The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

  In the first temptation, the Lord of Lust displayed his three beautiful daughters before the Buddha. Their names were Desire, Fulfillment, and Regrets—Future, Present, and Past. But the Buddha, who had already disengaged himself from attachment to his sensual character, was not moved.

  Then the Lord of Lust turned himself into the Lord of Death and flung at the Buddha all the weapons of an army of monsters. But the Buddha had found in himself that still point within, which is of eternity, untouched by time. So again, he was not moved, and the weapons flung at him turned into flowers of worship.

  Finally the Lord of Lust and Death transformed himself into the Lord of Social Duty and argued, “Young man, haven’t you read the morning papers? Don’t you know what there is to be done today?” The Buddha responded by simply touching the earth with the tips of the fingers of his right hand. Then the voice of the goddess mother of the universe was heard, like thunder rolling on the horizon, saying, “This, my beloved son, has already so given of himself to the world that there is no one here to be ordered about. Give up this nonsense.” Whereupon the elephant on which the Lord of Social Duty was riding bowed in worship of the Buddha, and the entire company of the Antagonist dissolved like a dream. That night, the Buddha achieved illumination, and for the next fifty years remained in the world as teacher of the way to the extinction of the bondages of egoism.

  Now, those first two temptations—of desire and of fear—are the same that Adam and Eve are shown to have experienced in the extraordinary painting by Titian (now in the Prado), conceived when he was ninety-four years old. The tree is, of course, the mythological world axis, at the point where time and eternity, movement and rest, are at one, and around which all things revolve. It is here represented only in its temporal aspect, as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, profit and loss, desire and fear. At the right is Eve, who sees the tempter in the form of a child, offering the apple, and she is moved by desire. Adam, however, from the opposite point of view, sees the serpent-legs of the ambiguous tempter and is touched with fear. Desire and fear: these are the two emotions by which all life in the world is governed. Desire is the bait, death is the hook.

  Adam and Eve were moved; the Buddha was not. Eve and Adam brought forth life and were cursed of God; the Buddha taught release from life’s fear.

  MOYERS: And yet with the child—with life—come danger, fear, suffering?

  CAMPBELL: Here I am now, in my eighties, and I’m writing a work that is to be of several volumes. I want very much to live until I finish this work. I want that child. So that puts me in fear of death. If I had no desire to complete that book, I wouldn’t mind dying. Now, both the Buddha and Christ found salvation beyond death, and returned from the wilderness to choose and instruct disciples, who then brought their message to the world.

  The messages of the great teachers—Moses, the Buddha, Christ, Mohammed—differ greatly. But their visionary journeys are much the same. At the time of his election, Mohammed was an illiterate camel-caravan master. But every day he would leave his home in Mecca and go out to a mountain cave to meditate. One day a voice called to him, “Write!” and he listened, and we have the Koran. It’s an old, old story.

  MOYERS: In each case receivers of the boon have done some rather grotesque things with their interpretation of the hero’s message.

  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. It isn’t always so much that the world doesn’t want the gift, but that it doesn’t know how to receive it and how to institutionalize it—

  MOYERS: —how to keep it, how to renew it.

  CAMPBELL: Yes, how to help keep it going.

  MOYERS: I’ve always liked that image of life being breathed back into the dry bones, back into the ruins and the relics.

  CAMPBELL: There is a kind of secondary hero to revitalize the tradition. This hero reinterprets the tradition and makes it valid as a living experience today instead of a lot of outdated clichés. This has to be done with all traditions.

  MOYERS: So many of the religions began with their own hero stories. The whole of the Orient has been blessed with the teaching of the good law brought back by Buddha, and the Occident has been blessed by the laws Moses brought back from Sinai. The tribal or local heroes perform their deeds for a single folk, and universal heroes like Mohammed, Jesus, and Buddha bring the message from afar. These heroes of religion came back with the wonder of God, not with a blueprint of God,

  CAMPBELL: Well, you find an awful lot of laws in the Old Testament.

  MOYERS: 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.

  CAMPBELL: That’s the reduction of mythology to theology. Mythology is very fluid. Most of the myths are self-contradictory. You may even find four or five myths in a given culture, all giving different versions of the same mystery. Then theology comes along and says it has got to be just this way. Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible.

  Religion turns poetry into prose. God is literally up there, and this is literally what he thinks, and this is the way you’ve got to behave to get into proper relationship with that god up there.

  MOYERS: You don’t have to believe that there was a King Arthur to get the significance of those stories, but Christians say we have to believe there was a Christ, or the miracles don’t make sense.

  CAMPBELL: They are the same miracles that Elijah performed. There’s a whole body of miracles that float, like particles in the air, and a man of a certain type of achievement comes along, and all these things cluster around him. These stories of miracles let us know simply that this remarkable man preached of a spiritual order that is not to be identified with the merely physical order, so he could perform spiritual magic. It doesn’t follow that he actually did any of these things, although of course it’s possible. Three or four times I’ve seen what appear to be magical effects occur: men and women of power can do things that you wouldn’t think possible. We don’t really know what the limits of the possible might be. But the miracles of legend need not necessarily have been facts. The Buddha walked on water, as did Jesus. The Buddha ascended to heaven and returned.

  MOYERS: I remember a lecture in which you drew a circle, and you said, “That’s your soul.”

  CAMPBELL: Well, that was simply a pedagogical stunt. Plato has said somewhere that the soul is a circle. I took this idea to suggest on the blackboard the whole sphere of the psyche. Then I drew a horizontal line across the circle to represent the line of separation of the conscious and unconscious. The center from which all our energy comes I represented as a dot in the center of the circle, below the horizontal line. An infant has no intention that doesn’t come from its own little body requirements. That’s the way life begins. An infant is mostly the impulse of life. Then the mind comes along and has to figure out what it’s all about, what is it I want? And how do I get it?

  Now, above the horizontal line there is the ego, which I represent as a square: that aspect of our consciousness that we identify as our center. But, you see, it’s very much off center. We think that this is what’s running the show, but it isn’t.

  MOYERS: What’s running the show?

  CAMPBELL: 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.

  MOYERS: It seems fairly evident that w
e arrive here as infants with some kind of memory box down there.

  CAMPBELL: Well, it’s surprising how much memory there is down there. The infant knows what to do when a nipple’s in its mouth. There is a whole system of built-in action which, when we see it in animals, we call instinct. That is the biological ground. But then certain things can happen that make it repulsive or difficult or frightening or sinful to do some of the things that one is impelled to do, and that is when we begin to have our most troublesome psychological problems.

  Myths primarily are for fundamental instruction in these matters. Our society today is not giving us adequate mythic instruction of this kind, and so young people are finding it difficult to get their act together. I have a theory that, if you can find out where a person is blocked, it should be possible to find a mythological counterpart for that particular threshold problem.

  MOYERS: We hear people say, “Get in touch with yourself.” What do you take that to mean?

  CAMPBELL: It’s quite possible to be so influenced by the ideals and commands of your neighborhood that you don’t know what you really want and could be. I think that anyone brought up in an extremely strict, authoritative social situation is unlikely ever to come to the knowledge of himself.

  MOYERS: Because you’re told what to do.

  CAMPBELL: You’re told exactly what to do, every bit of the time. You’re in the army now. So this is what we do here. As a child in school, you’re always doing what you’re told to do, and so you count the days to your holidays, since that’s when you’re going to be yourself.

  MOYERS: What does mythology tell us about how to get in touch with that other self, that real self?

  CAMPBELL: The first instruction would be to follow the hints of the myth itself and of your guru, your teacher, who should know. It’s like an athlete going to a coach. The coach tells him how to bring his own energies into play. A good coach doesn’t tell a runner exactly how to hold his arms or anything like that. He watches him run, then helps him to correct his own natural mode. 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.

  A good way to learn is to find a book that seems to be dealing with the problems that you’re now dealing with. That will certainly give you some clues. In my own life I took my instruction from reading Thomas Mann and James Joyce, both of whom had applied basic mythological themes to the interpretation of the problems, questions, realizations, and concerns of young men growing up in the modern world. You can discover your own guiding-myth motifs through the works of a good novelist who himself understands these things.

  MOYERS: That’s what intrigues me. If we are fortunate, if the gods and muses are smiling, about every generation someone comes along to inspire the imagination for the journey each of us takes. In your day it was Joyce and Mann. In our day it often seems to be movies. Do movies create hero myths? Do you think, for example, that a movie like Star Wars fills some of that need for a model of the hero?

  CAMPBELL: I’ve heard youngsters use some of George Lucas’ terms—“the Force” and “the dark side.” So it must be hitting somewhere. It’s a good sound teaching, I would say.

  MOYERS: I think that explains in part the success of Star Wars. It wasn’t just the production value that made that such an exciting film to watch, it was that it came along at a time when people needed to see in recognizable images the clash of good and evil. They needed to be reminded of idealism, to see a romance based upon selflessness rather than selfishness.

  CAMPBELL: The fact that the evil power is not identified with any specific nation on this earth means you’ve got an abstract power, which represents a principle, not a specific historical situation. The story has to do with an operation of principles, not of this nation against that. The monster masks that are put on people in Star Wars represent the real monster force in the modern world. When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face.

  MOYERS: What’s the significance of that?

  CAMPBELL: 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.

  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.

  MOYERS: When I took our two sons to see Star Wars, they did the same thing the audience did at that moment when the voice of Ben Kenobi says to Skywalker in the climactic moment of the last fight, “Turn off your computer, turn off your machine and do it yourself, follow your feelings, trust your feelings.” And when he did, he achieved success, and the audience broke out into applause.

  CAMPBELL: Well, you see, that movie communicates. It is in a language that talks to young people, and that’s what counts. It asks, Are you going to be a person of heart and humanity—because that’s where the life is, from the heart—or are you going to do whatever seems to be required of you by what might be called “intentional power”? When Ben Kenobi says, “May the Force be with you,” he’s speaking of the power and energy of life, not of programmed political intentions.

  MOYERS: I was intrigued by the definition of the Force. Ben Kenobi says, “The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together.” And I’ve read in The Hero with a Thousand Faces similar descriptions of the world navel, of the sacred place, of the power that is at the moment of creation.

  CAMPBELL: Yes, of course, the Force moves from within. But the force of the Empire is based on an intention to overcome and master. Star Wars is not a simple morality play, it has to do with the powers of life as they are either fulfilled or broken and suppressed through the action of man.

  MOYERS: The first time I saw Star Wars, I thought, “This is a very old story in a very new costume.” The story of the young man called to adventure, the hero going out facing the trials and ordeals, and coming back after his victory with a boon for the community—

  CAMPBELL: Certainly Lucas was using standard mythological figures. The old man as the adviser made me think of a Japanese sword master. I’ve known some of those people, and Ben Kenobi has a bit of their character.

  MOYERS: What does the sword master do?

  CAMPBELL: He is a total expert in swordsmanship. The Oriental cultivation of the martial arts goes beyond anything I’ve ever encountered in American gymnasiums. There is a psychological as well as a physiological technique that go together there. This character in Star Wars has that quality.

  MOYERS: There’s something mythological, too, in that the hero is helped by a stranger who shows up and gives him some instrument—

  CAMPBELL: He gives him not only a physical instrument but a psychological commitment and a psychological center. The commitment goes past your mere intention system. You are one with the event.

  MOYERS: My favorite scene was when they were in the garbage compactor, and the walls were closing in, and I thought, “That’s like the belly of the whale tha
t swallowed Jonah.”

  CAMPBELL: That’s where they were, down in the belly of the whale.

  MOYERS: What’s the mythological significance of the belly?

  CAMPBELL: The belly is the dark place where digestion takes place and new energy is created. The story of Jonah in the whale is an example of a mythic theme that is practically universal, of the hero going into a fish’s belly and ultimately coming out again, transformed.

  MOYERS: Why must the hero do that?

  CAMPBELL: It’s a descent into the dark. Psychologically, the whale represents the power of life locked in the unconscious. Metaphorically, water is the unconscious, and the creature in the water is the life or energy of the unconscious, which has overwhelmed the conscious personality and must be disempowered, overcome and controlled.

  In the first stage of this kind of adventure, the hero leaves the realm of the familiar, over which he has some measure of control, and comes to a threshold, let us say the edge of a lake or sea, where a monster of the abyss comes to meet him. There are then two possibilities. In a story of the Jonah type, the hero is swallowed and taken into the abyss to be later resurrected—a variant of the death-and-resurrection theme. The conscious personality here has come in touch with a charge of unconscious energy which it is unable to handle and must now suffer all the trails and revelations of a terrifying night-sea journey, while learning how to come to terms with this power of the dark and emerge, at last, to a new way of life.

  The other possibility is that the hero, on encountering the power of the dark, may overcome and kill it, as did Siegfried and St. George when they killed the dragon. But as Siegfried learned, he must then taste the dragon blood, in order to take to himself something of that dragon power. When Siegfried has killed the dragon and tasted the blood, he hears the song of nature. He has transcended his humanity and reassociated himself with the powers of nature, which are the powers of our life, and from which our minds remove us.