You are listening to the MythMaker Podcast Network.
Welcome to the Joseph Campbell Foundation podcast, Pathways with Joseph Campbell.I'm your host, Bradley Olson. On this podcast, we share archived audio lectures given by Joseph Campbell over the course of his teaching and lecturing career.
And today we're listening to a lecture Campbell gave at the Houston Jung Center in Houston, Texas on August 8, 1972.
The Jung Center of Houston was founded in 1958 by a group of students interested in understanding the human psyche through the theory advanced by C.G.Jung.
The Jung Center was chartered as a nonprofit educational institute dedicated to self-discovery, community outreach, and spiritual growth.
To this day, it is the one Jungian organization primarily devoted to serving the general public and remains unique in America, offering more than 200 public classes, programs, and workshops rooted in analytical psychology, the expressive arts, and the humanities.
Their mission is to support the development of greater self-awareness, creative expression, and psychological insight, individually, in relationships, and within the community.
In a nutshell, the Young Center provides pathways to finding deeper meaning in everyday life.Professor Campbell makes some very interesting comments in this lecture regarding topics he does not often address.
For instance, he discusses a fifth function of mythology, a bit of a departure from the more well-known four functions that he usually discusses.
And incidentally, 1972 is the same year in which he retired from Sarah Lawrence College after teaching for 38 years.
So with this in mind, please enjoy this 1972 lecture given to the Houston Jung Center regarding the relationship of mythology to psychology.
Immediately following this talk, I'll be back with some final remarks and explore some of the important and interesting ideas from the lecture.And now, here's Joseph Campbell.
Well, I'm here to give three talks on mythology.And I thought that this first talk, I would make some just general statements about approaches and history of mythic forms and things of that sort.
This evening, I will talk about the Oriental psychological interpretation in the way of the Kundalini Yoga and the bio of the Kundalini Yoga of India and the Book of the Dead of Tibet.
And then tomorrow, at this time, I will talk about some Occidental psychological practice in the subject.So this talk is going to be just about mythology. in a sort of general introductory way.
My favorite definition of mythology is other people's religions.My favorite definition of religion is misunderstood mythology.And what is the nature of the misunderstanding?
The nature of the misunderstanding is that symbols are interpreted as facts by the orthodox religious traditions. We have, for example, the problem, let us say, of the virgin birth.I was inspired to this thought by the figure behind my head here.
Is this a biological problem or is it a spiritual problem?The image of the virgin birth occurs in practically every quarter of the earth. many, many mythologies.The American Indian stories are full of such things.
The Greek stories, the Oriental stories.Therefore, the primary reference of the symbol or the image of the virgin birth cannot be, cannot have been to a historical event in the Near East about the year 2 BC.The reference must be psychological.
These symbolic forms of mythology derive from the psyche and refer to the psyche.They do not refer primarily to historical events in any time or place.
They refer to that which is eternally true, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, of the heart and spirit of man.And these truths become manifest in different parts of the world through different specific teachers and teachings and facts.
So that the mythologies come to us always in the costume, the dress of a certain time and place and historical event.But if we interpret the symbol as referring to that time and place and historical event, we've lost the reference.
For example, the image of the virgin birth.Does this refer to the biological miracle in a certain time and place? or does it refer to something that is to happen within us?
Now, I look at this figure here, and I'm going to be talking about it some more this evening in reference to the Kundalini Yoga, because the whole darn thing is right there.
Here is the serpent, which sheds its skin to be reborn again, pointing downward.You see the two point down with the apple in its mouth, the apple of the world, the apple of the reference to time and space and historicity, you might say.
And this is to be killed.That is to say, the natural man, the natural being, is to die and be born again.And the lovely crescent moon, which symbolizes in all the mythologies of the world, the rebirth.
The moon sheds its shadow as the serpent sheds its skin.Both of them represent the different aspects.That which transcends death, which throws off death.And here, the transformation is that, from the earthly down-pointing reference
to the open pointing heavenly reference.And as you'll see this evening, this transformation takes place at what the Indians call the chakra, the fourth chakra, the level of the heart.
And there she has her hands right on her heart, which is the place where one turns from the earthly physical into the spiritual life.That is to say, that very transformation that took place in this morning's fairy tale, when the swan maiden flew away
And one gave up one's reference to the earthly reproductive life and started for the spiritual productivity of the great heavenly quest.That is what is represented here.And the wrong attitude is that of finding the inner way of the kundalini yoga.
And the kundalini, the word kundalini itself means coiled up serpent.The serpent power is here to be transformed into lunar power and so forth.
Is this a reference now primarily in its eloquence to something that happened somewhere else, or is this symbol a reference to an eternal potential in the mind of man?
And here she stands on the orb, not the orb with the geography of Earth on it, but the orb of heaven.In other words, the heavenly reference, the celestial spiritual flight is what we are defined in.
Any symbol of a symbolic religious tradition interpreted historically becomes absurd.And one of the problems in our religious traditions today is that the absurdity of these images, if interpreted concretely, has become apparent to everyone.
There was a time when people could think that miracles of magic and so forth were taking place all the time, and that there might have been an assumption to heaven of the Virgin Mother.
But now we know, after our moon flight, if not before, that there's no place for an ascending body to go.Even at the speed of light, the body would not be out of the galaxy yet.This is a ridiculous image now. when interpreted concretely historically.
One of the great problems of our Occidental tradition is that the whole drift has been to a historical interpretation.And with the discrediting of the historical interpretation, we've lost the symbols.
Now this is a very serious thing, because what the symbols do is refer to unconscious potentials. those potentials that are occluded by our open eyes and their interest in the world of things.
And these images that form the communication means between our spiritual and our conscious lives have been lost to us, and so people feel rootless.And how come that the gurus and the rishis and the maha
Atmans, who come over here from India and Japan, are walking away with the chickens.They're walking away with them because they're saying, these symbols refer to you right inside.And so do us.
Once you get that message, you turn back to our own religious texts.And what they're really talking about is not historical events, but things within yourself.
When Paul says, I live now not I, but Christ in me, does he mean that Jesus, the historical character, is inside of him?He means nothing of the kind.
What he means is that the second person of the Blessed Trinity, who is the knower of the Father, the knowledge power to know God, has now awakened within him.And his earlier way of knowing, of mere waking consciousness, has died.
That man has died, and that has awakened in him the knowledge of God to the extent of his potential. So these symbols have to be read this way, and they can be read this way.And with this reading, the whole tradition comes back again.
We've got it here right among us.Now this among us is another problem.The kingdom of heaven is where?The Latin and Greek can be read to me either within or among.
And with the, what we call it, the rejection of the mystical way that has taken place, particularly lately, there is a tendency to read this as among us.When a group of people are together, then God is among them.
The other reading is, it's right within you, the kingdom of heaven, all the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you to be found there.And if not found there, in this life, they will not be found by you anywhere.
That will come to the problem of the functions that mythological imagery has served in traditional cultures.All of the great traditions of the world were founded on mythic forms.
The whole medieval tradition was founded on the myth of fallen redemption, and the church was the vehicle of redemption.The whole politics, the whole social life, the whole architectural life, the whole art life was
a manifestation, a revelation of that myth.And we have the residue of those mythic images in our life today, which we don't use in their proper sense anymore.
All the civilizations of the East, all the civilizations of antiquity, are based on mythic forms. Now, mythic forms are manifestations of visionary forms.
The beginning of every myth is a vision, and there is a visionary who's had the vision, and he communicates the vision, and the vision becomes socialized.
If you want to read a very interesting example of a myth vision becoming socialized, read that book, Black Elk Speaks.
which is of a Avalala Sioux Indian who, at the age of nine or so, had this fantastic vision of the horrendous destiny before his people.
and what would be the mode of transformation that they would have to undergo to adapt themselves from a hunting to a planting and agricultural way of life.
And he said as an old man that he had been about to say some wonderful vision, but he had not as an individual the power to realize it for his people.But he had the people dance the vision, and it became a motif in the cultural life, all mythic,
Forms are projections of visionary forms, and dream and vision are equivalent.There are two levels of dream.
There's the dream that refers only to your personal quirks, and there's the level that goes deeper than that to the grand archetypes of mythic forms when you actually find yourself dreaming the great myth of man.Now, the first function
of a traditional mythology is to awaken and maintain in the mind of the individual an attitude of awe and gratitude for the mystery of being, the mysterium tremendum fascinans of the universe, the fascination and the terror of the mystery of being.
Now, just on a purely temporal level, when you regard the world and see what's going on out there.It's very difficult to say yes.Before the eyes opened, life had been in being for hundreds of thousands of years.
And when eyes did open, what did they see?They saw life eating life.Life lives on life.That's the first fact about it.It's horrendous.The aim of life is to die.There's a wonderful Verse from the Upanishads.I am food.I am food.I am food.Oh, wonderful.
Oh, wonderful.Oh, wonderful.I am a food eater.I am a food eater.I am a food eater.Oh, wonderful.Oh, wonderful.Oh, wonderful.This is what we are.And that's the scent of the serpent biting its tail.That's the ultimate image mystery of life.
The fantastic Indian Hindu legend.The great deity Shiva is the lord of life, and his consort, the goddess of poverty, the goddess of the mountains, and so forth.And Runciter gained terrific power over all the gods through yoga.
And with this, he overthrew the gods.And then he came to the god of gods, he of whom all the gods are inflicted in aspects. And he challenged him and said, I want your consort as my consort.
Now, this impudence, of course, shocked and offended the deity.And he simply opened the third eye in the middle of his forehead and pinged a
The lightning bolt came out and struck the earth, and out of that explosion there emerged an enormous lion-like monster, lean as a rail, ravenous hungry, with his hair floating out to the points of the compass.
And he was there to eat up that first monster who had come to challenge the god.Now what do you do when something like that happens and there's a god around?You throw yourself on the mercy of the god.
And so this chap who had challenged the god, now throws himself on the god's mercy and says, save me.You do that, and the god has to save you.So the god forbade the hungry monster to eat the impudent monster.
And the hungry monster then said, well, here I am, so what do I eat?And she said, eat yourself.So he starts to work on his feet and starts chewing up.And he comes right up the line. And he doesn't stop until there's nothing left but a face.
And Shiva was absolutely enchanted by this sort of epitomization of the essence of what life is, this thing that eats itself.And he says, I will call you now Kirtimukta, face of glory.
And you'll notice on the shrines, many Buddhist shrines and many Hindu shrines, at the apex of the entrance to the shrine, there's this face, this mask face.That's Kirtimokha.
And what Shiva said is, no one who will not submit to you and bow to you is worthy to enter my shrine.That's to say, if you will not submit to the very facts of life, the fascinans,
and terrible, the fascinating and terrible fact that is this mystery of being, planets, galaxies, coming into being, exploding, going out of being, coming into being, going out again, you haven't begun to get to where the mystery of the ultimate God is to be found.
So the first function, then, is to say, yay, to this thing that God did in making the world.And I can say, oh, I could have done it better and there would have been no aggression had I been the creator.There would have been no world either.
These things all belong to the existence of the universe.And the rights, for example, of early peoples are horrendous.Why?So that the group in concept will say yay to what they have to do. their sacrifices, killings, and mutilations of their victims.
The first function of mythology, then, is to awaken in you a gratitude for this, that your consciousness can participate in the experience of this model.The second function of a traditional mythology I would call the cosmological function.
The first I would call the mystical. The second is the cosmological function of presenting an image of the universe that will be, as it were, a holy picture, through which this dimension of mystery will show itself through all the context of life.
All the old mythologies do this.The world in which they function has become a sacred world.Everything is sacred.Now, what has happened in our mythologies, which distinguish between the sacred and the
is that the world has been deprived of its divinity, so to say.The divine dimension has been taken away from the world.This I call mythic dissociation.It is a characteristic of the Semitic mythologies only, as far as I know.
The characteristic of these mythologies is that God is out there and not here.You could not say this is divine.You could not look
at a stick or a stone, draw a circle around it, and regard it not as something you know how to name, not as something you know how to use, but something that is in its very existence a mystery.
The mystery is the mystery of the universe, and any stick or stone can become the center for support of a meditation on the ultimate mystery.Well, these are the mythologies of the whole universe.
In ours, it's simply in the sacrament of the altar, or in the Koran, or in the Bible.The rest of the world is, as it were, secularized, deprived of its divinity.
The only relationship to the divine comes, for us, through our association with this particularly privileged sect.
The third function of a traditional mythology is to validate, support, and inculcate the principles of a certain specific moral order, a certain specific social order through which the universe and its history becomes immediately communicated to the individual.
Now, in all early traditions, the social order and the cosmic order are regarded as having been derived from the same source.
For example, in our biblical tradition, where the idea exists of a God who said that there'd be a world and that created the world, that same God is supposed to have delivered the law to Moses, so that the law of Moses has the same force and the same indestructibility, so to say, as the law of nature.
And you can't say, well, You know, sensible human beings sitting around have found that this way of action is now inconvenient, or is now even stupid, or is now even dangerous.No, no.You have to obey this law, which does not change.
That's the old traditional way.You do not change what has been handed down from the ancestors any more than you can change laws of the universe.
And in India, where you do not have the idea of a god who created the world, but an impersonal power that brings forth the universe and takes it out again, brings it forth and takes it out again, the caste system itself is part and parcel of the universal order.
So that. Just as the law for the action of a lion is different from that of the law for a mouse, so also the law for a brahmin is different from that for a shudra.And a shudra cannot act as a brahmin without violating his own nature and birth.
The first function is the mystical.The second, the cosmological.The third, the sociological.
And the fourth and final function that I'm going to talk about is the psychological, namely that of guiding and protecting the individual through the whole course of his life, from birth, inducting him into the order of his society and into his relationship to the universe, and then letting him out again when the man with the bones comes along.
Now, the problems here are constant to the human race.The historical and sociological aspects of our lives change with the centuries, but the basic psychology does not change.
There are certain basic principles that have to be regarded and are regarded in all functioning traditions.The first problem is to transform a little creature whose psychology is that of dependency into a creature of responsibility.
The human being, and this is peculiar to our species, does not achieve maturity for 20-odd years.It is even 12 years before it can take care of itself physically.
And during all this time, it has acquired an attitude and a response system based on dependency.I turn to my parents for instruction, for approval, and in fear of their disapproval.And when anything goes wrong, I blame somebody else.
Suddenly then, in puberty, one has to become oneself, the authority. Briefly stated in these terms, an erotic is a person who has not got over that bump.When something happens, he turns for authority.
If you're going to go through with your PhD degree, you won't get out of it until about the age of 45.You are always working and studying under a canopy of sage authorities who are watching to see that your footnotes are correct,
And you'll notice, you can judge a person's maturity by the number of footnotes in his text.
Has he lived hundreds of his own life?
Or has he always matured with some authority around him?It's hard enough to get out of it at the age of 12.But I hope you noticed on TV, for example, when a professor is asking questions, he hums and haws.
And he's pretty sure he's looking up here at a jury of professors that aren't there. And then, next on the TV is some baseball player or football player.Perfect.He answers all these questions.
He had graduated when he was the best pitcher in the sandlot at the age of 18, whereas this other poor fellow is just squeezing out of the eggshell now.So this is our first column to carry over.And it's here that a distinction is to be made between
the requirements of traditional cultures, and this includes the whole of Orient, and Europe.
In the traditional cultures, the idea is that the individual will do as told, that he will assume all the attitudes and moral judgments that are those of his society.He will not criticize.In teaching in the East, the student
not taught to question and criticize.He is taught to be a Xerox machine.And anyone who has thought-oriented students knows this.You pour it in, and it comes back.And if you don't like it, it's your fault.It's you reflected.
And if a student argues with you, it simply means that another professor told him something else, and he prefers that professor to you.There is no original critical thinking that is quenched out
In our culture, on the other hand, it is expected that the individual will develop his own judgment system and become self-responsible for his action.Now, this can lead to immature self-responsibility.
That's to say, you're acting in judgment of things that you have not yet experienced.This is a problem we'll come back to a little later.The fact that we teach
are young to criticize is exactly the opposite fact to that of a traditional culture where the young are taught not to criticize.
And the problem of relating these two principles, the endurance of the society and the critical power of the individual, is one of the great problems of our mythology, you might say, which is peculiar to our tradition in the world.
Then just as you learn to do what your culture wants you to do, you begin to drop the ball.You get pain in the back.You get old.You are on the way out.
And so there comes this dissociation of your libido, your psyche, your commitment from the world in which you have functioned.The swan maid has flown away. Are you going to be able to find her within?That's the problem of the last half of life.
I'm reminded of, well, I think of the old traditions of how they solved this, of a story that's told of Barnum and Bailey's circus in the old days.
They had a tent with the freaks in it, and you paid a certain sum to go in there, and then there were these signs.To the bearded lady, to the fat man, to the smallest, to the biggest in the world, and all that kind of thing.
All these signs that you paid to 50 cents, and you want to see everything.Well, pretty soon, of course, the tent begins to fill up with more and more people coming in.There's so many interesting things, I can't get the people out.
And somebody then thought of a grand answer.Take down the exit sign and put up a sign that says, To the Grand Egress. Out they go, looking for the egress, and they're out.Now, this is how we get people out the back door again.
You go to heaven, golden hearts, golden shoes, mother and daddy, and everybody's going to love you when you arrive.And if you go out, well, you're out of the tent.That's all.We can't help you.So the technology has to deal with all these problems.
It has to deal with the problem of the young psyche,
has to induct this person into the world in which he is living, not into some world it ought to be, not into some world that's somewhere else beyond the Iron Curtain, but this one, here, now, and its duties and its requirements.
And then after you've committed yourself to that, get you out.So we've got a younger shoveler coming along now to do the work.These, then, are the four functions that mythology serves, and the great secret
was in the concept of macrocosm to microcosm.The law of the universe and the law of the individual psyche are one law.Each of us is part and parcel of nature, so that the world of nature is within us.
This is Jung's concept of the archetype and nature living right in you, and you'll find it there and out there, too, before long.But the laws that govern this are not apparent to our daylight consciousness.
These are the laws that are discovered by the sages and are handed down in the great traditions.And the function of the society is to show you what those laws are through art forms, through social forms, through philosophical forms.
The philosophies, the socialities, the arts, of the traditional world are making manifest to waking consciousness those laws which are the inner laws simultaneously of the universe and of yourself.I call this the mesocosm.
The function of art and of society in the old traditions was to present a mesocosm that will inform you of the laws of nature and yourself.And by conforming to the laws of the society,
you put yourself in attunement with both the great and the little worlds.And through all these, there is manifest that mysterium, tremendous and fascinating of your own mysterious being.So much then for the basic functions that mythology has served.
Now, there's always a fifth function, and that is the function of black magic and of forcing nature to your will.Fraser in The Golden Bough has pointed out that the nature of magic was to manipulate the world to your will.
And when you found that the magic didn't work, then you thought, well, There must be somebody up there who's working this thing and doesn't like me anymore.
So then we come to what Fraser calls religion, where you personify the powers, and instead of manipulating them mechanically by imitative magic, you want rain, so you make raffles, make a sound with falling rain or something like that, and then the rain comes.
Instead of that, you pray.Oh, please.Or you bribe.You say, I will give you such and such.Or you threaten.Remember when I was a little boy? One of the sunny days when our ball came, we'd take the sack of zinc out and put it on in the yard.
And if it rained, he'd get it.There are these different ways of handling the problem.These are not the main original functions of mythology.These are the functions of science, dropping sand on rain clouds and make rain fall, and that kind of thing.
Magic is a preliminary science, and religion, from that standpoint, is a frustrating magic.So much then for the main cultures.Now I want to talk about the history of the subject.The earliest peoples were about writing.
The proper designation, primitive, is for people who do not have writing.And we know very little about such people.Because many of the people who are not called primitive are what are more properly called regressed.
Their culture forms are culture forms from the higher cultures with writing, which have regressed.Much of the African world is regressed.The Polynesian world was regressed.The earliest peoples were hunters or root and berry gatherers.
These are the two kinds of people.The people who lived on the animal plains, hunters, of the great hunt period, of the middle and late Paleolithic, were people who depended for their food supply on the men.
And their psychology and sociology was very strongly masculine-oriented.Now, it makes a difference whether a man is a good hunter or a bad one.And so, prestige was gained by being a good hunter.
And it was for the good of the society that this should be so.The masculine ego needs a bit of flattery and approval. Furthermore, these were very dangerous, difficult days.The bow and arrow hadn't even been invented.
They had to kill mammoths with sticks and stones.And this is something to think about.So you have a very strongly masculine-oriented society.The next point is that they're continually killing.And they live in blood.
And they live in tents made of animal skins.And they wear furs of animals.So death, death, death theme all the time. And primitive people did not make the distinction between human and animal lives that we make.
So that whereas you would not kill a human being, you would willingly kill an animal.There, killing an animal was equivalent to killing a human being.And you were in danger of revenge.
The principle ritual of hunting people right up to the end of the last century in the west of our own country, right around here, was the notion of a covenant between the human and the animal societies.
where the animals willingly give themselves as willing victims with the understanding that a ritual will be performed that will return their blood to the soil for return.
And so you have this understanding, not only learning to shoot an animal and kill it, but also learning what the proper right is that invokes him as a willing victim as part and parcel of the tradition.
There's a charming Indian Blackfoot story that I always love because it's quite typical of the animal mythology situation. This is the time when wind was approaching and the tribe could not get the buffalo to go to the buffalo's fall.
You know, they would try to stampede a herd so they would run over a cliff and fall down and be killed at the bottom.The animals would run to the cliff and then turn off and the tribe was going to be starving all winter.
Well, one morning, early, a young girl gets up to get the water and so forth for her little teepee, her family, and she sees the animals up on the top of the cliff there.
And she looks up and she says, oh, if you'll only come down so that we can have food for the winter, I'll marry one of you. What was her surprise when they all start coming over, right?A waterfall.
And she was simply ecstasy about this until one great old buffalo bull comes up and says, OK, girlie, off we go.And she goes, oh, no.I said, well, now look what's happened here.I'm obeying to your promise.And here I come to claim it.
And you're resisting?Come on.So he takes her up over the cliff and is away. Family wakes up, where's Minnie?Ha, ha.Well, you know how Minnie is.They can tell everything from the tracks.Then he goes out and says, Ronald, no buffalo.
He says, I'm going to fix this.So he gets his traveling moccasins and he comes to a wallow where the buffalo like to roll around and drink water and get kicks off and all this kind of thing.And he sits down and thinks.
And while he's sitting there, along comes a magpie.It's a beautiful bird.It's a magical bird.It's a shamrock bird.And he says, oh, beautiful bird, have you seen my daughter around?She ran off to the buffalo.
Well, says the magpie, I'm just going to go over there to the buffalo right now.Well, said, will you please tell her that her daddy's waiting for her here?So the bird flies over.You see, there she is.
weaving or whatever, with all the sleeping buffaloes round about, and a big old boy around his head.And he's picking around, he comes close, he says, wow, wow, wow, just wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.So he goes back and says, she'll be fine.
And apparently, the old buffalo boy wakes up.And he says, go get me some water.He'll plop on with his horns and do what she told him. Well, she said, this is very dangerous.
Now, you walk with me like this, they're going to come and they'll trample us to death.Now, you just wait.Be quiet.So she takes the water, goes back, and he, I saw him, I smelled the blood of an Indian, and she says, oh, no.
He says, oh, yes, your father.Somebody's here.And all the buffaloes get up and they do a big buffalo dance and then walk in track of the poor man to death to such an extent that you can't see a particle of him anywhere. The girl's crying.
And the old boy says, so you're crying.My daddy's dead.Well, he said, look at this.All these years, our wives, our children, our aunts, our uncles, dying for you.And now you're crying over your one solitary father.Yes, but he was my daddy after all.
And he says, well, if you can bring it back to life again, I'll let you go.So she said to the magpie. She's picking around to see if she can find a little potty for her daddy somewhere.And he does pick around.
He comes up with a little bit of a backbone.She takes that.This is a real, unimaginable.She takes this, puts it on the ground, puts her blanket over it, and sings a magical song.Presently, it's apparent that there's a man there.She picks it up.
He's there, but he's not alive yet.She sings a little more.Finally, he gets up.The buffalo say, well, this is wonderful.Why don't you do that for us? So we'll teach you now our buffalo dance and our buffalo song.
And every time you have a killing, you perform this, return our life to our Mother Earth, and we'll be back the next year.And this ritual, this is the legend of the origin of the buffalo dance of the Blackfoot Indians.
And when you look in the caves in southern France, in the Dardenne, in the cave, for example, of the Trois-Ferres, There you see this figure doing a dance in a room full of animal forms.And among them are men wearing buffalo head gear.
And these correspond exactly to the pictures that Catlin painted in the Missouri River in 1832.
So we have a continuity here of the buffalo dance and the pact, the covenant, between the human and the animal worlds, whereby the animal master, the master animal, becomes the giver, then, of the promise that we will furnish our bodies
for your life and you return.This is the way of the nature world.
Now, if we go from the hunting planet, where the male predominates, to the tropics, where vegetable life is the principal source, and where the world is not a great dome with a horizon marked out, but is a jungle of infinite distances and trees on top filled with singing birds and
Underbrush beneath where dangerous serpents dwell, we're in a totally different environment.And here the principal food supply is vegetable food.And women are the collectors of it.
Now anybody can pick a banana, so that there's no particular distinction in being a good banana picker.You don't have this emphasis on the ego.The emphasis is much more on the community.
And since it's Mother Earth that furnishes, because the Earth gives birth, as women give birth, and the Earth nourishes, as mother nourishes, and so you have the female principle here.
Whereas in the hunting societies, it's the male god, the thunder girl, who is the typical divinity.Here, we have, however, a rather horrendous realization.Out of the rotting brush, out of the rotting leaves, comes fresh life. out of death comes life.
And it's from this realm that the great out of death comes life tradition builds up.It's a tradition of the dead and resurrected Savior, God. And we identify with that in giving of our own bodies.There's no stress on the ego principle at all.
In these traditions, the idea exists, if you want to increase life, increase death.And so you have a system of human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, spilling of blood, all along the equatorial zone.
Now, it's from that zone that the next step comes, or what we call the Neolithic. the development of little agricultural communities, which emerged first in Southeast Asia and then in Southwest Asia.
Southeast Asia, something like 13 and perhaps 20,000 BC, and in Southwest Asia, about 10,000 BC.The emergence of agricultural and cattle herding societies dates, in our part of the world, from about 1,000 to 10,000 BC.
This makes possible the growth around a large set of communities. And by 4000 BC, these communities were so large that they began to resemble small cities.About that time, people moved into the river valleys of the Tigris, Euphrates, and the Nile.
And it was in the Tigris, Euphrates valleys, just mud there.People couldn't live there unless trade had been developed to bring other goods besides mud and water into the community.It's there, 3500 BC.
that the earliest city-states arose, Ur, Uruk, Nippur, Siripak, and so forth and so on, the little cities of ancient Sumer.In the old foraging societies, all the adults were in control of the whole cultural heritage.
In these larger societies, you have specialized professions and trades, and the four principal ones are the governing people, the priests, the trading people, and the tilling, tillers of the soil and owners of the soil.
The principal figures for us in studying mythology are the priests.It was an ancient song, 3500 BC, that writing was first developed in these temple compounds.Mathematics, based on the 60s, as our clocks are based on today,
careful records of astronomical observations.The wheel, taxation, kingship, all these come in like that.Suddenly, the emergence of what can be called the archaic high culture complex emerges, 3,500 BC and so on.
2850 BC, it appears in Egypt with the first dynasty.2500 BC in Crete and in India.1500 BC in China. with the Shang Dynasty, and by 1000 BC in Middle America with the Olmecs.This is a system that has diffused over the earlier primary cultural world.
And now comes a whole new mythological constellation, which is not to be interpreted simply in psychological terms.It has to be interpreted in terms of these specific astronomical proto-scientific observations.
What was the principal image of this mythology?It is the image of an impersonal power.These priests were the first to realize that the planets move at a mathematically determinable rate through the constellations of the fixed stars.
And the principal image is of an impersonal power that sends forth the worlds and takes them away again.Sends forth the worlds and takes them away.Sends forth a year. So it's what the day takes away.
This image of the cycles, and it's all mathematically determined in terms of 12s and 60s and 360s and so forth and so on.The mathematics of the time and space become a sign of the order of the universe.
And the concept emerges of a cosmic order for the first time.In the earlier primitive societies, you do not have the concept of a cosmic order.
What is dominant in primitive mythologies is the unique, exceptional figure, the man-pie, which is a very special kind of bird, or a certain kind of old buffalo bull that behaves in a certain way. or a stone of a certain peculiar shape.
But here you have the idea of a cosmic order and emphasis is on the common law of what now we call science.This is the order that survives in the orange.This notion of an impersonal power.You cannot pray to the sun to stop.That's a primitive concept.
You would never get that in a Babylonian context. where everything is according to law.You cannot reverse those laws.You have to put yourself in accord.And the function of the rights was to put you in accord in your deepest heart.
I want to talk a little later about some of the specifics of this great mathematics.It's absolutely a marvelous, marvelous, mythic order.This survives in the East. I'm going to talk about one hour, and then have a break, and then ask some questions.
So I'm going to continue in about 15 minutes more, and then we'll have a little break.
All of you with your cassettes.
You can always tell when a lecturer has his first half hour now by all the changes in the cassettes.The division between Orient and Occident I would draw through Iran. the latitude of 60 degrees east of Greenwich.
Eastward of Iran, there are two great creative high culture centers.One is India, North India, and the other is China.If you were to look at these on a map, you will notice that they are isolated.
India has the Himalayas on the north and the seas round about.China has the great deserts to the west and the seas to the east. So the new influences could never come in in massive force until just now.
There was always a rather subtle impact of an invasion, and then this could be absorbed by the culture that was already there.So that there is an almost incredible conservatism in those two domains.
And the whole high culture world of the East is from those.And they maintain to this day that pattern that we find in ancient Sumer of cosmic order, of change within fixed mathematical laws and forms.
Westward of Iran, there are two great high culture centers.One is the Near East, which includes Egypt, and the other is Europe.These are in very close contact with each other.And there's a continuous interaction between the two.
The Near East is the place where the earliest high cultures developed.Europe was one of the first to receive them.
And these are worlds that have been in interaction, not only between each other, but also wide open to massive invasions from North and South.The Northern invaders were the Aryans.These herding people, descendants of the old hunters,
The southern invaders were the Semites, herding people, descendants of the old hunters, whereas the middle people are the earth-oriented, goddess-oriented people.
The earth mother brings forth life and maintains it, and the consorts of the earth mother are secondary to her, whereas when the herding people come in, they're from north or from south, The thunder girl is their principal deity and is a male.
You have Zeus, you have Yahweh.And just as in the Old Testament, the whole sense of the Old Testament religion is Yahweh against the gods of nature.
So we have a collision now between comparatively primitive patriarchal peoples and highly sophisticated mother goddess civilizations.
And the later invading people take over the higher forms, reducing them, actually, in a certain way, but also giving a new impulse, namely the impulse of the masculine, independent will against
the gods, against the laws of nature, inflicting things.War mythologies are always magic mythologies to compel nature, to compel the gods, to compel the enemy.
And these are the past patterns, I would say, of the Old Testament and early classical mythologies.Here we have an important fact, and I think it's one of our own great problems.
patriarchal people coming into a higher culture zone, take over the higher mythology, but adapt it to their own ways.They take a mother-oriented mythology and turn it into a father-oriented mythology. But now the images of myth speak to your psyche.
You know what they mean, although your consciousness may not.And the person communicating the myth to you says, this is in celebration of daddy.And your psyche says, no, no, it's mother.And so you have what is called a psychological trauma.
There is this tension between the two.
Now, in general, to distinguish between the essential metaphysical or mystical orientation of the Oriental and the essential problem that we have, I'd like to speak first to the Oriental and then to our contemporary civilization.
The basic theme in Oriental mystical traditions, and this is inherited apparently from the Bronze Age, is this, that the ultimate mystery of being, The ultimate substance of life and all is absolutely beyond all categories of thought and name.
No name, no form can speak of it.It is beyond, it is transcendent of categories of thought. Now, being and non-being, those are categories of thought.Neither is nor is not.One and many, those are categories of thought.It's neither one nor is it many.
Or you can say neither, nor, neither, or.Those are categories of thought too.So the Buddha says the ultimate mystery neither is nor is not both is and is not. I mean, it's beyond thought.
To ask, therefore, as we do, is the ultimate divine merciful, loving, forgiving?Does it love these people more than others?This, from this standpoint, is kindergarten stuff.
This is to project anthropomorphic human sentiments on a mystery that transcends even the categories of being and thought.Now, that which is transcendent of all thought is ultimately the mystery of your own being.
are, in your own depth, identical with that mystery.And so we have this saying in the Chandogya Upanishad from about the middle of the 9th century B.C., tat tvam asi, you are it.But, not the you that you think you are.
Not the you that you're protecting, that your friends love, with the blue eyes or the brown eyes, or the dark hair on the face. That is not it.Natine, natine, not it, not it.Nothing that you can think of with respect to yourself is it.
And so we come to this oxymoron, this subcontradictory bit of nonsense.You are not, you are it.That aspect of you which transcends all your thoughts about yourself, all your protections of yourself and everything else, is it.
The ultimate drift of all our mysticism is that the individual should come to a realization of his identity with that mystic life.His identity with that mystic life.Now let's turn to the West.All of our religions have come from the Near East.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, they're all from that zone there that the early societies developed. That's prime heresy.Anyone who says, I'm God, when Jesus said, I am the father of one, he was crucified.So that was blasphemy.
900 years later, Haaj, the great Sufi mystic, said the same thing.He also was crucified for that.The problem of the Western mystic is you come out of that realization using a language that we've got to bring to the stage.
Here, God has created the world.Creator and creature are not the same. We're stressing the sphere of waking consciousness and the logic of waking consciousness, which differentiates.
And so, our religions are not devoted to the experience of your identity with the divine.What else can you talk about then?In our religions, the aim is to achieve a relationship with the divine.And how is this relationship achieved?
By membership in a certain social group. Let's think of the Jewish tradition.God has a covenant with a certain people.All others are out.No other people in the world has a covenant.
No other people in the world knows anything about God or has any relationship with God. There's only one, and that's the Jewish people of this town.And how does one become a member of that group?By birth from a Jewish mother.
Well, that's pretty exclusive.Christian tradition.Christ is true God and true man.Through our humanity, we relate to him through his Godhood and relationship to God.Well, that's regarded as a miracle here.
In the Orient, everybody should realize that about himself. So, how do we become related to Christ, to baptism in his church?Again, a social accent.Now, this has to be validated by a history.Moses got the word from God.Jesus was conceived of God.
Is this a historical fact, or is it not?Our whole tradition emphasizes the historical problem, so we get all confused with that, and it makes a difference. Whether Mary conceived this way, that way, or the other way?
Well, that's a pretty intimate question.And the fact that you're holding it is likely to depend on a decision like that is, to say the least, bizarre.Now, when you have these two terms, God and man, you come to your question of your own loyalty.
Is it to God, or is it to man?In the Near East, the ultimate loyalty is to God. And this is best illustrated by Job.God behaved out of courtesy to Job.He had a bet with his pal, the devil.And he said, you know, let me consider my servant Job.
He's a wonderful, wonderful man.Nobody like him in the world.And how devoted he is to me.And the devil said, well, why wouldn't he be?He'd be an awful wimp.We'll be tough on him and see what happens.
Okay, as Gilbert Moriarty once said, it's like making a bet with a friend that you could annoy your pet dog right down the line and he would never bite.Slowly you start it off and you know how it ends.
who had jobed on a heap of ashes that once was his family, and his house, and his property, and everything else, with a bad case of boils.
And these people arrived, who are for some reason called Jones' customers, and they said, you must have been a pretty bad boy to take this deal.And then he said, no, no, he was right.It's just as though he wasn't.He was a bastard, a thot.
And finally, God showed himself. Now, as God said, as a decent guy would, Job would have been marvelous.
Now, does he try by circumlocutions to justify himself?He just says, are you big?Go just further back than snows and hot moons.You try it.I did it.You won't try it again.And what does Job do?He abdicates his human judgment.
He says, I vow this for you. I've heard a thing with my ears, I've beheld it with my eyes, I've covered my head with ashes, I'm ashamed.No Greek would have done that.When the gods became morally reprehensible, or understood to be so, they lost force.
And almost exactly contemporary with the book of Job is Aeschylus' Prometheus. And just remember what happened there.There's Prometheus pinned to a rock by a big boy who could have filled the Bible's nose with popcorn, Zeus to win.
And he sends a little delegation, Zeus does.And the delegation says, apologize and we'll let you go.He played a dirty trick on you.And what does Prometheus say in the words of Aeschylus?You tell him I despise him.He's a thot.Let him do what he likes.
Now, here's the humanistic, and here's the religious post.And what about ourselves?Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, we work a new day?Sunday for half an hour.
Well, next Monday on this, I'll hide this couch, and what's the matter with me?Well, you're completely delusional.What would the Orientalists say about that? They would say the human value system is on the plane of waking consciousness.
This mystery, fascinating and tremendous, is the nature of thought, where both aspects of yourself put them in accord somehow through dialogue and discourse.Now to conclude with the contemporary problems I stated, first let's go from the primitive
Now, all of those are archaic.One planet.And it is one planet, because of a technological development, which has come to us out of the Greco-Roman sphere.Our tradition, in its rational aspect, is European.
And it is chaos of the gods and their doings.The great manifestation of the divine is the flower of the human mind, which is of nature, and which is to be revered, and is the home of the gods, you might say.
And with this over-accent, you might say, on the mental sphere, and the gradual, you see already with the Greeks, where you have the over-humanization of the deities, you begin to lose the sense of the mysterious there.
There is an accent on the rational.
And not just rational, there has developed the humanism of the Renaissance, and the technology, and our whole civilization is technologically, rationally based, historically oriented toward future, and indifferent in its social, of a certain aspect,
to the great mystery of dream consciousness and vision in the old tradition.Now when a shaman in the primitive world One had a psychological crack-up, what's called a shaman crisis.He'd go down when he was unconscious in a kind of psychosis.
He would find down there the very images that were already on the surface in his culture.And when he would come back, he'd find them there again.
So there was an accord between the conscious mythologically-based life and the life that was found within.But when we go down there and come up again, there's no connection. Here are these two worlds.
We live in a secular society, and we can thank God for that.Because now you can have your own mythology.You can have your own religion without being liquidated for it.A religion that befits your own mental potentials and capacities.
And so people can have their various religions.But what we lose is the ritual aspect of life.On one level, we have to live as purely conscious, technological machines.And in our sleep, we go down into another world.
I think our problem is to hold these two worlds.
Professor Campbell begins this lecture with his favorite definition of mythology, and I'm sure it's a favorite definition of myth for many of us.Myth is other people's religion, he says, and religion is misunderstood mythology.
The misunderstanding is, of course, created by the common tendency to confuse a symbol with a fact, what Campbell often calls literalizing or concretizing the symbol.
Campbell says, any symbol of a religious tradition interpreted historically becomes absurd, and presently this is apparent to everyone, end quote.Historical interpretations of myth are indeed absurd.
But that absurdity is no longer, if it ever was, apparent to everyone. In mythic thinking, there's no distinction between the real, the material, and the unreal, the immaterial or metaphysical.
In mythology, the mythic image, the symbolic form, is everything.And because mythic thought focuses solely on a symbol, there can be no category of thought in myth that moves one beyond the symbol itself.And this insufficiency of thought
leads one, of course, to think about myth historically and literally.In mythic traditions, nature is believed to be inert, infertile, and unresponsive without ceremonies or rituals to enliven it.
And in these ceremonies, the human being participates in the mythic action, aka ritual.
without regard for merely representing or imitating a mythic moment or scene, but rather actually has momentarily become the symbol in the mythic drama and actually exercises that mythic figure's power.
Another quality of myth that compels a follower or a disciple to literalize their myth is that in myth, One observes a dramatic world replete with its various powers, both seen and unseen, vying for ascendancy and sovereignty.
And these scenes are pregnant with drama and strong emotions.The powerfully dramatic emotional qualities of myth remain stubbornly removed from scientific explanations because the physiognomic or face value perceptions aroused by myth
are incredibly hard to override.In other words, because every aspect of the human experience has a more or less legitimate claim to reality, the mythic perception can seem just as true as the scientific perspective.
But it remains the case that the truth of myth is purely a subjective one.And in reality, it's not all that different from the subjective truth of, say, a delusion.But this is not intended as a dismissal of subjective truth, as subjective truths
are often reflective of an uncritical attitude toward a human experience, or as Jung might have called them, psychic facts, that constitute an important step along the road to a more objective reality.
But the argument for the truth of myth is not an argument to equate mythology with the objective validity of science.Myths are involuntary utterances of the collective unconscious.
And as Ernst Kacerer noted, they constitute a unity of feeling, whereas science comprises a unity of thought.
Mythic thinking, in this sense anyway, provides validation for and the expression of human emotions, rather than offering any objective understanding of the world. And here we run into yet another temptation to literalize myth.
The expression of feeling is not the feeling itself.It is not emotion itself.It is emotion turned into language. which is another way of saying it is emotion turned into a symbol.
And the mythic symbolization of these feeling states leads easily to an objectification of both the feeling and the symbol, and the expression of the feeling becomes conflated with the feeling itself, seeming to become independently real and objective.
And finally, myth is not simply true or false. Myth is beyond the grasp of logic.It's an externalization of an inner psychic phenomenon.Myth is an attempt to make sense out of an impenetrable world that is simultaneously frightening and alluring.
And in that sense, myth is, to borrow a phrase from the sublime Leonard Cohen, a broken hallelujah.
In his effort to illustrate what he means by misunderstanding symbols as facts, Professor Campbell gives the example of the virgin birth in this lecture, asking his listeners, quote, is it a biological problem or a spiritual problem, unquote.
The virgin birth, he goes on to say, appears in nearly every quarter of the earth in many, many mythologies.American Indians, the Greeks, Asian stories.And Campbell says, therefore, the images cannot be an historical event.
Nevertheless, people are inclined to take their symbols literally. Often the symbol appears to us in circumstances and in forms we can't easily explain, let alone understand.
It is a common human tendency rooted in our need for certainty, control, and understanding to make these confusing, sometimes frightening images intelligible, domesticated, and even better, predictable.
Literalizing symbolic experiences provides a sense of familiarity and comfort.
And through assigning concrete meanings to abstract concepts, we reduce ambiguity and uncertainty, which results in creating context for one's life experiences and leaves us feeling more in control of both our lives and the environment.
As Professor Campbell begins to launch into an explanation of what is by now a familiar concept to the listeners of this podcast, the four functions of mythology, he remarks that the mythic vision becomes socialized.
In other words, a mythic vision often becomes a shared organizing structure for a given society or people.Dreams and myths are visionary forms.
images or constellations of images that often arise from those archetypal images common to humanity in general, but are often evoked in an individual experience.
Professor Campbell mentioned the Lakota medicine man Black Elk, who was the subject of a 1937 book called Black Elk Speaks.The book is both a spiritual biography of Black Elk,
and an historical biography of the Lakota people, as told to the poet John Neihart, who wanted to record firsthand accounts of the so-called Indian Wars that, symbolically at least, concluded with the massacre of somewhere around 300 people at Wounded Knee, located on what is now the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota.
Black Elk related these stories through his son, Ben, who then translated them into English for Nihart.
It turns out that Black Elk was a cousin of Crazy Horse, and while just 12 years old, fought with him in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which was known to the Lakota and other Plains Indian tribes as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.
And this took place in June of 1876 along the Little Bighorn River in southeastern Montana Territory.Black Elk told Neihardt of a vision he had when he was nine years old in which he was taken to the quote, central mountain of the world.
And this is what Neihardt records him as saying. And while I stood there, I saw more than I can tell and understood more than I saw.This is the essence of the mythic vision, by the way.So let me repeat this.
And while I stood there, I saw more than I can tell, and understand more than I saw.For I was seeing, in a sacred manner, the shapes of all things in the Spirit, and the shapes of all shapes, as they must live together like one being.
And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight.And in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all children of one mother and one father.
and I saw that it was holy."This is a favorite anecdote that Professor Campbell returns to frequently in his lectures.The hoop of Black Elk's people, merely one of many sacred hoops of peoples spanning the world, indeed, the cosmos.
And Black Elk's visionary journey to the central mountain of the world, which Campbell always took a particular pleasure in informing his listeners, was Harney Peak in South Dakota.
Harney Peak is now called, happily, Black Elk Peak, a 7,200 foot summit, which, according to the USGS, is the highest point in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains.But the point is,
As Campbell would always emphasize, Harney Peak itself is a mythic form which symbolizes the subject of the transcendent revelation as an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
Now Campbell generally attributes this quote to Nicholas of Cusa. But it's attributed to many others over the centuries, such as Voltaire, Pascal, and even goes as far back to Hermes Trismegistus.
Black Elk is a fascinating figure and one well worth delving into more deeply than this podcast allows.His journey to the central mountain of the world
recalls Muhammad's night journey during which he was carried away to Al-Aqsa and then ascended into heaven where he spoke with God.Black Elk was present at the Wounded Knee Massacre where he was wounded by a bullet in the hip.
He also performed later in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show.
and was an important contributor to the ghost dance, a millenarian movement linked to a prophecy that the spirits of dead ancestors would return and fight to end colonialist expansion and the federal government's military campaigns against various Native American tribes.
The ghost dancers would dance a new world into being and rid itself of compulsory reservation life and the colonialists' domestic livestock and their telegraph poles and mines and factories.
The wonderful old world as it had been before settlers arrived would once again become a paradise for the Native American. After his wife's first death, Black Elk converted to Catholicism in 1904 when he was 41 years old.
1904, you'll recall, is the year of Joseph Campbell's birth.But there is some evidence that Black Elk told his daughter just before his death that, quote, the only thing I believe is the pipe religion, unquote.
After his remarks on visionary forms, Professor Campbell then moves into his explanation of the four functions of mythology, functions that by now we're all familiar with, the metaphysical, cosmological, sociological, and psychological functions.
He sometimes refers to the fourth function, the psychological function, as the pedagogical function, the teaching function. In this lecture, he doesn't hide his disdain for PhDs.
He points out that often the academic has trouble finding words while athletes spontaneously express their truth, that teachers are unoriginal and uncritical, that they have little experience of the world outside the ivy-covered walls of the academy, yet they freely make pronouncements on all those things they have no experience of.
This attitude of Campbell's is in part, I believe, an artifact of modernism, which was an artistic and philosophical movement that arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and prioritized individualism, personal experience, and interiority.
Modernism championed hard-earned experience and independent thought, and it had little time and really could not care less for the opinions of men of letters.
While his attitude in some ways may be consistent with modernism, I think it's also an expression of Campbell's own shadow.Jung once spoke of the archetype of the shadow as, quote, the thing a person has no wish to be, unquote.
That's the thing about the shadow.Because it's the thing no one wishes to be, it's revealed in our criticism and disapproval and censure of others.
The antipathy we express for others suggests that I find some part of myself to be just like those I condemn.More than anything, Campbell fancied himself an individualist.And how can one be critical of that?
That's certainly a strong component of my own nature.And I spent a good deal of time dealing with life in a hands-on fashion, one might say, exploring the dark recesses of human nature and the world before I returned to school and the PhD.
But in fairness, I don't think most athletes would know where to begin to address this issue either.So here comes the nuanced thinking that makes PhDs struggle to find words.Professor Campbell liked the story of the Grand Egress, P.T.
Barnum's final attraction.Barnum's American Museum was located in Lower Manhattan at Broadway and Ann Street. The museum became a huge attraction, hosting 38 million visitors from its opening in 1841 until it burned down in 1865.
Now this is an enormous number given that the population of the entire United States at the time was only about 32 million.
Admission to the museum cost a quarter, about $9 or $10 in today's money, and people could stay in the museum as long as they wanted.
Well, Barnum, who was famous for saying, there's a sucker born every minute, even though he may not have actually said that, he was famous for it.Barnum could make much more money if he could get people out of the building.
So he introduced a new exhibit with a sign that said, this way to the great egress.
The museum visitor who found the great egress ended up on Broadway, and if they wanted to continue to look around the museum, it would cost them another 25 cents to get back in.Funny?Yeah.But it's also a problem of bad pedagogy.
This only works on people who don't know the meaning of the word egress.Pedagogy is important. As I said, he often calls the psychological function the pedagogical function, and he taught at a university for nearly 40 years.
But every now and then his individualism is expressed with what I can only assume is at the bottom of that shadow of individualism. a kind of pain derived from some sort of rejection.
We do know that a rejection of this sort certainly did come from Thomas Mann, Campbell's idol, in an encounter we discussed in an earlier podcast episode.
I also think that not having a PhD and being a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence would have had its own difficulties and frustrations over the years.
There were likely other instances as well, but a better Campbell biographer than I is needed to answer those questions.
But on occasion, his individualism was so vehement that it must have been an overcompensation in some respect to a sense of alienation or confinement, or perhaps simply the unfairness of a world that rewarded his father's hard work and willingness to play by the rules with financial ruin.
But let's move on to the real Easter egg in this lecture.After he finishes speaking about the fourth function of myth, the psychological function, he introduces a fifth function of myth.
Even more surprising, he calls it the function of black magic, enforcing nature to your will.That's a quote.The black magic enforcing nature to your will.Now, I've not heard him say this before.
And there are, as far as I can tell, no examples of a statement like this in his collected works.Generally, where he writes about the functions of mythology, I only find four.
So I turned to our resident JCF expert on all things Campbell, Stephen Garinger, and he pointed me to a publication called Changing Images of Man, which was a book prepared by the Center for the Study of Social Policy at the Stanford Research Institute.
Edited by O.W.Markley and Willis W. Harmon, And it bears the copyright date of 1982.
In their acknowledgments, Markley and Harmon allow that major contributions were made by Joseph Campbell, and that chapter two was written, quote, based on contributions from Joseph Campbell, Arthur Hastings, and Floyd Matson, unquote.
The editors go on to remark that the Pergamon Press edition is essentially the same as the Stanford Research Institute publication, except that they have, quote, added back a section on the role of myth in society by Joseph Campbell that was contained in the original draft, but not in the final report, end quote.
Then in the text of this publication, on page seven, we find this, quote, from the studies of mythology and past civilizations done by Joseph Campbell, at least five functions stand out as needing to somehow be fulfilled by images, rituals, and institutions of a society.
They are the mystical, the cosmological, the sociological, the pedagogical, or the psychological, and the editorial function.So after the familiar four comes this fifth editorial function.So let me read from the book what this is.I'm quoting now.
In its editorial function, the myths and images of culture define some aspects of reality as important and credible, hence to be attended to, while other aspects are seen as unimportant or incredible, hence to be ignored and culturally not seen.
For example, the anthropologist Malinowski reported that the Trobriand Islanders believed that a child inherits his physical characteristics only from his father.
Hence, the Trobriands simply do not observe or notice any resemblance between the child and his mother, although to Malinowski such similarities were quite evident. Here's where it gets interesting.
Two additional functions, the political and the magical, are also noteworthy. Now, as an aside, we're now up to seven functions.So back to the text.
The political, as distinct from the strictly sociological function, appears wherever a myth or institution of society is deliberately employed to represent the claim to privilege and authority of some special person, race, social class, nation, or civilization.
and the magical, wherever prayers, rituals, or other extraordinary techniques are used for special benefit, such as for rain, good crops, war winning."
So here we see Campbell, as late as 1982, continuing to evolve, or at least sharpen his thinking, on some of his most favorite and enduring concepts.I think that's admirable. For Campbell, magic was, as he put it, a preliminary science.
Now, science is a way of manipulating nature indirectly, I suppose, through a deep understanding of nature.The aim of science is experimentation that sheds light on how and why the natural world is the way it is.
Magic presupposes that one already knows the hows and whys of the world, and is then able to use that knowledge in the manipulation of it, or of others in it.I tend to think of magic not as science, but magic as techne, magic as technology.
In fact, in 1973, Arthur C. Clarke proposed that, quote, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, unquote.
And the purpose, of course, of technology is to make life easier, make the world more responsive to, more aligned with one's own desires, more organized, more systematic, and even more profitable.
Users of techne, users of technology, are not charged with understanding the world scientifically, nor with having even the remotest understanding of science.
Users of technology only need to understand how to use the technology so that it works, so that it makes the world more user-friendly.They don't need to understand the science of why it works.
Myth is metaphysical technology, just as noetic science is a metaphysical science.These immaterial realms of existence don't submit to the material sciences or physical technologies, but they operate metaphysically in just the same way.
Now, operating systems need to be updated regularly.Adhering dogmatically to a Bronze Age mythology is like using obsolete technology.
Not only doesn't it work, it works so badly that it screws up other aspects of your life, strips your life of joy, introduces anxiety and worry, and makes it hard to maintain relationships with others in the world.
The ultimate mysteries, the deep enigmas of life, the inscrutable puzzle of existence, are all beyond categories of thought and form. What are the implications of such transcendence?
How may one even approach a conversation or an investigation of it, let alone understand it?Campbell rightly suggests that technology is indifferent to the dream, to the mythic vision.
We can lose ourselves in the technology, or we can reject the technology and search for transcendence instead.But must it only be one or the other?I don't think so.As Campbell points out, we have to hold both worlds.
We latch on to the double vision inherent in myth, the ironic constituent of myth that allows us to encounter the ineffable while still having one foot grounded in the material.
As we move, then, in this sort of perpetual oscillation, this is necessarily the work of great psychological effort and a kind of metaphysical diplomacy.
We can achieve a kind of knowing and understanding what Blackelt describes so eloquently as seeing more than I can tell and understanding more than I saw. We can achieve this because there is another world, the surrealist poet Paul Edouard wrote.
And it's in this one.Thank you for listening to this episode of Pathways with Joseph Campbell.And please visit jcf.org and check out our other offerings on the MythMaker podcast network.
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 that I'll see you next month for another brand new episode of Pathways with Joseph Campbell.
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 Mallett.All music exclusively provided by APM Music.For more podcasts and information about Joseph Campbell, please visit jcf.org.
Sign in
