Myths to Live By

by Joseph Campbell

  The mythical figure of Babel is in this connection doubly appropriate, since it was actually in the early city-states of Mesopotamia, ca. 3500 B.C., that the original foundations were laid of all higher (i.e., literate and monumental) civilization whatsoever; so that it was indeed from the Levant, and even specifically, those early temple cities of the towering ziggurats, that all branches of the one great tree of the four domains of civilization have stemmed. Moreover, it was there that the mythic forms of social organization came into being by which the individual in the Orient is to this day bound and restrained from the realization of a truly individual personal life. In the earlier, primitive societies of food-collecting hunters, foragers, and fishers, the precariously nurtured, nomadic social units were neither very large nor complex. The only divisions of labor were in terms of age and sex, with every man, woman, and even youngster pretty much in control of the entire cultural heritage. Every adult in such a context could—in terms at least of the local cultural model—become a total human being. Whereas with the rise and development in the ancient Near East, after ca. 7500 B.C., of comparatively well-to-do, settled communities supported by grain agriculture and stock-breeding, life became much more complex; and with the gradual increase of such communities both in number and in size, highly specialized departments of knowledge and professional skills became increasingly important. By 4500 B.C. there was a flourishing constellation of self-supporting villages throughout the Near East, and by 3500 B.C. those in the lower Tigris-Euphrates valley were becoming cities—the first cities in the history of the world. In these there were clearly distinguished governing and serving castes, wonderfully skilled specialist craftsmen, priestly orders, trading people, and so on; so that no one now could possibly hope to become a total human being. Each was but a part man. And accordingly, there appeared abruptly in the decorative arts of this period unmistakable signs of an attempt to symbolize the idea of a unification of disparate parts in relation to a whole.

  Already in the pottery styles of the middle fifth millennium B.C., for example, balanced geometrical organizations of a circular field make their appearance, with a binding figure in the center symbolizing the integrating principle: a rosette, a cross, or a swastika. In late symbolic compositions this central position was occupied by the figure of a god, and in the earliest city-states the same divinity was incarnate in the king; in Egypt, in the pharaoh. Moreover, not the king alone, but all the members of his court played in their lives symbolic roles, determined not by their personal wishes but by the game rules of a ritual pantomime of identification with heavenly bodies—very much as in the earlier, primitive stages of human cultural mutation the rituals had been imitative of the animal species or of the life-and-death cycles of plants.

  For, as has already been pointed out in the last chapter, it was in the early temple compounds of the Old Sumerian city-states, ca. 3500 B.C., that the priestly observers of the skies for omens first realized that the moon, the sun, and the five visible planets moved at mathematically determinable rates through the constellations. And it was then, as we have said, that the grandiose idea was conceived of a heavenly cosmic order, which should be reflected in the social order. Wearing symbolic crowns and in solemn costume, the king, his queen, and their courts duplicated in earthly mime the spectacle of celestial lights, and the force of their dedication to their roles would today be hardly credited, were it not for the astounding evidences brought to light by the late Sir Leonard Woolley from the “royal tombs” of the ancient moon-god’s holy city of Ur.

  Sir Leonard, as he tells, was excavating in the ancient temple cemetery of the old city from which Father Abraham is supposed to have taken his departure, when his men’s spades broke into an astonishing series of multiple graves, some containing as many as sixty-five individuals laid to rest in courtly array. One of the best-preserved was of a woman named Shub-ad, buried with her court of some twenty-five attendants directly above the entombment of a male personage named A-bar-gi, with whom sixty-five or so had been laid to rest. The richly attired Shub-ad had been brought into her tomb on a sledge drawn by asses; A-bar-gi, possibly her husband, in a wagon drawn by oxen. Both the animals and the human beings had been buried in the monstrous grave alive: the court ladies lying peacefully in rows, in court regalia, wearing hair ribbons of silver and gold, red cloaks with beaded cuffs, great lunate earrings, and multiple necklaces of lapis-lazuli and gold. The girl harpists’ skeleton hands were still resting on the harp strings—or where the harp strings once had been. And the instruments themselves suggested in form the body of a bull, with its beautiful golden bull’s head bearing a rich lapis-lazuli beard.

  Fig. 4.2 — Monster Slayer

  For this was a mythological bull: the divine lunar bull whose song of destiny had summoned these two willing companies—first of the buried king, then of his lady—to rebirth through death. And we know the name of the god of whom this bull was the animal vehicle. It was the great Near Eastern legendary god-king and universal savior Tammuz (Sumerian Dumuzi), the dates of whose annual death-and-resurrection festival are now assigned in our own mythic and ritual calendar, by the Synagogue to Passover, and by the Church to Good Friday and Easter.

  We do not know what the precise occasion may have been for the burial of these two courts. Similar burials have been registered, however, for every one of the archaic civilizations. In Egypt and in China tombs have been discovered containing as many as eight hundred or more entombed, and in fact the pharaohs of the first three dynasties even had two such post-mortem estates, one at Abydos in Upper Egypt, one at Memphis in Lower: a country and a town palace, so to speak, with as many as four hundred or more skeleton attendants in each.

  And now, just where, I should like to ask, is the individual in such a context? There is, in fact, in such a world, no such thing as an individual life, but only one great cosmic law by which all things are governed in their places. In Egyptian this law was known as ma’at, in Sumerian, as me; in Chinese it is tao; in Sanskrit, dharma. There is to be no individual choosing, willing, even thinking; no occasion to pause to ask oneself, “What is it I would now most like to do? What is it I would like to be?” One’s birth determines what one is to be, as well as what one is to think and to do. And the great point that I most want to bring out is that this early Bronze Age concept of a socially manifest cosmic order, to which every individual must uncritically submit if he is to be anything at all, is fundamental in the Orient—one way or another—to this day.

  The feminine present participle of the Sanskrit verb “to be” is satī, pronounced “suttee,” and refers to the character of the virtuous Hindu wife immolating herself on her deceased husband’s funeral pyre. In this selfless, thoughtless, dutiful act, fulfilling her social role, she has become something eternal, of eternal validity and life, undestroyed: that is to say, a wife. Any Indian wife refusing to fulfill her role to the end would be a-satī, a “non-being,” a mere nothing; for one’s life, one’s meaning, the whole sense of one’s existence on this earth is encompassed in the enactment and experience of one’s social role. Only the one absolutely faultless in fulfillment can be said most truly “to be.” And when we now look back to that dual multiple grave in the ancient royal cemetery of Ur—there indeed was already such a wife.

  But A-bar-gi himself, it would appear, had also been ritually slain. Indubitable evidences of an ancient custom of ritual regicide have been found over a great portion of the globe. Turn, for example, to almost any page of Sir James G. Frazer’s Golden Bough. The earliest god-kings were ritually slain every six years, eight years, or twelve, according to the various local orders; and with them the dignitaries of their courts, all casting off their bodies to be born again. It is a fantastic, noble, weirdly wonderful ideal, this of the individual who is nobody at all if not the incarnation, even unto death, of the one eternal, absolutely impersonal, cosmic law.

  And it is against this that the Occidental, or, more particularly, modern European, ideal of the indi
vidual must be measured.

  Fig. 4.3 — Masks of God

  2.

  Let me now, therefore, turn directly to the question of the European individual and, for a start, cite the observations of the Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung, throughout whose works the term “individuation” is used to designate the psychological process of achieving individual wholeness. Jung makes the point that in the living of our lives every one of us is required by his society to play some specific social role. In order to function in the world we are all continually enacting parts; and these parts Jung calls personae, from the Latin persona, meaning “mask, false face,” the mask worn by an actor on the Roman stage, through which he “sounded” (per-sonare, “to sound through”). One has to appear in some mask or other if one is to function socially at all; and even those who choose to reject such masks can only put on others, representing rejection, “Hell no!” or something of the sort. Many of the masks are playful, opportunistic, superficial; others, however, go deep, very deep, much deeper than we know. Just as every body consists of a head, two arms, a trunk, two legs, etc., so does every living person consist, among other features, of a personality, a deeply imprinted persona through which he is made known no less to himself than to others, and without which he would not be. It is silly, therefore, to say, for example, “Let’s take off our masks and be natural!” And yet—there are masks and masks. There are the masks of youth, the masks of age, the masks of the various social roles, and the masks also that we project upon others spontaneously, which obscure them, and to which we then react.

  For example, let us suppose that you have been chatting comfortably with the unknown gentleman sitting beside you in an airplane seat. A stewardess stops by and respectfully addresses him as “Senator.” When she leaves, you find that you are speaking to him with different feelings from those you had before, and not quite the same sense of ease. He has become for you what Jung has termed a “ mana-personality,” one charged with the magic of an imposing social mask, and you are talking now not simply to a person, but to a personage, a presence. And you have yourself become, furthermore, a subordinate personage or presence: a respectful American citizen conversing with a senator. The personae of the little scene will have changed—at least for your side of the dialogue. As far, however, as the Senator is concerned, he will still be the man he was before; and if he was putting on no airs then, he will be putting on no airs now.

  To become—in Jung’s terms—individuated, to live as a released individual, one has to know how and when to put on and to put off the masks of one’s various life roles. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” and when at home, do not keep on the mask of the role you play in the Senate chamber. But this, finally, is not easy, since some of the masks cut deep. They include judgment and moral values. They include one’s pride, ambition, and achievement. They include one’s infatuations. It is a common thing to be overly impressed by and attached to masks, either some mask of one’s own or the mana-masks of others. The work of individuation, however, demands that one should not be compulsively affected in this way. The aim of individuation requires that one should find and then learn to live out of one’s own center, in control of one’s for and against. And this cannot be achieved by enacting and responding to any general masquerade of fixed roles. For, as Jung has stated: “In the last analysis, every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can be called ‘individuation.’ All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of this alone makes sense of life.”2

  Which is precisely the opposite to the ideal enforced upon everyone—even the greatest saints and sages—in the great East, where the only thought is that one should become identified absolutely with the assigned mask or role of one’s social place, and then, when all assigned tasks shall have been perfectly fulfilled, erase oneself absolutely, slipping (as one famous image has it) like a dewdrop into the sea. For there—in contrast to the typically Western European idea of a destiny and character potential in each one of us, to be realized in our one lifetime as its “meaning” and “fulfillment”—the focus of concern is not the person but (as in the modern communist tyrant states) the established social order: not the unique, creative individual—who is regarded there as a menace—but his subjugation through identification with some local social archetype, and his inward quelling, simultaneously, of every impulse to an individual life. Education is indoctrination, or, as described today, the brainwash. The Brahmin is to be a Brahmin; the shoemaker, a shoemaker; the warrior, a warrior; the wife, a wife: nothing other, nothing less, and nothing more.

  Under such a dispensation the individual never comes to the knowledge of himself as anything but the more or less competent actor of a perfectly standard part. Whatever signs of a personality may have been promising in infancy will in a few brief years have disappeared, to be replaced by the features of a social archetype, a general standard mask, a mirage personality, or—as I think we should say of such a one today—a stuffed shirt. The ideal student in such a society is the one who accepts instruction without question and, blessed with the virtue of perfect faith in his authorized instructor, is avid to assimilate not only his codified information but also his mannerisms, criteria of judgment, and general image of the persona that the student is to become—and when I say “become,” that is what I mean; for there is to be nothing else remaining, no ego in our Western sense at all, with personal opinions, likes, dislikes, and unprecedented thoughts or aims.

  Fig. 4.4 — Beatrice Shows Paradise to Dante

  It is interesting to remark that throughout the great Divine Comedy of Dante, the visionary voyager through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven could recognize his deceased friends and talk to them of their lives. Likewise in the classical afterworlds of the Odyssey and Aeneid, Odysseus and Aeneas readily recognize and can talk with the shades of those recently dead. In the Orient, on the other hand, in the Hells and Heavens of the Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains, no such continuity of recognizable personal traits would have been found; for at death the mask of the earthly role is dropped and that of an afterlife assumed. The beings inhabiting the Hells wear demonic shapes; those in the Heavens, godly. And when the reincarnating nonentity again returns to this earth, it will assume still another mask, with no conscious recollection of any past. For whereas in the European sphere—whether in the classical epics and tragedies, Dante’s Divine Comedy, or Jung’s modern psychology of “individuation”—the focus of concern is the individual, who is born but once, lives but once, and is distinct in his willing, his thinking, and his doing from every other; in the whole great Orient of India, Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan the living entity is understood to be an immaterial transmigrant that puts on bodies and puts them off. You are not your body. You are not your ego. You are to think of these as delusory. And this fundamental distinction between the Oriental and our usual European concepts of the individual touches in its implications every aspect of social and moral as well as psychological, cosmological, and metaphysical thought.

  Fig. 4.5 — The Bliss of Your Own True Empire

  “This objective universe,” I read in a Sanskrit text, for example, “is absolutely unreal. So too is ego, the life span of which, as seen, is but a wink... Stop identifying yourself, therefore, with this lump of flesh, the gross body, and with ego, the subtle body, which are both imagined by the mind... Destroying this egoism, your enemy, with the mighty sword of Realization, enjoy freely and directly the bliss of your own true empire, which is the majesty of the Self that is the All in all.”3

  The universe from which we are to strive thus for release is to be known as an ever-appearing-and-disappearing dreamlike delusion, rising and falling in recurrent cycles. When it is known as such and when one has learned to play one’s part in it without any sense of ego, of desires, hopes, and fears, release from the everl
asting rounds of meaningless reincarnations will have been attained. As the sun sets and rises when it should and as it should, the moon waxes and wanes, and animals act in the manners of their kind, so too must you and I behave in the manners proper to our birth. It is supposed that, as a consequence of behavior in earlier lives, we have been born just where we have appeared and nowhere else. No judging deity is required to assign one to this place or that. All is determined automatically by the spiritual weight (so to say) of the reincarnating monad. This and this alone is what determines the level of one’s social entry, the rules of life that will be waiting for you, and all that you are to suffer and to enjoy.

  In the old Sanskrit law books, The Laws of Manu, The Institutes of Viṣṇu, etc., detailed descriptions are given of the types of study proper to each caste, the kinds of food to eat, the kind of person to marry, when to pray, to bathe, in what direction to face when sneezing or when yawning, how to rinse the mouth after meals, and so on, ad infinitum. The assigned punishments are appalling. And in the Far East also, where, although the Way or Order of Nature is described in terms that are not exactly the same as those of India, they amount to pretty much the same as far as the government of one’s life is concerned. For there too there is a cosmic order made known through the social order to which it is one’s duty, as well as in one’s nature, to conform. And there again the so-called sumptuary laws will tell in exact detail precisely how each is to live: in what size room to sleep (according to one’s social status) and on a mattress of what material, how long one’s sleeves are to be and of what material one’s shoes, how many cups of tea one must drink in the morning, and so on. Every detail of life is prescribed to an iota, and there is so much that one has to do that there is no chance at all to pause and ask, “What would I like to do?”