Quotations in bold type are from the book.
Campbell begins with the usual Freudian mishmash. Disappointing. Reference to Freud’s apparently mistaken theory that "every pathological disorder of sexual life is rightly to be regarded as an inhibition in development". Reminds me of C.A. Tripp’s rebuttal of Freud on sex (in The Homosexual Matrix, 1975): "According to an especially outlandish version of the castration-complex, a man can become homosexual because he unconsciously imagines that there are teeth in a vagina, and so, unaccountably, he chooses to place his penis in a cavity where there are real teeth." The more I hear of Freud the less impressed I am with him and his supporters. Yet Campbell does quote Sophocles as saying: "For many a man hath seen himself in dreams/ His mother’s mate..." Many a man, but surely not all? I would like to see literature on men who have never had such dreams. I find it very difficult to believe in Campbell’s proposition that all our myths of paradise and expulsion from same are rooted in the infant’s gradual separation from its mother. Doesn’t the child take an active part in the process of separation?
I concede that there are families in which the children have reason to view their father as a threat. Mine was one, but I’m a female. What happens, then, to the vaunted Oedipal/Electra complex? It’s not so closely tied to heterosexuality as Freud seems to think.
Freud did get one thing right -- the existence of the unconscious mind. Even so, he wasn’t quite the pioneer he was made out to be, I don’t think. Witness, as a relatively late predecessor, St. Paul: "For when I do, not the good I wish to do, but the bad I do not wish to do, it is not I, but sin dwelling in me." But I like Campbell’s formulation better -- it is true as well as more optimistic: "The human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide." The threat comes from the possibility of the destruction of the world that each of us weaves for ourselves; the glory, from the possibility of reconstruction. Anyone who has ever left a church knows this.
The whole purpose of ritual is to separate the participant from everyday life, "usually formal, and very severe, exercises of severance [hence the occasional complaints about UU’s "watered-down" borrowings from other traditions], whereby the mind is radically cut away from the attitudes, attachments, and life patterns of the stage left behind," followed by rituals that re-orient the person to his new station in life.
In illustrating his fascinating point that the symbols of mythology occur automatically in the dreams of people progressing toward mental health, Campbell said something that I thought was mistaken, at first:
"It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid. We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood." (I concede there is some truth in this. At 17 I joined a separatist millenarian church because I was looking for a place to hide form the burdens of the world. "In the United States there is even a pathos of inverted emphasis: the goal is not to grow old, but to remain young; not to mature away from the Mother, but to cleave to her." Here I am inclined to disagree. Yes, we worship youth, but I think it is Christina Wolff [in The Beauty Myth] who makes the point that our youth-worship is at least partly market-driven. Looking 21 when you’re 35 is a full-time job which distracts too many intelligent women from breaking down the walls of privilege. And to participate in the frolics of adolescence, as many men do, from sports to Magic: The Gathering, requires expensive equipment.
Another reason for youth-worship is that maturity looks so damned unattractive. I once read a story that bitterly complained that the American Dream had been reduced to "finding a cheap apartment on a bus line" so you could make your way to your minimum-wage job without going broke. Hence we shy away -- but not back to mother-centered childhood; instead, to adolescence.
"Sigmund Freud," Campbell continues, "stresses in his writings the passages and difficulties of the first half of the human cycle of life....C.G. Jung, on the other hand, has emphasized the crises of the second portion -- when, in order to advance, the shining sphere [the sun as the individual soul] must submit to descend and disappear, at last, into the night-womb of the grave." Yeah; what I said. Maybe I ought to read Jung. "What is difficult to leave, then, is not the womb but the phallus..." The phallus, I suppose, being the prime symbol of aggressive activity and the power to lead. But then what does the womb, equally valuable, symbolize? Nurturing, I suppose. Passivity? I can’t see any value in that, except where it is needed in things like meditation, where it becomes mindfulness -- an extremely alert quietude -- which is not really passive at all.
I think -- based on nobody’s experience or emotions but my own -- that genitalia generally make a symbol of every human’s desire to live and to make life possible for others. The same is true of love -- sex symbolizes the need both to receive and to give love.
Campbell draws an interesting moral from the story of Pasiph äe giving birth to the Minotaur: It was the king’s fault for not sacrificing the god-sent bull that fathered the Minotaur in the first place. By converting "a public event" (the sacrifice that should have confirmed his kingship) "to personal gain," he refused to submit to the demands of kingship. "The return of the bull should have symbolized his absolutely selfless submission to the functions of his role. The retaining of it represented, on the other hand, an impulse to egocentric self-aggrandizement. And so the king ‘by grace of God’ became the dangerous tyrant Holdfast --" of whom his monstrous son, living on human flesh and compassed about only by treacherous mazes, becomes a symbol. "The tyrant-monster," says Campbell, is a universal symbol, "and his characteristics are everywhere the same." John Holt once described a little boy he knew who had recurrent dreams about "a mountain-lion-eater," truly a figure of irresistible menace -- what kind of creature could kill and eat a mountain lion! But Holt did not make such capital out of this figure -- only saw it as a projection of vivid childish fears.
But what could be more fearful than the tyrant-monster? Or what fearsome figure could be more familiar? "He is the hoarder of the general benefit. He is the monster avid for the greedy rights of ‘me and mine.’ The havoc wrought by him is described in mythology and fairy tale as being universal throughout his domain. This may be no more than his household, his own tortured psyche, or the lives that he blights with the touch of his friendship and assistance; or it may amount to the extent of his civilization."
The hero, by contrast, is "the man of self-achieved submission," but the question is -- submission to what? If civilization is in the hands of the tyrant-monster, then submission appears to be a betrayal of what is good. Campbell -- lovely soul that he seems to be -- quotes a few lines of T.S. Eliot’s to illustrate this. You’ll have to read it for yourself. Then he cites Toynbee’s A Study of History, saying that neither nostalgia nor forward-looking utopianism, nor even conscientious world-mending, will save a civilization that has begun to crumble in the monster’s grip. No, it is time for something new to be born.
I suppose Campbell would classify Amitai Etzioni’s communitarian ideas as mere world-mending, therefore doomed to fail. And yet the eternal verities, slippery as they are, have a way of sneaking up no you.
The birth of the new may occur from without, as in the story of the Minotaur, whose people were saved by Theseus, the Greek interloper. "The rising civilization of the Greeks...was the new and living thing." Or it may arise from "within the very walls of the tyrant’s empire itself," a possibility I find more exciting, possibly because it bears some resemblance to my own experience. More than a little: "Toynbee uses the terms ‘detachment’ and ‘transfiguration’ to describe the crisis by which the higher spiritual dimension is attained that makes possible the resumption of the work of creation."
Certainly my becoming one of Jehovah’s Witnesses was a retreat from the world in the most blatant sense. I can see, on reading this book, that burying myself in a separatist church was exactly analogous to Jesus’ retreat to the wilderness.
Or at least it was supposed to be. It turned out to be more like Jonah’s flight form his mission. For where do we retreat to? "The eternal world...the peace of the eternal world that is within...precisely the infantile unconscious...All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there...And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization...are there; for such golden seeds never die." Well, then perhaps Campbell is right about modern Westerners being "fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy." We are not so much reluctant to journey on as helpless to do so.
The church I joined had pretty much declared war on the unconscious mind. But "the hero...is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normal human forms. Such a one’s visions, ideas and inspirations come pristine from the primary springs of human life and thought....The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man -- perfected, unspecific, universal man, -- he has been reborn." I think Emerson’s version is prettier, though:
"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark." (From "Self-Reliance")
Campbell returns to the correspondence between dream-symbol and myth-symbol. Most of us, he says, have no opportunity nor inclination for questing on such a heroic scale; "but these seekers, too, are saved -- by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments...it is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight is truly desperate; that is to say, most of us today..." Theseus got through the maze with the aid of "a simple skein of linen thread" to enable him to find his way out again (and to retrace false steps, it occurs to me). "It is, indeed, very little [aid] that we need! But, lacking that, the adventure into the labyrinth is without hope. The little is close at hand."
Now Campbell turns to the dismemberment of Osiris, without quite giving up the Minotaur. He brings in Anna Karenina, too. After all, "Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time."
In a secularized culture that has ejected the possibility of "happily ever after," everyone gets dismembered like Osiris, because, even if we never see any other trouble, each of us dies. And each of us does see considerably more trouble than that. "Happily ever after" is for children who still need protection from the realities; the hope of heaven, for the old who must face death sooner rather than later. Modern literature is concerned with people who get no miracles, who find no kindly grannies offering talismans. And Campbell says our literature misses the point. In the ancient world, comedies -- stories with happy endings, whether or not there were any jokes in them -- were thought to be "of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete...not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man." Well, he may be right. I recently heard a Unitarian Universalist minister preach on envy. In passing, he said he had once been a prison chaplain, ministering to people who had "to live in conditions I could not survive." And yet they found reasons to be happy, at least intermittently. Joy welled up unaccountably from only God knew where.
"Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible." Emerson understood this:
O what are heroes, prophets, men
But pipes through which the breath of Pan doth blow
A momentary music. Being's tide
Swells hitherward, and myriads of forms
Live, robed with beauty, painted by the sun;
Their dust, pervaded by the nerves of God,
Throbs with an overmastering energy
Knowing and doing. Ebbs the tide, they lie
White hollow shells along the desert shore,
But not the less the eternal wave rolls on
To animate new millions, and exhale
Races and planets, its enchanted foam.
Secularists, many of them (myself too often included) deny the possibility of such inexhaustible joy. Conservative religionists are prone to deny tragedy its full due. Both are one-eyed men in a country where no one need be blind at all.
Of course the ancient formulations of this idea (Campbell quotes from Ovid and the Bhagavad-Gita in discussing this point) depend on the belief in an immortal soul -- a belief I do not share. Nothing has ever happened to me which has compelled me to believe it. And yet I’m afraid I must believe in "the inexhaustible joy of life invincible," welling up unaccountably from unknown depths. That has happened to me, unbidden, even unwelcome, more than once.
Every story puts the hero through an effortful journey on his way to the conquest of evil. In a dreamlike manner, Everyman’s psychological business is put on display for our instruction. But after the preliminary struggle is over, "life no longer suffers hopelessly...but with its horror visible still, its cries of anguish still tumultuous, it becomes penetrated by an all-suffusing, all-sustaining love, and a knowledge of its own unconquered power." Well, I would like to know: "unconquered power" to do what? Not to eliminate suffering, certainly, or even reduce it by very much.
Here is the kernel of the book: "The standard path of the mythological adventures of the hero is a magnification of the rites of passage: separation -- initiation -- return," the purpose of return being "to bestow boons on his fellow man."
Here follows an elaborate description, garishly embroidered, of the Buddha’s enlightenment. This is the sort of thing I have long been taught to dismiss as rank idolatry. In fact it does read rather like a cosmic religious procession. Then another elaborate set piece about the giving of the Law at Mt. Sinai -- apparently the simple account in Exodus didn’t do justice to the theme, and hence this legend arose.
I can see why. Epiphanies happen inside people’s heads, where outsiders can see nothing. These stories are an attempt to make the material world reflect spiritual events. It’s when we take them literally, instead of rejoicing in their emotional effects, that we run into trouble -- logical inconsistencies, intellectual dishonesty, defensive intolerance, and so forth. And yet so many people find that a literalistic approach to the stories of their faith tradition makes them much easier to take seriously.
The center of the world, whatever form it takes -- the Immovable Spot on which Buddha sat and thought, the World Tree of Norse myth, or even the Crucifix, is where the world’s revivification comes from, where Earth connects to Heaven. The connection works both ways -- that is what sacrifice is about. Sacrifice nourishes the gods as the gods nourish men. Blessings and sacrifices are supposed to bind god and man together, something I have completely lost track of over the past ten years or so.
"Wherever a hero has been born, has wrought, or has passed back into the void, the place is marked and sanctified. A temple is erected there to signify and inspire the miracle of perfect centeredness; or this is the place of the breakthrough into abundance. Someone at this point discovered eternity. The site can serve, therefore, as a support for fruitful meditation." The floor plans of ancient temples, like maps of ancient cities, reveal a schematic representation of the world: a portal at each of the Four Directions, an outer wall linking them around the horizon, and the World Navel, "the Inexhaustible Spot," at its center.
But I have been feeling nihilistic of late. I feel the inevitability of Ragnarok and no reason to hope for Valhalla. I know the human race is eating the natural world alive, increasing its own suffering by its very carelessness. Howard Perlmutter once told me we are one generation away from a die-off that will make the Black Plague look like the annual winter flu season. How can there be such a place as the Inexhaustible Spot? The Ganges, whose source is said to spill from Krishna’s hair on its way down from heaven -- which is said to be a god itself -- is one of the filthiest rivers on earth.
Campbell answers: "since [the World Navel] is the source of all existence, it yields the world’s plenitude of both good and evil. Ugliness and beauty, sin and virtue, pleasure and pain, are equally its production. ‘To God all things are fair and good and right,’ declared Heraclitus; but men hold some things wrong and some right.’ Hence the figures worshipped in the temples of the world are by no means always beautiful, always benign, or even necessarily virtuous. And likewise, mythology does not hold as its greatest hero the merely virtuous man. Virtue is but the pedagogical prelude to the culminating insight...."
A Yoruba trickster figure named Edshu says, "Spreading strife is my greatest joy."
"Mythology breaks the whole of life into a vast, horrendous Divine Comedy. Its Olympian laugh is not escapist in the least, but hard, with the hardness of life itself -- which, we may take it, is the hardness of God, the creator. Mythology...makes the tragic attitude seem somewhat hysterical [thank you too much, Dr. Campbell], and the merely moral judgment shortsighted." So the heroic, that is, the fully human approach to life is to embrace everything as fully real and inescapable, to perform the Dance of Life with Shiva Nataraja (which Campbell gets into later) -- an attitude feebly expressed by the all-too-popular aphorism, "Ya gotta take the bad with the good."
© 1996 Michaele Maurer
Created Friday, February 9, 1996