The Power of Myth

A central theme of The Power of Myth is Campbell’s argument that all myths are metaphors. Myths may take inspiration from historical events, but they primarily symbolize something beyond their literal meaning, often the stages and mysteries of life that all people experience. Campbell illustrates this thesis with the story of Jesus’s ascension. According to the New Testament, Jesus died, was reborn, and ascended to the right hand of God. A literal reading would see Jesus flying bodily into the sky, ultimately reaching a place called heaven. As Campbell believes there is “no physical heaven anywhere in the universe” (67), he instead reads the story as a metaphor for Jesus’s inward awakening to the transcendent, heaven-like consciousness within him. The literal reading distinguishes ordinary people from Jesus, while a metaphoric reading urges each of us to seek a similar awakening in ourselves. Campbell focuses on the symbolism of the Bible throughout the conversation both because his Western audience would be most familiar with these stories and because he believes the Western Christian tradition focuses too strongly on a literal reading of the Bible.

Campbell’s theory of dreams builds on his belief that myths are metaphors, as a dream, which is a kind of individual myth, can be read as a series of symbols that point towards larger realities. Dreams come from the unconscious. They are imaginative impulses of the brain that produce “a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives” (48). Dream interpretation, Campbell argues, can help people understand themselves and their connection to shared human experiences. Using Jung’s theory of the types of dreams—either personal or archetypal—Campbell interprets a dream about failing an exam. On a personal level, the dream expresses the individual’s fear of failing a specific task. More broadly, however, the dream reveals an archetypal human fear of crossing thresholds. The dream is a symbolic “local example” of a universal human challenge (47).

Campbell argues that the Garden of Eden was not a real place, but rather is a symbol of “dreamtime.” The mythological story of humanity’s exile from Eden grapples with human existence in a world of dualities by symbolically exiling humanity from the original unity created by God. Once humankind eats the apple—a symbol for knowledge—they gain awareness of dualities: man and woman, God and man, good and evil, life and death (55-56). Campbell compares this story to an image from Hinduism, a triangle with a point in the middle. Like Eden, the central dot symbolizes dreamtime, from which all things come into the world as pairs, represented by the various sides of the triangle. These images illustrate Campbell’s argument that archetypal mythological symbols point towards a realm of non-duality to which humans desire to return.

Campbell and Moyers’s conversation about creation myths reveals the striking similarities among such stories around the world. Moyers reads from the Book of Genesis, which contains the creation myth a Western audience would be most familiar with. Campbell then describes myths from many different cultures that follow a similar structure: the earth forms in a void of darkness, a divine entity creates light and mankind, the divine entity contemplates their creation, and they finally rest. Moyers reads the following excerpt from Genesis 1: “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, […] and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters” (51). Emphasizing the imagery of darkness, the void, and water, Campbell then reads from the Pima Indians’ “The Song of the World”: “In the beginning there was only darkness everywhere—darkness and water” (51). Structuring this section as a back-and-forth recitation highlights the similarities between the stories, underscoring Campbell’s argument about a shared human unconscious that produces the same images for the same explanatory purposes in different contexts.

In this chapter, Campbell begins to consider the relationship between life and death, which he expands upon in his discussion of hunting rituals and sacrifice in the two following chapters. He introduces the symbol of the snake, which he believes represents life at its most basic level—the impulse to survive by killing and eating. Many traditions—like Buddhism and Hinduism—revere the snake because it “represents the power of life engaged in the field of time, and of death, yet eternally alive” (53). By affirming the snake, one affirms the necessity of recognizing death to experience being alive. Campbell notes that the biblical tradition conversely sees the snake as a bringer of sin because the snake encouraged Eve to eat the apple of knowledge, thus exiling humanity from “dreamtime.”