Quotations in bold type are from the book.
Now he turns to all those perilous adventures that heroes undergo, which you can see in abundance any time you open a copy of Grimm. (I was reminded of Gerda’s search for Kay in The Snow Queen, which he doesn’t cite.) In the far north, shamans still (or did when Campbell wrote this) go on such adventures when they recover the wandering souls of the sick. Apparently they don’t always come back. A Lapp (pardon me! Sami) shaman is described as calling for reindeer to be harnessed as he goes into his trance. I wonder if the Santa Claus legend carries a faint echo of this? Campbell didn’t think to ask. Ah well.
There follows a hash of dream descriptions culled from old books on psychoanalysis (remember, the first edition of this book came out in 1949), some of which I am rather dubious about; but all of them deal with meeting enemies or obstacles on the way to triumph or enlightenment. The magical dangers of myths stand for the psychological ones we face in dreams and we have no better guide than the pyschoanalyst, any more (if we can afford him).
Set against all this is the stately tale in Innanna, the Babylonian goddess, descending to the underworld, handing over a piece of clothing or jewelry in payment at each of seven gates, so that she finally arrives at her destination naked. Then she goes before seven judges who kill her with a word. The queen of the underworld is Innanna’s own sister, Erishkigal -- just as the devil we must face, and assimilate rather than conquer, is that part of ourselves which we can’t admit to. (God help us, he quotes Finnegans Wake to illustrate this point.) It’s bitter medicine, a bitter task, full of setbacks -- but "meanwhile there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies, and momentary glimpses of the promised land."
The princess of the fairy tale is the goddess of the myths is everyone’s mother in her loving, nourishing aspect. Furthermore, "Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known." As a woman myself, fully aware of how little of the universe I amount to, I resent this. To be a symbol, especially such a vast one, seems an intolerable burden. But I don’t know. I’ve never tried it. What does the man who plays koshare, or kachina, feel the rest of the year?
Campbell recounts the story of the Well of Tubber Tintyre, the flaming fairy well. Five princes go hunting, get lost and go off one at a time in search of water. They all end up at the flaming fairy well, where each of them is greeted by a hag of irrepressible ugliness who demands a kiss in exchange for water. Only Niall, the youngest (why is it always the youngest?), agrees. "I will even hug thee!" he cries, and keeps his promise. "And when he looked at her, in the whole world was not a woman...fairer than she." I find it very interesting that the version Campbell quotes does not actually say that the hag was transformed; only that, on kissing her, Niall found her fair. "Who art thou?" he asks.
"I am Royal Rule," she answers, and proclaims him and his descendants kings of Tara. "And as at first thou hast seen me ugly, brutish, loathly -- in the end, beautiful -- even so is royal rule: for without battles, without fierce conflict, it may not be won; but in the result, he that is king of no matter what shows comely and handsome forth."
"Such is royal rule?" cries Campbell. "Such is life itself. The goddess guardian at the inexhaustible well...requires that the hero should be endowed with what the troubadours and minnesingers termed ‘the gentle heart.’ Not by the animal desire of an Actaeon [who caught sight of Diana in the nude], nor by the fastidious revulsion of [Niall’s older brothers], but only by gentleness...
"The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman)" -- now wait just a damn minute. I know who’s inside this female skin, and it ain’t no goddess. I protest. Having given birth to a couple of kids doesn’t put me anywhere near that sacred well. I resent being splashed with holy water against my will.
I think. Anyway, it rings false and it scares me.
Ahem: "The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the casement of eternity." And here again I run into the fact that I don’t believe in eternity for human beings.
I don’t know, maybe it has to do with the idealization that happens when people fall in love: these stories symbolize that, and falling in love itself stands for something greater, supposedly. (But "Love’s miracle enough," says James Thurber.)
Of course many of these old stories have to do with maidens questing after lost men. Not just any woman, but "one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal." Most anyone can do yearning well enough. "And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes [when he catches her]; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace." So for each sex, "the joy of life inexhaustible" is represented in the other. Well, I’ve been (and still am) in love; so this makes perfect sense to me, after all.
"The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero’s total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master....The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale."
But before we get to the mystical marriage, there are all kinds of tests and suffering, perils and ugliness as "depth beyond depth of self-ignorance is fathomed," as Campbell rephrases it in modern psychoanalytic terms. It isn’t pretty, by any means. The truth masked by all our illusions is revealed in all its dreadful glory. Rather than face up to it, though, we spend much of our time denying "the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell. Rather, we tend to perfume, whitewash, and reinterpret; meanwhile, imagining that all the flies in the ointment, all the hairs in the soup are the fault of some unpleasant someone else.
"But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is...a moment of revulsion: the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul." From this source arises all the ranting against womankind of every hermit and ascetic throughout history.
All of it, he implies, wrong-headed and deluded.
Campbell begins this section with extensive quotations from Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which some evangelicals still claim to admire. Edwards reduces the mercy of God to "God’s mere pleasure," a mere whim which is all that holds back the full blast of his wrath from all and sundry. Other religious traditions, especially Asian ones, also wax eloquent about divine recompense for sinners, but they are equally eloquent about divine mercy; a balance which Campbell says Christianity lacks. I will say that, whatever the balance struck in Watchtower literature (which, as I remember, was fairly positive) I found it very difficult to retain a clear idea of, or even belief in, the mercy of God.
Contrast Campbell’s lovely poetic riffing on Shiva, Lord of the Dance: "Briefly: The extended right hand holds the drum, the beat of which is the beat of time, time being the first principle of creation; the extended left holds the flame, which is the flame of the destruction of the created world; the second right hand is held in the gesture of ‘fear not,’ while the second left, pointing to the lifted left foot, is held in a position symbolizing ‘elephant’ (the elephant is the ‘breaker of the way through the jungle of the world,’ i.e., the divine guide); the right foot is planted on the back of a dwarf, the demon ‘Non-knowing,’ which signifies the passage of souls from God into matter, but the left is lifted, showing the release of the soul: the left is the foot to which the ‘elephant-hand’ is pointing and supplies the reason for the assurance, ‘Fear not.’ The God’s head is balanced, serene and still, in the midst of the dynamism of creation and destruction which is symbolized by the rocking arms and the rhythm of the slowly stamping right heel. This means that at the center all is still. Shiva’s right earring is a man’s, his left, a woman’s; for the God includes and is beyond the pairs of opposites. Shiva’s facial expression is neither sorrowful nor joyous, but is the visage of the Unmoved Mover, beyond, yet present within, the world’s bliss and pain. The wildly streaming locks represent the long-untended hair of the Indian Yogi, now flying in the dance of life; for the presence known in the joys and sorrows of life, and that found through withdrawn meditation, are but two aspects of the same, universal, non-dual, Being-Consciousness-Bliss. Shiva’s bracelets, arm bands, ankle rings, and brahminical thread [the one that crosses his torso diagonally from left shoulder to right hip], are living serpents. This means that he is made beautiful by the Serpent Power -- the mysterious Creative Energy of God, which is the material and the formal cause of his own self-manifestation in, and as, the universe with all its beings. In Shiva’s hair may be seen a skull, symbolic of death...as well as a crescent moon, symbolic of birth and increase, which are his other boons to the world. Also, there is in his hair the flower of a datura -- from which plant an intoxicant is prepared (compare the wine of Dionysos and the wine of the Mass). A little image of the goddess Ganges is hidden in his locks; for it is he who receives on his head the impact of the descent of the divine Ganges from heaven, letting the life- and salvation-bestowing waters then flow gently to the earth for the physical and spiritual refreshment of mankind. ... Such a figure illustrates the function and value of a graven image, and shows why long sermons are unnecessary among idol-worshipers. The devotee is permitted to soak in the meaning of the divine symbol in deep silence and in his own good time....
"Many other details of life and local custom are similarly duplicated, interpreted, and thus validated, in the details of the anthropomorphic idols. In this way, the whole of life is made into a support for meditation. One lives in the midst of a silent sermon all the time."
Surfacing from this footnote, Campbell continues: "‘Fear not!’ says the hand gesture of the god Shiva, as he dances before his devotee the dance of the universal destruction. ‘Fear not, for all rests well in God. The forms that come and go -- and of which your body is but one -- are the flashes of my dancing limbs. Know Me in all, and of what shall you be afraid?’ The magic of the sacraments....the protective power of primitive amulets and charms, and the supernatural helpers of the myths and fairy tales of the world, are mankind’s assurances that the arrow, the flames and the flood are not as brutal as they seem."
Then Campbell plunges into an exposition of the Freudian doctrine of the Oedipal complex, focusing on sons’ relationship to their fathers. "The ogre aspect of the father," he says, arises from "...the sensational nursery scene that has been left behind," whatever that might be; I hope he isn’t referring to that nonsensical "primal scene" business. I dare say being on the bad side of someone ten times as big as you are, who has Mommy wrapped around his little finger, would be sensational enough.
Liberate yourself from the "double monster" -- from the double tyranny of scruple and sin -- and you have reached Atonement, which I have heard from several sources was originally "at-one-ment" (and yes, my dictionary says that "onement" used to be a perfectly good word for "union"). "But this requires an abandonment of attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult. One must have a faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy." Well, this faith and reliance were just what I ultimately found to be impossible. But that is the role of the magical granny-ladies: "For if it is impossible to trust the terrifying father-face, then one’s face must be centered elsewhere (Spider Woman, Blessed Mother); and with that reliance for support one endures the crisis -- only to find, in the end, that the father and the mother reflect each other, and are in essence the same." This justifies Goddess-worship of every kind and the veneration of Mary, not to mention amulets and fetishes and charms, which are the counterparts of the magical tools handed out by the granny-ladies -- reassurances that there are such things as love and support Out There. Not that I have any compelling reason to believe that.
The purpose of suffering in myth and fairy tale is initiation. If initiation is not earned, the hero is not fit to take over the role of the father, which is the whole point of the quest.
Campbell says that the "nightmare of the ogre father is made actual in the ordeals of primitive initiation." The Murngin tribe of Australia fed their boy initiates literally on the blood of their elders, who actually bled themselves to the point of exhaustion -- and the boys were literally eaten themselves if they did anything to spoil the rite. Children have nightmares of being eaten; parents have nightmares about eating their children (no, really; it happened to me once.)
Myths and initiations turn back to the idea that the ogre and the savior are one. There is an African tribe called the Basumbwa who tell the story of a man who wandered into the underworld and saw Death handing out decrees about people’s fate; this one condemned to bad luck, that one to poverty, and so forth. Next day Death reappeared and handed out happier fates -- good luck in trading, prosperity, health and the like. In this story death is handsome on one side of his body and worm-eaten and corrupt on the other.
The great god of the Incas, Viracocha, is both sun-god and storm-god; the life-giving sunlight and the shattering thunderbolt are the same energy, and he waters the world with his tears. "Herewith the world-discrediting insight of the monk, ‘All life is sorrowful,’ is combined with the world-begetting affirmative of the father, ‘Life must be!’ In full awareness of the life anguish of the creatures of his hand, in full consciousness of the roaring wilderness of pains, the brain-splitting fires of the deluded, self-ravaging, lustful, angry universe of his creation, this divinity acquiesces in the deed of supplying life to life." The creator grieves for our miseries; his grief keeps us alive.
Why not just shut down the whole business, then? (Maybe that’s why the Norse could live with the prospect of Ragnarok.) Campbell turns to the book of Job by way of explanation: rather than giving Job any ethical justification for his miseries, or even telling him about His wager with the Devil in the first couple of chapters, He simply unveils himself to Job in all His incomprehensible glory. And Job is satisfied. He asked for answers; he got Reality instead. Truth is about Reality.
"For the son who has grown really to know the father, the agonies of the ordeal are readily borne; the world is no longer a vale of tears but a bliss-yielding, perpetual manifestation of the Presence."
Now we move a half-step away from Viracocha, to Avalokiteshvara, "The Lord Looking Down in Pity," one of the most popular bodhisattvas of Buddhist Asia. (A bodhisattva is someone "whose being or essence is enlightenment," who is on the verge of becoming a Buddha.) Avalokiteshvara, it is said, postponed his entry into Nirvana because he did not want to leave the rest of us behind. That’s Universalism, in spades.
Now, a curious thing happens with these compassionate savior figures: either they come in male-female pairs (like Avalokiteshvara and Kuan Yin) or they are androgynous, like the Zuñi Awonawilona. Even the Bible says that man and woman were originally one body. Ovid and Herodotus are crawling with hermaphrodite seers. Shiva and his wife Shakti are sometimes represented as one body.
Campbell’s point about all this is Freudian: we all start off in a little love-nest with our mothers. Father comes to drag us out into the cold, cruel world, and we cast him as an ogre. But his intent is only to teach us to avoid fatal pitfalls and to make our way back to the cosmic union and sense of abiding, unshakable love that a human mother can only symbolize. That’s the meaning of a bisexual god-figure: a successful quest.
If you accept Fromm’s analysis of Freud’s basic idea -- that, instead of a struggle between sexual impulses and a death wish, our inner lives are a struggle between life-loving impulses and a death-dealing wish for power -- then the whole business of child and father fighting over the mother ceases to be objectionable.
Obviously, I have not found my Awonawilona yet.
Campbell quotes Hosea 6:1-3: "Come, and let us return unto the Lord: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up, and we shall live in his sight. Then we shall know, if we follow on to know the Lord; his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth." I was taught that, after scourging, restoration would come to the repentant. But the religions of the world teach that restoration comes to the survivors -- those persistent enough, stubborn enough, to see the quest through. Having seen that the ogre’s tortures are meant to refine and teach us, "the childhood images of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ have been surpassed. We no longer desire and fear; we are what was desired and feared. All the gods, Bodhisattvas and Buddhas have been subsumed in us," because we have shared their experience.
This is the point of all that human-potential yammering about loving yourself and realizing that "you’re already perfect" -- but these ideas are too burdensome for the beginner’s toolkit. They are only useful -- are only comprehensible -- after long, hard, thoughtful struggle. Until you have sweated and bled for your enlightenment, any talk of your perfection will sound like a lie; and so it will be.
Now, what is all this about Nirvana being "nothingness" or "nonexistence"? Actually, it means that the barrier between living and not-living crumbles away; and also that "the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility and Delusion" goes out (the word nirvana literally means "blown out," "extinguished"). Campbell specifies that what gets blown out is the "primitive physical will to live like other human beings -- the will to live according to the normal motives of desire and hostility, in a delusory ambient of phenomenal causes, ends, and means." The desire that goes out is not the desire to live (I don’t think) or the desire to do good or to see good done. What gets extinguished is the perception that everything is animated by hunger or hostility -- in other words, the very attitude that so much of Western thought considers realism.
Campbell returns to the Well of Tubber Tintye, which is, after all, a separate story from that of Niall, the hag, and the well. This one is about another prince who goes to Tubber Tintye for water to heal the Queen of Erin. A magical auntie gave him a disreputable wonder-working horse and guided him through the usual run of dangers and monsters. Finally he ends up in a series of twelve rooms each of which contains a beautiful woman asleep. The thirteenth room holds the Queen of Tubber Tintye, on a wheeled golden bed which circles continually around the well. He sleeps on that bed, apparently not disturbing her, for six days. On the seventh he collects three bottles of magical water for the Queen of Erin. He eats from an inexhaustible feast he finds laid out there and then leaves her a letter explaining what he has done.
Campbell finds three fascinating motifs here: the well at the World Navel, of course; the castle where everyone is asleep, like Sleeping Beauty’s, "that ultimate abyss to which the descending consciousness submerges in dream, where the individual life is on the point of dissolving into undifferentiated energy; and it would be death to dissolve; yet death, also , to lack the fire" -- a dangerous place to be, then, and yet equally dangerous to stay away; the inexhaustible dish, which Campbell traces to "infantile fantasy" about the material ease of childhood -- a child’s ability and opportunity to take his next meal for granted.
But then he has to go and quote from a book written in 1937 or something, to the effect that this infantile fantasy, when baby goes hungry, is "to tear everything out of the mother’s body" which leads to fear that mother or someone else will retaliate. I don’t believe this, but -- Australian medicine men are said to have their guts magically removed and replaced by collections of quartz crystals and pebbles, rope and possibly a little magical snake. The chain of subconscious reasoning is supposed to run: ‘My innards have already been destroyed. No, they have been replaced by incorruptible objects. I am not trying to tear anybody’s guts out; sorcerers are doing that; I am healing people.’ And yet the healing is accomplished by removing something from the patient’s body. This is an interesting chain of reasoning, and the element of rationalization makes it seem humanly plausible -- but I am frequently taken in by merely interesting ideas.
These inexhaustible feasts on magical foods generally confer immortality. The Olympian gods feast on "ambrosia" -- from the Greek for "not mortal."
But this is, spiritually, a dangerous idea. It klangs so closely with our childhood fantasies of carefreeness that it is a sore temptation to insist on a literal fulfillment somewhere. "...The mind feels at home with these images and seems to be remembering something already known. But...the feelings come to rest in the symbols and resist passionately every desire to go beyond." So descriptions of the true source and nature of what might be called eternal life are "clothed, necessarily, in figures reminiscent of the imagined beatitude of infancy; hence the deceptive childishness of the tales."
Hence, also, the occasional ludicrousness in the world’s scriptures, where satire creeps into these divine battles over the world-saving food or artifact. The gods themselves are in need of salvation; woe to those who take them too literally. Take the case of Amaterasu, the Japanese sun-goddess, who was enticed to restore her light to the world of the gods by the sounds of a rowdy party featuring a strip-tease by a minor goddess named Umuze.
Hindu scripture tells and (retells) a story of the battle of gods and titans for the liquor of immortality. Both sides were taking crippling losses in war, which is why they were interested in the project. They declared a temporary truce in which they set about using a holy mountain to "churn the milky Ocean of Immortality for its butter" -- which is called Amrita, the Sanskrit word for "not mortal." So the great thousand-year cooperative project began. The first thing to be churned up is a poisonous black smoke which proves to be the concentrated essence of death. You mess with immortality and face death -- there’s a lesson here somewhere, maybe the same as the one in Genesis. But Hinduism overcomes the threat, where the Hebrews did not: Krishna drinks the death essence and miraculously holds it in his throat, which turns blue (as if bruised?).
The situation improves rapidly: nymphs and a variety of divine power objects are churned up. Last of all is the physician of the gods, holding the moon, which serves as a cup for the nectar of life. This sounds to me rather like Pandora’s box in reverse, with the positive predominating.
So the gods and titans begin to fight. "One of the titans, Rahu, managed to steal a sip, but was beheaded before the liquor passed his throat; his body decayed but his head remained immortal and this head now goes pursuing the moon forever through the skies, trying again to seize it. When it succeeds the cup passes easily through its mouth and out again at its throat: that is why we have eclipses of the moon." I have heard repeatedly that myths arise to explain natural phenomena -- which would make mythology a dull business indeed. I think it’s a mistake. Why concoct such an outré story to explain a natural phenomenon? No, these kinds of stories are attempts to make the natural world into living parables of spiritual realities.
Vishnu carries the day by turning into a dancing girl, charming the moon-cup out of the titans’ hands, and suddenly passing it to the gods. Then he turns into a mighty warrior and helps chase the titans out. Such a scene could certainly be played for laughs. "Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological," says Campbell, "as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood." Makes me think of Samson walking off with the gates of Gaza on his back. Or Yahweh plotting to whisper falsehoods to the prophets Micaiah had to contend with. Whenever you find satire in scripture, you’re being pointed toward something more important than the gods themselves. When done properly, all myths and religions are allegory. The stories are more powerful as metaphor than as history. They are juicier if you take them not literally but seriously. Campbell quotes a Tibetan lama as saying, "from one point of view all those divinities exist; from another they are not real."
So the gods themselves are only custodians of the "miraculous-energy-substance" that confers immortality. "Its guardians dare release it only to the duly proven." All gods are armed angels ranged about the tree of life. "But the gods may be oversevere, overcautious, in which case the hero must trick them of their treasure," like Prometheus.
The Sumerian hero Gilgamesh went on a quest for the source of immortality. When he began, Ishtar discouraged him, recommending that he abandon the impossible and be content with ordinary mortal joys: "Fill thy belly, Gilgamesh...prepare each day some pleasant occasion...Regard the little one who takes thy hand. Let thy wife be happy against thy bosom." Gilgamesh isn’t buying -- smart man; he won’t find himself in the position of the man who is happy in love and at work and nevertheless has a fine case of the existential blues.
After many trials, Gilgamesh learns, from Utnapishtim, the Sumerian Noah, that the secret of immortality is contained in a plant "like a brier in the field; its thorn, like that of the rose, will pierce thy hand." So the tests are not finished once he has the treasure in hand.
After he eventually wins the plant and begins the trek home with it, a snake creeps up and eats it one night while Gilgamesh is asleep; we have the fact that they shed their skins to remind us of this catastrophe. Snakes get to renew their youthful vigor, but not we. Of course, such a ludicrous ending reminds us that we will never find a literal fulfillment in this world; the truth is hidden higher and deeper.
Campbell follows this up with the tale of a sage who becomes so expert in the compounding and use of pills of immortality that he disappears. (The pills are compounded of cinnabar -- mercury ore -- and honey. This isn’t the first reference I’ve seen to medicinal uses of mercury. It actually was used in Europe to treat syphilis, once upon a time. I wonder what led to the conclusion that mercury was medically valuable? Is there a tie with religion or astrology? But Mercury isn’t a Chinese deity, I don’t think, nor does it show up in the Chinese zodiac.)
Well, these immortality stories, though not to be taken literally, are far from pointless. Campbell quotes Lao-Tse:
"All things are in process, rising and returning. Plants come to blossom, but only to return to the root. Returning to the root is like seeking tranquillity. Seeking tranquillity is like moving toward destiny. To move toward destiny is like eternity. To know eternity is enlightenment, and not to recognize eternity brings disorder and evil.
"Knowing eternity makes one comprehensive. Comprehension makes one broadminded; breadth of vision brings nobility; nobility is like heaven.
"The heavenly is like Tao. Tao is the Eternal. The decay of the body is not to be feared."
Knowledge of the indescribable Reality, which we can point to but not name, is all the immortality that is available -- or needed. The Sunday-school (and biblical) aphorism that "God gives his people anything the ask for" is a mistake when taken literally.
In pagan myths the gods themselves lose their lives that they may find them, as Campbell notes in describing how Odin submitted to crucifixion while searching for immortality and knowledge:
To shatter the illusion of the world, Campbell assures us, is to see it reborn. That, he says, is what Buddha’s enlightenment was about. Buddhist scripture contains an ecstatic poetic riff in which banners stream across the sky from world’s edge to world’s edge; all trees "throughout the ten thousand worlds" were heavy with flowers and fruit -- again, the material universe is able to reflect the epiphany. Even "the eight-thousand-league-long hells, which not even the light of seven suns had been able to illumine, were now flooded with radiance." Does this mean that the experience of true reality leads to redemption, so that the gates of hell are no longer locked from the inside?
It is a truly beautiful idea; but is that enough reason to believe it? Maybe beauty will suffice; to quote Keats: