The Power of Myth

The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.” (Location 114)

He taught, as great teachers teach, by example. It was not his manner to try to talk anyone into anything (except once, when he persuaded Jean to marry him). Preachers err, he told me, by trying “to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.” (Location 143)

Campbell was no pessimist. He believed there is a “point of wisdom beyond the conflicts of illusion and truth by which lives can be put back together again.” Finding it is the “prime question of the time.” (Location 192)

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. (Location 227)

It would have to be. It would be inhuman. The umbilical point, the humanity, the thing that makes you human and not supernatural and immortal—that’s what’s lovable. That is why some people have a very hard time loving God, because there’s no imperfection there. You can be in awe, but that would not be real love. It’s Christ on the cross that becomes lovable. (Location 274)

Now, the Buddha himself is called “the one thus come.” There’s no meaning. What’s the meaning of the universe? What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there. That’s it. And your own meaning is that you’re there. We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about. (Location 296)

Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what the experience is. Marriage, for example. What is marriage? The myth tells you what it is. It’s the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is. (Location 303)

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

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one. (Location 333)

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

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

We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet. A model for that is the United States. Here were thirteen different little colony nations that decided to act in the mutual interest, without disregarding the individual interests of any one of them. (Location 717)

Figuring out how you can break through a wall is not reason. The mouse who figures out, after it bumps its nose here, that perhaps he can get around there, is figuring something out the way we figure things out. But that’s not reason. Reason has to do with finding the ground of being and the fundamental structuring of order of the universe. (Location 835)

Don’t you think modern Americans have rejected the ancient idea of nature as a divinity because it would have kept us from achieving dominance over nature? How can you cut down trees and uproot the land and turn the rivers into real estate without killing God? CAMPBELL: Yes, but that’s not simply a characteristic of modern Americans, that is the biblical condemnation of nature which they inherited from their own religion and brought with them, mainly from England. God is separate from nature, and nature is condemned of God. It’s right there in Genesis: we are to be the masters of the world. But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth. (Location 873)

MOYERS: But aren’t many visionaries and even leaders and heroes close to the edge of neuroticism? CAMPBELL: Yes, they are. MOYERS: How do you explain that? CAMPBELL: They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience—that is the hero’s deed. (Location 1004)

Furthermore, the serpent represents the primary function of life, mainly eating. Life consists in eating other creatures. You don’t think about that very much when you make a nice-looking meal. But what you’re doing is eating something that was recently alive. And when you look at the beauty of nature, and you see the birds picking around—they’re eating things. You see the cows grazing, they’re eating things. The serpent is a traveling alimentary canal, that’s about all it is. And it gives you that primary sense of shock, of life in its most primal quality. There is no arguing with that animal at all. Life lives by killing and eating itself, casting off death and being reborn, like the moon. This is one of the mysteries that these symbolic, paradoxical forms try to represent. (Location 1078)

—I and you, this and that, true and untrue—every one of them has its opposite. But mythology suggests that behind that duality there is a singularity over which this plays like a shadow game. “Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” says the poet Blake. (Location 1146)

But if you read “Jesus ascended to heaven” in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward—not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body’s dynamic source. (Location 1320)

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image. (Location 1331)

There has to be a training to help you open your ears so that you can begin to hear metaphorically instead of concretely. Freud and Jung both felt that myth is grounded in the unconscious. (Location 1371)

It could, but it is not doing it now. Religions are addressing; social problems and ethics instead of the mystical experience. (Location 1425)

You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation. (Location 1529)

Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. (Location 1598)

but there is a place where the information stops. And until you have writing, you don’t know what people were thinking. (Location 1668)

No, guilt is what is wiped out by the myth. Killing the animal is not a personal act. You are performing the work of nature. (Location 1717)

A temple is a landscape of the soul. When you walk into a cathedral, you move into a world of spiritual images. It is the mother womb of your spiritual life—mother church. All the forms around are significant of spiritual value. (Location 1849)

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

happened to the female in this period because there is very little evidence to tell us. But in primary cultures today the girl becomes a woman with her first menstruation. It happens to her. Nature does it to her. And so she has undergone the transformation, and what is her initiation? Typically it is to sit in a little hut for a certain number of days and realize what she is. MOYERS: How does she do that? CAMPBELL: She sits there. She is now a woman. And what is a woman? A woman is a vehicle of life. Life has overtaken her. Woman is what it is all about—the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment. She is identical with the earth goddess in her powers, and she has got to realize that about herself. The boy does not have a happening of this kind, so he has to be turned into a man and voluntarily become a servant of something greater than himself. (Location 1897)

“Be careful lest in casting out the devils you cast out the best thing that’s in you.” (Location 2012)

For them the whole world was a sacred place. But our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it. Get a phonograph and put on the music that you really love, even if it’s corny music that nobody else respects. Or get the book you like to read. In your sacred place you get the “thou” feeling of life that these people had for the whole world in which they lived. (Location 2071)

I’ll tell you a way, a very nice way. Sit in a room and read—and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. This realization of life can be a constant realization in your living. When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done. Don’t say, “Oh, I want to know what So-and-so did”—and don’t bother at all with the best-seller list. Just read what this one author has to give you. And then you can go read what he had read. And the world opens up in a way that is consistent with a certain point of view. But when you go from one author to another, you may be able to tell us the date when each wrote such and such a poem—but he hasn’t said anything to you. (Location 2183)

The Garden is the place of unity, of nonduality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings. You eat the duality, and you are on the way out. The tree of coming back to the Garden is the tree of immortal life, where you know that J and the Father are one. (Location 2361)

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

It’s characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong. (Location 2569)

Do you ever have this sense when you are following your bliss, as I have at moments, of being helped by hidden hands? CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time—namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. MOYERS: Have you ever had sympathy for the man who has no invisible means of support? CAMPBELL: Who has no invisible means? Yes, he is the one that evokes compassion, the poor chap. To see him stumbling around when all the waters of life are right there really evokes one’s pity. MOYERS: The waters of eternal life are right there? Where? CAMPBELL: Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. (Location 2640)

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world. (Location 2653)

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. (Location 2661)

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

Making money gets more advertisement. You know the old saying: if a dog bites a man, that’s not a story, but if a man bites a dog, you’ve got a story there. So the thing that happens and happens and happens, no matter how heroic it may be, is not news. Motherhood has lost its novelty, you might say. (Location 2690)

That is a problem Tolstoy dealt with in War and Peace. Here you have Napoleon ravaging Europe and now about to invade Russia, and Tolstoy raises this question: Is the leader really a leader, or is he simply the one out in front on a wave? In psychological terms, the leader might be analyzed as the one who perceived what could be achieved and did it. (Location 2723)

The moral objective is that of saving a people, or saving a person, or supporting an idea. The hero sacrifices himself for something—that’s the morality of it. Now, from another position, of course, you might say that the idea for which he sacrificed himself was something that should not have been respected. That’s a judgment from the other side, but it doesn’t destroy the intrinsic heroism of the deed performed. (Location 2741)

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

When you are doing something that is a brand-new adventure, breaking new ground, whether it is something like a technological breakthrough or simply a way of living that is not what the community can help you with, there’s always the danger of too much enthusiasm, of neglecting certain mechanical details. Then you fall off. (Location 2829)

the edge, the interface between what can be known and what is never to be discovered because it is a mystery that transcends all human research. The source of life—what is it? No one knows. We don’t even know what an atom is, whether it is a wave or a particle—it is both. We don’t have any idea of what these things are. (Location 2837)

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

But that’s the transformation of religion to theology. Religion begins with the sense of wonder and awe and the attempt to tell stories that will connect us to God. Then it becomes a set of theological works in which everything is reduced to a code, to a creed. (Location 3025)

What’s running the show is what’s coming up from way down below. The period when one begins to realize that one isn’t running the show is adolescence, when a whole new system of requirements begins announcing itself from the body. The adolescent hasn’t the slightest idea how to handle all this, and cannot but wonder what it is that’s pushing him—or even more mysteriously, pushing her. (Location 3050)

A good teacher is there to watch the young person and recognize what the possibilities are—then to give advice, not commands. The command would be, “This is the way I do it, so you must do it this way, too.” Some artists teach their students that way. But the teacher in any case has to talk it out, to give some general clues. If you don’t have someone to do that for you, you’ve got to work it all out from scratch—like reinventing the wheel. (Location 3073)

Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He’s a robot. He’s a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn’t help to try to change it to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That’s something else, and it can be done. (Location 3094)

MOYERS By doing what? CAMPBELL: By holding to your own ideals for yourself and, like Luke Skywalker, rejecting the system’s impersonal claims upon you. (Location 3100)

The Buddha can’t tell you exactly how to get rid of your particular fears, for example. Different teachers may suggest exercises, but they may not be the ones to work for you. All a teacher can do is suggest. He is like a lighthouse that says, “There are rocks over here, steer clear. There is a channel, however, out there.” (Location 3221)

This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s. (Location 3238)

When the Buddha declares there is escape from sorrow, the escape is Nirvana, which is not a place, like heaven, but a psychological state of mind in which you are released from desire and fear. (Location 3467)

Well, the mother loves all her children—the stupid ones, the bright ones, the naughty ones, the good ones. It doesn’t matter what their particular character is. So the feminine represents, in a way, the inclusive love for progeny. The father is more disciplinarian. He’s associated much more with the social order and the social character. This is actually the way it works in societies. The mother gives birth to his nature, and the father gives birth to his social character, you might say, how he is to function. (Location 3904)

Any life career that you choose in following your bliss should be chosen with that sense—that nobody can frighten me off from this thing. And no matter what happens, this is the validation of my life and action. MOYERS: And in choosing love, too? (Location 4043)

CAMPBELL: In choosing love, too. (Location 4046)

No, they should not. They should be in cooperation. The head should be present, and the heart should listen to it now and then. MOYERS: Are there times when the heart is in the lead? CAMPBELL: That would be the desirable situation most of the time. The five main virtues of the medieval knight might be brought in here. One is temperance, another is courage, another is love, another is loyalty, and another is courtesy. Courtesy is respect for the decorum of the society in which you are living. (Location 4089)

the meeting of the eyes, that idea. “So through the eyes love attains the heart: / For the eyes are the scouts of the heart.” (Location 4145)

Now, the worst of the pains of hell, insofar as hell has been described, is the absence of the Beloved, which is God. So how does Satan sustain the situation in hell? By the memory of the echo of God’s voice, when God said, “Go to hell.” That is a great sign of love. MOYERS: Well, it’s certainly true in life that the greatest hell one can know is to be separated from the one you love. That’s why I’ve liked the Persian myth. Satan is God’s lover— CAMPBELL: —and he is separated from God, and that’s the real pain of Satan. (Location 4360)

Of course. That’s what a meditation is. Meditation means constantly thinking on a certain theme. It can be on any level. I don’t make a big split in my thinking between the physical and the spiritual. For example, meditation on money is a perfectly good meditation. And bringing up a family is a very important meditation. But there is an alone meditation, when you go into the cathedral, for example. (Location 4431)

You know the idea of the ascent of the spirit through the different centers or archetypal stages of experience. One begins with the elementary animal experiences of hunger and greed, and then of sexual zeal, and on to physical mastery of one kind or another. These are all empowering stages of experience. But then, when the center of the heart is touched, and a sense of compassion awakened with another person or creature, and you realize that you and that other are in some sense creatures of the one life in being, a whole new stage of life in the spirit opens out. This opening of the heart to the world is what is symbolized mythologically as the virgin birth. It signifies the birth of a spiritual life in what was formerly an elementary human animal living for the merely physical aims of health, progeny, power, and a little fun. (Location 4452)

“AUM” is a word that represents to our ears that sound of the energy of the universe of which all things are manifestations. You start in the back of the mouth “ahh,” and then “oo,” you fill the mouth, and “mm” closes the mouth. When you pronounce this properly, all vowel sounds are included in the pronunciation. AUM. Consonants are here regarded simply as interruptions of the essential vowel sound. All words are thus fragments of AUM, just as all images are fragments of the Form of forms. AUM is a symbolic sound that puts you in touch with that resounding being that is the universe. If you heard some of the recordings of Tibetan monks chanting AUM, you would know what the word means, all right. That’s the AUM of being in the world. To be in touch with that and to get the sense of that is the peak experience of all. A-U-M. The birth, the coming into being, and the dissolution that cycles back. AUM is called the “four-element syllable.” A-U-M—and what is the fourth element? The silence out of which AUM arises, and back into which it goes, and which underlies it. My life is the A-U-M, but there is a silence underlying it, too. That is what we would call the immortal. This is the mortal and that’s the immortal, and there wouldn’t be the mortal if there weren’t the immortal. One must discriminate between the mortal aspect and the immortal aspect of one’s own existence. In the experience of my mother and father who are gone, of whom I was born, I have come to understand that there is more than what was our temporal relationship. Of course there were certain moments in that relationship when an emphatic demonstration of what the relationship was would be brought to my realization. I clearly remember some of those. They stand out as moments of epiphany, of revelation, of the radiance. (Location 4854)