A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)

by Joseph Campbell

  So, following Nietzsche, the lion of virtue is the one that tears a lamb to pieces, and the bad lion is the one that won’t. But from the lamb’s point of view, the bad lion is the one that eats him. And so, what you find in slave morality is that the people of excellence—the masterly ones—are regarded as bad. It really is so.

  With the idea of the masterly ones, we get the idea of elitism. “Elitism? Elitism is bad.” Have you ever heard that said? It’s slave morality speaking. I recall lecturing at the University of Oklahoma to a select group of outstanding students from colleges all over the country. I’d never before had such an assemblage of excellent students. One of the professors later told me that one student came to him and said, “Having only excellent students in this group is elitism.” The professor replied, “This program is for people who are up to the scholarship.” “No,” the student argued, “it’s elitism and shouldn’t be on this campus.” So the professor said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Bill. I’m going to recommend to the football coach that you play defensive halfback. What do you think?” He got the idea. The only place where excellence is appreciated is on the athletic field.

  Around the eighteenth century, linguists discovered that almost all of the languages from India to Ireland, across that whole range, were of the Indo-European language family. At the time, they did not know how ancient civilization is—the Mesopotamian region and Egyptian civilization had not yet been explored—but it was evident that the Greek, Roman, and European civilizations were all out of the impulse of the Indo-European peoples. And so, a Frenchman came up with the idea of a master race. The idea of Aryan supremacy that Hitler later picked up had to do with this idea of a master race. It had nothing to do with master morality or slave morality. But Hitler used Nietszche’s words, which is very unfortunate, because Nietzsche absolutely despised anti-Semitism and the idea of the state. In fact, he said, “The new idol is the state.” And that’s what Hitler represented. A horrible little man. His ideas were not Nietzsche’s.

  PSYCHOLOGY is a means of interpretation, a way of interpreting what’s going on. Are you going to interpret it as the work of a concrete deity up there who has brought it about? Is that concrete deity a fact? How did it get there? That diety has to be interpreted psychologically, so that you know that what we’re talking about is not “out there,” but “in here.”

  It was for me a startling experience, as it must have been for many others watching at that time the television broadcast of the Apollo space-flight immediately before that of Armstrong’s landing on the moon, when Ground Control in Houston asked, “Who’s navigating now?” and the answer that came back was, “Newton!”

  I was reminded of Immanuel Kant’s discussion of space in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic, where he asks: “How is it that in this space, here, we can make judgments that we know with apodictic certainty will be valid in that space, there?”75

  Kant’s reply to the question was that the laws of space are known to the mind because they are of the mind. They are of a knowledge that is within us from birth, a knowledge a priori, which is only brought to recollection by apparently external circumstance.…

  In other words, it then occurred to me that outer space is within us inasmuch as the laws of space are within us; outer and inner space are the same. We know, furthermore, that we have actually been born from space, since it was out of primordial space that the galaxy took form, of which our life-giving sun is a member. And this earth, of whose material we are made, is a flying satellite of that sun. We are, in fact, productions of this earth. We are, as it were, its organs. Our eyes are the eyes of this earth; our knowledge is the earth’s knowledge. And the earth, as we now know, is a production of space.…

  And so now we must ask: What does all this do to mythology? Obviously, some corrections have to be made.

  For example: It is believed that Jesus, having risen from the dead, ascended physically to heaven (Luke 24:51), to be followed shortly by his mother in her sleep (Early Christian belief, confirmed as Roman Catholic dogma on November 1, 1950). It is also written that some nine centuries earlier, Elijah, riding a chariot of fire, had been carried to heaven in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:11).

  Now, even ascending at the speed of light, which for a physical body is impossible, those three celestial voyagers would not yet be out of the galaxy. Dante in the year A.D. 1300 spent the Easter weekend in a visit to hell, purgatory, and heaven; but that voyage was in spirit alone, his body remaining on earth. Whereas Jesus, Mary, and Elijah are declared to have ascended physically. What is to be made today of such mythological (hence, metaphorical) folk ideas?

  Obviously, if anything of value is to be made of them at all (and I submit that the elementary original idea must have been something of this kind), where those bodies went was not into outer space, but into inner space. That is to say, what is connoted by such metaphorical voyages is the possibil-ity of a return of the mind in spirit, while still incarnate, to full knowledge of that transcendent source out of which the mystery of a given life arises into this field of time and back into which it in time dissolves. It is an old, old story in mythology: of the Alpha and Omega that is the ground of all being, to be realized as the beginning and end of this life.76

  The limits of psychology are the same as the limits of theology. They have to do with the problem of symbolization, not with the transcendence, and they go the same distance. When you simply translate God into a psychological function or factor, you have gone as far as God and no further. As long as you have a God, you’re stuck. Recall Meister Eckhart: “The ultimate leave-taking is the leaving of God for God.”

  It’s a shame we have only one word for the two concepts. In India, there are several—jīva, ātman, brahman—and they are all different. “God,” our one word, is a really inadequate word. It always implies a personification, and unless one says “Goddess,” it implies a male personification. Our limited vocabulary is what binds us, what ties us up.

  In relation to the first books and chapters of the Bible, it used to be the custom of both Jews and Christians to take the narratives literally, as though they were dependable accounts of the origin of the universe and of actual prehistoric events. It was supposed and taught that there had been, quite concretely, a creation of the world in seven days by a god known only to the Jews; that somewhere on this broad new earth there had been a Garden of Eden containing a serpent that could talk; that the first woman, Eve, was formed from the first man’s rib, and that the wicked serpent told her of the marvelous properties of the fruits of a certain tree of which God had forbidden the couple to eat; and that, as a consequence of their having eaten of that fruit, there followed a “Fall” of all mankind, death came into the world, and the couple was driven forth from the garden. For there was in the center of that garden a second tree, the fruit of which would have given them eternal life; and their creator, fearing lest they should now take and eat of that too, and so become as knowing and immortal as himself, cursed them, and having driven them out, placed at his garden gate “cherubim and a flaming sword which turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”77

  Those cherubim are an important symbol. The Garden of innocence and spontaneous life, of unity before the knowledge of pairs of opposites, exits into the world of time and historical duality, symbolized by the cherubim at the gate with the flaming sword between: you can’t go through. How are we to interpret those cherubim and the Garden?

  Well, you go to Japan to see the Great Buddha at Nara. He is seated in the garden at the foot of the Tree of Immortal Life. As you approach the temple, you come to a preliminary building where two terrific figures stand as door guardians. They are the cherubim. One of them has his mouth open, the other’s mouth is closed: a pair of opposites. One represents the fear of death, and the other the desire for life—the temptations that didn’t touch the Buddha.

  No earthly paradise has been found.…for it is the garden of man’s soul. As pictured in the Bible tal
e with its four mysterious rivers flowing in the four directions from a common source at the center, it is exactly what C. G. Jung has called an “archetypal image”: a psychological symbol, spontaneously produced, which appears universally, both in dreams and in myths and rites.…Like the image of a deity, the quadrated garden with the life source at its center is a figment of the psyche, not a product of gross elements, and the one who seeks without for it, gets lost.78

  So what is keeping you out of the Garden? Your fear and desire: that which the Buddha transcended. And when the Buddha did not respond to temptations of fear and desire, he passed through the gate to the tree, where he now sits with his hand pointing to the earth. That’s redemption. The Buddha and the Christ are equivalent. Jesus has gone through and become, himself, the fruit of the tree.

  When threatened

  by fear and desire,

  let ego go.

  So the idea of redemption in both Christianity and Buddhism has to do with one’s having come through. Whether one does or not, in either tradition, is some-thing else. You can walk between those figures at Nara and enter the temple, bringing fear and desire with you, and you’ve not really gone through. You may think you’ve achieved illumination, but you’re still in exile.

  The Buddhist interpretation of this whole thing is one of psychological transformation. The Christian interpretation is one of debt and payment. Paul was preaching to a group of merchants, who understood

  the whole mystery in terms of economics: there is a debt, and you get an equivalent payment. The debt is enormous, so the payment has to be enormous This is all bankers’ thinking. Christianity is caught up in that.

  I see Buddhism and Christianity as two vocabularies for speaking about the same thing. In Buddhism we are lost in the world of fear and desire, the field of māyā, illusion. This is, in Christian iconography, the Fall. Redemption is losing those fears and having the experience of eternal life. You experience that through the act of Jesus in affirming the world, in participating in the world with joy.

  The Buddha is saying, “Don’t be afraid of those gate guardians. Come in and eat the fruit of the tree.” The act of communion is eating the fruit of the second tree in the Garden. The fruit is symbolic of the spiritual nourishment that comes when you have reached the knowledge of your eternal life. There are various ways of interpreting these mysteries. I am not telling you something I invented.

  “Since in the world of time every man lives but one life, it is in himself that he must search for the secret of the Garden.”—Loren Eisely79

  …in the Levant, the accent is on obedience, the obedience of man to the will of God, whimsical though it might be; the leading idea being that the god has rendered a revelation, which is registered in a book that men are to read and to revere, never to presume to criticize, but to accept and to obey. Those who do not know, or who would reject, this holy book are in exile from their maker. 80

  So, then, what is it that our religions actually teach? Not the way to an experience of identity with the Godhead, since that, as we have said, is the prime heresy; but the way and the means to establish and maintain a relationship to a named God. And how is such a relationship to be achieved? Only through membership in a certain supernaturally endowed, uniquely favored social group.81

  A religion of relationships

  is a religion of exile.

  The Old Testament God has a covenant with a certain historic people, the only holy race—the only holy thing, in fact—on earth. And how does one gain membership? The traditional answer was most recently (March 10, 1970) reaffirmed in Israel as defining the first prerequisite to full citizenship in that mythologically inspired nation: by being born of a Jewish mother.82

  Our actual ultimate root

  is in our humanity,

  not in our personal genealogy.83

  And in the Christian view, by what means? By virtue of the incarnation of Christ Jesus, who is to be known as true God and true man (which, in the Christian view, is a miracle, whereas in the Orient, on the other hand, everyone is to be known as true God and true man, though few may have yet awakened to the force of that wonder in themselves).84

  We are all Christs

  and don’t realize it.

  Among tribesmen depending on the hunting skills of individuals for their existence, the individual is fostered: even the concept of immortality is individual, not collective. Spiritual leadership is exercised primarily by shamans, who are individuals endowed with spiritual power through personal experience, not socially installed priests, made members of an organization through appointment and anointment.85

  The central demand is to surrender our exclusivity: everything that defines us as against each other. For years people have used religious affiliations to do this. Martin Buber speaks of “I-Thou” and “I-It” relationships. An ego talking to a Thou is different from an ego talking to an It. Wherever we emphasize otherness or outgroups, we are making persons into Its: the gentile, the Jew, the enemy—they all become the same.

  Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love: they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of the protection of his god. And there takes place, then, that dramatic divorce of the two principles of love and hate which the pages of history so bountifully illustrate. Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.86

  If you fix

  on yourself and your tradition,

  believing you alone have got “It,”

  you’ve removed yourself

  from the rest of mankind.

  Some say Communism is a social system without a religion; but you can’t say that Communism is not religious, for the laws of a Communist society have all the qualities of a religion because Communism has become the religion.

  In terms of the ritual side of it, Communism has all the character of a religion, and it has the characteristics of one that is a biblical descendent. There is a good and there is a bad, and we’re fighting for the good, and there will be a day, come the Revolution, when all will be Communist and right. Part of the argument between Russia and China is about who is interpreting Marx properly, which is sheer scholasticism.

  So, actually, most of the world’s societies are being ruled by post-biblical traditions, in which anybody who is anything else is out. Besides the Communist brother-hood, there is the Jewish community, the Christian community, and the Islamic, the Muslim community. Judaism doesn’t have a missionizing impulse, but the other three—Islam, Christianity, and Communism—are murderous traditions. The aim of each is total world conquest. That’s a beautiful show. Makes a mess of the world though.

  The goal of life

  is to make your heartbeat

  match the beat of the universe,

  to match your nature with Nature.

  In Buddhism the goal of life is the repose of the nirvāṇic experience of life: “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world,” and soon. In a credo religion, the goal of life tends to get formulated. In Islam, it’s in the very name of the religion: islām means “submission,” to bow in acquiescence and reverence to the will of God. This credo gives warriors enormous courage and power: whether they’re going to get killed or not get killed, they move in with submission to the fate. In fact, that’s what a warrior has to do anyhow.

  The warrior’s approach

  is to say “yes” to life:

  “yea” to it all.

  In terms of historical action, Christianity and Islam have the same character. They’re going to remake the world for their God. I find this repulsive, but it’s what makes history, so you have to say “yes” to it. If you say
“no” to one little detail of your life, you’ve unraveled the whole thing. You have to say “yes” to the whole thing, including its extinction. That’s what’s known as “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.” It’s my little theme song.

  Love informs the whole universe

  right down into the abyss of hell.

  Dante in his Divine Comedy unfolded a vision of the universe that perfectly satisfied both the approved religious and the accepted scientific notions of his time. When Satan had been flung out of heaven for his pride and disobedience, he was supposed to have fallen like a flaming comet and, when he struck the earth, to have plowed right through to its center. The prodigious crater that he opened thereupon became the fiery pit of Hell; and the great mass of displaced earth pushed forth at the opposite pole became the Mountain of Purgatory, which is represented by Dante as lifting heavenward exactly at the South Pole.87

  Dante saw even the fires of hell

  as a manifestation of God’s love.

  You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created the angels, he commanded them to pay worship to no one but himself; but then, creating man, he commanded them to bow in reverence to this most noble of his works, and Lucifer refused—because, we are told, of his pride. However, according to the Moslem reading of his case, it was rather because he loved and adored god so deeply and intensely that he could not bring himself to bow before anything else. And it was for that that he was flung into Hell, condemned to exist there forever, apart form his love.88