The Power of Myth

“Read other people’s myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts—but if you read other ones, you begin to get the message.”

Here Campbell urges Moyers and his audience to read mythologies beyond their religious traditions because reading the stories from only one tradition can limit understanding of universal human experiences. Through comparing mythologies, as the book does, the individual can see similarities as well as local differences that bring the individual closer to grasping the “message” of mythology, which is how to experience the rapture of life.

“But the models have to be appropriate to the time in which you are living, and our time has changed so fast that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. The virtues of the past are the vices of today. And many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. The moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now.” 

Campbell describes the need for mythologies to reflect the times in which they exist. If the figures of these stories reflect dated values, people will be deterred from looking to them for guidance. However, modern society also changes so quickly that it is difficult for mythologies to capture the collective imagination before new developments or changes occur.

“The main motifs of the myths are the same, and they have always been the same. If you want to find your own mythology, the key is with what society do you associate? Every mythology has grown up in a certain society in a bounded field.”

Although myths have universal themes about life, death, and the stages of human existence, they also produce highly local stories about cultural customs, sacred sites, and local environments. Like interpreting a personal dream to unlock universal archetypes, individuals can introduce themselves to mythology by seeking out local mythologies, as these will lead to learning about the larger themes in global myths.

“You can’t predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you’re going to dream tonight. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form.”

This statement illustrates the central theme of myths as metaphors. Campbell mentions the common place where dreams and myths come from, the unconscious, which is the hidden space of consciousness that houses evolutionary memory and primal instincts common to all humans. Myths and dreams are manifestations of this unconscious mind’s knowledge that can only be expressed through symbolic images due to an incompatibility with human language.

“We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers.”

This excerpt from a letter attributed to Chief Seattle expresses how the Native peoples of America relate to their environment in terms of kinship. Not only do they recognize the divinity in the environment, but they recognize that same divinity within themselves, which makes all of creation a sacred space. For Campbell, Chief Seattle’s letter exemplifies a planetary worldview that will be necessary for new mythologies.

“It’s as though the same play were taken from one place to another, and at each place the local players put on local costumes and enact the same old play.” 

Campbell uses the metaphor of a play with different local costumes to explain the way archetypal myth structures exist in apparent variation within world mythologies. The basic structures, like the text of a play, are effectively the same, but each community adapts the surface details—the costume—to their specific environment and societal values. When the individual looks beyond the surface level of the stories, Campbell argues, they can find a consciousness shared by all peoples.

“The serpent is a traveling alimentary canal, that’s about all it is. And it gives you that primary sense of shock, of life in its most primal quality. There is no arguing with that animal at all. Life lives by killing and eating itself, casting off death and being reborn, like the moon. This is one of the mysteries that these symbolic, paradoxical forms try to represent.”

Campbell describes the recurring symbol of the snake in mythology and why it is often a feared animal. The snake at once symbolizes life at its most basic—killing and eating—while also symbolizing the cycles of life that come with its shedding of skin. Human beings too must kill other beings to survive, and the older generations must die out for new ones to take their place, so the snake confronts the individual with these unpleasant facts while also being a celebratory image of life’s affirmation.

“I and you, this and that, true and untrue—every one of them has its opposite. But mythology suggests that behind that duality there is a singularity over which this plays like a shadow game. [...] We want to think about God. God is a thought. God is a name. God is an idea. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought.”

Human language in the temporal world is built around pairs of opposites, and Campbell suggests that humans try to illuminate the unified realm behind the physical world through symbols. God figures attempt to grapple with the transcendent singularity, but because “God” is a human idea, it cannot accurately embody the mysterious reality it points towards. Campbell argues that all mythologies try to understand this mystery through imaginative stories.

“The Garden of Eden is a metaphor for that innocence that is innocent of time, innocent of opposites, and that is the prime center out of which consciousness then becomes aware of the changes.”

Campbell asserts that the Garden of Eden and similar mythological places are not real, historical locations in the temporal world that humans once could access. Rather, these places symbolize the transcendent realm of unity where opposites of man/woman, mankind/God, life/death are not differentiated. Understanding these images as literal places can hinder the individual from understanding the concept behind the symbol.

“The psyche is the inward experience of the human body, which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears. Out of this common ground have come what Jung has called the archetypes, which are the common ideas of myths.”

Campbell explains why world mythologies use the same symbols and motifs despite having no apparent connection to one another. Using Jung’s theory of the archetypes that exist as instinctual evolutionary images in the unconscious, Campbell argues that because all humans have shared organs and experience the same stages of life, all humans across time and place have the impulse to use the same symbols for describing various mysteries of the self and the world.

“However, we do know that burials always involve the idea of the continued life beyond the visible one, of a plane of being that is behind the visible plane, and that is somehow supportive of the visible one to which we have to relate. I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology—that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one.”

Again, Campbell argues that all world mythologies attempt to grapple with the mysterious invisible realm that seems to animate and create all physical life. He notes that the earliest known evidence of this kind of thinking can be seen in Neanderthal burials. By burying their dead with weapons and animal sacrifices, the Neanderthals exhibit a primitive belief that life continues after the physical one.

“Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.”

Although Campbell believes that myths have become powerless in the modern West, he remains optimistic that new myths will be created. Artists are those most attuned to questioning the universe because they work in the world of metaphor and symbols. If an artist takes their role seriously, he later explains, they can interpret the mysteries of life for the broader society in the modern era through literature, film, and other art forms.

“But every land should be a holy land. One should find the symbol in the landscape itself of the energies of the life there. That’s what all early traditions do. They sanctify their own landscape.” 

A central theme of the book is the need for myth in the modern era, and Campbell suggests an individual can begin to connect to myth by seeing the divine life energy in their own environments. From there, one perceives the entire planet as a sacred space worthy of compassion and understanding. The mythologies of early agricultural and hunting societies perceive the world in this way, which is a relevant perspective for modern global culture.

“You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but a vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is the carrier. That is the God.” 

Campbell describes how the body simply houses the human consciousness, and once the body dies the consciousness re-enters its place of origin in the transcendent. This transcendent is what “God” and “heaven” images refer to—not actual beings or places, but the release from the temporal world into the eternal source of energy. Campbell says that this understanding helped him cope with mortality in his old age.

“Each person can have his own depth, experience, and some conviction of being in touch with his own sat-chit-ananda, his own being through consciousness and bliss. The religious people tell us we really won’t experience bliss until we die and go to heaven. But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you are still alive.”

“Sat-chit-ananda” is a Sanskrit phrase that Campbell translates as “being through consciousness and bliss,” or experiencing the rapture of being alive through bliss in the temporal world. Campbell believes that when physical life is over one’s consciousness will be so busy with the joy of the eternal that it won’t have the individual experience of heaven. The individual experience is only possible in the temporal world of separation, and so he advises his readers to seek out their bliss while on earth.

“The hero sacrifices himself for something—that’s the morality of it. Now, from another position, of course, you might say that the idea for which he sacrificed himself was something that should not have been respected. That’s a judgement from the other side, but it doesn’t destroy the intrinsic heroism of the deed.” 

A key aspect of the hero’s journey is sacrifice—overriding the instinct of self-preservation for the community, the nation, or an ideal. Campbell asserts that regardless of our judgement of whether the hero’s sacrifice was worthy, the act of sacrifice remains intrinsically heroic. He goes on to use the example of German and American soldiers, who both sacrificed themselves heroically for their countries, but from each side the other is not considered a hero.

“A legendary hero is usually the founder of something—the founder of a new age, the founder of a new religion, the founder of a new city, the founder of a new way of life. In order to found something new, one has to leave the old and go in quest of the seed idea, a germinal idea that will have the potentiality of bringing forth that new thing.” 

Myths of the hero’s journey describe how a certain custom, religion, or place came to be important to a particular community. Although the hero’s journey—the monomyth—is the common structure of these stories, each local community will imbue the narrative structure with a location and temporally-specific details. The hero’s journey depicts someone having an original experience that catalyzes a change both within himself and in his community.

“The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life but as an aspect of life.”

The world of mankind is one of duality, meaning that life and death are opposites but also necessary for the other to exist. Without affirming the necessity of death, the individual cannot fully understand the experience of life. One of Campbell’s pieces of advice to his audience is following bliss, which means finding the thing that makes you most happy and following its path; by doing this and affirming that death will come to all living things the individual can experience the joys of temporal life.

“So woman magic and earth magic are the same. They are related. And the personification of the energy that gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female. It is in the agricultural world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Nile, and in the earlier planting-culture systems that the Goddess is the dominant mythic form.” 

In agriculture-based societies, the figure of divinity is usually a woman, as her ability to create human life mimics the way the earth creates plant life. In societies like these, women in the community are valued for their life-giving abilities both in birth and the act of farming. Throughout the book, Campbell explains that one’s culture and environment dictate the community’s image of divinity—whether it is male or female—and dictate how the community interacts with the natural world.

“And do you know who that god is? It’s you. All of these symbols in mythology refer to you. You can get stuck out there, and think it’s all out there. So you’re thinking about Jesus with all the sentiments relevant to how he suffered—out there. But that suffering is what ought to be going on in you.”

A central theme of the book is that mythology is not literal, but metaphoric, and it is particularly metaphoric in reference to the life stages and transformations that all humans go through. If the individual or society becomes too focused on making myth out to be literal and historical, the individual will be distanced from spiritual experience and identification with the mysteries that myth tries to explain. Campbell often uses biblical tradition as an example of a religion that hinders its followers from spiritual understanding.

“When Yahweh creates, he creates man of the earth and breathes life into the formed body. He’s not himself there present in that form. But the Goddess is within as well as without. Your body is of her body. There is in these mythologies a recognition of that kind of universal identity.” 

Campbell describes the difference between male and female divine figures. Because in human life the woman is the immediate parent, female goddesses create from their own bodies, which are used to represent the entire planet. Because in life the father is the distant parent, male figures of divinity create from afar. Campbell asserts that today the image of a Mother Earth goddess can help connect people across national boundaries through an idea of shared origins.

“It was important in that it gave the West this accent on the individual, that one should have faith in his experience and not simply mouth terms handed down to him by others. It stresses the validity of the individual’s experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the monolithic system.” 

Campbell cites troubadour poets from the 12th and 13th centuries as those who influenced a change in consciousness for the wider society. The troubadours wrote stories of individual spiritual experiences in love, which eventually translated into trusting individual wisdom in other areas. Campbell continually affirms the importance of individual intuition for a blissful life, and so he celebrates the troubadours’ contributions to spirituality.

“I come into this society, so I’ve got to live in terms of this society. It’s ridiculous not to live in terms of this society because, unless I do, I’m not living. But I mustn’t allow this society to dictate to me how I should live.”

Moyers relates his understanding of Campbell’s argument that each person lives in both an inner and outer world. Although individual wisdom is important, merely following personal desires would lead to anarchy. Moyers and Campbell both see that an individual must exist in harmony with their external society, but also mustn’t let that society dictate everything that the individual does.