The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero, he said, is that one lives only for self while the other acts to redeem society.

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

the Koran: “Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed away before you?”

“The writer must be true to truth.” And that’s a killer, because the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections. The perfect human being is uninteresting—the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable.

Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story.

We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.

When people get married because they think it’s a long-time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment.

If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male or female counterpart. But if we are distracted by certain sensuous interests, we’ll marry the wrong person. By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that’s what marriage is.

Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that’s what is threatening the world at this minute.

Specialization tends to limit the field of problems that the specialist is concerned with. Now, the person who isn’t a specialist, but a generalist like myself, sees something over here that he has learned from one specialist, something over there that he has learned from another specialist—and neither of them has considered the problem of why this occurs here and also there. So the generalist—and that’s a derogatory term, by the way, for academics—gets into a range of other problems that are more genuinely human, you might say, than specifically cultural.

he has an obligation to educate himself in public. Now, I remember when I was a young man going to hear Heinrich Zimmer lecture. He was the first man I know of to speak about myths as though they had messages that were valid for life, not just interesting things for scholars to fool around with.

MOYERS: Movies seem to create these large figures, while television merely creates celebrities. They don’t become models as much as they do objects of gossip. CAMPBELL: Perhaps that’s because we see TV personalities in the home instead of in a special temple like the movie theater.

You tell a story about a local jungle native who once said to a missionary, “Your god keeps himself shut up in a house as if he were old and infirm. Ours is in the forest and in the fields and on the mountains when the rain comes.”

Now brotherhood in most of the myths I know of is confined to a bounded community. In bounded communities, aggression is projected outward. For example, the ten commandments say, “Thou shalt not kill.” Then the next chapter says, “Go into Canaan and kill everybody in it.” That is a bounded field. The myths of participation and love pertain only to the in-group, and the out-group is totally other. This is the sense of the word “gentile”—the person is not of the same order.

The way of— CAMPBELL: —the way of man. And of course what destroys reason is passion. The principal passion in politics is greed. That is what pulls you down.

our founders opposed religious intolerance—

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a world of learned gentlemen. We haven’t had men of that quality in politics very much.

How do you reconcile the role of science, which is reason, with the role of faith, which is religion? CAMPBELL: No, no, you have to distinguish between reason and thinking. MOYERS: Distinguish between reason and thinking? If I think, am I not reasoning things out? CAMPBELL: Yes, your reason is one kind of thinking. But thinking things out isn’t necessarily reason in this sense. Figuring out how you can break through a wall is not reason. The mouse who figures out, after it bumps its nose here, that perhaps he can get around there, is figuring something out the way we figure things out. But that’s not reason. Reason has to do with finding the ground of being and the fundamental structuring of order of the universe.

The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong. There is an often-quoted verse in Sanskrit, which appears in the Chinese Tao-te Ching as well: “He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows. For in this context, to know is not to know. And not to know is to know.”

The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is to be experienced.

The person who has had a mystical experience knows that all the symbolic expressions of it are faulty. The symbols don’t render the experience, they suggest it. If you haven’t had the experience, how can you know what it is? Try to explain the joy of skiing to somebody living in the tropics who has never even seen snow. There has to be an experience to catch the message, some clue—otherwise you’re not hearing what is being said.

you don’t teach until you are asked. You don’t force your mission down people’s throats.)

moving out of the sphere of achievement into the sphere of enjoyment and appreciation and relaxing to the wonder of it all.

What you have here is what might be translated into raw individualism, you see, if you didn’t realize that the center was also right there facing you in the other person. This is the mythological way of being an individual. You are the central mountain, and the central mountain is everywhere.

the Son of God came down into this world to be crucified to awaken our hearts to compassion, and thus to turn our minds from the gross concerns of raw life in the world to the specifically human values of self-giving in shared suffering.

The one who suffers is, as it were, the Christ, come before us to evoke the one thing that turns the human beast of prey into a valid human being. That one thing is compassion.

St. Paul had written, “For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all.” You cannot be so disobedient that God’s mercy will not be able to follow you, so give him a chance. “Sin bravely,” as Luther said, and see how much of God’s mercy you can invoke. The great sinner is the great awakener of God to compassion. This idea is an essential one in relation to the paradoxology of morality and the values of life.

It’s characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.

MOYERS: Have you ever had sympathy for the man who has no invisible means of support? CAMPBELL: Who has no invisible means? Yes, he is the one that evokes compassion, the poor chap. To see him stumbling around when all the waters of life are right there really evokes one’s pity. MOYERS: The waters of eternal life are right there? Where? CAMPBELL: Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

among the Aztecs, for example, who had a number of heavens to which people’s souls would be assigned according to the conditions of their death, the heaven for warriors killed in battle was the same for mothers who died in childbirth. Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another.

what all the myths have to deal with is transformations of consciousness of one kind or another. You have been thinking one way, you now have to think a different way. MOYERS: How is consciousness transformed? CAMPBELL: Either by the trials themselves or by illuminating revelations. Trials and revelations are what it’s all about.

the political temptation. Jesus is taken to the top of a mountain and shown the nations of the world, and the Devil says to him, “You can control all these if you’ll bow down to me,” which is a lesson, not well enough made known today, of what it takes to be a successful politician.

isn’t it only the very few who can face the challenge of a new truth and put their lives in accord with it? CAMPBELL: Not at all! A few may be the teachers and the leaders, but this is something that anybody can respond to, just as anybody has the potential to run out to save a child. It is within everybody to recognize values in his life that are not confined to maintenance of the body and economic concerns of the day.

Myths grab you somewhere down inside. As a boy, you go at it one way, as I did reading my Indian stories. Later on, myths tell you more, and more, and still more. I think that anyone who has ever dealt seriously with religious or mythic ideas will tell you that we learn them as a child on one level, but then many different levels are revealed. Myths are infinite in their revelation.

Our Western dragons represent greed. However, the Chinese dragon is different. It represents the vitality of the swamps and comes up beating its belly and bellowing, “Haw ha ha haww.” That’s a lovely kind of dragon, one that yields the bounty of the waters, a great, glorious gift. But the dragon of our Western tales tries to collect and keep everything to himself. In his secret cave he guards things: heaps of gold and perhaps a captured virgin. He doesn’t know what to do with either, so he just guards and keeps. There are people like that, and we call them creeps. There’s no life from them, no giving. They just glue themselves to you and hang around and try to suck out of you their life.

MOYERS: Like all heroes, the Buddha doesn’t show you the truth itself, he shows you the way to truth.

MOYERS: There’s the question Hamlet asked, “Are you up to your destiny?” CAMPBELL: Hamlet’s problem was that he wasn’t. He was given a destiny too big for him to handle, and it blew him to pieces. That can happen, too.

I can give you examples from what I know of students in art studios. There comes a moment when they have learned what the artist can teach them. They have assimilated the craft, and they are ready for their own flight.

MOYERS: There is an old prayer that says, “Lord, teach us when to let go.”

MOYERS: Do most myths say that suffering is an intrinsic part of life, and that there’s no way around it? CAMPBELL: I can’t think of any that say that if you’re going to live, you won’t suffer. Myths tell us how to confront and bear and interpret suffering, but they do not say that in life there can or should be no suffering.

CAMPBELL: “All life is suffering,” said the Buddha, and Joyce has a line—“Is life worth leaving?” MOYERS: But what about the young person who says, “I didn’t choose to be born—my mother and father made the choice for me.” CAMPBELL: Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That’s the helpful thing about the Indian idea of karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.

The five main virtues of the medieval knight might be brought in here. One is temperance, another is courage, another is love, another is loyalty, and another is courtesy.

marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one.

a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you’re not married.

In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament—love and forgiveness.

MOYERS: There’s another story from Persia about the first two parents. CAMPBELL: That’s a great one, yes. They were really one in the beginning and grew as a kind of plant. But then they separated and became two, and begat children. And they loved the children so much that they ate them up. God thought, “Well, this can’t go on.” So he reduced parental love by something like ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent, so parents wouldn’t eat up their children.

Love itself is a pain, you might say—the pain of being truly alive.

we’re told God is love. You once took the saying of Jesus, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust”—you once took this to be the highest, the noblest, the boldest of the Christian teachings.

the most gripping scripture in the Christian New Testament is for me: “I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”

we’re losing this sense of the circle in relation to time, because we have digital time, where you just have time buzzing by.