The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

  You see, there are two ways of thinking “I am God.” If you think, “I here, in my physical presence and in my temporal character, am God,” then you are mad and have short-circuited the experience. You are God, not in your ego, but in your deepest being, where you are at one with the nondual transcendent.

  MOYERS: Somewhere you say that we can become savior figures to those in our circle—our children, our wives, our loved ones, our neighbors—but never the Savior. You say we can be mother and father but never the Mother and the Father. That’s a recognition of limitation, isn’t it?

  CAMPBELL: Yes, it is.

  MOYERS: What do you think about the Savior Jesus?

  CAMPBELL: We just don’t know very much about Jesus. All we know are four contradictory texts that purport to tell us what he said and did.

  MOYERS: Written many years after he lived.

  CAMPBELL: Yes, but in spite of this, I think we may know approximately what Jesus said. I think the sayings of Jesus are probably pretty close to the originals. The main teaching of Christ, for example, is, Love your enemies.

  MOYERS: How do you love your enemy without condoning what the enemy does, without accepting his aggression?

  CAMPBELL: I’ll tell you how to do that: do not pluck the mote from your enemy’s eyes, but pluck the beam from your own. No one is in a position to disqualify his enemy’s way of life.

  MOYERS: Do you think Jesus today would be a Christian?

  CAMPBELL: Not the kind of Christian we know. Perhaps some of the monks and nuns who are really in touch with high spiritual mysteries would be of the sort that Jesus was.

  MOYERS: So Jesus might not have belonged to the Church militant?

  CAMPBELL: There’s nothing militant about Jesus. I don’t read anything like that in any of the gospels. Peter drew his sword and cut off the servant’s ear, and Jesus said, “Put back thy sword, Peter.” But Peter has had his sword out and at work ever since.

  I’ve lived through the twentieth century, and I know what I was told as a boy about a people who weren’t yet and never had been our enemies. In order to represent them as potential enemies, and to justify our attack upon them, a campaign of hatred, misrepresentation, and denigration was launched, of which the echoes ring to this day.

  MOYERS: And yet we’re told God is love. You once took the saying of Jesus, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust”—you once took this to be the highest, the noblest, the boldest of the Christian teachings. Do you still feel that way?

  CAMPBELL: I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.

  MOYERS: I’ll tell you what the most gripping scripture in the Christian New Testament is for me: “I believe. Help thou my unbelief.” I believe in this ultimate reality, that I can and do experience it. But I don’t have answers to my questions. I believe in the question, Is there a God?

  CAMPBELL: A couple of years ago, I had a very amusing experience. I was in the New York Athletic Club swimming pool, where I was introduced to a priest who was a professor at one of our Catholic universities. So after I had had my swim, I came and sat in a lounging chair in what we call the “horizontal athlete” position, and the priest, who was beside me, asked, “Now, Mr. Campbell, are you a priest?”

  I answered, “No, Father.”

  He asked, “Are you a Catholic?”

  I answered, “I was, Father.”

  Then he asked—and I think it interesting that he phrased the question in this way—“Do you believe in a personal god?”

  “No, Father,” I said.

  And he replied, “Well, I suppose there is no way to prove by logic the existence of a personal god.”

  “If there were, Father,” said I, “what then would be the value of faith?”

  “Well, Mr. Campbell,” said the priest quickly, “it’s nice to have met you.” And he was off. I felt I had executed a jujitsu throw.

  But that was an illuminating conversation to me. The fact that a Catholic father had asked, “Do you believe in a personal god?” meant to me that he also recognized the possibility of an impersonal god, namely, a transcendent ground or energy in itself. The idea of Buddha consciousness is of an immanent, luminous consciousness that informs all things and all lives. We unthinkingly live by fragments of that consciousness, fragments of that energy. But the religious way of life is to live not in terms of the self-interested intentions of this particular body at this particular time but in terms of the insight of that larger consciousness.

  There is an important passage in the recently discovered Gnostic Gospel According to St. Thomas: “ ‘When will the kingdom come?’ Christ’s disciples ask.” In Mark 13, I think it is, we read that the end of the world is about to come. That is to say, a mythological image—that of the end of the world—is there taken as predicting an actual, physical, historical fact to be. But in Thomas’ version, Jesus replies: “The kingdom of the Father will not come by expectation. The kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it”—so I look at you now in that sense, and the radiance of the presence of the divine is known to me through you.

  MOYERS: Through me?

  CAMPBELL: You, sure. When Jesus says, “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am and I shall be he,” he’s talking from the point of view of that being of beings, which we call the Christ, who is the being of all of us. Anyone who lives in relation to that is as Christ. Anyone who brings into his life the message of the Word is equivalent to Jesus, that’s the sense of that.

  MOYERS: So that’s what you mean when you say, “I am radiating God to you.”

  CAMPBELL: You are, yes.

  MOYERS: And you to me?

  CAMPBELL: And I am speaking this seriously.

  MOYERS: I take it seriously. I do sense that there is divinity in the other.

  CAMPBELL: Not only that, but what you represent in this conversation and what you’re trying to bring out is a realization of these spiritual principles. So you are the vehicle. You are radiant of the spirit.

  MOYERS: Is this true for everyone?

  CAMPBELL: It is true for everyone who has reached in his life the level of the heart.

  MOYERS: You really believe there is a geography of the psyche?

  CAMPBELL: This is metaphorical language, but you can say that some people are living on the level of the sex organs, and that’s all they’re living for. That’s the meaning of life. This is Freud’s philosophy, is it not? Then you come to the Adlerian philosophy of the will to power, that all of life is centered on obstructions and overcoming the obstructions. Well, sure, that’s a perfectly good life, and those are forms of divinity also. But they are on the animal level. Then there comes another kind of life, which involves giving oneself to others one way or another. This is the one that’s symbolized in the opening of the heart.

  MOYERS: What is the source of that life?

  CAMPBELL: It must be a recognition of your life in the other, of the one life in the two of us. God is an image for that one life. We ask ourselves where this one life comes from, and people who think everything has to have been made by somebody will think, “Well, God made it.” So God’s the source of all this.

  MOYERS: Well then, what is religion?

  CAMPBELL: The word “religion” means religio, linking back. If we say it is the one life in both of us, then my separate life has been linked to the one life, religio, linked back. This has become symbolized in the images of religion, which represent that connecting link.

  MOYERS: Jung, the famous psychologist, says that one of the most powerful religious symbols is the circle. He says that the circle is one of the great primordial images of mankind and that, in considering the symbol of the circle, we are analyzing the self. What do you make of that?

  CAMPBELL: The whole world is a circle. All of these
circular images reflect the psyche, so there may be some relationship between these architectural designs and the actual structuring of our spiritual functions.

  When a magician wants to work magic, he puts a circle around himself, and it is within this bounded circle, this hermetically sealed-off area, that powers can be brought into play that are lost outside the circle.

  MOYERS: I remember reading about an Indian chief who said, “When we pitch camp, we pitch a camp in a circle. When the eagle builds a nest, the nest is in a circle. When we look at the horizon, the horizon is in a circle.” Circles were very important to some Indians, weren’t they?

  CAMPBELL: Yes. But they’re also in much that we’ve inherited from Sumerian mythology. We’ve inherited the circle with the four cardinal points and three hundred and sixty degrees. The official Sumerian year was three hundred and sixty days with five holy days that don’t count, which are outside of time and in which they had ceremonies relating their society to the heavens. Now we’re losing this sense of the circle in relation to time, because we have digital time, where you just have time buzzing by. Out of the digital you get the sense of the flow of time. At Penn Station in New York, there’s a clock with the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the tenths of seconds, and the hundredths of seconds. When you see the hundredths of a second buzzing by, you realize how time is running through you.

  The circle, on the other hand, represents totality. Everything within the circle is one thing, which is encircled, enframed. That would be the spatial aspect. But the temporal aspect of the circle is that you leave, go somewhere, and always come back. God is the alpha and the omega, the source and the end. The circle suggests immediately a completed totality, whether in time or in space.

  MOYERS: No beginning, no end.

  CAMPBELL: Round and round and round. Take the year, for example. When November rolls around, we have Thanksgiving again. Then December comes, and we have Christmas again. Not only does the month roll around again, but also the moon cycle, the day cycle. We’re reminded of this when we look at our watches and see the cycle of time. It’s the same hour, but another day.

  MOYERS: China used to call itself the Kingdom of the Center, and the Aztecs had a similar saying about their own culture. I suppose every culture using the circle as the cosmological order puts itself at the center. Why do you suppose the circle became so universally symbolic?

  CAMPBELL: Because it’s experienced all the time—in the day, in the year, in leaving home to go on your adventure—hunting or whatever it may be—and coming back home. Then there is a deeper experience, too, the mystery of the womb and the tomb. When people are buried, it’s for rebirth. That’s the origin of the burial idea. You put someone back into the womb of mother earth for rebirth. Very early images of the Goddess show her as a mother receiving the soul back again.

  MOYERS: When I read your works—The Masks of God, or The Way of the Animal Powers, or The Mythic Image—I often come across images of the circle, whether it’s in magical designs or in architecture, both ancient and modern; whether it’s in the dome-shaped temples of India or the Paleolithic rock engravings of Rhodesia or the calendar stones of the Aztecs or the ancient Chinese bronze shields or the visions of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, who talks about the wheel in the sky. I keep coming across this image. And this ring, my wedding ring, is a circle, too. What does that symbolize?

  CAMPBELL: That depends on how you understand marriage. The word “sym-bol” itself means two things put together. One person has one half, the other the other half, and then they come together. Recognition comes from putting the ring together, the completed circle. This is my marriage, this is the merging of my individual life in a larger life that is of two, where the two are one. The ring indicates that we are in one circle together.

  MOYERS: When a new pope is installed, he takes the fisherman’s ring—another circle.

  CAMPBELL: That particular ring is symbolic of Jesus calling the apostles, who were fishermen. He said, “I will make you fishers of men.” This is an old motif that is earlier than Christianity. Orpheus is called “The Fisher,” who fishes men, who are living as fish in the water, out up into the light. It’s an old idea of the metamorphosis of the fish into man. The fish nature is the crudest animal nature of our character, and the religious line is intended to pull you up out of that.

  MOYERS: A new king or new queen of England is given the coronation ring.

  CAMPBELL: Yes, because there’s another aspect of the ring—it is a bondage. As king, you are bound to a principle. You are living not simply your own way. You have been marked. In initiation rites, when people are sacrified and tattooed, they are bonded to another and to the society.

  MOYERS: Jung speaks of the circle as a mandala.

  CAMPBELL: “Mandala” is the Sanskrit word for “circle,” but a circle that is coordinated or symbolically designed so that it has the meaning of a cosmic order. When composing mandalas, you are trying to coordinate your personal circle with the universal circle. In a very elaborate Buddhist mandala, for example, you have the deity in the center as the power source, the illumination source. The peripheral images would be manifestations or aspects of the deity’s radiance.

  In working out a mandala for yourself, you draw a circle and then think of the different impulse systems and value systems in your life. Then you compose them and try to find out where your center is. Making a mandala is a discipline for pulling all those scattered aspects of your life together, for finding a center and ordering yourself to it. You try to coordinate your circle with the universal circle.

  MOYERS: To be at the center?

  CAMPBELL: At the center, yes. For instance, among the Navaho Indians, healing ceremonies are conducted through sand paintings, which are mostly mandalas on the ground. The person who is to be treated moves into the mandala as a way of moving into a mythological context that he will be identifying with—he identifies himself with the symbolized power. This idea of sand painting with mandalas, and their use for meditation purposes, appears also in Tibet. Tibetan monks practice sand painting, drawing cosmic images to represent the forces of the spiritual powers that operate in our lives.

  MOYERS: There is some effort, apparently, to try to center one’s life with the center of the universe—

  CAMPBELL: —by way of mythological imagery, yes. The image helps you to identify with the symbolized force. You can’t very well expect a person to identify with an undifferentiated something or other. But when you give it qualities that point toward certain realizations, the person can follow.

  MOYERS: There is one theory that the Holy Grail represented the center of perfect harmony, the search for perfection, for totality and unity.

  CAMPBELL: There are a number of sources for the Holy Grail. One is that there is a cauldron of plenty in the mansion of the god of the sea, down in the depths of the unconscious. It is out of the depths of the unconscious that the energies of life come to us. This cauldron is the inexhaustible source, the center, the bubbling spring from which all life proceeds.

  MOYERS: Do you think that is the unconscious?

  CAMPBELL: Not only the unconscious but also the vale of the world. Things are coming to life around you all the time. There is a life pouring into the World, and it pours from an inexhaustible source.

  MOYERS: Now, what do you make of that—that in very different cultures, separated by time and space, the same imagery emerges?

  CAMPBELL: This speaks for certain powers in the psyche that are common to all mankind. Otherwise you couldn’t have such detailed correspondences.

  MOYERS: So if you find that many different cultures tell the story of creation, or the story of a virgin birth, or the story of a savior who comes and dies and is resurrected, they are saying something about what is inside us, and our need to understand.

  CAMPBELL: That’s right. 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 live
s.

  MOYERS: So when a scripture talks about man being made in God’s image, it’s talking about certain qualities that every human being possesses, no matter what that person’s religion or culture or geography or heritage?

  CAMPBELL: God would be the ultimate elementary idea of man.

  MOYERS: The primal need.

  CAMPBELL: And we are all made in the image of God. That is the ultimate archetype of man.

  MOYERS: Eliot speaks about the still point of the turning world, where motion and stasis are together, the hub where the movement of time and the stillness of eternity are together.

  CAMPBELL: That’s the inexhaustible center that is represented by the Grail. When life comes into being, it is neither afraid nor desiring, it is just becoming. Then it gets into being, and it begins to be afraid and desiring. When you can get rid of fear and desire and just get back to where you’re becoming, you’ve hit the spot. Goethe says godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in what has already become and set fast. So reason is concerned, he states, with striving toward the divine through the becoming and the changing, while intelligence makes use of the set fast, what is knowable, known, and so to be used for the shaping of a life. But the goal of your quest for knowledge of yourself is to be found at that burning point in yourself, that becoming thing in yourself, which is innocent of the goods and evils of the world as already become, and therefore desireless and fearless. That is the condition of a warrior going into battle with perfect courage. That is life in movement. That is the essence of the mysticism of war as well as of a plant growing. I think of grass—you know, every two weeks a chap comes out with a lawnmower and cuts it down. Suppose the grass were to say, “Well, for Pete’s sake, what’s the use if you keep getting cut down this way?” Instead, it keeps on growing. That’s the sense of the energy of the center. That’s the meaning of the image of the Grail, of the inexhaustible fountain, of the source. The source doesn’t care what happens once it gives into being. It’s the giving and coming into being that counts, and that’s the becoming life point in you. That’s what all these myths are concerned to tell you.