The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

The secret cause of all suffering,” he said, “is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed.

Preachers err, he told me, by trying “to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.

marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity.

I would say that if the marriage isn’t a first priority in your life, you’re not married. The marriage means the two that are one, the two become one flesh. If the marriage lasts long enough, and if you are acquiescing constantly to it instead of to individual personal whim, you come to realize that that is true—the two really are one.

One not only biologically but spiritually.

Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

What we’ve got on our hands. If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.

haha

I know ranch people who have a pet cow in addition to their ranch animals. They won’t eat the meat of that cow because there is a kind of cannibalism in eating the meat of a friend.

You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is.

That is why the mother becomes the symbol of Mother Earth. She is the one who has given birth to us and on whom we live and on whose body we find our food.

Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another.

A questionnaire was once sent around one of the high schools in Brooklyn which asked, “What would you like to be?” Two thirds of the students responded, “A celebrity.” They had no notion of having to give of themselves in order to achieve something.

The belly is the dark place where digestion takes place and new energy is created. The story of Jonah in the whale is an example of a mythic theme that is practically universal, of the hero going into a fish’s belly and ultimately coming out again, transformed.