I can’t stop quoting Joseph Campbell, but apparently he can’t stop being incredibly insightful.
Mythology is defeated when the mind rests solemnly with its favorite or traditional images, defending them as though they themselves were the message that they communicate.
From Hero With A Thousand Faces:
Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended upon the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.
To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.
Bam. J. Campbell just served you, fundamentalists. If you have any interest in the spiritual traditions of the entire planet, you are doing yourself a disservice by not reading this book.
Instead of clearing his own heart, the zealot tries to clear the world.
Awesome. The Hero with a Thousand Faces continues to be revelatory and brilliant.
More great stuff from The Power of Myth:
Campbell: There are some teachers who decide they won’t teach at all because of what society will do with what they’ve found.
Moyers: What if the hero returns from his ordeal, and the world doesn’t want what he brings back?
Campbell: That, of course, is a normal experience.
Endlessly fascinating, this book. I think Campbell’s first sentence perfectly mirrors what Einstein says about wishing he had become a watchmaker, and the second puts me in mind of Galileo. Except this was a discussion about myths that were thousands of years old. Another gem, especially from an improv perspective:
Campbell: There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, the “love of your fate,” which is in fact your life. As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing.
Gives a lot more weight to denials, right? You have to accept your life holistically or you have not accepted it all.
I’m reading Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, and it is blowing my mind. So much basic, simple stuff that feels so relevant. All these primitive cultures sharing the same stories despite being geographically isolated from each other because they’re trying to describe the same realities in their day to day existence.
– Man is forced to kill to survive, be it plant or animal. What happens to the living thing that we kill to eat? How do we honor the sacrifice of that being? An eternal dilemma for early societies.
– Duality is a by-product of being bound to the physical world. Man, woman; good, evil; past, present. When you transcend these things and commune with God, you see that all are the same and there is only the One.
– In times of danger, man forgets his separation between himself and others. A police officer in Hawaii rushed to save a man about to commit suicide by leaping from a cliff, only to find himself being dragged down as well until both are saved by another police officer. Why did the first officer rush to save the man? Because his instinct tells him that he and this man are the same and to let him die is to die himself.
I am totally buying the bejeezus out of The Hero with 1,000 Faces after this.
