You see, Christianity was born in a panic time. In the centuries just before the Christian era, the Levant was in turmoil. The Hellenistic empire was breaking up, Rome was in its ascendancy, and the Jewish community was in a hell of a condition.
In 167 B.C., Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid emperor of Syria, installed a Greek altar on the Jewish altar in the temple court of Jerusalem. By establishing a Greek shrine in the Jewish temple compound, he hoped he would show that this religion was a variant of what all religions are about. No siree! Instead, Judas Maccabeus and his brothers killed the commissioner who was to establish the shrine. There was an uproar, the Maccabean revolt, which led to independent governance of the Jewish state for nearly a hundred years by a succession of Maccabean priest-kings.
In the age of the Maccabees the leaders in Jerusalem of the Hellenizing party were the Sadducees, among whom were priestly families claiming descent from the priestly patriarch Zadoc (Zadoc>Sadducee), and these were opposed chiefly by the Pharisees, or “Separatists,” who believed themselves to be of a stricter orthodoxy—though, in fact, they had combined the old Hebrew heritage of a Day of Yahweh to come with the idea of the world end of Zoroastrian eschatology.101
During that period there was continual internecine conflict, which intensified in 104 B.C., when the Jewish king Aristobulus claimed that he was, essentially, also the Messiah. This was heresy! Though he reigned only a year, his son, Alexander Jannaeus, spent the next thirty fighting a series of wars and suppressing all Jewish insurrections with his foreign troops.
And with [his] death, 76 B.C., the Pharisees came to power, and the internecine tide only ran the other way. New purges, fratricides, betrayals, liquidations, and miracles kept the kingdom in uproar until, after a decade of such madness, the Roman legion of Pompey was invited by one of two brothers who were then contending for the crown to assist him in his holy cause; and it was in this way that the city of God, Jerusalem, passed in the year 63 B.C. into the sphere of Rome.102
It was a fantastic period in Jewish history. With all this going on, at least one sect, the Essenes, thought that the end of the world was coming. So, they went out near Wady Qumrân, at the northwest corner of the Dead Sea, and built a monastery, where they rigorously trained to survive that ultimate moment when the Messiah would appear. We’ve learned about this Essene community from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered hidden in desert caves and rock crannies. These fantastic documents exhibit a very strong Zoroastrian influence. Even some of the vocabulary is Zoroastrian. One of the scrolls, for example, projects detailed plans for a forty-year apocalyptic war between “the Sons of Light” and “the Sons of Darkness.”
It is in this context, then, at precisely that time, the first century B.C., that St. John the Baptist was baptizing people only a few miles north of the Qumrân community. Now ritual bathing was a Qumrân rite, but John was not one of the Essenes, who wore white garments, for he wore the skins of animals and ate locusts and wild honey. The gospels recount that Jesus went out there, was baptized by John, and then went into the desert to have his own experience, known as “the Temptation in the Desert.” After forty days in the desert—imitating, in small, the Hebrew’s forty years—he returned and began to teach. And that’s where his story really begins.
It is not dissimilar from the story of the Buddha, who also goes out, studies with the principle teachers of the time, goes beyond them in his austerities, comes to illumination, and returns. Whether or not it happened to either of them is a question. The myth of a teacher who goes past all teachers is a standard motif.
What Jesus thought he was, we just don’t know. He didn’t write anything. He talked sometimes as though he thought he was the god of the Greek mys-teries who dies and is resurrected—dies to today and is resurrected to tomorrow—but he wrote, as it were, in sand. What little we do know about him, we’ve learned from the four gospels, and they are of different dates and actually differ considerably. For instance, if you look in your Bible, you will see that the Virgin Birth motif is found only in the gospel of Luke, a Greek. In Matthew and Mark, where the genealogy of Jesus is related in detail from David on down the royal line, it ends up, not with Mary, but with Joseph. Though we do not know the date of Jesus’ birth—we know nothing about it, in fact, except what we read in Luke—if he died, he probably died around 30 A.D. The gospels are funny things. They don’t agree. Unfortunately, four people wrote them, and they wrote differing accounts.
Luke seems to have traveled with Paul, and the earliest writings about Jesus are those of Paul, who never saw him. Paul, in fact, was in the crowd of Jewish zealots who killed the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen—which, by the way, is why Joyce calls his hero Stephen Dedalus. It was shortly after that event, on the road to Damascus, that Paul’s conversion took place: he had a vision, fell off his horse, and, so to speak, “founded Christianity.” It seems that Paul, a Jew who wrote elegant Greek, was torn between the monotheistic culture of Judaism and the non-dualistic Greek tradition. So, my notion of what happened to Paul is that he realized that the catastrophic killing of this young, inspired Jewish rabbi could be read as an enactment of the death and resurrection of the Greek mystery hero.
Now, monotheism is a concretization of God, a mystery that actually transcends concretization, and the concretization of the mystery savior in Jesus is equivalent. So, God is concretized, the savior is concretized, the end of the world is concretized, and Christianity loses its metaphoric perspective. If you read the historical “facts” as metaphors, however, then you will discover in Christianity a marvelous array of psychologically valid symbols that are fundamentally okay until they’re concretized.
Concretization is alright for teaching little children, who don’t understand metaphor. Matters such as these, they tend to take concretely. What has to happen at a certain point in one’s development is that these child-hood concretizations have to be opened up. You can’t get rid of them, because symbols that are taken concretely are put right into you. They are internalized and can’t just be dismissed. They have to be reread. I know. Until I was twenty-five-years old I took Christianity concretely. And I must say I’m grateful for having been exposed to such rich symbolism.
Yet there’s also some great strength to be gained by giving up that religion, by going beyond it. I mean, if you really do. If you just “drop out,” that’s something else. But if you think it through—if you learn to read the symbols as metaphors instead of accepting them as the facts they’re purported to be—if you know, in other words, why you are out, then it can be a source of great strength. But when you do break out, you then have to set up your own sacred field.
When I was student, still in the Catholic church, there was one week each year when we gave up all our studies and spent our time listening to sermons: some were like the hell sermon Joyce recounts in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; others were on such themes as the meaning of the sacraments. The purpose of these “retreats,” as they were called, was to remove us from the secular world and put us in a sacred space.
Such events are examples of the church creating a sacred space, but it’s the church’s sacred space, set up according to its program. Now, if the church is the rope you’re hanging onto, if that is what’s bringing you to your bliss place, then this approach avoids the problem of working this stuff out for yourself. But another way is to have your own little tabernacle, your own sacred space, from which you exclude everything else.
A sacred space is any space that is set apart from the usual context of life. In the secular context, one is concerned with pairs of opposites: cause and effect, gain and loss, and so on. Sacred space has no function in the way of earning a living or a reputation. Practical use is not the dominant feature of anything in the space. You do not have anything in your sacred space that’s not of significance to you for the harmonization of your own life. In your sacred space, things are working in terms of your dynamic—and not anybody else’s.
&nbs
p; Your sacred space is
where you can find yourself
again and again.
You really don’t have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that’s not a wasteland, some field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia—a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you—a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there. I think everybody, whether they know it or not, is in need of such a place.
Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy.
What you have to do,
you do with play.
I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you’re doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can’t play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don’t lead anywhere.
One great thing about growing old
is that nothing
is going to lead to anything.
Everything is of the moment.
When Jung decided to try to discover the myth by which he was living, he asked himself, “What was the game I enjoyed when I was a child?” His answer was making little towns and streets out of stones. So, he bought some property and, as a way of playing, began to build a house. It was a lot of work, utterly unneces-sary for he already had a house, but an appropriate way to create sacred space. It was sheer play.
What did you do as a child
that created timelessness,
that made you forget time?
There lies the myth to live by.
What do you like to do? What have you learned to do? Jung was a big, strong man, and he liked to push rocks around, so that’s what he did. I’ll bet that if you search back, you’ll find connections between the sacred space that you have now and a really special space that you had as a child.
As an adult,
you must rediscover
the moving power of your life.
Tension, a lack of honesty,
and a sense of unreality
come from following
the wrong force in your life.
In my own situation, when I was between the ages of about eleven and fifteen, I was crazy about American Indians. My family bought me The Complete Works of Parkman, reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, and all sorts of other books on the subject. I had a very nice little library, with beautiful, bronze, Indian heads that were bookends, and Navajo rugs, and so on. Then the house burned down. It was a terrible crisis in our family. My grandmother was killed. All of my things were gone.
I now realize that the sacred space I created for myself, the room in which I do my writing, is really a reconstruction—a reactivation, if you will—of my boy-hood space. When I go in there to write, I’m surround-ed by books that have helped me to find my way, and I recall moments of reading certain works that were particularly insightful. When I sit down to do the writing, I pay close attention to little ritual details—where the notepads and pencils are placed, that sort of thing—so that everything is exactly as I remember it having been before. It’s all a sort of “set-up” that releases me. And since that space is associated with a certain kind of performance, it evokes that performance again. But the performance is play.
Work begins
when you don’t like
what you’re doing.
And if your life isn’t play, or if you are engaged in play and having no fun, well, quit! The spirit of the sacred space is Śiva dancing. All responsibilities are cast off. There are various ways of doing this casting off. and it doesn’t matter how it happens. The rest is play.
“Any man who is attached to the senses and things of this world…is one who lives in ignorance and is being consumed by the snakes that represent his own passions.” —Black Elk103
A sacred space is hermetically sealed off from the temporal world. When you’re in such a space, there is no penetration through the enclosure. You are in an eternal zone that is protected from the impact of the stimuli of the day and the hour. That’s what you do in meditation: seal yourself off. The meditation posture is a sealing-off posture, and the regularized breathing furthers your inward-turned explorations. The world is sealed off, and you become a self-contained entity.
You must have such a sealing-off program for yourself whenever you require it: once a week, once a day, or once an hour. Of what value is that? It is an absolute necessity if you are going to have an inner life. What it provides is an interval in which the eternal within you is disengaged from the field of time. We spoke earlier of God’s making us “to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world,” out there, “and to be happy with him forever in heaven,” in the hermetically sealed sacred space within yourself. The further you can get into that, the more at peace you will be with whatever happens.
I was thinking of the sorts of conditions you set up for yourself to achieve the visit to the Grail Castle—for that’s what this sacred space is: the place where your associations are not with the field of phenomenal experience, but with the field of your own inward life. You do not get there in the normal run of life. To visit the Grail Castle, you have to have a sacred space. Then, once you have found the connection in your sacred space, you can perhaps translate it into other parts of your life. But first you have to have a little oil well, as it were, that goes down deep.
To live in sacred space
is to live in a symbolic environment
where spiritual life is possible,
where everything around you
speaks of exaltation of the spirit.
* * *
I’ve been traveling a lot the last ten years, and when I’m not somewhere I’ve been before, the kind of hotel room I prefer is a completely noncommittal room, an efficient room, the kind you find in a Holiday Inn. I open my bag, put my books on the table, hang my clothes on the open rack, and that’s it: here is Joe Campbell and here are his books—so what more do we have in the world? You can turn any place into a sacred space once you have your own sacred space. However, you can say that sacred space is everywhere only after you have learned, through a meditation discipline or the experience of sacred places, what the sanctity is. It is the metaphoric relevance of the object.
In sacred space,
everything is done
so that the environment
becomes a metaphor.
In India, I’ve seen sacred places that are just a red circle put around a stick or a stone in such a way that the environment becomes metaphoric: when you look at that stick or stone, you see it as a manifestation of brahman, a manifestation of the mystery.
Sacred space is a space that is transparent to transcendence, and everything within such a space furnishes a base for meditation. I’m thinking specifically of those Indian temples with a great wall around them: when you enter through the door, everything within that space is symbolic, the whole world is mythologized.
The earliest sacred spaces of which we have any evidence might well have been the little shrines of Neanderthal man, where there was a cave-bear skull and a lighted fire to build up a little atmosphere. The first, real sacred spaces were probably caves in southern France and northern Spain, dating from 30,000 B.C. When you go into those caves, you are in a magical sacred space, and your consciousness is transformed. I remember going into the big cave in Lascaux. It was fantastic. That universe down there seemed to be the primary world. The animals above ground were simply reflections of those on the walls of the caves. You don’t want to leave a place like that. The majesty and magic of it all somehow brings you into your own center. And once you are there, then sacred space is everywhere.
I’ve been a few places like that where I’ve thought, “A breakthrough is possible here. This is a
place for the exercises that will bring me to where I want to be.” That’s the whole meaning of a cult. A cult is a sacred place. But if you get stuck in a cult—if you think, “I just can’t be anywhere if I’m not here”—well, that’s too bad. You’re still in training.
WHEN I was in India, I wanted to meet a real, first-class master, and I didn’t want to hear any more slop about māyā and how you’ve got to give up the world and all that kind of thing. I’d had enough of that for about fifteen or twenty years. I was nosing around, listening, and I heard of one master in Trivandrum, in southwest India, and I decided to go see him. His mystic name was “Sri Atmananda.” I’ll call him that. Now when you get close to a master of that kind, you’re bound to meet a lot of nuts. You just are, there’s no doubt about it. But I knew that if I went, and if I was on the beam, I would get to see him.
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Page 14
