Myths to Live By

by Joseph Campbell

  Fig. 9.7 — The Great Seal of the United States

  And we have the ideal symbolized also in the figure of our American eagle, which is pictured with a cluster of arrows in the talons of its left foot, an olive branch in its right, and its head—in the spirit of Grotius—turned rightward, facing the olive branch. Let us hope, however, in the name of peace, that he keeps those arrowheads over there sharp until neither asceticism nor the power of arms, but an understanding of mutual advantage, will have become for all mankind the guarantee, at long last, of a knowledge of the reign of peace.

  [Discuss]

  X—Schizophrenia: the Inward Journey

  Fig. 10.1 — The Inward Journey

  X

  Schizophrenia—the Inward Journey

  [1970]1

  In the spring of 1968 I was invited to deliver a series of talks on schizophrenia at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California. I had lectured there the year before on mythology; and apparently Mr. Michael Murphy, the imaginative young director of that highly interesting enterprise, thought there should be a connection of some kind. However, since I knew next to nothing of schizophrenia, on receipt of his letter I telephoned.

  “Mike, I don’t know a thing about schizophrenia,” I said. “How would it be if I lectured on Joyce?”

  “Why, fine!” he answered. “But I’d like to hear you on schizophrenia, just the same. Let’s set up a dual talk in San Francisco: you and John Perry, on mythology and schizophrenia. How’s that?”

  Well, I didn’t then know Dr. Perry; but in my youth I had had the very great experience of kissing the Blarney Stone—which, I can tell you, is worth a dozen Ph.D. degrees; so I thought, “Okay! Why not?” And besides, I had such confidence in Mike Murphy that I was pretty sure he had something interesting in mind.

  A few weeks later, and sure enough! There came in the mail an envelope from John Weir Perry, M.D., of San Francisco, containing the reprint of a paper on schizophrenia that he had published in 1962 in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences;2 and to my considerable amazement I learned, on reading it, that the imagery of schizophrenic fantasy perfectly matches that of the mythological hero journey, which I had outlined and elucidated, back in 1949, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

  My own had been a work based on a comparative study of the mythologies of mankind, with only here and there passing references to the phenomenology of dream, hysteria, mystic visions, and the like. Mainly, it was an organization of themes and motifs common to all mythologies; and I had had no idea, in bringing these together, of the extent to which they would correspond to the fantasies of madness. According to my thinking, they were the universal, archetypal, psychologically based symbolic themes and motifs of all traditional mythologies; and now from this paper of Dr. Perry I was learning that the same symbolic figures arise spontaneously from the broken-off, tortured state of mind of modern individuals suffering from a complete schizophrenic breakdown: the condition of one who has lost touch with the life and thought of his community and is compulsively fantasizing out of his own completely cut-off base.

  Very briefly: The usual pattern is, first, of a break away or departure from the local social order and context; next, a long, deep retreat inward and backward, as it were, in time, and inward, deep into the psyche; a chaotic series of encounters there, darkly terrifying experiences, and presently (if the victim is fortunate) encounters of a centering kind, fulfilling, harmonizing, giving new courage; and then finally, in such fortunate cases, a return journey of rebirth to life. And that is the universal formula also of the mythological hero journey, which I, in my own published work, had described as: 1) separation, 2) initiation, and 3) return:

  A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men.3

  That is the pattern of the myth, and that is the pattern of these fantasies of the psyche.

  Now it was Dr. Perry’s thesis in his paper that in certain cases the best thing is to let the schizophrenic process run its course, not to abort the psychosis by administering shock treatments and the like, but, on the contrary, to help the process of disintegration and reintegration along. However, if a doctor is to be helpful in this way, he has to understand the image language of mythology. He has himself to understand what the fragmentary signs and signals signify that his patient, totally out of touch with rationally oriented manners of thought and communication, is trying to bring forth in order to establish some kind of contact. Interpreted from this point of view, a schizophrenic breakdown is an inward and backward journey to recover something missed or lost, and to restore, thereby, a vital balance. So let the voyager go. He has tipped over and is sinking, perhaps drowning; yet, as in the old legend of Gilgamesh and his long, deep dive to the bottom of the cosmic sea to pluck the watercress of immortality, there is the one green value of his life down there. Don’t cut him off from it: help him through.

  Well, I can tell you, it was a wonderful trip I had to California. The conversations with Dr. Perry and the talk we delivered together opened a whole new prospect to me. The experience started me thinking more and more about the possible import to people in trouble today of these mythic materials on which I have been working in a more or less academic, scholarly, personally enthusiastic way all these years, without any precise knowledge of the techniques by which they might be applied to the needs of others.4

  Dr. Perry and Mr. Murphy introduced me to a paper on “Shamans and Acute Schizophrenia,” by Dr. Julian Silverman of the National Institute of Mental Health, which had appeared in 1967 in the American Anthropologist,5 and there again I found something of the greatest interest and of immediate relevance to my studies and thinking. In my own writings I had already pointed out that among primitive hunting peoples it is largely from the psychological experiences of shamans that the mythic imagery and rituals of their ceremonial life derive.6 The shaman is a person (either male or female) who in early adolescence underwent a severe psychological crisis, such as today would be called a psychosis. Normally the child’s apprehensive family sends for an elder shaman to bring the youngster out of it, and by appropriate measures, songs, and exercises, this experienced practitioner succeeds. As Dr. Silverman remarks and demonstrates in his paper, “In primitive cultures in which such a unique life crisis resolution is tolerated, the abnormal experience (shamanism) is typically beneficial to the individual, cognitively and affectively; he is regarded as one with expanded consciousness.” Whereas, on the contrary, in such a rationally ordered culture as our own—or, to phrase the proposition again in Dr. Silverman’s words, “in a culture that does not provide referential guides for comprehending this kind of crisis experience, the individual (schizophrenic) typically undergoes an intensification of his suffering over and above his original anxieties.”

  Fig. 10.2 — Knud Rasmussen

  Now let me describe to you the case of an Eskimo shaman who was interviewed in the early 1920s by the great Danish scholar and explorer Knud Rasmussen. Rasmussen was a man of the broadest human sympathy and understanding, who was able to talk in a marvelous way, man to man, with the characters he encountered all the way across the Arctic lands of North America in the course of the Fifth Danish Thule Expedition, which from 1921 to 1924 trekked the whole long stretch from Greenland to Alaska.

  Igjugarjuk was a Caribou Eskimo shaman of a tribe inhabiting the North Canadian tundras. When young, he had been visited constantly by dreams that he could not interpret. Strange unknown beings came and spoke to him; and when he woke he remembered all so vividly that he could describe to his friends and family exactly what he had seen. The family, disturbed, but knowing what was happening, sent for an old shaman named Peqanaoq, who, on diagnosing the case, placed the youngster on a sledge just large enough for him to sit on, and in the depth of winter—the absolutely dark and freezing Arctic
winter night—dragged him far out onto a lonely Arctic waste and built for him there a tiny snow hut with barely room for him to sit cross-legged. He was not allowed to set foot on the snow, but was lifted from the sledge into the hut and there set down on a piece of skin just large enough to contain him. No food or drink was left with him. He was instructed to think only of the Great Spirit, who would presently appear, and was left there alone for thirty days. After five days the elder returned with a drink of lukewarm water, and after another fifteen, with a second drink and with a bit of meat. But that was all. The cold and the fasting were so severe that, as Igjugarjuk told Rasmussen, “sometimes I died a little.” And during all that time he was thinking, thinking, thinking of the Great Spirit, until, toward the end of the ordeal, a helping spirit did in fact arrive in the form of a woman who seemed to hover in the air above him. He never saw her again, but she became his helping spirit. The elder shaman then brought him home, where he was required to diet and fast for another five months; and, as he told his Danish guest, such fasts, often repeated, are the best means of attaining to a knowledge of hidden things. “The only true wisdom,” Igjugarjuk said, “lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone open the mind of a man to all that is hidden to others.”

  Fig. 10.3 — Najaqneq

  Another powerful shaman, whom Dr. Rasmussen met in Nome, Alaska, told him of a similar venture into the silence. But this old fellow, Najagneq by name, had fallen upon bad times in relation to the people of his village. For shamans, you must know, live in a rather perilous position. When things anywhere go wrong, people tend to blame the local shaman. They imagine he is working magic. And this old man, to protect himself, had invented a number of trick devices and mythological spooks to frighten his neighbors off and keep them safely at bay.

  Dr. Rasmussen, recognizing that most of Najagneq’s spirits were outright frauds of this kind, one day asked him if there were any in whom he himself believed; to which he replied, “Yes, a power that we call Sila, one that cannot be explained in so many words: a very strong spirit, the upholder of the universe, of the weather, in fact of all life on earth—so mighty that his speech to man comes not through ordinary words, but through storms, snowfall, rain showers, the tempests of the sea, all the forces that man fears, or through sunshine, calm seas, or small, innocent, playing children who understand nothing. When times are good, Sila has nothing to say to mankind. He has disappeared into his infinite nothingness and remains away as long as people do not abuse life but have respect for their daily food. No one has ever seen Sila. His place of sojourn is so mysterious that he is with us and infinitely far away at the same time.”

  And what does Sila say?

  “The inhabitant or soul of the universe,” Najagneq said, “is never seen; its voice alone is heard. All we know is that it has a gentle voice, like a woman, a voice so fine and gentle that even children cannot become afraid. And what it says is: Sila ersinarsinivdluge, ‘Be not afraid of the universe.’”7

  Now these were very simple men—at least in our terms of culture, learning, and civilization. Yet their wisdom, drawn from their own most inward depths, corresponds in essence to what we have heard and learned from the most respected mystics. There is a deep and general human wisdom here, of which we do not often come to know in our usual ways of active rational thinking.

  In his article on shamanism Dr. Silverman had distinguished two very different types of schizophrenia. One he calls “essential schizophrenia”; the other, “paranoid schizophrenia”; and it is in essential schizophrenia alone that analogies appear with what I have termed “the shaman crisis.” In essential schizophrenia the characteristic pattern is of withdrawal from the impacts of experience in the outside world. There is a narrowing of concern and focus. The object world falls back and away, and invasions from the unconscious overtake and overwhelm one. In “paranoid schizophrenia,” on the other hand, the person remains alert and extremely sensitive to the world and its events, interpreting all, however, in terms of his own projected fantasies, fears, and terrors, and with a sense of being in danger from assaults. The assaults, actually, are from within, but he projects them outward, imagining that the world is everywhere on watch against him. This, states Dr. Silverman, is not the type of schizophrenia that leads to the sorts of inward experience that are analogous to those of shamanism. “It is as if the paranoid schizophrenic,” he explains, “unable to comprehend or tolerate the stark terrors of his inner world, prematurely directs his attention to the outside world. In this type of abortive crisis solution, the inner chaos is not, so to speak, worked through, or is not capable of being worked through.” The lunatic victim is at large, so to say, in the field of his own projected unconscious.

  The opposite type of psychotic patient, on the other hand, a pitiful thing to behold, has dropped into a snake-pit deep within. His whole attention, his whole being, is down there, engaged in a life-and-death battle with the terrible apparitions of unmastered psychological energies—which, it would appear, is exactly what the potential shaman also is doing in the period of his visionary journey. And so, we have next to ask what the difference is between the predicament of the “essential schizophrenic” and that of the trance-prone shaman: to which the answer is simply that the primitive shaman does not reject the local social order and its forms; that, in fact, it is actually by virtue of those forms that he is brought back to rational consciousness. And when he has returned, furthermore, it is generally found that his inward personal experiences reconfirm, refresh, and reinforce the inherited local forms; for his personal dream-symbology is at one with the symbology of his culture. Whereas, in contrast, in the case of a modern psychotic patient, there is a radical break-off and no effective association at all with the symbol system of his culture. The established symbol system here provides no help at all to the poor lost schizophrenic, terrified by the figments of his own imagination, to which he is a total stranger; whereas, in the case of the primitive shaman, there is between his outward life and his inward a fundamental accord.

  Well, as I have said and you may imagine, that was an extremely interesting trip for me to California; and when I returned to New York (it was all happening as though some guiding spirit were setting everything up for me), a leading psychiatrist in our own tortured city, Dr. Mortimer Ostow, invited me to be discussant to a paper that he was about to read before a meeting of The Society for Adolescent Psychiatry. This turned out to be a study of certain common characteristics that Dr. Ostow had remarked, which seemed to relate, as of one order, the “mechanisms” (as Dr. Ostow termed them) of schizophrenia, mysticism, the LSD experience, and the “antinomianism” of contemporary youth: those aggressively antisocial attitudes that have become so prominent in the behavior and accomplishments of a significant number of campus adolescents and their faculty advisers of the present hour. And this invitation, too, was a major experience for me, opening my own thinking to another critical field into which my mythic studies might play—one, moreover, with which I was already in personal touch in my role as a college professor.

  What I learned now was that the LSD retreat and inward plunge can be compared to an essential schizophrenia, and the antinomianism of contemporary youth to a paranoid schizophrenia. The sense of threat from every quarter of what is known as the Establishment—which is to say, of modern civilization—is not altogether a put-on or an act for many of these young folk, but an actual condition of soul. The break-off is real, and what is being bombed and blown up outside are actual symbols of interior fears. Moreover, many are unable even to communicate, every thought being so charged for them with feeling that in rational speech there is no name for it. An astonishing number cannot bring forth even a simple declarative sentence, but, interrupting every attempted phrase with the irrelevant syllable “like,” they are reduced to mute signs and feeling-loaded silences, pleading for appreciation. One feels, sometimes, in dealing with them, that on
e is indeed in a lunatic asylum without walls. And the indicated cure for the ills that they are shouting about is not sociological at all (as our news media and many of our politicians claim) but psychiatric.

  The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is an intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning. Can he be saved? If a line is thrown to him, will he grab it?

  Fig. 10.4 — Drowning

  Let us first ask about the waters into which he has descended. They are the same, we have said, as those of the mystical experience. What, then, is their character? What are their properties? And what does it take to swim?

  They are the waters of the universal archetypes of mythology. All my life, as a student of mythologies, I have been working with these archetypes, and I can tell you, they do exist and are the same all over the world. In the various traditions they are variously represented; as, for instance, in a Buddhist temple, medieval cathedral, Summerian ziggurat, or Mayan pyramid. The images of divinities will vary in various parts of the world according to the local flora, fauna, geography, racial features, etc. The myths and rites will be given different interpretations, different rational applications, different social customs to validate and enforce. And yet the archetypal, essential forms and ideas are the same—often stunningly so. And so what, then, are they? What do they represent?