Joseph Campbell - Mythic Reflections

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Tom: What does myth do for us? Why is it so important?

Joseph: It puts you in touch with a plane of reference that goes past your mind and into your very being, into your very gut. The ultimate mystery of being and nonbeing transcends all categories of knowledge and thought.

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Joseph: You find it in mysticism and get in touch with mystics who read these symbolic forms symbolically. Mystics are people who are not theologians; theologians are people who interpret the vocabulary of scripture as if it were referring to supernatural facts.

There are plenty of mystics in the Christian tradition

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Tom: What are the purposes of myth?

Joseph: There are four of them. One's mystical. One's cosmological: the whole universe as we now understand it becomes, as it were, a revelation of the mystery dimension. The third is sociological, taking care of the society that exists. But we don't know what this society is, it's changed so fast. Good God! In the past 40 years there have been such transformations in mores that it's impossible to talk about them. Finally, there's the pedagogical one of guiding an individual through the inevitables of a lifetime. But even that's become impossible because we don't know what the inevitables of a lifetime are any more. They change from moment to moment.

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What role does ritual play in mythology?

Joseph: A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And through the enactment it brings to mind the implications of the life act that you are engaged in.

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Tom: What does the term "transcendent" mean, in von Durckheim's phrase, "transparent to the transcendent"?

Joseph: The simple meaning of the term is that which goes beyond all concepts and conceptualization, or that which lies beyond all conceptualization.

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Tom: Where does this experience come from?

Joseph: Your life is your experience of transcendent energies because you don't know where your life comes from, but you can experience them. We're experiencing them right here, just by sitting on them and having them bubble up.

Tom: Are you using "transcendent" as another term for God?

Joseph: If you want to personify it. Brahman is the Sanskrit way of talking about it. Manitou is the Algonquin way, Orinda is the Iroquois, Owacan is the Sioux.

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Tom: Do you mean that if the infinite reveals itself to you, your little mind responds by saying "God spoke to me" because it can only grasp what happened in its limited terms?

Joseph: That's right.

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The thing I see about the Bible that's unfortunate is that it's a tribally circumscribed mythology. It deals with a certain people at a certain time. The Christians magnified it to include them. It then turns this society against all others, whereas the condition of the world today is that this particular society that's presented in the Bible isn't even the most important. This thing is like a dead weight. It's pulling us back because it belongs to an earlier period. We can't break loose and move into a modern theology.

One of the great promises of mythology is, with what social group do you identify? How about the planet? To say that the members of this particular social group are the elite of God's world is a good way to keep that group together, but look at the consequences! I think that what might be called the sanctified chauvinism of the Bible is one of the curses of the planet today.

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Tom: But if you throw out the Bible as history, don't you also throw it out as a moral imperative?

Joseph: Yes. I don't think the Bible is anybody's moral imperative, unless you want to be a traditional Jew. That's what the Bible tells you.

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Tom: Heinrich Zimmer said "The best truths cannot be spoken. . . "

Joseph: "And the second best are misunderstood."

Tom: Then you added something to that.

Joseph: The third best is the usual conversation - science, history, sociology.

Tom: Why do people confuse these?

Joseph: Because the imagery that has to be used in order to tell what can't be told, symbolic imagery, is then understood or interpreted not symbolically but factually, empirically. It's a natural thing, but that's the whole problem with Western religion. All of the symbols are interpreted as if they were historical references. They're not. And if they are, then so what?

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If a deity blocks off transcendency, cuts you short of it by stopping at himself, he turns you into a worshipper and a devotee, and he hasn't opened the mystery of your own being.

Tom: You once called that the pathology of theology.

Joseph: That's what I would call it.

Tom: Walter Huston Clark says the church is like a vaccination against the real thing.

Joseph: Jung says religion is a defense against the experience of god. I say our religions are.

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Tom: What do you do, then, if the experience is not to be found in religion?

Joseph: You find it in mysticism and get in touch with mystics who read these symbolic forms symbolically. Mystics are people who are not theologians; theologians are people who interpret the vocabulary of scripture as if it were referring to supernatural facts.

There are plenty of mystics in the Christian tradition, only we don't hear much about them. But now and again you run into it. Meister Eckhart is such a person. Thomas Merton had it. Dante had it. Dionysus the Areopagyte had it. John of the Cross breaks through every now and again and then comes slopping back again. He flashes back and forth.

I think Joyce is full of it. And Thomas Mann had it in his writing, though it isn't as far out as Joyce. It's strange how after Mann's death it disappears and you don't get it any more.

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Tom: I gather you're not terribly fond of the Bible.

Joseph: Not at all! It's the most over-advertised book in the world. It's very pretentious to claim it to be the word of God, or accept it as such and perpetuate this tribal mythology, justifying all kinds of violence to people who are not members of the tribe.

The thing I see about the Bible that's unfortunate is that it's a tribally circumscribed mythology. It deals with a certain people at a certain time. The Christians magnified it to include them. It then turns this society against all others, whereas the condition of the world today is that this particular society that's presented in the Bible isn't even the most important. This thing is like a dead weight. It's pulling us back because it belongs to an earlier period. We can't break loose and move into a modern theology.

One of the great promises of mythology is, with what social group do you identify? How about the planet? To say that the members of this particular social group are the elite of God's world is a good way to keep that group together, but look at the consequences! I think that what might be called the sanctified chauvinism of the Bible is one of the curses of the planet today.

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Tom: There's a lot of interesting material in the Old Testament, isn't there? For instance, it says that God created everything except the water.

Joseph: You've put your finger on it. The water I is the goddess. You see, what happens in the Old Testament is that the masculine principle remains personified and the female principle is reduced to an element. The first verse says when God created, the breath of God brooded over the waters. And the water is the goddess.

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Tom: I assume you don't believe in an actual, literal seven days of creation.

Joseph: Of course not. That has nothing to do with the actual evolutionary story as we now get it.

Tom: How do you reconcile these two accounts?

Joseph: Why should one bother to, any more than you would try to reconcile the Navajo story?

Tom: I remember hearing a wonderful lecture by the late Louis Leakey in which he insisted that there was no conflict between the Genesis account of creation and what he had discovered.

Joseph: Well, it is in conflict because he didn't read it carefully enough. There are two Biblical accounts, one in the first chapter and one in the second, and they're quite contrary to each other.

It's about time we stopped feeling that we have to believe in the Bible. I'd just as soon try to work out the Navajo thing, where they come up through four worlds. One is red, one yellow . . .

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Tom: But if you throw out the Bible as history, don't you also throw it out as a moral imperative?

Joseph: Yes. I don't think the Bible is anybody's moral imperative, unless you want to be a traditional Jew. That's what the Bible tells you.

Tom: Doesn't it tell you how to be a good person?

Joseph: No.

Tom: Lots of people think so.

Joseph: Just read the thing. Maybe it gives you a few hints, but the Bible also tells you to kill everyone in Canaan, right down to the mice.

Tom: What was the passage you quoted to justify their exclusivity ideas?

Joseph: "There is no God in all the world but in Israel." That leaves everybody out except the Jews. This is one of the most chauvinistic views of morality.

One of the great texts is in Exodus, when the Jews are told to kill the lambs and put the blood on their doorsteps so the angel of death won't kill any of their children, but will kill the first children of the Egyptians. And the night before they leave, they're to invite their Egyptian friends to lend them their jewels and so on. Then the next night, they run off with the jewels, and the text says, so they fleeced the Egyptians. No, so they despoiled the Egyptians. You call this good ethics?

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Tom: What's the background of something like Cain and Abel?

Joseph: There's a very amusing Sumerian dialogue that appeared about 1500 years earlier than the Cain and Abel story. It's about a herder and an agriculturalist competing for the favor of the goddess. The goddess chooses to prefer the agriculturalist and his offering. Well, the Jews come into this area, and they're not agriculturalists, they're herders. And they don't have a goddess, they have a god. So they turn the whole thing upside down, and make God favor the herder against the agriculturalist.

The interesting thing is that throughout the Old Testament, it's the younger brother who overturns the older brother in God's favor. It happens time and time again. This is simply a function of the fact that the Jews come in as younger brothers. They come in as barbaric Bedouins from the desert, into highly sophisticated agricultural areas, and they're declaring that although the others are the elders - as Cain was, the founder of cities and all that - they are God's favorite. It's just another form of sanctified chauvinism. You understand the view of exclusive religion, don't you - "You worship God in your way, I'll worship God in his."

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Tom: I gather there were a number of East-West conflicts in the early church. I find Pellagius a fascinating figure, for example.

Joseph: Pellagius in the fourth century was either a Welshman or an Irishman, I think. He upheld the individualistic Western tradition against what I would call the tribalism of the East, and was considered a heretic. He stated the main points against the doctrines of which St. Augustine, his contemporary, was the champion. One was the doctrine of original sin. Pellagius said, you cannot inherit another's sin. Therefore, Adam's sin is not inherited by anybody.

Tom: The sins of the father are not visited upon the son?

Joseph: That is all Eastern philosophy, not European. Another thing Pellagius said is that you cannot be saved by another's act. That takes care of Jesus on the cross and knocks the whole thing out. Of course that was rejected. Pellagius was defending a doctrine of individual responsibility. I don't know where it comes from, but certainly it was typical, I would say, of European as opposed to Eastern points of view. You were an individual, not merely the member of a group.

Tom: That sounds like the line in the King Arthur legend . . .

Joseph: "Each knight entered the forest at a point he had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no way or path." That's from The Quest of the Sangral, 1215 or so in France.

Tom: How do they expect to find their way then?

Joseph: By questing.

Tom: And that's what we all do in life?

Joseph: Yes. Otherwise, you'd follow someone else's path, follow the well-tried ways. No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities. It's a shame to waste those by doing what someone else has done.

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