The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

  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.

  V

  THE HERO’S

  ADVENTURE

  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.

  —JOSEPH CAMPBELL

  MOYERS: Why are there so many stories of the hero in mythology?

  CAMPBELL: Because that’s what’s worth writing about. Even in popular novels, the main character is a hero or heroine who has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

  MOYERS: So in all of these cultures, whatever the local costume the hero might be wearing, what is the deed?

  CAMPBELL: 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.

  The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there’s something lacking in the normal experiences available or permitted to the members of his society. This person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It’s usually a cycle, a going and a returning.

  But the structure and something of the spiritual sense of this adventure can be seen already anticipated in the puberty or initiation rituals of early tribal societies, through which a child is compelled to give up its childhood and become an adult—to die, you might say, to its infantile personality and psyche and come back as a responsible adult. This is a fundamental psychological transformation that everyone has to undergo. We are in childhood in a condition of dependency under someone’s protection and supervision for some fourteen to twenty-one years—and if you’re going on for your Ph. D., this may continue to perhaps thirty-five. You are in no way a self-responsible, free agent, but an obedient dependent, expecting and receiving punishments and rewards. To evolve out of this position of psychological immaturity to the courage of self-responsibility and assurance requires a death and a resurrection. That’s the basic motif of the universal hero’s journey—leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition.

  MOYERS: So even if we happen not to be heroes in the grand sense of redeeming society, we still have to take that journey inside ourselves, spiritually and psychologically.

  CAMPBELL: That’s right. Otto Rank in his important little book The Myth of the Birth of the Hero declares that everyone is a hero in birth, where he undergoes a tremendous psychological as well as physical transformation, from the condition of a little water creature living in a realm of amniotic fluid into an air-breathing mammal which ultimately will be standing. That’s an enormous transformation, and had it been consciously undertaken, it would have been, indeed, a heroic act. And there was a heroic act on the mother’s part, as well, who had brought this all about.

  MOYERS: Then heroes are not all men?

  CAMPBELL: Oh, no. The male usually has the more conspicuous role, just because of the conditions of life. He is out there in the world, and the woman is in the home. But among the Aztecs, for example, who had a number of heavens to which people’s souls would be assigned according to the conditions of their death, the heaven for warriors killed in battle was the same for mothers who died in childbirth. Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another.

  MOYERS: Don’t you think we’ve lost that truth in this society of ours, where it’s deemed more heroic to go out into the world and make a lot of money than it is to raise children?

  CAMPBELL: 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.

  MOYERS: That’s a wonderful image, though—the mother as hero.

  CAMPBELL: It has always seemed so to me. That’s something I learned from reading these myths.

  MOYERS: It’s a journey—you have to move out of the known, conventional safety of your life to undertake this.

  CAMPBELL: You have to be transformed from a maiden to a mother. That’s a big change, involving many dangers.

  MOYERS: And when you come back from your journey, with the child, you’ve brought something for the world.

  CAMPBELL: Not only that, you’ve got a life job ahead of you. Otto Rank makes the point that there is a world of people who think that their heroic act in being born qualifies them for the respect and support of their whole community.

  MOYERS: But there’s still a journey to be taken after that.

  CAMPBELL: There’s a large journey to be taken, of many trials.

  MOYERS: What’s the significance of the trials, and tests, and ordeals of the hero?

  CAMPBELL: If you want to put it in terms of intentions, the trials are designed to see to it that the intending hero should be really a hero. Is he really a match for this task? Can he overcome the dangers? Does he have the courage, the knowledge, the capacity, to enable him to serve?

  MOYERS: In this culture of easy religion, cheaply achieved, it seems to me we’ve forgotten that all three of the great religions teach that the trials of the hero journey are a significant part of life, that there’s no reward without renunciation, without paying the price. The Koran says, “Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you?” And Jesus said in the gospel of Matthew, “Great is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth to life, and few there be who find it.” And the heroes of the Jewish tradition undergo great tests before they arrive at their redemption.

  CAMPBELL: If you realize what the real problem is—losing yourself, giving yourself to some higher end, or to another—you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial. When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

  And what all the myths have to deal with is transformations of consciousness of one kind or another. You have been thinking one way, you now have to think a different way.

  MOYERS: How is consciousness transformed?

  CAMPBELL: Either by the trials themselves or by illuminating revelations. Trials and revelations are what it’s all about.

  MOYERS: Isn’t there a moment of redemption in all of these stories? The woman is saved from the dragon, the city is spared from obliteration, the hero is snatched from danger in the nick of time.

  CAMPBELL: Well, yes. There would be no hero deed unless there were an achievement. We can have the hero who fails, but he’s usually represented as a kind of clown, someone pretending to more than he can achieve.

  MOYERS: How is a hero different from a leader?

  CAMPBELL: 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 l
eader 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.

  MOYERS: It has been said that a leader is someone who discerned the inevitable and got in front of it. Napoleon was a leader, but he wasn’t a hero in the sense that what he accomplished was grand for humanity’s sake. It was for France, the glory of France.

  CAMPBELL: Then he is a French hero, is he not? This is the problem for today. Is the hero of a given state or people what we need today, when the whole planet should be our field of concern? Napoleon is the nineteenth-century counterpart of Hitler in the twentieth. Napoleon’s ravaging of Europe was horrific.

  MOYERS: So you could be a local god and fail the test on a larger cosmic level?

  CAMPBELL: Yes. Or you could be a local god, but for the people whom that local god conquered, you could be the enemy. Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.

  MOYERS: So we have to be careful not to call a deed heroic when, in a larger, mythological sense, it simply doesn’t work that way.

  CAMPBELL: Well, I don’t know. The deed could be absolutely a heroic deed—a person giving his life for his own people, for example.

  MOYERS: Ah, yes. The German soldier who dies—

  CAMPBELL: —is as much a hero as the American who was sent over there to kill him.

  MOYERS: So does heroism have a moral objective?

  CAMPBELL: 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.

  MOYERS: That’s a different angle on heroes from what I got as a young boy, when I read the story of Prometheus going after fire and bringing it back, benefiting humanity and suffering for it.

  CAMPBELL: Yes, Prometheus brings fire to mankind and consequently civilization. The fire theft, by the way, is a universal mythic theme. Often, it’s a trickster animal or bird that steals the fire and then passes it along to a relay team of birds or animals who run with it. Sometimes the animals are burned by the flames as they pass the fire along, and this is said to account for their different colorings. The fire theft is a very popular, worldwide story.

  MOYERS: The people in each culture are trying to explain where fire came from?

  CAMPBELL: The story isn’t really trying to explain it, it has to do more with the value of fire. The fire theft sets man apart from the animals. When you’re in the woods at night, you light a fire, and that keeps the animals away. You can see their eyes shining, but they’re outside the fire range.

  MOYERS: So they’re not telling the story just to inspire others or to make a moral point.

  CAMPBELL: No, it’s to evaluate the fire, its importance to us, and to say something about what has set man apart from the beasts.

  MOYERS: Does your study of mythology lead you to conclude that a single human quest, a standard pattern of human aspiration and thought, constitutes for all mankind something that we have in common, whether we lived a million years ago or will live a thousand years from now?

  CAMPBELL: There’s a certain type of myth which one might call the vision quest, going in quest of a boon, a vision, which has the same form in every mythology. That is the thing that I tried to present in the first book I wrote, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you’re in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as you move back into your social world again. That’s not an easy thing to do.

  MOYERS: So the hero goes for something, he doesn’t just go along for the ride, he’s not simply an adventurer?

  CAMPBELL: There are both kinds of heroes, some that choose to undertake the journey and some that don’t. In one kind of adventure, the hero sets out responsibly and intentionally to perform the deed. For instance, Odysseus’ son Telemachus was told by Athena, “Go find your father.” That father quest is a major hero adventure for young people. That is the adventure of finding what your career is, what your nature is, what your source is. You undertake that intentionally. Or there is the legend of the Sumerian sky goddess, Inanna, who descended into the underworld and underwent death to bring her beloved back to life.

  Then there are adventures into which you are thrown—for example, being drafted into the army. You didn’t intend it, but you’re in now. You’ve undergone a death and resurrection, you’ve put on a uniform, and you’re another creature.

  One kind of hero that often appears in Celtic myths is the princely hunter, who has followed the lure of a deer into a range of forest that he has never been in before. The animal there undergoes a transformation, becoming the Queen of the Faerie Hills, or something of that kind. This is a type of adventure in which the hero has no idea what he is doing but suddenly finds himself in a transformed realm.

  MOYERS: Is the adventurer who takes that kind of trip a hero in the mythological sense?

  CAMPBELL: Yes, because he is always ready for it. In these stories, the adventure that the hero is ready for is the one he gets. The adventure is symbolically a manifestation of his character. Even the landscape and the conditions of the environment match his readiness.

  MOYERS: In George Lucas’ Star Wars, Solo begins as a mercenary and ends up a hero, coming in at the last to save Luke Skywalker.

  CAMPBELL: Yes. There Solo has done the hero act of sacrificing himself for another.

  MOYERS: Do you think that a hero is created out of guilt? Was Solo guilty because he had abandoned Skywalker?

  CAMPBELL: It depends on what system of ideas you want to apply. Solo was a very practical guy, at least as he thought of himself, a materialist. But he was a compassionate human being at the same time and didn’t know it. The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he hadn’t known he possessed.

  MOYERS: So perhaps the hero lurks in each one of us when we don’t know it?

  CAMPBELL: 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.”

  Ortega y Gasset talks about the environment and the hero in his Meditations on Don Quixote. Don Quixote was the last hero of the Middle Ages. He rode out to encounter giants, but instead of giants, his environment produced windmills. Ortega points out that this story takes place about the time that a mechanistic interpretation of the world came in, so that the environment was no longer spiritually responsive to the hero. The hero is today running up against a hard world that is in no way responsive to his spiritual need.

  MOYERS: A windmill.

  CAMPBELL: Yes, but Quixote saved the adventure for himself by inventing a magician who had just transformed the giants he had gone forth to encounter into windmills. You can do that, too, if you have a poetic imagination. Earlier, though, it was not a mechanistic world in which the hero moved but a world alive and responsive to his spiritual readiness. Now it has become to such ah extent a sheerly mechanistic world, as interpreted through our physical sciences, Marxist sociology, and behavioristic psychology, that we’re nothing but a predictable pattern of wires responding to stimuli. This nineteenth-century interpretation has squeezed the freedom of the human will out of modern life.

  MOYERS: In the political sense, is there a danger that these myths of heroes teach us to look at the deeds of others as if we were in an amphitheater or coliseum or a mov
ie, watching others perform great deeds while consoling ourselves to impotence?

  CAMPBELL: I think this is something that has overtaken us only recently in this culture. The one who watches athletic games instead of participating in athletics is involved in a surrogate achievement. But when you think about what people are actually undergoing in our civilization, you realize it’s a very grim thing to be a modern human being. The drudgery of the lives of most of the people who have to support families—well, it’s a life-extinguishing affair.

  MOYERS: But I think I would take that to the plagues of the twelfth century and the fourteenth century—

  CAMPBELL: Their mode of life was much more active than ours. We sit in offices. It’s significant that in our civilization the problem of the middle-aged is conspicuous.

  MOYERS: You’re beginning to get personal!

  CAMPBELL: I’m beyond middle age, so I know a little bit about this. Something that’s characteristic of our sedentary lives is that there is or may be intellectual excitement, but the body is not in it very much. So you have to engage intentionally in mechanical exercises, the daily dozen and so forth. I find it very difficult to enjoy such things, but there it is. Otherwise, your whole body says to you, “Look, you’ve forgotten me entirely. I’m becoming just a clogged stream.”

  MOYERS: Still, it’s feasible to me that these stories of heroes could become sort of a tranquilizer, invoking in us the benign passivity of watching instead of acting. And the other side of it is that our world seems drained of spiritual values. People feel impotent. To me, that’s the curse of modern society, the impotence, the ennui that people feel, the alienation of people from the world order around them. Maybe we need some hero who will give voice to our deeper longing.