Myths to Live By

by Joseph Campbell

  O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!

  Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us!

  Happy shall he be who takes your little ones

  and dashes them against the rock!

  But then there came to pass, very suddenly, an altogether radical transformation of the whole mythology of the Near East, with the sudden appearance and brilliant victories of the Aryan Persians over every nation of the ancient world save Greece, from the Bosporus and Upper Nile to the Indus. Babylon fell in the year 539 B.C. to Cyrus the Great, whose idea for the government of an empire, however, was neither to massacre nor to uproot, but to return peoples to their places, restoring them to their gods and governing them through subordinate kings of their own races and traditions. Thus he became the first King of Kings. And that title of the powerful Persian monarchs became the title presently of the Lord God of Israel himself, whose people Cyrus restored to their city and encouraged to the rebuilding of their Temple. In Isaiah 45 this gentile is even celebrated as a virtual Messiah, the anointed servant of Yahweh, the work of whose hand had been the work, actually, of Yahweh’s hand, for the restoration of his people to their sacred seat. And if I read that chapter rightly, what it promises through its prophet is that ultimately it would be not the Persians, but the people themselves of Yahweh who would be reigning over the world in the name of God.19

  The actual mythology of the Persians, on the other hand, was not of Isaiah, but of Zarathustra (Greek: Zoroaster); and since it was to exert considerable influence not only on Judaism, but also on the whole development of Christianity, we shall do well to pause with it a moment before proceeding in our survey to the mythologies of peace.

  The World Creator, according to this view, was Ahura Mazda, a god of truth and light, whose original creation was perfect. However, an opposing evil power of darkness and deception, Angra Mainyu, infused into it evils of all kinds, so that there occurred a general Fall into ignorance and there is in progress now a continuing conflict between the powers of light and of darkness, truth and deception. These, in the Persian view, are not particular to any race or tribe but are cosmic, general powers, and every individual, of whatever race or tribe, must, through his own free will, choose sides and align himself with the powers either of goodness or of evil in this world. If with the former, he will contribute through his thoughts, words, and deeds to the restoration of the universe to perfection; if however, with the latter, to his own great grief in a Hell appropriate to his life.

  As the day of the ultimate world-victory approaches and the powers of darkness make their final desperate stand, there will come a season of general wars and universal catastrophe, after which there will arrive the ultimate savior, Saoshyant. Angra Mainyu and his demons will be utterly undone; the dead will be resurrected in bodies of immaculate light; Hell vanishing, its souls, purified, will be released; and there will follow an eviternity of sheer peace, purity, joy, and perfection—forever.

  According to the view of the ancient Persian kings, it was they who, in a special way, were the representatives on earth of the cause and will of the Lord of Light. And so we find that in the great multiracial and multicultural empire of the Persians—which, in fact, was the first such empire in the history of the world—there was a religiously authorized imperialistic impulse, to the end that, in the name of truth, goodness, and the light, the Persian King of Kings should become the leader of mankind to the restitution of truth. The idea is one that has had a particular appeal to kings and has been taken over, accordingly, by conquering monarchs everywhere. In India the mythic image of the Cakravartin, for example, the universal king, the illumination of whose presence would bring peace and well-being to mankind, is a figure inspired largely by this thought. It is to be recognized in the royal emblems of the first Buddhist monarch, Ashoka, ca. 262–248 B.C. And in China, immediately following the turbulent period known as Chan-kuo, “of the Warring States,” the first ruler of a united empire, Qin Shi Huang (r. 221–207 B.C.), governed, according to his claim, by the mandate of Heaven, under Heaven’s law.

  It is then hardly to be wondered if the enthusiastic Hebrew author of Isaiah 40–55, who was a contemporary of Cyrus the Great and living witness of the Persian restoration to Jerusalem of its people, gives evidence in his prophecies of the influence of Zoroastrian ideas; for example, in the famous passages of 45: “Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus... ‘I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe, I am the Lord, who do all these things.’ “ It is in these chapters of the so-called Second or Deutero Isaiah that we find the earliest celebrations of Yahweh not simply as the greatest and most powerful god among gods, but as the one God of the universe, in whom not only Jews but also the gentiles are to find salvation: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth!” we read, for instance. “For I am God, and there is no other.”20 Moreover, whereas the earlier idea of the Messiah of the pre-exilic prophets had been simply of an ideal king on David’s throne, “to uphold it,” as in Isaiah, “with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and for evermore”;21 in the post-exilic period, and particularly in the very late, apocalyptic writings of the Alexandrian age—as, for instance, in the Book of Daniel—there is the notion of one who, at the end of historic time, should be given, over “all peoples, nations, and languages,” “an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away.”22 And at that time, furthermore, “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”23

  There can be no doubt of the influence of Zoroastrian eschatology on such ideas as these of the end of the world and resurrection of the dead. Moreover, in the Essene Dead Sea Scrolls of the last century B.C., the influence of Persian thought is apparent at every turn. Their period itself, in fact, was one of such terrible tumult that the end of the world and coming of the savior Saoshyant might well have been expected by anyone familiar with the old Zoroastrian theme. Even in Jerusalem there was schism, with two contending parties in rivalry for the mastery: one supported by the Hasidim, the orthodox “pious one,” who were loyal to the law; the other favoring Greek ideas. And when (as we are told in the Books of the Maccabees) those of the latter party went to the Greek Emperor Antiochus and gained from him permission to build themselves in Jerusalem a gymnasium, “according to the customs of the heathen, and made themselves uncircumcised, and forsook the holy covenant, and joined themselves to the heathen,” new contentions arose within the holy city, which culminated when the Greeks, supporting the claims of an opportunistic Hellenizer to the office of the high priesthood, sacked the Temple and ordered heathen altars to be set up all over the land. For it was then, 168 B.C., in a village named Modein, that Mattathias and his five sons (the Maccabees) attacked and slew not only the first Jew who approached the heathen altar to sacrifice “according to the king’s commandment,” but also the Greek officer who had arrived to set it up. However, the Maccabees themselves then impudently assumed the titles of both the kingship and high priesthood, to which they were not by descent entitled, and there were perpetrated within that family a number of ugly betrayals and murders in subsequent struggles for the inheritance. The Pharisees, Hasidim, and others resenting these impieties rose presently in a revolt that was put down with the greatest cruelty by the reigning Alexander Jannaeus (r. 104–78 B.C.), who crucified eight hundred of his enemies in a single night, slaughtered their wives and children before their eyes, and himself watched the executions, drinking and publicly disporting with his concubines. “Upon which so deep a terror seized on the people,” wrote the Jewish historian Josephus in concluding his account of this atrocity, “that eight thousand of his opposers fled away the very next night, out of all Judea.”24

  It has been suggested that this event specifically may have been the occasion for the founding in the wilderness on the Dead Sea shore of the apocalyptic community of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Its founders, in any case, f
oresaw the end of the world and were in all seriousness preparing themselves to be worthy to survive it and to continue into eternity the destiny of the remnant of God’s people. Their expectation seems to have been that they would themselves constitute an army of such virtue that with God’s help they would conquer and purify the world. There would be a war to be fought, of forty years, of “the Sons of Light” against “the Sons of Darkness.” (Compare the old Zoroastrian theme!) This would commence with a battle of six years against such immediate neighbors as the Moabites and Egyptians and, after a year of Sabbath rest, recommence with a series of campaigns against the peoples of remoter lands. On their trumpets and their standards the Covenanters would have written inspiring, flattering slogans: “The Elect of God,” “The Princes of God,” “The Chiefs of the Fathers of the Congregation,” “The Hundred of God, a Hand of War against All Erring Flesh,” “The Truth of God,” “The Righteousness of God,” ‘The Glory of God,” etc. But meanwhile, in Jerusalem, alas! two sons of Alexander Jannaeus were contending for the kingship. One of them invited the Romans in to assist him in his cause—and that was that, 63 B.C.

  Now it is of the very greatest interest to remark the sense that seems to have prevailed throughout that period, among the Jews of many persuasions, of the imminent end of the world. In a Zoroastrian context this would have brought the savior Saoshyant. In the post-exilic Jewish, it would be the Anointed, the Messiah, who appeared. The nations were to be annihilated. Even of Israel only a remnant would survive. And it was in this atmosphere of immediate urgency that Christianity came to birth. The prophet John the Baptist, baptizing only a few miles up the Jordan from the Dead Sea Covenanters, was also waiting, preparing the way, and to him it was that Jesus came; who thereafter fasted forty days in the desert and returned to deliver his own version of the general apocalyptic message.

  And so what, then, is the outstanding difference between the message of Christ Jesus and that of the nearby Covenanters of Qumran? It would seem to me to be this: that the Covenanters were thinking of themselves as about to engage in battle as the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness, their posture, that is to say, being of preparation for war, whereas the gospel of Jesus was, rather, of the battle already resolved. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”25 And exactly this, I would say, is the difference between a gospel of war and one of peace.

  However, we come a little later to those startling words of Matthew:

  Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.26

  And again in Luke we encounter another echo of the same: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”27

  The key to the meaning of all this, I believe, is in the last line here cited, and in the words immediately following each of our two quotations. In Matthew: “He who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” And in Luke: “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple.” Still further, returning to Matthew: “Go sell what you possess and give to the poor...; and come, follow me.”28 And again: “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.”29

  The ideal of this teaching is of an ascetic absolute abandonment of all the concerns of normal secular life, family ties, community, and all, leaving “the dead” — i.e., those that we call the living—“to bury their dead”; and in this the earliest Christian teaching is seen to have been of the order of the early Buddhist and of the Jain. It is a “forest teaching.” And what it does to the general apocalyptic theme is to transform its reference radically from a historical future to a psychological present: the end of the world and coming of the Day of God, that is to say, are not to be awaited in the field of time, but to be achieved right now in solitude, in the chamber of the heart. And in confirmation of this meaning, we find in the last lines of the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas that when Christ’s disciples said to him, “When will the Kingdom come?” he replied: “It will not come by expectation; they will not say: ‘See here,’ or ‘See there.’ But the Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.”30

  Moreover, that the allusion of Jesus’s reference to the sword which he had brought cannot possibly have been to any weapon of physical warfare appears clearly in the scene of his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.

  Judas came [we read], and with him a great crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the elders of the people. And the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, “The one I shall kiss is the man; seize him.” And he came up to Jesus at once and said, “Hail Rabbi!” And he kissed him. Jesus said to him, “Friend, do that for which you have come!” Then they came up and laid hands on Jesus and seized him. And behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand and drew his sword, and struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, “Put up your sword; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”31

  Fig. 9.4 — Judas' Kiss

  Clear enough! Is it not? And yet that stout wielder of the sword, who is identified in the John Gospel as Peter,32 was not the last of Jesus’s followers to betray as surely as ever Judas did their teacher and his teaching. From the period of the victories of Constantine (fourth century A.D.), the Church founded on the rock of that same good Peter’s name was advanced very largely by swordsmanship. And at the height of the Middle Ages, under the mighty Pope Innocent III (1198–1216 A.D.), the flashing of Peter’s zealous weapon attained to a blazing climax in the crackling fires of the Albigensian Crusade—where the people going up in flames were the heretic Cathari, the self-styled Pure Ones, who had explicitly rejected the sword for lives of ascetic purity in peace.

  An ascetic renunciation of the world and its life—and even of the will to survive in life—may be named, then, as the best-known discipline of peace that has been proposed, as yet, to mankind. And if one may judge from the historic circumstances of its original pronouncement, it arose—or at least caught on—as a response to a desperate general sense of things falling apart. The earlier mythic notion had been of a great war, a holy terminal war, through which a universal reign of peace should be ultimately established at the end of historic time: which, however, was not properly a mythology of peace but a summons, rather, to war, perpetual war—until... And, ironically, no sooner had the ascetic Christian message passed from the lips of Jesus to the ears of his closest follower than it became transformed into (and has remained ever since interpreted as) only another such doctrine of the Holy War, jihad, or crusade. So let us review and compare now, briefly, the ideals and destinies of a number of other of the best-known ascetic mythologies of peace.

  Undoubtedly the most austere and ruthlessly consistent is the religion of the Jains of India, whose teacher Mahāvīra was a contemporary of the Buddha. Mahāvīra’s teaching was already at that time of great age, he having been but the last of a long series of Jain teachers known as “passage-makers,” Tirthankaras, dating back to prehistoric times. And according to the absolutely nonviolent teaching of this line of sages, the candidate for release from rebirth must neither kill nor hurt any being, nor eat any animal flesh. He may not even drink water at night, for fear of swallowing insects possibly floating on the surface. Vows are to be assumed, limiting the num
ber of steps taken a day; because every time a step is taken the lives of insects, worms, and the like are endangered. Jain yogis in the forest carry little brooms with which to sweep the ground before each step; and to this day you may see in Bombay monks and nuns of the Jain sect wearing cheesecloth masks across nose and mouth (like surgeons in the operating room) to insure against their inhaling any living thing. One is not to eat fruits that have been plucked; one is to wait for the fruits to fall. Nor is one to cut living plants with a blade. Logically, the goal of the Jain monk is an early death; not, however, before his will to life has been absolutely quenched. For if he should die with the least impulse to live, to enjoy, or to protect his own life, he would surely be reborn and so be back in this dreadful world again, again hurting and murdering things.

  Now Buddhism in its primitive form was closely related to the Jain sect; however, with a critical shift of accent from the literal quenching of one’s life to the quenching, rather, of one’s ego. What is to be got rid of is the sense of “I” and “mine,” the impulse to protect oneself, one’s property, and one’s life. Thus the accent is rather psychological than physical, and yet here too we may find that an absolute rule of virtue maintained to the bitter end may lead ultimately to something very much like an absolute denial of life.

  Fig. 9.5 — Vessantara and His Elephant

  For example, there is the Buddhist pious tale of the case of King Vessantara, who was asked by a neighboring monarch for the loan of his imperial white elephant. White elephants attract clouds, and the clouds of course bring rain. King Vessantara, being selfless, gave the elephant away without a second thought. However, his people were indignant that he should have shown so little concern for their own welfare, and exiled him from their kingdom, together with his family. In carriages, the royal house departed; but when about to enter the forest, they were approached by a company of Brahmins, who asked for the carriages and horses; and Vessantara, selfless absolutely, with no sense whatsoever of “I” and “mine,” gave up these valuables willingly and with his family entered the dangerous forest afoot. Next he was approached by an old Brahmin who asked to be given the children. The mother selfishly protested; but the king with no sense of “I” and “mine” delivered the children willingly—into slavery. Then the wife was asked for, and she too was surrendered.