Myths to Live By

by Joseph Campbell

  So let me now proceed to the Greek version of the legend, which is to be of still another teaching. It appears—you will recall—in Plato’s dialogue The Symposium, where it is attributed to Aristophanes; and in keeping with the lighthearted mood of the great spirits of Plato’s company, it was there offered rather as a metaphor of the mystery of love than as an account to be taken seriously of the actual origin of mankind.

  The fantasy begins with the race of man already in existence, or rather with three distinct human races: one entirely male, whose place of residence was the sun; one female, here on earth; and a third, of males and females joined, whose dwelling, of course, was the moon. And they were all as large as two human beings of today. They had each four hands and feet, sides and backs forming a circle, one head with two faces, and the rest to correspond. And the gods being fearful of their strength, Zeus and Apollo cut them in two, “like apples halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair.” But those divided parts, each desiring the other, came together and embraced, and would have perished of hunger had the gods not set them far apart—the lesson here to be learned being that “human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love [according to its three kinds]... And if we are friends of God and reconciled to him we shall find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this world”; whereas, “if we are not obedient to the gods there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo.”

  As in the Biblical version, so here, the being split in two is not the ultimate divinity. We are again securely in the Occident, where God and man are set apart, and the problem, once again, is of relationship. However, the Greek gods were not, like Yahweh, the creators of the human race. They had themselves come into being, like men, from the bosom of the goddess Earth, and were rather man’s elder and stronger brothers than his makers. Moreover, according to this typically Greek, poetically humorous version of the archaic tales, the gods, before splitting them in two, had been afraid of the first men, so terrible had been their might and so great were the thoughts of their hearts. They had once even dared to attack the gods, scaling heaven, and the pantheon had then been thrown for a time into confusion; for if with their thunderbolts the gods had annihilated man, that would have been the end of sacrifice, and they would themselves have expired from lack of worship. Hence, they settled upon the splitting idea, and might yet carry it further.

  The Greeks, that is to say, are on man’s side, both in sympathy and in loyalty; the Hebrews, on the contrary, on God’s. Never would we have heard from a Greek such words as those of the sorely beaten “blameless and upright” Job, addressed to the god who had “destroyed him without cause” and who then came at him in the whirlwind, boasting of his power.

  “Behold,” pleaded Job, “I am of small account... I know that thou canst do all things... I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

  Repent! Repent for what?

  In contrast, the great contemporary Greek playwright Aeschylus, of about the same fifth-century date as the anonymous author of the Book of Job, puts into the mouth of his Prometheus—who was also being tormented by a god that could “draw Leviathan out with a fishhook, play with him as with a bird, and fill his skin with harpoons”—the following stunning words: “He is a monster... I care less than nothing for Zeus. Let him do as he likes.”

  And so say we all today in our hearts, though our tongues may have been taught to babble with Job.

  [Discuss]

  V—The Confrontation of East and West in Religion

  Fig. 5.1 — Kandi, 1956

  V

  The Confrontation of East and West in Religion

  [1970]1

  One never would have thought, when I was a student back in the twenties, that in the seventies there would be intelligent people still wishing to hear and think about religion. We were all perfectly sure in those days that the world was through with religion. Science and reason were now in command. The World War had been won (the First, that is to say), and the earth made safe for the rational reign of democracy. Aldous Huxley in his first phase, of Point Counter Point, was our literary hero; Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and other reasonable authors of that kind. But then, in the midst of all that optimism about reason, democracy, socialism, and the like, there appeared a work that was disturbing: Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Other writings of uncertain import were also appearing in those happy years, from unexpected quarters: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” In a literary sense, those were very great years indeed. But what certain of its authors seemed to be telling us was that with all our rational triumphs and progressive political achievements, illuminating the dark quarters of the earth and so on, there was nevertheless something beginning to disintegrate at the heart of our Occidental civilization itself. And of all these warnings and pronouncements, that of Spengler was the most disquieting. For it was based on the concept of an organic pattern in the life course of a civilization, a morphology of history: the idea that every culture has its period of youth, its period of culmination, its years then of beginning to totter with age and of striving to hold itself together by means of rational planning, projects, and organization, only finally to terminate in decrepitude, petrifaction, what Spengler called “fellaheenism,” and no more life. Moreover, in this view of Spengler’s, we were at present on the point of passing from what he called the period of Culture to Civilization, which is to say, from our periods of youthful, spontaneous, and wonderful creativity to those of uncertainty and anxiety, contrived programs, and the beginning of the end. When he sought for analogies in the classical world, our moment today corresponded, he found, to that of the late second century B.C., the time of the Carthaginian Wars, the decline of the culture-world of Greece into Hellenism, and the rise of the military state of Rome, Caesarism, and what he termed the Second Religiousness, politics based on providing bread and circuses to the megalopolitan masses, and a general trend to violence and brutality in the arts and pastimes of the people.

  Well, I can tell you, it has been for me something of a life experience to have watched the not so gradual coming into fulfillment in this world of every bit of what Spengler promised. I can remember how we used to sit around and discuss this looming prospect, trying to imagine how it might be beaten back, and trying to guess what the positive features might be of this period of crisis and transition. Spengler had declared that in periods like ours, of the passage from Culture to Civilization, there is a dropping off and away of the Culture forms: and indeed, in my own teaching I am today encountering more and more students who profess to find the whole history of our Western culture “irrelevant.” That is the brush-off term they use. The “kids” (as they like to call themselves) seem to lack the energy to encompass it all and press on. One notes, or at least at times suspects, a kind of failure of heart, a loss of nerve. But then, one can also regard their situation from another point of view and consider the concatenation of new problems now to be faced, new facts and influences to be absorbed. One might then conclude that their energies are perhaps being directed to an expanding present and problematical future and, in line with Spengler’s concept, recognize that in this period Western man is not only dropping the culture forms of the past but also shaping the civilization forms that are to build and support a mighty multicultural future.

  I am reminded here of that very strange prophetic work of the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats, A Vision, which he composed mainly during the twenty years from 1917 to 1936, and wherein he has recognized certain affinities of his own intuitions with those of Spengler’s morphological view. Yeats there represents our present moment as the last phase of a great Christian cycle or “gyre” of two thousand years: “And I notice,” he writes, “that when the limit is approached or past, when the moment of surrender is reached, when the new gyre begi
ns to stir, I am filled with excitement.”2 On which theme he wrote and published already in 1921 a most awesome, fate-inspired poem:

  THE SECOND COMING

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  Surely some revelation is at hand;

  Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

  The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

  When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

  Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

  The darkness drops again; but now I know

  That twenty centuries of stony sleep

  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?3

  Fig. 5.2 — Leo Frobenius

  There was another German culture-historian also writing in those days, Leo Frobenius, who, like Spengler and like Yeats, conceived of culture and civilization in morphological terms as a kind of organic, unfolding process of irreversible inevitability. He was, however, an Africanist and anthropologist, and so included in his purview not only the higher civilizations but also the primitive, his leading concept being of three distinct great stages in the total development of the culture history of mankind. The first was of the primitive food-foragers, hunters and planting villagers, non-literate, greatly various, and of a time span extending from the first emergence of our species on this earth to (in some quarters) the very present. The second, commencing ca. 3500 B.C., was of the “monumental cultures,” literate and complex—first of Mesopotamia and Egypt, then Greece and Rome, India, China and Japan, Middle and South America, the Magian-Arabic Levant, and Gothic-to-modern Europe. And now finally comes stage three, of this greatly promising, dawning global age, which Frobenius looked upon as probably the final phase of mankind’s total culture history, but to last, possibly, for many tens of thousands of years. That is to say, what both Spengler and Yeats were interpreting as the end of the Western culture cycle Frobenius saw in a very much larger prospect as the opening of a new age of boundless horizons. And indeed, this present season of the coming together of all the formerly separate culture worlds may well mark not only the end of the hegemony of the West but also the beginning of an age of mankind, united and supported by the great Western gifts of science and the machine—without which no such age as our own could ever have come to pass.

  However, the darker vision of Spengler foresees only desolation here too. For science and the machine are in his view expressions of the mentality of Western man, which are being taken over by non-Western peoples only as a means by which to undo and destroy the West. And when this killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs will have been accomplished, there will be no further development either of science or of industry, but a loss of competence and even of interest in both, with a resultant decline in technology and return of the various peoples to their local styles; the present great age of Europe and its promise for the world then but a broken dream. In contrast, Frobenius, like Nietzsche before him, saw the present as an epoch of irreversible advance in the one life course of the entire human race, here passing from its youthful, locally bounded stages of cultural growths to a new and general future of as yet unforeseen creative insights and realizations. But I must confess that while in my own thinking it is to the later view that I incline, I cannot quite get the other, of Spengler, out of my mind...

  In any case, what we all today surely recognize is that we are entering—one way or another—a new age, requiring a new wisdom: such a wisdom, furthermore, as belongs rather to experienced old age than to poetically fantasizing youth, and which every one of us, whether young or old, has now somehow to assimilate. Moreover, when we turn our thoughts to religion, the first and most obvious fact is that every one of the great traditions is today in profound disorder. What have been taught as their basic truths seem no longer to hold.

  Yet there is a great religious fervor and ferment evident among not only young people but old and middle-aged as well. The fervor, however, is in a mystical direction, and the teachers who seem to be saying most to many are those who have come to us from a world that was formerly regarded as having been left altogether behind in the great press forward of modern civilization, representing only archaic, outlived manners of thinking. We have gurus galore from India; roshis from Japan; lamas from Tibet. And Chinese oracle books are outselling our own philosophers.

  They are not, however, outselling our best psychologists. And this, finally, is not surprising; for the ultimate secret of the appeal of the Orient is that its disciplines are inward-pointing, mystical, and psychological.

  I find an illuminating analogy to our present religious situation in that of the North American Indian tribes, when, toward the close of the nineteenth century, in the 1870s and 1880s, the buffalo were disappearing. That was the time, not yet a century past, when the railroad lines were being laid across the plains and buffalo scouts were going out to kill off the herds and make way for the new world of the Iron Horse and a population of wheat-planting settlers moved westward from the Mississippi. A second aim of the buffalo slaughter was to deprive the buffalo-hunting Indians of their food supply, so that finally they would have to submit to life on the reservations. And it was subsequently to these (for them devastating) developments that a new religion of inward visionary experiences became suddenly fashionable throughout the Indian West.

  For, as with all primitive hunting peoples, so had it been with these plains tribes. The relationship of the human to the animal community that supplied its food had been the central, pivotal concern of the religiously maintained social order. Hence, with the buffalo gone, the binding symbol was gone. Within the span of a decade the religion had become archaic; and it was then that the peyote cult, the mescal cult, came pouring up from Mexico, onto and across the plains, as a psychological rescue. Many accounts have been published of the experiences of participants: how they would gather in special lodges to pray, to chant, and to eat peyote buttons, each then experiencing visions, finding within themselves what had been lost from their society, namely an imagery of holiness, giving depth, psychological security, and apparent meaning to their lives.

  Now the first and most important effect of a living mythological symbol is to waken and give guidance to the energies of life. It is an energy-releasing and -directing sign, which not only “turns you on,” as they say today, but turns you on in a certain direction, making you function a certain way—which will be one conducive to your participation in the life and purposes of a functioning social group. However, when the symbols provided by the social group no longer work, and the symbols that do work are no longer of the group, the individual cracks away, becomes dissociated and disoriented, and we are confronted with what can only be named a pathology of the symbol.

  A distinguished professor in psychiatry at the University of California, Dr. John W. Perry, has characterized the living mythological symbol as an “affect image.” It is an image that hits one where it counts. It is not addressed first to the brain, to be there interpreted and appreciated. On the contrary, if that is where it has to be read, the symbol is already dead. An “affect image” talks directly to the feeling system and immediately elicits a response, after which the brain may come along with its interesting comments. There is some kind of throb of resonance within, responding to the image shown without, like t
he answer of a musical string to another equally tuned. And so it is that when the vital symbols of any given social group evoke in all its members responses of this kind, a sort of magical accord unites them as one spirtual organism, functioning through members who, though separate in space, are yet one in being and belief.

  Now let us ask: What about the symbolism of the Bible? Based on the Old Sumerian astronomical observations of five to six thousand years ago and an anthropology no longer credible, it is hardly fit today to turn anybody on. In fact, the famous conflict of science and religion has actually nothing to do with religion, but is simply of two sciences: that of 4000 B.C. and that of A.D. 2000. And is it not ironic that our great Western civilization, which has opened to the minds of all mankind the infinite wonders of a universe of untold billions of galaxies and untold billions of years, should have been saddled in its infancy with a religion squeezed into the tightest little cosmological image known to any people on earth? The ancient Mayan calendar with its recurrent aeons of 64,000,000 years would have been far more easily justified; or the Hindu with its kalpas of 4,320,000,000. Moreover, in those far more grandiose systems the ultimate divine power is neither male nor female but transcendent of all categories; not a male personage “put there,” but a power immanent in all things: that is to say, not so alien to the imagery of modern science that it could not have been put to acceptable use.

  The Biblical image of the universe simply won’t do any more; neither will the Biblical notion of a race of God, which all others are meant to serve;4 nor again, the idea of a code of laws delivered from on high and to be valid for all time. The social problems of the world today are not those of a corner of the old Levant, sixth century B.C. Societies are not static; nor can the laws of one serve another. The problems of our world are not even touched by those stone-cut Ten Commandments that we carry about as luggage and which, in fact, were disregarded in the blessed text itself, one chapter after they were announced.5 The modern Western concept of a legal code is not of a list of unassailable divine edicts but of a rationally contrived, evolving compilation of statutes, shaped by fallible human beings in council, to realize rationally recognized social (and therefore temporal) aims. We understand that our laws are not divinely ordained; and we know also that no laws of any people on earth ever were. Thus we know—whether we dare to say so or not—that our clergies have no more right to claim unassailable authority for their moral law than for their science. And even, finally, in their intimate role of giving spiritual advice, the clergy have now been overtaken by the scientific psychiatrists—and indeed to such a degree that many clergymen are themselves turning to psychologists to be taught how best to serve their pastoral function. The magic of their own traditional symbols works no longer to heal but only to confuse.