The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

  CAMPBELL: That’s the information that one gets from being married. That’s the way you get in touch with your feminine side.

  MOYERS: But what happens to this self-discovery in love when you meet someone else, and you suddenly feel, “I know that person,” or “I want to know that person”?

  CAMPBELL: That’s very mysterious. It’s almost as though the future life that you’re going to have with that person has already told you, This is the one whom you will have that life with.

  MOYERS: Is that something coming from within our inventory of memories that we don’t understand and don’t recognize? Reaching out and being touched by that person in a way—

  CAMPBELL: It’s almost as though you were reacting to the future. It’s talking to you from what is to be. This has to do with the mystery of time and the transcendence of time. But I think we’re touching a very deep mystery here.

  MOYERS: Do you in your own life just leave it there as a mystery? Or do you think that one can successfully have a marriage and a relationship other than the marriage?

  CAMPBELL: Technically, one could say, “Why, yes, of course.”

  MOYERS: But it seems that whatever one gives to the love affair is barred from the marriage relationship and diminishes the loyalty to the relationship.

  CAMPBELL: I think one has to work out these things oneself. There could be a love seizure after you have a commitment to marriage, and it could be such a seizure that not responding to it might—what can I say?—dull the whole experience of the vitality of love.

  MOYERS: I think that’s the core of the question. If the eyes scout for the heart and bring back that which the heart passionately desires, is the heart only going to desire once?

  CAMPBELL: Love does not immunize the person to other relationships, let me just say that. But whether one could have a full-fledged love affair, I mean a real full-fledged love affair, and at the same time be loyal to the marriage—well, I don’t think that could happen now.

  MOYERS: Because?

  CAMPBELL: It would break off. But loyalty doesn’t forbid you to have an affectionate, even a loving relationship to another person of the opposite sex. The way in which the knightly romances describe the tenderness of the relationships to other women, of one who is being loyal to his own love, is very graceful and sensitive.

  MOYERS: The troubadours would sing to their ladies even if there was very little hope of furthering a relationship with them.

  CAMPBELL: Yes.

  MOYERS: Now, does mythology say anything about whether it is better to have loved and lost?

  CAMPBELL: Mythology in a general way doesn’t really deal with the problem of personal, individual love. One marries the one that one is allowed to marry, you know. If you belong to that clan, then you can marry that one but not that one, and so forth.

  MOYERS: Then what does love have to do with morality? CAMPBELL: Violates it. MOYERS: Violates it?

  CAMPBELL: Yes. Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in terms of the socially approved manners of life. That’s why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order. It is a higher spiritual experience than that of socially organized marriage.

  MOYERS: When we say God is love, does that have anything to do with romantic love? Does mythology ever link romantic love and God?

  CAMPBELL: That’s what it did do. Love was a divine visitation, and that’s why it was superior to marriage. That was the troubadour idea. If God is love, well then, love is God. Meister Eckhart said, “Love knows no pain.” And that’s exactly what Tristan meant when he said, “I’m willing to accept the pains of hell for my love.”

  MOYERS: But you’ve been saying that love involves suffering.

  CAMPBELL: That is the other idea. Tristan was experiencing love—Meister Eckhart was talking about it. The pain of love is not the other kind of pain, it is the pain of life. Where your pain is, there is your life, you might say.

  MOYERS: There’s that passage in Corinthians where Paul says, “Love beareth all things, endureth all things.”

  CAMPBELL: That’s the same thing.

  MOYERS: And yet one of my favorite myths is the story from Persia that Satan was condemned to hell because he loved God so much.

  CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s a basic Muslim idea about Satan being God’s greatest lover. There are a number of ways of thinking about Satan, but this is based on the question, Why was Satan thrown into hell? The standard story is that, when God created the angels, he told them to bow to none but himself. Then he created man, whom he regarded as a higher form than the angels, and he asked the angels to serve man. And Satan would not bow to man.

  Now, this is interpreted in the Christian tradition, as I recall from my boyhood instruction, as being the egotism of Satan. He would not bow to man. But in the Persian story, he could not bow to man because of his love for God—he could bow only to God. God had changed his signals, do you see? But Satan had so committed himself to the first set of signals that he could not violate those, and in his—I don’t know if Satan has a heart or not—but in his mind, he could not bow to anyone but God, whom he loved. And then God says, “Get out of my sight.”

  Now, the worst of the pains of hell, insofar as hell has been described, is the absence of the Beloved, which is God. So how does Satan sustain the situation in hell? By the memory of the echo of God’s voice, when God said, “Go to hell.” That is a great sign of love.

  MOYERS: Well, it’s certainly true in life that the greatest hell one can know is to be separated from the one you love. That’s why I’ve liked the Persian myth. Satan is God’s lover—

  CAMPBELL: —and he is separated from God, and that’s the real pain of Satan.

  MOYERS: There’s another story from Persia about the first two parents.

  CAMPBELL: That’s a great one, yes. They were really one in the beginning and grew as a kind of plant. But then they separated and became two, and begat children. And they loved the children so much that they ate them up. God thought, “Well, this can’t go on.” So he reduced parental love by something like ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent, so parents wouldn’t eat up their children.

  MOYERS: What was that myth—

  CAMPBELL: I’ve heard people say, “This is such a delicious little thing, I could eat it up.”

  MOYERS: The power of love?

  CAMPBELL: The power of love.

  MOYERS: So intense it had to be reduced.

  CAMPBELL: Yes. I saw a picture once of a mouth wide open swallowing more, and a heart was in it. That’s the kind of love that eats you up. That’s the kind of love that mothers have to learn to reduce.

  MOYERS: Lord, teach me when to let go.

  CAMPBELL: Yes. There were in India little rituals to help mothers let go, particularly of their sons. The guru, the chaplain of the family, would come and ask the mother to give him that which she most prized. And it might be some very valuable jewel or something. And then there were these exercises, where the mother would be learning to give up that which she most prized. And then, finally, she would have to give up her son.

  MOYERS: So joy and pain are in love.

  CAMPBELL: Yes. Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain.

  MOYERS: But love bears all things.

  CAMPBELL: Love itself is a pain, you might say—the pain of being truly alive.

  VIII

  MASKS

  OF ETERNITY

  The images of myth are reflections of the spiritual potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating these, we evoke their powers in our own lives.

  MOYERS: As you’ve moved among various world views, dipping in and out of cultures, civilizations, and religions, have you found something in common in every culture that creates the need for God?

  CAMPBELL: Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There is
a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: “When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity.” Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence. People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something there that is much greater than the human dimension. Man’s tendency, however, is to personify such experiences, to anthropomorphize natural forces.

  Our way of thinking in the West sees God as the final source or cause of the energies and wonder of the universe. But in most Oriental thinking, and in primal thinking, also, the gods are rather manifestations and purveyors of an energy that is finally impersonal. They are not its source. The god is the vehicle of its energy. And the force or quality of the energy that is involved or represented determines the character and function of the god. There are gods of violence, there are gods of compassion, there are gods that unite the two worlds of the unseen and the seen, and there are gods that are simply the protectors of kings or nations in their war campaigns. These are all personifications of the energies in play. But the ultimate source of the energies remains a mystery.

  MOYERS: Doesn’t this make fate a kind of anarchy, a continuing war among principalities?

  CAMPBELL: Yes, as it is in life itself. Even in our minds—when it comes to making a decision, there will be a war. In acting in relationship to other people, for example, there may be four or five possibilities. The influence of the dominant divinity in my mind will be what determines my decision. If my guiding divinity is brutal, my decision will be brutal, as well.

  MOYERS: What does that do to faith? You are a man of faith, of wonder, and—

  CAMPBELL: No, I don’t have to have faith, I have experience.

  MOYERS: What kind of experience?

  CAMPBELL: I have experience of the wonder of life. I have experience of love. I have experience of hatred, malice, and wanting to punch this guy in the jaw. From the point of view of symbolic imaging, those are different forces operating in my mind. One may think of them—wonder, love, hatred—as inspired by different divinities.

  When I was a little boy being brought up as a Roman Catholic, I was told I had a guardian angel on my right side and a tempting devil on my left, and that the decisions I made in life would depend on whether the devil or the angel had the greater influence upon me. As a boy, I concretized these thoughts, and I think my teachers did, too. We thought there was really an angel there, and that the angel was a fact, and that the devil was also a fact. But instead of regarding them as facts, I can now think of them as metaphors for the impulses that move and guide me.

  MOYERS: Where do these energies come from?

  CAMPBELL: From your own life, from the energies of your own body. The different organs in the body, including your head, are in conflict with each other.

  MOYERS: And your life comes from where?

  CAMPBELL: From the ultimate energy that is the life of the universe. And then do you say, “Well, there must be somebody generating that energy”? Why do you have to say that? Why can’t the ultimate mystery be impersonal?

  MOYERS: Can men and women live with an impersonality?

  CAMPBELL: Yes, they do all over the place. Just go east of Suez. You know there is this tendency in the West to anthropomorphize and accent the humanity of the gods, the personifications: Yahweh, for example, as either a god of wrath, of justice and punishment, or as a favoring god who is the support of your life, as we read, for example, in the Psalms. But in the East, the gods are much more elemental, much less human and much more like the powers of nature.

  MOYERS: When someone says, “Imagine God,” the child in our culture will say, “An old man in a long white robe with a beard.”

  CAMPBELL: In our culture, yes. It’s our fashion to think of God in masculine form, but many traditions think of divine power principally in female form.

  MOYERS: The idea is that you cannot imagine what you cannot personify. Do you think it’s possible to center the mind on what Plato called “thoughts immortal and divine”?

  CAMPBELL: Of course. That’s what a meditation is. Meditation means constantly thinking on a certain theme. It can be on any level. I don’t make a big split in my thinking between the physical and the spiritual. For example, meditation on money is a perfectly good meditation. And bringing up a family is a very important meditation. But there is an alone meditation, when you go into the cathedral, for example.

  MOYERS: So prayer is actually a meditation.

  CAMPBELL: Prayer is relating to and meditating on a mystery.

  MOYERS: Calling a power from within.

  CAMPBELL: There is a form of meditation you are taught in Roman Catholicism where you recite the rosary, the same prayer, over and over and over again. That pulls the mind in. In Sanskrit, this practice is called japa, “repetition of the holy name.” It blocks other interests out and allows you to concentrate on one thing, and then, depending on your own powers of imagination, to experience the profundity of this mystery.

  MOYERS: How does one have a profound experience?

  CAMPBELL: By having a profound sense of the mystery.

  MOYERS: But if God is the god we have only imagined, how can we stand in awe of our own creation?

  CAMPBELL: How can we be terrified by a dream? You have to break past your image of God to get through to the connoted illumination. The psychologist Jung has a relevant saying: “Religion is a defense against the experience of God.”

  The mystery has been reduced to a set of concepts and ideas, and emphasizing these concepts and ideas can short-circuit the transcendent, connoted experience. An intense experience of mystery is what one has to regard as the ultimate religious experience.

  MOYERS: There are many Christians who believe that; to find out who Jesus is, you have to go past the Christian faith, past the Christian doctrine, past the Christian Church—

  CAMPBELL: You have to go past the imagined image of Jesus. Such an image of one’s god becomes a final obstruction, one’s ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith.

  You know the idea of the ascent of the spirit through the different centers or archetypal stages of experience. One begins with the elementary animal experiences of hunger and greed, and then of sexual zeal, and on to physical mastery of one kind or another. These are all empowering stages of experience. But then, when the center of the heart is touched, and a sense of compassion awakened with another person or creature, and you realize that you and that other are in some sense creatures of the one life in being, a whole new stage of life in the spirit opens out. This opening of the heart to the world is what is symbolized mythologically as the virgin birth. It signifies the birth of a spiritual life in what was formerly an elementary human animal living for the merely physical aims of health, progeny, power, and a little fun.

  But now we come to something else. For to experience this sense of compassion, accord, or even identity with another, or with some ego-transcending principle that has become lodged in your mind as a good to be revered and served, is the beginning, once and for all, of the properly religious way of life and experience; and this may then lead to a life-consuming quest for a full experience of that one Being of beings of which all temporal forms are the reflections.

  Now, this ultimate ground of all being can be experienced in two senses, one as with form and the other as without and beyond form. When you experience your god as with form, there is your envisioning mind, and there is the god. There is a subject, and there is an object. But the ultimate mystical goal is to be united with one’s god. With that, duality is transcended and forms disappear. There is nobody there, no god, no you. Your mind, going past all concepts, has dissolved in identification with
the ground of your own being, because that to which the metaphorical image of your god refers is the ultimate mystery of your own being, which is the mystery of the being of the world as well. And so this is it.

  MOYERS: Of course the heart of the Christian faith is that God was in Christ, that these elemental forces you’re talking about embodied themselves in a human being who reconciled mankind to God.

  CAMPBELL: Yes, and the basic Gnostic and Buddhist idea is that that is true of you and me as well. Jesus was a historical person who realized in himself that he and what he called the Father were one, and he lived out of that knowledge of the Christhood of his nature.

  I remember, I was once giving a lecture in which I spoke about living out of the sense of the Christ in you, and a priest in the audience (as I was later told) turned to the woman beside him and whispered, “That’s blasphemy.”

  MOYERS: What did you mean by Christ in you?

  CAMPBELL: What I meant was that you must live not in terms of your own ego system, your own desires, but in terms of what you might call the sense of mankind—the Christ—in you. There is a Hindu saying, “None but a god can worship a god.” You have to identify yourself in some measure with whatever spiritual principle your god represents to you in order to worship him properly and live according to his word.

  MOYERS: In discussing the god within, the Christ within, the illumination or the awakening that comes within, isn’t there a danger of becoming narcissistic, of an obsession with self that leads to a distorted view of oneself and the world?

  CAMPBELL: That can happen, of course. That’s a kind of short-circuiting of the current. But the whole aim is to go past oneself, past one’s concept of oneself, to that of which one is but an imperfect manifestation. When you come out of a meditation, for example, you are supposed to end by yielding all the benefits, whatever they may be, to the world, to all living beings, not holding them to yourself.