You are listening to the MythMaker Podcast Network.
Welcome back to another episode of the Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast, Pathways with Joseph Campbell.I'm your host, Bradley Olson.
On this podcast, we at the Joseph Campbell Foundation are excited to share the power of myth through our archive of audio lectures given by Joseph Campbell over the course of his teaching and lecturing career.
Today, we're listening to a lecture Campbell gave sometime in 1971 at Esalen, that beautiful retreat center in Big Sur, California.
In this episode, Professor Campbell has a few lively interactions with those attending this lecture, people who seem to have spent some time thinking about myth and Campbell's work as well as depth psychology.
And their questions move Campbell to consider aspects of ritual that might not have come up otherwise.
Joseph Campbell began going to Esalen in 1965 and returned each March as a scholar-in-residence to celebrate his birthday and give a series of lectures at the Holistic and Educational Retreat Center in California's majestic Big Sur mountain range.
These lectures explored his latest thoughts, insights, and stories in a place that he described as paradise on the Pacific Coast.So with that, I hope you'll enjoy Campbell's 1971 Esalen Lecture on Primitive Rites and Traditions.
As always, immediately following Campbell's lecture, I'll return with some final remarks and explore some of the important and interesting ideas from it. Now, here's Joseph Campbell.
The principal rights are those of what are known as the rights of passage.These are the basic rights, anyhow, of all societies.One is birth, at the time of birth, the problem of welcoming the new arrival.
but also the father's recognition of his responsibilities.Of course, the actual accidents of birth and all have led to all kinds of magic to facilitate the birth.And Birthright writes a passage. The next principle series have to do with puberty.
We can talk about those in a little while.These are tremendously important.They're very simple in the very earliest order of societies.They become very complicated later on.But the principle problem in the puberty rights is one that we still face.
It's one of the basic functions of mythology to serve this.The human being is born 12 years too soon.He can't take care of himself for 12 years.He's physically dependent.He isn't physically mature until his early 20s.I mean, there's a period.
It's the slowest developing animal in the whole world.Now, there's one other. period in animal development where you have a lag like that in animal development, not birds or anything like that with the little nest.And this is the marsupials.
The marsupials don't have a placenta and so the fetus can't remain in the womb after the egg yolk has gone, which is the food supply, has to be born.The little baby kangaroo is born after about 18 days or so.
It's a tiny, tiny little thing, but it has very strong front legs.And it can crawl up its mother's belly into the pouch.There it attaches itself to a nipple, which spontaneously enlarges in its mouth so it can't get loose.
And there it is in the second womb, which I always think of as a womb with a view.And there it remains until it is matured.
Now, with the development of the placenta in the mammals, the little thing can remain in the womb until it's practically ready to take care of itself, and some little animals can almost immediately take care of themselves on birth, others a couple of days.
like a week or so, and they're toddling around pretty well and soon are able to take care of themselves.
With the human being, with the development of this marvelous thing we have up here, there's an extremely slow development again, so that there is a sort of fetalization in the human being.
It is not as mature as a young gorilla or chimp when it's born. Now, I think of mythology as a kind of second womb like this.The home plays the role of the second womb, and the child is brought up in this atmosphere.Now, what has to mature?
It's after birth that all the human characteristics are received.Upright walking. thinking, speaking, the whole feeling system.It all comes in in relation to a specific social order, so that there's no such thing as a human being qua human being.
One's a human being in relation to this society, in relation to that, in relation to another society.And the first stage of life, then, is this of the individual growing up completely
vulnerable, you might say, and having to receive from the social order, and then comes suddenly at puberty time this tremendous problem of shifting from an attitude of absolute dependency to an attitude of responsibility, self-responsible action.
All of these reflexes, have to be changed in their character.Instead of thinking, am I doing right, or what would mother say, or what punishment or reward am I going to get, you are it.
Now a neurotic, in terms of this, is a person who has not gone over that line, who, when the impulse comes, first acts in submission, so to say, and then realizes, oh no, I'm the authority here, and there's an ambivalence.
One has to, as Freud says, kill the infantile ego, and the infantile ego is the ego that is subordinate, that is dependent on authority and susceptible to punishment.
The mature ego is the one that has gone past that and acts on its own responsibility.Yes?
But it doesn't feel superior.It feels... I mean, it feels superior. Very small.
That little ego, don't you think?You mean the infantile ego?
Isn't superior.No, it's submissive, always.It is susceptible to punishment.It is interested in knowing whether it's doing well.What would father say?What would mother say?
Now, if you go through for a PhD degree, you stay under the ceiling of authority until you're about 40, and it's too late.You never get out.This is one of the problems of professors.
Listen, on TV, when they're asking a professor a question, he stutters and fumbles around.He's wondering whether he's getting good marks. for what he's saying.
But when you hear a football player or a baseball player, I say, well, geez, they answer with ease, and the words come out without any problem at all.They've been adult ever since they were the best batter on the sandlot, you know?
Is that you really feel that the infantile is really killed?I mean, is it possible to kill the infantile completely?
Well, I would say that from what we know of savage life, it was fairly successfully done, generally.And it is done by very violent means.But one could talk about some of these rights.There are some very fantastic experiences.Just to name one or two.
Typically, in these early societies, the bulrura is the voice of the ancestral power.And it's often represented normally, and the usual representation is of a great cosmic serpent.
And when the youngster is about to be initiated, in Australia, for example, how does it start?It starts when the boys begin to be a little bit unmanageable.
Then there will be only about half a dozen in the particular village that would be of this age, you know, about the 10, 11, 12 year age.The women beat the kids.That's the beginning of their show.Then comes the great time when
All of a sudden, the men come, but such as the boys have never seen them before, with these decorations of ostrich feather lines that have been stuck to them with their own blood, you know, and the fierce looking horrendous things with the sound of the bull roaring.
Now, these are the ancestral spirits.They come and the kid is taken away from the women.The women pretend to protect the kid. The men take it away.Mother's no good anymore.She can't protect me anymore.She's gone.
Then the boy has to become, what can we say, seduced into the man's world.The mother birth, there's a basic mythological thought right now, or I don't know.The mother birth is the birth of the nature animal, the little nature being.
And through the initiation you have the birth into the culture. and the food is men's blood.The kids are fed on the blood of the men.They drink it, they eat it caked, they have it poured all over them.It's a rather unappetizing event.
It's then that they receive their mythological instruction in extremely sensational way.To give a couple of examples.The boy is told to sit behind a certain fence, a fence of wood or leaves or whatnot, and not look at what's going to go on.
And there are these wild things going on out there, and the kid, of course, is curious.Any kid that looks is killed and eaten.Now, that's one way to get rid of juvenile delinquents.But you lose a lot of original thinking that way.
You see, what you are doing in these traditional societies is seeing to it that everybody's going to behave
Yes, it's the guys who are going to be creative, who are going to innovate, who are curious, are knocked out.
You see, there is no creativity in a primitive culture, in the sense that we think it is.
So they get killed, those who show the sign of possible creativity get killed.
Yes.It's not regarded as creativity, it's regarded as heresy.
Any of the Australian tribes, you can read this in Spencer and Gillen, the Aranda of Central Australia.
You described it in the Mass of God.
That's right, I do, I use it in the Mass of God.I'm simply giving that material here.
Is this kept secret?In other words, you know, like the 11-year-old doesn't really know what's going to happen?
He doesn't know what's going to happen.
So then these are very secret rituals I would like to keep.The 16-year-old is not going to tell the 11-year-old, hey, this is what's happening.
The 16-year-old's a man.The 11-year-old's a child.You don't communicate your masculine adult secrets to the child.
I have to pose something in a modern context, if I can, because I teach adolescence.And the difficulty I find, particularly, it's not with the girls so much, it's with the boys. What can I do?
In my capacity as a teacher, and very often, in an enormous amount of friendships, I'll have the kids come to the house a lot.I see that, wanting to pass over, in a sense.And I'm put in a very precarious and rather funny kind of position.
The precarious position is of the crushes that always ensue, that I can handle all right. But the difficulty is, I'm the female figure, instead of the male figure that should help this youngster free himself.
And unfortunately, there aren't enough male teachers in the school to do this.
And a youngster will usually choose a teacher, very often, although it can happen, I suppose, in other things that they're interested in, for this, for this that they want to do.
Well, see, our culture just doesn't have initiation rights. Our education has to do with the communication of information.
And the real brutal side of the thing is left to one's contemporaries, who can give one the see-to-it that you behave the way they want, all that kind of thing.
But the real initiatory rites in the Christian community is reduced to the confirmation ceremony where the bishop gives you a little slap on the face and that's the end of it.These kids get a hell of a deal.
All of the scarifications and circumcisions and even sub-incisions are enacted in this situation here.
And in this Australian ceremony, the circumcision is enacted by two men, one standing in front of the other, with their beards in their mouths, which signifies wrath.
And the man behind is grasping the man before around so that these two figures come out with this flint knife, which is going to do the circumcision.
And the kid is put, he doesn't know what's going to happen, he's put on a shield and carried up, and before he knows what's happened, he's been circumcised by two men who represent wrath, the terror. And it's not, oh, Sonny, this isn't going to hurt.
And then everybody's making a lot of noise so that when the kid starts screaming and crying, he, that's drowned out.And they can say, oh, you manly little fellow.And then they take one of these,
the, what the, um, Turinga boards, which is a spiritual fetish, and they apply this to the wound, and to tell him that this is the spirit now protecting him, and his, his guardian is this stick.
So that, uh, he has left his mother and all, and the man who has circumcised him is the father of the girl who has been selected for his marriage.So, uh, he, he loses one thing and comes over to the other.
But then after that, in this particular culture, there comes the sub-incision, and you know what that is, where the penis is slit the length of it beneath, which gives a vagina in the penis, so that he is now himself of the androgyne dual sex in his ceremonial aspect.
He's no longer got the little boy body he had before.He's not the same kid anymore.I mean, he's through as a boy.
But in a traditional culture, the requirement is that the adult should accept without question, now here we come to our problem, accept without question the given order of the society.He goes from the attitude of, I want,
to the attitude of thou shalt, he himself representing the thou shalt system.He has given up his independent personal wish system and has assimilated to himself, taken on to himself the culture system.
Now that goes for all traditional societies, primitive and oriental.In India, you have the idea of dharma, the duty of your caste, and there's no questioning of it.
And if you have throughout your life performed your dharma perfectly, you can perform magic by that.A person who has performed his dharma perfectly is something.The Sanskrit word for to be something is sat.The feminine participle is sati.
You get it?The wife who throws herself on her husband's funeral pyre, not thinking, will it hurt?Do I want to?Did I love him?But just what the duty of the wife is, is something because she's a wife.That is to say, because she has fulfilled her role.
A woman who hasn't done this is asat, is nothing. So, this is precisely the opposite to the point of view represented in our Occidental world.The person is not his role.He plays his role.
What Jung calls individuation, that is to say, finding your own character, this is an initiation the Orient doesn't know anything about.
is one who does not identify his self with his role, whereas in the Orient and in the primitive society, what you are is your role.Now, this requires a totally different initiation from the primitive or Oriental initiation.
It would be a persona in the human sense, then.In the primitive sense, the persona is you.
That you identify with the persona. What would the counterpart here be?The counterpart here is the military life.A good soldier is one who does well what he has to do.He doesn't decide.He isn't morally responsible for anything he does.
That's why these trials are absolute abominations that are going on now, where soldiers are being tried as though they were private citizens when they're in the army.They're not.
And they are executing orders, and it may be that a human passion overtakes it for a moment, but they cannot be judged as citizens.
They are soldiers, and they're not responsible for a damn thing they're doing, unless it is that they don't execute orders properly, then that's court-martialed.But the civil trial is utterly, utterly out here.I mean, something nutty has happened.
The problem in our culture then is the transition from the civil life to military life and back.These require rights.Now there's another order of ritual even in primitive societies for the one who is going on a war party.
He has to undergo special initiations.The first book I ever published was a Navajo war ceremonial. And what happens there is the individual lives through the life of the war hero, the tribal war hero.Among the Navajo, his name is Killer of Enemies.
The individual identifies himself with that figure, and the whole morality system changes.It's the morality of war and killing. Then when he comes back, there has to be a decoding, you know, another thing to get him back.
And we don't know that either.And then we wonder why these poor guys go berserk this way or that.The rights are gone.But these rights, when they are applied, work.
And they work to such an extent that, or at least they're expected to work to such an extent, that if they don't, the person who misbehaves is killed. is mutilated, is tortured.
When you read the Laws of Manu in India, the great classical law books, the punishments are almost incredible.You can hardly read them for comparatively slight misdemeanors.
So I was asked before the later arrivals arrived, what were the most primitive orders of rights?And these are the rights that are known as the rights of passage, the rights at birth, the rights at adolescence.
I've named two more now, the rights from civilian to war life and back.Also, when people have been killed, you have to have rights of expiation for having killed them.
It's interpreted as appeasing their souls and releasing their souls or capturing their souls and making their souls work for you one way or another.
But what it actually is, is detonating or defusing your own war spirit so that you are able to return to civil life. Then there is another order of rites of passage that have to do with installation.
When a person is installed in an official position, he is no longer a personality.He is in that role.Again, we still have that with the installation of judges, the installation even of a president of a university.
He no longer is to act as an individual, but as a representative of certain principles that he has assumed responsibility for. Then there are the rights of curing people of diseases and so forth, and finally the rights of death.
And always here, it's interpreted as though the soul were being helped, but what is actually being helped are the people who have been left behind, that they should feel the gap closed.
It is a reinforcement of social solidarity after the loss of an important member. For most early societies, children, there are no rights of burial for children.They haven't got a personality yet.
They haven't made a place in the society, and there's no rupture to be healed, except perhaps the parent who hasn't even had time to become devoted to the child yet.
But where an important person or a person who has had some life in the community dies, then you have the rights that reaffirm the society's solidarity.
Now, these are the normal rites of passage, but then there's another kind of rite that has to do with spiritual achievements that transcend those of the community.These, in the early societies, are associated with the shaman crisis.
Now, what is a shaman crisis?It is a psychological breakdown, and it occurs in early or middle adolescence.
Just the time that the person would be undergoing initiation rites, he has a psychological crisis of his own, which puts him in touch with those psychological powers that are actually the supporting powers of the community itself.
It goes into what would be called a schizophrenic breakdown. And a shaman is sent for, an older shaman, to come and cure the boy.He knows what it is.He's gone through it himself.
And his songs and so forth are songs that he brought forth from that state when he was in it.And by singing these songs and so forth, he can cure the boy.Now, the best accounts I've read of actual shamanistic cures of a young man
are those that Rasmussen gave in describing his passage across the north of North America in the North Canadian area with the shamans of the Caribou Eskimo up there.And I'll just describe one, which I've also described in the book.
The shaman took this youngster and put him on a sled and towed him out onto the ice in mid-winter in northern Canada.
and built a little igloo just big enough for the kid to sit in, and lifted him onto a skin that he put in there, and sat him down on that, and left him there for something like 30 days.
And he came twice, once with a bit of water for the kid to drink, and once with a bit of meat and so forth, and told him while he was sitting there just to think about the Great Spirit.
And as the shaman said, who had gone through this in his youth, I died many times during that period.But there came to him at the end a vision of a female figure that became his protecting power.
Now, throughout the American Indian societies of the North Americas, this puberty vision was the main point. boys were sent out to have a vision, not quite as extreme as that, necessarily.
And so this shaman vision is simply a heightened example of the norm for young men in the North American system, anyhow, that you have a vision which tells you what your career is.
Are you going to be a great hunter, a great chieftain, a great warrior?The power that comes to you in the vision gives you your powers.
That practically is the list of the early psychological rites, the rites of puberty, the rites of passage, and the rites of shamanistic cure and initiation.Now let me just very briefly, having mentioned this,
tell you what I regard as the four main dominant functions that a mythology serves, and has always served, and now is having trouble serving.
The first I call the mystical function, and this is the function of awakening in the individual and maintaining in the individual a sense of awe and gratitude for the mystery of the universe.
that mystery dimension that cannot be penetrated by any research, any category of knowledge, and evoking an attitude of affirmation.
Now, this morning I spoke of those horrendous rights where you accede to the fact that life lives on life, that life is monstrous, that life is horrendous.
In all the early societies, the attitude toward this terrible thing that life is, which Schopenhauer said, you know, should not have been.Life is something that should not have been.The attitude is always one of affirmation.
Then when you come to about the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries BC, that takes place what I've been calling the Great Reversal, where the sensitives who are unable to say yay to this thing say nay to it.
and you have the rights of pulling out, how to train yourself psychologically so that you are not attached to the world, so that you lose all fear of death and lose all desire for life and are a null.You are a no-thing, a non-thing.
There is a third point of view which emerges in the Near East and its earliest example is in Zoroastrianism.
Next we have the Bible and it is that originally there was a good creation and that it was through someone's fault that it got to be this nasty thing.And so you have the idea of the fall.
And there is now underway a restoration of the good state, which is conducted by way of our society.We are the ones who are restoring the original goodness of the world.This is true of Zoroastrianism.You have the fall of Gaia March, the first man.
He fell because he was rendered sick by the evil power Angramanyu.
There is a good creator, Ahura Mazda, who creates a world that is all light and truth, and Angramanyu, the god of evil and the lie, delivers into this negative powers, which bring about a fall and the collapse of the universe, and the collapse of the universe is the creation of the universe.
That's the point in Zoroastrianism, and this is a metaphysically tenable position.The Fall is the creation.The God was what fell, not man later.And then there comes into the world
Zoroaster, the great teacher, who teaches that order of moral life, which will restore the world to its proper state, and then there will come, at the end of time, because it's time that brings death and all of this in, at the end of time there will come Sarashyant, who in the Hebrew tradition would be the Messiah,
and through him the evil power is rendered extinct and the timeless perfection restored.
Now this is taken over in Judaism, this is taken over in Christianity, and you have actually the Adam, Christ the second Adam, and the second coming of Christ, the same three powers in this cycle.
Now, of course, the point here is that what it involves is a condemnation of nature, and this is fundamental to the Judeo-Christian tradition.Nature, as it now exists, is evil, and the only salvation of it comes through a supernatural infusion.
The Savior comes from a God who is not of nature. I'm going to try to indicate, while I'm on this theme, the essential difference between the Oriental and the biblical traditions.
The line of division for me between Orient and Occident is 60 degrees east of Greenwich, and it runs through Iran.Eastward of Iran, you have two major creative centers of high civilization.One is India, and the other is China.
Look at these on a map, and you'll see that both are surrounded by impassable barriers.The great deserts westward of China, which have to be crossed by anyone going there, the great Himalayas northward of India, and then the oceans round about.
In the early period, you could not have a massive invasion by sea, and the invasions by land could be assimilated.They were not massive in either case. Westward of Iran, you have two great creative centers.
One is the Near East, and the other is Europe.And these are very close together with communication back and forth.Not only that, but open north and south to invasion by very powerful fighting barbarian people.
The Aryans from northern, from the European plains, and the Semites from the Sierra Arabian Desert.These people come in ruthlessly, smash, smash, smash.And so that there's a continuous
turnover in the Western realm, and with that, of course, progress.There is the devastation of the earlier form and the shaping of a new one, devastation of an earlier one and shaping of a new one.
The discoveries, for example, of iron, antedate by 700 years in Europe their appearance in the Far East.So China and India are completely conservative, and the mythologies
and philosophies of those two realms are the philosophies and mythologies that were brought there in the first civilization.In India, with the Indus Valley Civilization, 2500 BC, in China with the Shang Dynasty, 1500 BC, this is High Bronze Age.
The philosophies of China and India are High Bronze Age philosophies to this day.These are philosophies that hold that there is a impersonal power that is the ultimate power of the universe.It brings forth worlds, the worlds go on.
Come forth, they disappear.And the gods are simply the agents of that process.They do not initiate the process.They are the agents and they go out as the universe does.They are functions of this universe of power.Now, the main point in that system is
that the power that is the truth and substance of the universe is absolutely beyond conception.It's absolutely beyond all categories of thought.It neither is nor is not.Being and non-being are categories of thought.
To ask, as we do, is God merciful, just, wrathful?This is to project human sentiments on a transcendent mystery.This is for children.There it is absolutely beyond that, and you can't judge it or anything of the kind.
And yet, here's the next point, that which is the transcendent mystery is the mystery of your being, because you are the being of anything. object here, the mystery of its existence is exactly the same as the mystery of the existence of the universe.
So you can take anything and regard it in the mystery of its existence and it becomes an object, a base for contemplation.So you are it.That's that Chandogya Upanishad statement, Tat Tvam Asi, you are it.
You can write it on the board, A is yourself, X is the mystery, A equals the mystery.But not the you that you can name, not the you that you know, not the you that you think you are or would wish to be or anything of the kind.And so you are not it.
Now that oxymoron, you are not, you are, is the root of all oriental mystical things. And the goal of all the disciplines, the ultimate goal, is to give you an experience of that identity with that which is no that.
Now, all yogas ultimately terminate in that experience.They're meant to.And there are a variety of yogas, depending on your temperament. One yoga is the yoga of discrimination, known as jnana yoga, the yoga of knowledge.
Identify yourself with the witness and not with the object witnessed.I know my body.I'm not my body.I know my feelings.I'm not my feelings.I know my thoughts.I'm not my thoughts.You drive yourself out the back of the wall that way.
And then the Buddha comes along and says, you're not the witness either.There is no witness. When that thing comes, that's what's known as Satori, or Bodhi illumination.
In contrast to that, westward of Iran, God created the world, and the creator and the world are not the same, and to say, I am God, Final heresy, it's the typical heresy.
So that there is, what in the East is the aim of all religion, is the prime heresy here.We can't say, or we're not supposed to say, I am one with the divine mystery.We have to say, I have been put in relationship to it.
So what we have is an A, X, with an R in between, relationship.A achieves a relationship to X. And how do you achieve the relationship? by membership in a social group.In the Judaism, God has a covenant with a certain people.
And it is through that covenant that the relationship to God takes place.That covenant was established at a certain time and place by a supernatural intervention.And no one within that covenant is in a valid relationship to God.
This is fantastic when you think about it.Whereas in the East, anybody can open his ears to the song of the universe or look at something like this and suddenly get it.Not so there.In Christianity, Christ is true God and true man.
That's what everybody has to realize about himself.There it's regarded as a unique occasion.And Christ can't become our model because we're not true God and true man. He's only in a very strange way our model.
Whereas in the East, these incarnations are meant to give you the clue to your own character as an incarnation.Well, so much for the first function of mythology then.
It's to bring about an experience either of relationship through baptism or birth from a Jewish mother to God, or on the other hand, experience of identity.
The second function of a traditional mythology is to present a cosmic image, an image of the cosmos, a notion of the universe and its coming and going, through which this sense of the mystery will be communicated, so that every object within the universe or within the social context becomes, as it were, a holy picture.
through which the mystery of that mystery dimension is rendered.Now, in our sciences, we stress what might be called the net of causality, cause and effect, and we know what causes this and causes that.
And the mystery dimension is left to you to experience through what science shows.But the scientist isn't talking about the mystery dimension.He's talking about the cause-effect net.
And this doesn't mean that you or I can't just look, as we did last night, at the sky, or even think of those men up on the moon, and we can very easily have the sense of the mystery of this cosmos.
This cosmos is infinitely more marvelous and mysterious than what the Bible shows.So, it's up to you, though.It's optional.The culture doesn't present it to you. First function, the mystical one.Second function, the cosmological one.
The third function of a traditional society is sociological.That is the one of training the individual to his place in a certain given community, according to a certain social order.It validates the social order.
And in all traditional mythologies, the social order is thought to be unchangeable. In the biblical tradition, the same God who's supposed to have created the world is also supposed to have delivered the law.
In the Hindu tradition, where you don't have a God who creates the world, you have the world come into being, the caste system came into being with it.And just as mice and lions have different laws to govern them, so have shudras and chakras.
The laws cannot be changed.In all traditional societies, the older the document, the truer. In our scientific world, it's just the opposite.A scientific study that's ten years old is already out of date.
We don't look for the oldest thing, we look for the latest, whereas in the traditional culture, there's the look back.Of course, in the communist world, they're looking back to Marx.Everything has to be validated that way.
This is really an Asian culture that I would recognize in the reactionary Asian That's a little bit surprising.That's because these people just talk upside down, that's the whole point.
The fourth function of a traditional mythology then is the psychological one of guiding the individual through the course of his life from the dependency of childhood to the responsibility of adulthood and then when the
thing begins to break, just about the time you learn how to do it, you're dropping the ball, you know?How do you get out?I have a little thought that comes to me in that connection whenever I have to speak of this.
In the old days, in Barnum & Bailey Circus, they had a freak tent.You know, you paid $2.50 going to look at the freaks.And there were signs up to the bearded lady, to the fat man, to the smallest man in the world.
And people go in, having paid their $2.50, they had a lot to look at, and the tent would get crowded, so they couldn't get people out.How do you get them out?
Somebody thought, let's take down the exit sign and put up a sign that says, to the Grand Egress.And then people go to see the Grand Egress and they're out.And so it is here.
Heaven and all that and God and Daddy and all will be out there waiting to greet you. Who cares, right?When you're out.
The thing is to get the person out without having them back up and get excited and all that, but give them some... The forward movement is so important in life that you shouldn't drag back.
In youth, the problem is that of the rising sun leaving the mother world behind and coming to the world of light.The latter half of life, which starts around 40-ish, The problem is to go down, to let the world go and still feel you're going forward.
So whereas life is the threat to youth, death is the threat to later life.You become used to this thing like going from home to Yosemite.When you get to Yosemite, you don't want to go home again.
So we went from home to life and now we don't want to go home. Dante, in his wonderful philosophical work, the Convito, gives a schedule for this, which I'm going to suggest.It's good old Occident.It's Stoicism and so forth.
He divides life, that great arc, in the middle.Now, the middle is based on his own life.He was born in 1265. And so he was 35 years old in the year 1300.That was thought to be the middle year of the universe at that period.
And so the middle of his life and the middle of the universe coincide, you see?So 35 is the middle of life.And then you double that, and you get to 70 on the way out.Now, he divides this, the first,
He divides it into four stages, as the Indians do, but they're quite different here.The first stage takes us up to 25, which he calls the period of infancy or of youth.
This is a period of growth and learning and achievement of mastery of some kind or other.Then from 25 to 35, to 45, that is to say, a 20-year span is the maturity period.That he calls maturity.Then from 45 to 70, he calls age.
And from 70 to whenever the man with the bones comes is decrepitude.And he announces the virtues of the four periods, which I think they're lovely, for youth.
There is obedience, and there is a sense of shame, and there is comeliness, and there is sweetness.These are what make youth tolerable, but they also give it its, they enhance the charm that is native to it.The virtues of maturity are temperance,
courage and love and loyalty and courtesy.Those are the five governing principles of the knightly man.The virtues of age are wisdom and justice and magnanimity What have you got to lose?Give.And a kind of joyous generosity of spirit.
And then comes decrepitude.Looking back over the life already lived with gratitude, gratitude, and going out as a return home.Now comes the next point here, this midpoint, that midpoint in Dante's own life.
I've named it because that's the moment of his divine vision, of the divine comedy as the Easter, Good Friday to Easter of that year, which was his 35th year.The first half of life you are living according to what you've been taught.
The youth obeys, the youth learns.The mature man acts according to what he has been taught.
But in midlife, you are eligible for an experience of the validity of what you've been taught that renders you capable of judging it, of innovating, of creative transformation and interpretation of what has been taught.
And in the period of age, then you are in a position to give wisdom, to give justice, you see.Now contrast that with the Orient.
In India, the four ages are studenthood, when you are to be absolutely obedient to your guru, not criticizing, then maturity, when you are to enact the laws in terms of
what you have been taught, not criticizing, and then when you come to the period that for Dante is the one of contributing to society, you go into the forest to practice yoga and extinguish your ego.
The first stage is student, the second is householder, the third is going into the forest to practice yoga, the fourth is illumination when you are nothing. And as Shankaracharya says, a man who has achieved illumination is like a burnt string.
When you see a burnt string, it looks like a string.But blow, and there's nothing there.That man coming down the way, the illuminated one, it looks like a man.There's nobody there.These are the contrasts between Western and Oriental thinking.
Now, the mythologies are ordered to these four functions and these four stages of life in all the great traditions.The myth has to serve the child to bring it to maturity.
It has to serve the agent to receive that libido that is being dissociated from the functions of society and going back into the psyche and activating the inward imagination. And in India, the inward imagination is to carry you out.
In the West, the inward imagination is to contribute new richness and interpretations and understanding to the forms inherited.
Is the... perhaps the... the word freedom is a very important dividing concept.
Correct.In Sanskrit, it's boksha.And the word boksha means freedom from being anything. And here it means freedom for a human being to do as he will.Precisely the opposite.Everything we stand for is contrary to what the East regards.
When we speak of individuality and individual things, that's exactly what you don't want.
So the question is, which is delusional?
Oh, well, that's the question for you to think about when you're sitting down.But in the actual action, our life asks, in the West, for the freedom of the ego function.
Now, the ego function is the function – I'm using Freud terms now – what he calls the reality function.It puts you in touch with the empirical actualities of the world as it is, of you in that world as it is.
The id function is simply the pleasure principle.I want the dynamics of the body.The superego are the laws of the community.In the East, they regard only id and superego.I want, extinguish that, and perform in terms of thou shalt.Ego, out.
Whereas ego is the creative, thinking, initiating principle.And our whole education is devoted to developing critical judgment, impersonal application of the virtues that you regard and have found for yourself and for which you take responsibility.
That's not so in the army.I had the experience in India time and time again.You'd ask somebody, where's the post office?And he'd say, it's over there and there and there.And then you say thank you and say, oh, it's only my duty.
My God, is that a deflating thing?There's no personal relationship at all. And the whole business is you're just a good soldier.
How did you react emotionally to being there?
I?Oh, I don't want to go through that.This to me was something enormously upsetting.I had spent, before I went to India, I had spent literally 35 years studying Hinduism and Oriental thought and all.
And when I went there and saw what the actual sociology and psychology was that resulted from these things, it was something.
All right, so the Hero with a Thousand Faces was written before, right?
No, no.Oh yes, it was written before.
Had to be.Now I understand the difference.
I couldn't understand... If I were writing it today, there would be a stronger Occidental accent.
But I must say that the oriental philosophies still, as they say, turn me on.And they are, in terms of the quest for illumination and expanded consciousness, they've got all the answers there.
This is what I wanted to ask you, because friends that I have that have returned from India, it is the enormous suffering that is such a shock to them. Well that's the karma idea.
Well now that's very good for keeping people quiet.They're responsible for it themselves.This is the attitude.But there's another very interesting thing about it.
Once you have, you never do recover from the shock of, I mean our words don't apply there, poverty, you know, misery, nothing like it, what you see there.Then you realize there's peace.
There's a kind of percolation of sweet living of life as it has come, miserable as it is.And he see people in luxury and everything, they're miserable inside.They're not there. You can ask yourself a question or two on that.Here we all feel guilt.
If anybody's got ten cents more than the other fellow, he's guilty of something.Or his father was the son of a bitch who built a palace on blood and bones.Nothing of the kind there.
Ghandi described them as living vegetables that sat in their own excretion and didn't even move out of it.
Well there's no doubt about that too, but they like it there. Gandhi was a reformer.He was brought up in South Africa, he'd been to England, he learned about the Bhagavad Gita by finding it in Annie Besant's translation in an English drawing room.
But I can't – doesn't it go on – you know, when you say they were happy and they're sitting there as a vegetable, that's... I wouldn't want to say that I knew how happy they were, but you get a sense of acquiescence in this and an experience of whatever the life is that they've got.
I had a very funny experience in Orissa, which is a provincial part of India.It's away from the big cities.It's where the great temple of Puri is, the Jatana and all that kind of business.
And we were invited by a Brahmin family, I was traveling with two other chaps, to a dinner at their home.And the dinner was just men sitting around, We're eating with our hands, this really awkward manner.
And a woman comes in with a shawl over her head, you know, like this, and dishes out something.The boy says, this is my mother, and out she goes.Then comes another one, this is my aunt, out she goes.And here we are, you know, like this.
After this fabulous meal, the young man, our host, said, my father would like to speak to you.So we go down to father.Father is seated like this on the floor, big, massive man, bare.
upper with the Brahminical thread across his beautiful chest and his jyoti here, and behind him, a table with great books on it.I thought, Mahabharata, Ramayana, you know, Panishad and all that.
And he speaks Malayalam, which is another language, and the son translates it.The father asks us a question, three philosophers from the West.What do you think of Indian philosophers?
Well, each in his turn said the finest things he could about Indian philosophy.The son translates this to the father who's there receiving it.The father speaks again.The son translates.My father asks, are you mad?Do you have eyes?
Have you not seen India?Well, that was a... a stunning moment for us all.
I blank out at that point.Really, one can only, one can't imagine that it can have yielded such a society in the earlier days.It must just be that
the increased population that comes as a result of the contribution of medicine from the West, you know, no infant mortality as it used to be and all, that this horrific overpopulation has rendered a problem that in the old days did not exist.
In what we gather, I mean, when you read of the the Gupta period, the Chalukya period and all that, you get a sense of a quite nicely prospering agricultural, agrarian world, something like our own 18th century.
When would you say that was happening?
When what happened? you know, where they were living in this nice, prosperous... Well, the Gupta period's about 320 to 650 AD.Earlier than that, I'm not speaking about, because the philosophies of India crystallized at that time.
I'm trying to visualize Western man bringing medicine in there.That's pretty recent.
Oh, that comes in with England, with the conquest of India in the 18th century.Well, the East-West, just when one goes
gaga about all these Eastern things coming over here, just remember something, that there is a difference between the developed, civilized ego of the West and the extinguished ego of the East.
But I see something else that might, you know, I'm to project, and you probably could project it better than I, there is an increasing desire, especially among youth and great They're attracted by this enormous attraction for Eastern religions.
I don't think I have at least half of the student population in high school where I am.There are at least 10 yoga centers very actively supported by youth in San Francisco.And there are all these little bookshops, different practices.
The kids are reading so much Eastern literature and all the Eastern philosophy. and a very certain kind of passivity I see emerging with young people, a movement to vegetarianism.Why would this attraction, well, the question can be focused two ways.
One is, I can see in one sense why this might be attractive to young people, but could you see a mythological synthesis?
Well, first let me say what I think is the reason for the attraction. The reason for the attractiveness, I think, is that it makes the religious problem a problem of experience, not of faith, not of accepting teachings that you can't credit.
Now, all human beings have the mythological dimension, the mystical dimension inside them.This is like the need for food.A human being has this.
And our religions have not been feeding it because they are handing down a mythology of a god out there, not in here.
And you get to that god only by way of this social institution, which has been totally discredited by everything we know about science and everything else. Our sociology is not the sociology that is carried in the Bible.
It's not the sociology that's carried in the medieval traditions of the Catholic Church or the Lutheran traditions or any of these.It's a totally different social problem, which this does not serve.And then the realization that the divine is
It's available to anybody, if he will put himself to it, to turn his mind to it.This is what is the attractive thing, and it's a valid attraction.
And the techniques that are supplied, while they are not entirely proper to the potential of the Western mind, which has been educated in a totally different way, nevertheless lead you.I notice as these yogas are taught now, they are modified.
These are not the yogas you'd get if you went to India. And they've got to be modified.We have the traditions of meditation in our own West, but they were extinct.They were extinguished in the time of the Renaissance and Reformation.
The Reformation and counter-Reformation killed the meditation techniques of the West.But when you read Meister Eckhart, you are reading Upanishad.He's saying the same things, and he's using the imagery of the Christian heritage.
this term that I've used in speaking with you, dehistoricization.Our mythological symbols have been interpreted as referring to historical events and personages.
And you better keep them exactly there because history put them right there in this exact same situation.
And you better keep them there because our church is the one that tells you about this, and we collect the fees for that.But actually, the symbol refers to a truth that is within oneself.
All of these truths, all of these, I gave a series of talks in March up in a little place up north of San Francisco on the symbolism of the Christian faith. rendered in the same way in which people are rendering the Hindu symbols.
As referring inward, you'd be surprised how they work.And they are in us.They've been put in.But the churches are interpreting them as referring to events in their church.
My religious experience now, which is involved in the Catholic Church, is very much an inner experience, which is promoted by the younger priests.The younger priests don't understand what the A.R.I.I'm talking about.
But back, you were talking about these meditation centers in Berkeley, like the Maharishi who's promoted this, at least has several of them in San Francisco, he said that India was not ready for this.
For his type of meditation.He came here and his idea is meditate in the morning.You're taking this creative energy and going out and work.Then meditate in this transition from your working to your social life in the evening.
So when you meditate, you have energy and go out and live it.
Well, good boy, but the reason India isn't ready for it is they don't work that way.
Also, he's bringing daisies to Florida.They've got no end to these routines, so why should he be the one that they take?I mean, if you want to make a hit, go someplace where they don't know what you're talking about, and then you can do well.
You heard Professor Campbell say that all societies make use of rites of passage in one form or another.In essence, these rites serve to help the individual locate and understand their life situation along or within developmental stages.
Therefore, there are rites attending birth, puberty, marriage, and death, all the major stages or transformations of life in all societies.
But interestingly, in response to a question, Campbell remarks that our contemporary society doesn't have initiation rites.
Mircea Eliade agreed with its statement, writing in Rites and Symbols of Initiation that, quote, in the modern Western world, significant initiation is practically nonexistent, unquote.
One problem with the lack of initiation rituals is that their absence leads to a person's sense of disconnection and exclusion from their group or community, even from themselves.
Without them, one remains immature, somehow stalled in the developmental stage of primary narcissism.
lacking a strong connection to the larger culture and society generally, and finding it to be oppressive, inhibiting, and largely operating against personal autonomy in regards to freedom, love, and happiness.
Initiation rituals produced conscious, unmistakable, definitive changes in an individual's social and religious status.
In traditional initiation rituals, knowledge previously withheld is now, via the ritual, transmitted to the initiate by a kind of metaphysical technology that, theoretically at least, deciphers the mysterium and connects one to the transcendent source of life.
It reveals the world to be sacred, and all who inhabit it are recognized as a manifestation of the single universal force that is made manifest in all of creation.
Eliade notes that the ritual ordeals of initiation are nearly always symbolic of death and rebirth, of metaphorically dying into another way of being. Initiatory death is, Eliade writes, indispensable for the beginning of spiritual life.
He argues it's a death-rebirth myth ingrained in human psychology.Professor Campbell points out that often these rituals are quite violent. even deadly for some participants.
And I'll attempt to explain why, from Campbell's perspective, that this is so.Interestingly enough, he grounds this issue in his first function of myth, the metaphysical function.
He says, quote, life had been in being for hundreds of millions of years before human eyes opened and saw what was going on out there.And what did the eyes behold when they really looked?They saw life eating life. Life lives on life.
That's the first face of it.The primitive rites are concerned primarily with making the individual say yes to that, making him say yes to this horrific, awesome, terrifying aspect of life.It lives on life.
And you will wonder why the rituals of primitive peoples, and not only primitive peoples either, are so horrific. It's always an act of killing which is at the center.
We who live in a civilization, the principal religious symbol of which is a human being nailed to a cross, ought to recognize this, that if you're going to say yea to life, you've got to say yea to the crucifixion.
That comes from a lecture that he gave called Myth and Violence.So if you're going to say yea to life, you must say yay to the violence of it as well.For most of us, that's a very big ask.It's a bitter pill to swallow.
And it takes a tremendous degree of psychological courage to say yes to this fact of life without tipping over into nihilism or seeking refuge in the astonishingly enormous human proclivity for denial.
One of my colleagues and friends, Norlin Tellez, wrote this about mythic violence.
Norland says, rather than a heavenly cradle or a lost paradise, what we find at the root of the soul's emergence is the festival of humanity's primordial self-slaughter, a sacrificial killing of an innocent human victim, not unlike the figure of Christ, lies at the cradle of humanity's spiritual emergence.
Evidently, the literal act was needed for the space of the symbolic to truly open up.In this way, we may say with Wolfgang Gierich that the human soul killed itself into being, that sacrificial killings are the primordial act of soul-making.
In the breakthrough of the kill, the human animal is symbolically castrated of its biological determinateness For only then can the slain creature resurrect as a being of spirit, language, and culture.
The human animal, Homo, is thus transformed into a being of myth and conscious self-awareness, sapiens."In other words, through ritualized violence, humans divest themselves of natural instincts
diminish the influence of our animal nature, and replaces instinct with images of gods or archetypes.In this way of thinking, the violence itself is the act that initiates the reversal and becomes the origin of the archetypal images, the god images.
Walter Burkett, a specialist in early Greek history who died in 2015, and likely he had no familiarity with Giegerich, but he writes in a strikingly similar vein how closely related were violence and religion.I'm quoting from his book Homo Neckens.
The worshiper experienced the God most powerfully, Burkitt says, not just in pious conduct or in prayer, song, and dance, but in the deadly blow of the axe, the gush of blood, and the burning of thigh pieces.
The realm of the gods is sacred, but the sacred act done at the sacred place by the consecrating actor consists of slaughtering sacrificial animals. Sacrificial killing is the basic experience of the sacred.
Homo religiosus acts and attains self-awareness as homo necens.And of course, homo necens is Latin for man the killer.
For Burkitt, ritual sacrifice emerges from the collective process of the hunt in which the victim of the killing is transformed into life by eating it.
René Girard, who was no doubt influential in Burkitt's thought, takes a more psychological and universalist approach to explaining cultural phenomenon like ritual sacrifice.Girard insists that mimesis, imitation,
and mimetic desire evoke rivalry, conflict, and violence among human beings.As Joseph Campbell himself said many times, human beings learn through imitation, and nothing inspires imitation like profound desire or the means of acquisition.
Girard postulates that mimetic desire is aroused by the imitation of another's desire for an object or person that can't be shared.For Girard, violence is produced by envy and competitive drive rather than merely instinctual aggression.
It's a desire to possess the qualities of another person.But of course, only one person in this dyad of envy authentically possesses the desired qualities.
So the mimetic desire continues to escalate and it leads to violence, up to and including the murder of the innocent person who genuinely possessed the desired qualities.
Total or complete escalations of desire are, of course, dangerous to the entire society.So a scapegoat is identified as being to blame for all the dangerous chaos threatening the stability of the society now racked with desire.
The death of the scapegoat quells the indiscriminate mob violence and returns the society to order by forming a consensus of opinion and belief that the sacred individual was guilty of causing the disorder in the first place.
The fact that order has been restored only affirms the erroneous belief that the victim was the cause of the chaos in the first place.
Furthermore, ritual sacrifice can be the impetus for commemorating the upheaval, and such commemorations have some preventative effects in limiting any similar future violence.
But returning to Campbell and the lecture on myth and violence I quoted from earlier, he sums up his thoughts on the violence of myth this way.We have to face it as it is, and it's horrific. It is the mystery fascinating and terrifying.
That's what life is, and its violence is of its nature.That is the whole sense of the Dionysian Rapture, tearing creatures apart.But we don't have protecting walls around us now.They're opened up.We don't even know how to behave.
We have to make it up as we go along.We're in free fall into the future.
But the big question, which I suppose has got to stay a question, is whether the violence that is inherent in life can be so controlled that we'll all enjoy life at greater ease.
But until it is, we all have to accept the violence as belonging to life, not reject life, not turn away from it and say, oh, no.But as the great Mahayana Buddhas say, joyful participation in the agony.
Or like Jesus going to the cross like a bridegroom to his bride.Go into it.Get into the fight.You know the old Irish saying, is this a private fight or can anyone get into it? It's a rough game.That's the point.Can it be made less rough?
Well, that's the question.Whether it can or cannot, the only way to live is to participate.And the other question is whether the stage of the fight that we're in now represents the end or the beginning of the game.
Is it the end of our civilization, or is it the beginning of a whole new period for mankind?Which I believe it is. And I think it's worth the game to act as though it were.And that's the kind of invitation I would offer."End quote.
So one other thing, 17 or 18 minutes into this lecture, that got my attention was Campbell's brief denunciation of soldiers tried as private citizens for acts committed during warfare.Now, as a reminder,
This recording was made in 1971 when the Vietnam War was going badly, and only a year or so after Lieutenant William Calley was court-martialed and convicted of murdering no fewer than 20 people in a small Vietnamese village called San My, which was identified on military maps as My Lai, and came to be known popularly as the My Lai Massacre.
This was the largest slaughter of civilians by U.S.forces in the 20th century. A major element of Calley's defense was that he was only following orders.
Yet no superior officers were convicted, and he was the only one convicted of the 26 military personnel who were charged.
Kempel remarked that soldiers should not be tried as civilians, and moreover, should not be responsible for what they do as soldiers. Now, I find this to be a problematic statement in many ways.
First of all, there was no instance that I could find during the Vietnam War in which any military personnel were tried in civilian courts for actions while engaged in battle.But soldiers were often tried in military courts, Marshal.
However, Campbell is correct to some degree, anyway, that there is a different moral imperative for soldiers engaged in warfare than there is for civilians.But there are, in fact, moral guidelines for conduct in war.
A soldier does not have the freedom to perpetuate unrestrained violence.In international humanitarian law, these guidelines are called Jus in bello, which means something like right conduct in war and govern how military personnel behave in war.
These jus in bello rules of warfare aim to safeguard human life and fundamental human rights while ensuring that war remains limited in its scope and level of violence.
When soldiers attack noncombatants, when they pursue their enemy beyond what is reasonable, or violate other rules of fair conduct, they commit not acts of war, but acts of murder.
International law suggests that every individual, regardless of rank or governmental status, is personally responsible for any war crime that he might commit, and if a soldier obeys orders that he knows to be immoral, as Lt.
Calley did, he must be held accountable.Perhaps Campbell was upset with the injustice of Calley's court-martial.It's hard to know for sure. The truth is that even by his own admission, Campbell's politics were hard to pin down.
While he was in India, Campbell wrote in his journal, quote, in the Orient, I am for the West.In the West, for the Orient.In Honolulu, I am for the liberals.In New York, for big business.In the temple, I am for the university.
And in the university, for the temple. The blood apparently is Irish," unquote.Now, there is no doubt he was certainly fiercely independent.And that independence sometimes inspired in him a contrarian individualism.
His biographers, Robin and Stephen Larson, point out that he held deeply political and social opinions one could only describe as conservative.
His conservatism, perhaps more accurately described as libertarianism, stemmed from the passionate belief in individual, intellectual, and artistic liberty that had always been the most important thing to him.
And thus, in the early 50s, he saw liberty far more threatened by communism than democracy was by McCarthyism. which he saw as a transitory phenomenon and was not shy in sharing this concern.
And you can imagine this appalled his more liberal colleagues.In the 60s, Despite a long infatuation with pacifism, he supported the Vietnam War on the same anti-totalitarian grounds.
He was quite vocal about his disdain for the protesters of the Vietnam War, resigning, for example, from Penn International because then-Penn president Arthur Miller wrote a letter to President Johnson declining
to attend a bill signing for the Arts and Humanities Act by noting that, quote, when the guns boom, the arts die.
Well, Campbell was deeply upset by this, and he sent a supportive letter to Richard Nixon after a Sarah Lawrence president was critical of the government's prosecution of the war.
And he was quite upset with the poet Gary Snyder for his anti-war rhetoric.
As Professor Lance Smith, a Campbell friend and the editor of one of the books in the JCF Collected Works series, Correspondence, 1927 to 1987, wrote, politics was Joseph Campbell's inferior function, full of contradictions, staunch right-wing conservatism alongside anger against the nation's shameful treatment of Native Americans.
rage towards demonstrations protesting the war in Vietnam, and bewildering animosities."
Yet in 1940 and 1941, Campbell had not been able to muster a similar hawkishness to World War II, holding instead to a very high view of the artist and intellectual's need to remain an independent observer above the political passions of the moment.
Campbell's apolitical stance was not uncommon in the days before World War II.
And as an artist, Campbell believed it to be important to look at this cataclysm of history in a somewhat detached, extremely long view, through which nations, states, civilizations, and eras have all relatively limited shelf lives.
And from the very long lens of history, Peoples and nations and eras rise and fall, decline and succeed, change the world, and then are subsequently changed by it.
The job of the artist is to simply observe and interpret such cultural oscillations, and by no means should the artist become politically involved or advocate for one side or the other.
His idealistic and perhaps even naive attitude in 1940 is, I think, sometimes misunderstood to be a remote and insensitive attitude toward the horror of World War II. Thomas Mann, one of Campbell's heroes, certainly thought so.
And in a letter that deeply wounded him, Mann reported that he had dutifully read the essay Campbell had forwarded to him called Permanent Human Values, in which the idealistic author insists that the artist not be concerned with matters of politics and only pursue art for art's sake.
I believe that Mann's unambiguous repudiation of the essay, and by association Campbell's own thoughts, broke Campbell's heart and created a wound that he never quite seemed to get over.But this is the thing.
It's often the case that in this kind of woundedness, in our inconsinities, that we find ourselves.
We shouldn't expect Campbell or any human being to be perfect, to be free from error, and to be in full alignment or agreement with ourselves, let alone the world.Additionally, we must be willing to see these qualities in ourselves, too.
The unpleasant qualities that reside in us are not entirely destructive, even if they do sometimes lead to disintegration.
We will always feel inadequate before the great panoply of life, the overmuchness of being, because something about life insists on remaining incomprehensible, alien even.In some fundamental way, it remains unlivable.
This doesn't detract, nor should it distract, from the value of life. In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote that, one is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions.And Campbell was certainly fruitful.
As a writer, as a person, whatever contradictions or inner conflicts he may have held, they boiled down to only one.And it's a conflict that adopts a variety of masks and lives in every single one of us.
to reconcile ourselves with the conditions of life as it is.In a letter to a friend, the poet Rilke explained his rejection of psychoanalysis this way.
Judging by my knowledge of myself, it seems certain that if my devils were driven out, my angels would also receive a shock.And you see, I cannot let it come to that pass at any price.
Rilke intuitively seemed to know that the ability to live with one's demons as well as with one's angels is what defines wholeness.In his book, Psychology and Religion, C.G.
Jung writes that, quote, if the opposites were not contained in the image, and the image he's referring to is the image of the archetype of the self, the symbol of human wholeness,
If the opposites were not contained in the image, it would not be an image of totality.
Here Jung reflects Rilke's comment about demons and angels and makes the really important point that these oppositions don't resolve in the experience of wholeness.
If there were no oppositions, if these oppositions melted away, there wouldn't be wholeness. for a human being or anything to be a totality.It must contain its opposites.
Finally, we must, after all, take Campbell as he is and work to see him and indeed see ourselves in our own lives as that totality.
Such a scene lets us reach beyond the inner-outer, right-wrong, good-bad dichotomies, and connect more fully to the rhythms and experiences of life.So there he is, Campbell as a totality.
He was a man, as Shakespeare wrote in hushed tones of awe, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.So, thank you. Thank you for listening and exploring with me this perpetually vexing problem of violence.
And if you'd like to explore more on this issue, please head over to jcf.org and check out Campbell's book, The Masks of God, Primitive Mythology, as well as our other offerings on the Mythmaker Podcast Network.
And while you're there, sign up for the weekly MythBlast newsletter at jcf.org slash subscribe, in which we are celebrating the power of myth every month this year.
And I hope very much that I'll see you next month for another brand new episode of Pathways with Joseph Campbell.Take care, and so long.
Pathways with Joseph Campbell is a production of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the Mythmaker Podcast Network.It is produced by Tyler Lapkin, executive producer John Booker.Your host has been Bradley Olson.
Editing and audio services provided by Charles Mallet.All music exclusively provided by APM Music.For more podcasts and information about Joseph Campbell, please visit jcf.org.
