free from the binding ego of your own self. CAMPBELL: This is what is known in Sanskrit as viveka, “discrimination.” There is a very important Buddha figure who is shown holding a flaming sword high over his head—and so what is that sword for? It is the sword of discrimination, separating the merely temporal from the eternal. It is the sword distinguishing that which is enduring from that which is merely passing.  Read more at location 4736

If you don’t experience it here and now, you’re not going to get it in heaven. Heaven is not eternal, it’s just everlasting.  Read more at location 4745

Shiva is a very ancient deity, perhaps the most ancient worshiped in the world today. There are images from 2000 or 2500 B.C., little stamp seals showing figures that clearly suggest Shiva. In some of his manifestations he is a really horrendous god, representing the terrific aspects of the nature of being. He is the archetypal yogi, canceling the illusion of life, but he is also the creator of life, its generator, as well as illuminator.  Read more at location 4757

************  this is it, this is Eden. When you see the kingdom spread upon the earth, the old way of living in the world is annihilated. That is the end of the world. The end of the world is not an event to come, it is an event of psychological transformation, of visionary transformation. You see not the world of solid things but a world of radiance.  Read more at location 4840

****  Goethe says, “All things are metaphors.” Everything that’s transitory is but a metaphorical reference. That’s what we all are.  Read more at location 4847

That’s what people are doing all over the place—dying for metaphors. But when you really realize the sound, “AUM,” the sound of the mystery of the word everywhere, then you don’t have to go out and die for anything because it’s right there all around. Just sit still and see it and experience it and know it. That’s a peak experience.  Read more at location 4850

“AUM” is a word that represents to our ears that sound of the energy of the universe of which all things are manifestations. You start in the back of the mouth “ahh,” and then “oo,” you fill the mouth, and “mm” closes the mouth. When you pronounce this properly, all vowel sounds are included in the pronunciation. AUM. Consonants are here regarded simply as interruptions of the essential vowel sound. All words are thus fragments of AUM, just as all images are fragments of the Form of forms. AUM is a symbolic sound that puts you in touch with that resounding being that is the universe. If you heard some of the recordings of Tibetan monks chanting AUM, you would know what the word means, all right. That’s the AUM of being in the world. To be in touch with that and to get the sense of that is the peak experience of all. A-U-M. The birth, the coming into being, and the dissolution that cycles back. AUM is called the “four-element syllable.” A-U-M—and what is the fourth element? The silence out of which AUM arises, and back into which it goes, and which underlies it. My life is the A-U-M, but there is a silence underlying it, too. That is what we would call the immortal. This is the mortal and that’s the immortal, and there wouldn’t be the mortal if there weren’t the immortal.  Read more at location 4854

****  Words are always qualifications and limitations.  Read more at location 4869