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.”

the only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others.’

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?”

It’s primarily a spiritual exercise, and the society is supposed to help us have the realization. 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.

“I wrestle against principalities and powers.” That was two thousand years ago. And in the caves of the early Stone Age hunter, there are scenes of wrestling against principalities and powers. Here in our modern technological myths we are still wrestling.

What I see in Star Wars is the same problem that Faust gives us: Mephistopheles, the machine man, can provide us with all the means, and is thus likely to determine the aims of life as well.

Eisenhower went into a room full of computers. And he put the question to these machines, “Is there a God?” And they all start up, and the lights flash, and the wheels turn, and after a while a voice says, “Now there is.”

And of course what destroys reason is passion. The principal passion in politics is greed. That is what pulls you down. And that’s why we’re on this side instead of the top of the pyramid.

That was out entirely. And that’s why they rejected the idea of the Fall, too. All men are competent to know the mind of God. There is no revelation special to any people.

Ethical laws. The laws of life as it should be in the good society. All of Yahweh’s pages and pages and pages of what kind of clothes to wear, how to behave to each other, and so forth, in the first millennium B.C. But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to—and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. Myths can teach you that.

As Kant said, the thing in itself is no thing. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can’t be told because they transcend thought.

That is the point. 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.”

Ramakrishna once said that if all you think of are your sins, then you are a sinner. And when I read that, I thought of my boyhood, going to confession on Saturdays, meditating on all the little sins that I had committed during the week. Now I think one should go and say, “Bless me, Father, for I have been great, these are the good things I have done this week.” Identify your notion of yourself with the positive, rather than with the negative.

my mouth will become as I am, and I shall be he.” Now, that is exactly Buddhism. We are all manifestations of Buddha consciousness, or Christ consciousness, only we don’t know

“He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” CAMPBELL: There has to be a training to help you open your ears so that you can begin to hear metaphorically instead of concretely. Freud and Jung both felt that myth is grounded in the unconscious.

The Sanskrit name for that is marga, which means “path.” It’s the trail back to yourself. The myth comes from the imagination, and it leads back to

Indra says, “I ask. Teach.” (That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don’t teach until you are asked. You don’t force your mission down people’s throats.)

optimism about the world?” And I say, “Yes, it’s great just the way it is. And you are not going to fix it up. Nobody has ever made it any better. It is never going to be any better. This is it, so take it or leave it. You are not going to correct or improve it.”

What about this idea of good and evil in mythology, of life as a conflict between the forces of darkness and the forces of light? CAMPBELL: That is a Zoroastrian idea, which has come over into Judaism and Christianity. In other traditions, good and evil are relative to the position in which you are standing.

That is not the necessary conclusion to draw. You could say, “I will participate in this life, I will join the army, I will go to war,” and so forth. MOYERS: “I will do the best I can.” CAMPBELL: “I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera—except that it hurts.”

universe is a manifestation of divinity itself, how should we say no to anything in the world? How should we say no to brutality, to stupidity, to vulgarity, to thoughtlessness?” And he answered, “For you and for me—the way is to say yes.” We then had a wonderful talk on this theme of the affirmation of all things. And it confirmed me in the feeling I had had that who are we to judge? It seems to me that this is one of the great teachings, also, of Jesus.

You’ll just have this unending delight in the beatific vision of God. But the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life. MOYERS: This is it. CAMPBELL: This is it.

As we know from the life of the Bushmen and from the relation of the native Americans to the buffalo, it is one of reverence, of respect. For example, the Bushmen of Africa live in a desert world. It’s a very hard life, and the hunt in such an environment is a very difficult hunt.

Killing is not simply slaughter, it’s a ritual act, as eating is when you say grace before meals. A ritual act is a recognition of your dependency on the voluntary giving of this food to you by the animal who has given its life. The hunt is a ritual.

The boy does not have a happening of this kind, so he has to be turned into a man and voluntarily become a servant of something greater than himself.

takes me back to a time when these spiritual principles informed the society. You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is.

Why do we like to talk about these things again? Because it puts us back in touch with the essential archetypology of our spiritual life. Going through

You can. Very often one of the things that one learns as a member of the mystery religions is that the labyrinth, which blocks, is at the same time the way to eternal life. This is the final secret of myth—to teach you how to penetrate the labyrinth of life in such a way that its spiritual values come through.

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.

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.

hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

Don’t you think we’ve lost that truth in this society of ours, where it’s deemed more heroic to go out into the world and make a lot of money than it is to raise children? CAMPBELL: Making money gets more advertisement. You know the old saying: if a dog bites a man, that’s not a story, but if a man bites a dog, you’ve got a story there. So the thing that happens and happens and happens, no matter how heroic it may be, is not news. Motherhood has lost its novelty, you might say.

Is the leader really a leader, or is he simply the one out in front on a wave? In psychological terms, the leader might be analyzed as the one who perceived what could be achieved and did it.

The story isn’t really trying to explain it, it has to do more with the value of fire. The fire theft sets man apart from the animals. When you’re in the woods at night, you light a fire, and that keeps the animals away. You can see their eyes shining, but they’re outside the fire range.

he was a compassionate human being at the same time and didn’t know it. The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he hadn’t known he possessed.

longer spiritually responsive to the hero. The hero is today running up against a hard world that is in no way responsive to his spiritual need. MOYERS: A windmill. CAMPBELL: Yes, but Quixote saved the adventure for himself by inventing a magician who had just transformed the giants he had gone forth to encounter into windmills.

Then you fall off. “A dangerous path is this.” When you follow the path of your desire and enthusiasm and emotion, keep your mind in control, and don’t let it pull you compulsively into disaster. MOYERS: One of the intriguing points of your scholarship is that you do not believe science and mythology conflict.

“Oh,” he said, “don’t be impatient! That’s not for you yet, darling.” And so it is: when you get older, and everyone you’ve known and originally lived for has passed away, and the world itself is passing, the maya myth comes in. But, for young people, the world is something yet to be met and dealt with and loved and learned from and fought with—and so, another mythology.

The messages of the great teachers—Moses, the Buddha, Christ, Mohammed—differ greatly. But their visionary journeys are much the same. At the time of his election, Mohammed was an illiterate camel-caravan master. But every day he would leave his home in Mecca and go out to a mountain cave to meditate. One day a voice called to him, “Write!” and he listened, and we have the Koran. It’s an old, old story.

He is a total expert in swordsmanship. The Oriental cultivation of the martial arts goes beyond anything I’ve ever encountered in American gymnasiums. There is a psychological as well as a physiological technique that go together there. This character in Star Wars has that quality.

It may be all much too small, in which case it will nail you down. And if you simply do what your neighbors tell you to do, you’re certainly going to be nailed down. Your neighbors are then your dragon as it reflects from within yourself. Our Western dragons represent greed.

I remember reading as a boy of the war cry of the Indian braves riding into battle against the rain of bullets of Custer’s men. “What a wonderful day to die!” There was no hanging on there to life. That is one of the great messages of mythology. I, as I now know myself, am not the final form of my being. We must constantly die one way or another to the selfhood already achieved.

The Buddhists speak of the bodhisattva—the one who knows immortality, yet voluntarily enters into the field of the fragmentation of time and participates willingly and joyfully in the sorrows of the world. And this means not only experiencing sorrows oneself but participating with compassion in the sorrows of others. Compassion is the awakening of the heart from bestial self-interest to humanity. The word “compassion” means literally “suffering with.”

Who, when or where, has ever been quit of the suffering of life in this world?

There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, the “love of your fate,” which is in fact your life.

The Buddhist Nirvana is a center of peace of this kind. Buddhism is a psychological religion. It starts with the psychological problem of suffering: all life is sorrowful; there is, however, an escape from sorrow; the escape is Nirvana—which is a state of mind or consciousness, not a place somewhere, like heaven.

It is the state you find when you are no longer driven to live by compelling desires, fears, and social commitments, when you have found your center of freedom and can act by choice out of that.

Voluntary action out of this center is the action of the bodhisattvas—joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. You are not grabbed, because you have released yourself from the grabbers of fear...

such a god as this, you may next expect a resurrection. The death of Osiris was symbolically associated with the annual rising and flooding of the river Nile, by which the soil of Egypt was annually fertilized. It was as though the rotting of the body of Osiris fertilized and vitalized the land.

inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. That is the wasteland. And that is what T. S. Eliot meant in his poem The Waste Land. In a wasteland the surface