The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

“Why do you need the mythology?” She held the familiar, modern opinion that “all these Greek gods and stuff” are irrelevant to the human condition today. What she did not know—what most do not know—is that the remnants of all that “stuff” line the walls of our interior system of belief, like shards of broken pottery in an archaeological site. But as we are organic beings, there is energy in all that “stuff.” Rituals evoke it.

Consider the position of judges in our society, which Campbell saw in mythological, not sociological, terms. If this position were just a role, the judge could wear a gray suit to court instead of the magisterial black robe. For the law to hold authority beyond mere coercion, the power of the judge must be ritualized, mythologized. So must much of life today, Campbell said, from religion and war to love and death.

Walking to work one morning after Campbell’s death, I stopped before a neighborhood video store that was showing scenes from George Lucas’ Star Wars on a monitor in the window. I stood there thinking of the time Campbell and I had watched the movie together at Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in California. Lucas and Campbell had become good friends after the filmmaker, acknowledging a debt to Campbell’s work, invited the scholar to view the Star Wars trilogy. Campb...

On this particular visit, having again exulted over the perils and heroics of Luke Skywalker, Joe grew animated as he talked about how Lucas “has put the newest and most powerful spin” to the classic story of the hero. “And what is that?” I asked. “It’s what Goethe said in Faust but which Lucas has dressed in modern idiom—the message that technology is not going to save us. Our c...

“That’s not what the hero’s journey is about. It’s not to deny reason. To the contrary, by overcoming the dark passions, the hero symbolizes our ability to control the irrational savage within us.” Campbell had lamented on other occasions our failure “to admit within ourselves the carnivorous, lecherous fever” that is endemic to human nature. Now he was describing the hero’s journey not as a courageous act but as a life lived in self-discovery, “and Luke Skywalker was never more rational than when he found within himself the resources of character to meet his destiny.”

The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.” 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.

Joseph Campbell affirmed life as adventure. “To hell with it,” he said, after his university adviser tried to hold him to a narrow academic curriculum. He gave up on the pursuit of a doctorate and went instead into the woods to read. He continued all his life to read books about the world: anthropology, biology, philosophy, art, history, religion. And he continued to remind others that one sure path into the world runs along the printed page.

A few days after his death, I received a letter from one of his former students who now helps to edit a major magazine. Hearing of the series on which I had been working with Campbell, she wrote to share how this man’s “cyclone of energy blew across all the intellectual possibilities” of the students who sat “breathless in his classroom” at Sarah Lawrence College. “While all of us listened spellbound,” she wrote, “we did stagger under the weight of his weekly reading assignments. Finally, one of our number stood up and confronted him (Sarah Lawrence style), saying: ‘I am taking three other courses, you know. All of them assigned reading, you know. How do you expect me to complete all this in a week?’ Campbell just laug...

A journalist, it is said, enjoys a license to be educated in public; we are the lucky ones, allowed to spend our days in a continuing course of adult education. No one has taught me more of late than Campbell, and when I told him he would have to bear the responsibility for whatever comes of having me as a pupil, he laughed and quoted an old Roman: “The fates lead him who will; him who won’t they drag.”

Matthew Arnold believed the highest criticism is “to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.” This is what Campbell did. It was impossible to listen to him—truly to hear him—without realizing in one’s own consciousness a stirring of fresh life, the rising of one’s own imagination.

And I asked: Now that we moderns have stripped the earth of its mystery—have made, in Saul Bellow’s description, “a housecleaning of belief”—how are our imaginations to be nourished? By Hollywood and made-for-TV movies? Campbell was no pessimist. He believed there is a “point of wisdom beyond the conflicts of illusion and truth by which lives can be put back together again.” Finding it is the “prime question of the time.” In his final years he was striving for a new synthesis of science and spirit.

He argued that it is not science that has diminished human beings or divorced us from divinity. On the contrary, the new discoveries of science “rejoin us to the ancients” by enabling us to recognize in this whole universe “a reflection magnified of our own most inward nature; so that we are indeed its ears, its eyes, its thinking, and its speech—or, in theological terms, God’s ears, God’s eyes, God’s thinking, and God’s Word.”

The last time I saw him I asked him if he still believed—as he once had written—“that we are at this moment participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit to a knowledge not only of outside nature but also of our own deep inward mystery.” He thought a minute and answered, “The greatest ever.”

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

The umbilical point, the humanity, the thing that makes you human and not supernatural and immortal—that’s what’s lovable. That is why some people have a very hard time loving God, because there’s no imperfection there. You can be in awe, but that would not be real love. It’s Christ on the cross that becomes lovable.

CAMPBELL: People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves. MOYERS: Myths are clues? CAMPBELL: Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.

Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. 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 the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what the experience is.

Marriage, for example. What is marriage? The myth tells you what it is. It’s the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is. It’s different from a love affair. It has nothing to do with that. It’s another mythological plane of experience. 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. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity.

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, w...

MOYERS: If marriage is this reunion of the self with the self, with the male or female grounding of ourselves, why is it that marriage is so precarious in our modern society? CAMPBELL: Because it’s not regarded as a marriage. 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.

MOYERS: You talk a lot about consciousness. CAMPBELL: Yes. MOYERS: What do you mean by it? CAMPBELL: It is a part of the Cartesian mode to think of consciousness as being something peculiar to the head, that the head is the organ originating consciousness. It isn’t. The head is an organ that inflects consciousness in a certain direction, or to a certain set of purposes. But there is a consciousness here in the body. The whole living world is informed by consciousness.

I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow. Where you really see life energy, there’s consciousness. Certainly the vegetable world is conscious. And when you live in the woods, as I did as a kid, you can see all these different consciousnesses relating to themselves. There is a plant consciousness and there is an animal consciousness, and we share both these things. You eat certain foods, and the bile knows whether there’s something there for it to go to work on. The whole process is consciousness. Trying to interpret it in simply mechanistic terms won’t work.

MOYERS: Machines help us to fulfill the idea that we want the world to be made in our image, and we want it to be what we think it ought to be. CAMPBELL: Yes. But then there comes a time when the machine begins to dictate to you. For example, I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine—it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.

To say that the divinity informs the world and all things is condemned as pantheism. But pantheism is a misleading word. It suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is trans-theological. It is of an undefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being.

MOYERS: Scientists are beginning to talk quite openly about the Gaia principle. CAMPBELL: There you are, the whole planet as an organism. MOYERS: Mother Earth. Will new myths come from this image? CAMPBELL: Well, something might. 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. And the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it. That’s my main thought for what the future myth is going to be.

Living a human life in New York City or living a human life in the caves, you go through the same stages of childhood, coming to sexual maturity, transformation of the dependency of childhood into the responsibility of manhood or womanhood, marriage, then failure of the body, gradual loss of its powers, and death. You have the same body, the same bodily experiences, and so you respond to the same images. For example, a constant image is that of the conflict of the eagle and the serpent. The serpent bound to the earth, the eagle in spiritual flight—isn’t that conflict something we all experience? And then, when the two amalgamate, we get a wonderful dragon, a serpent with wings. All over the earth people recognize these images. Whether I’m reading Polynesian or Iroquois or Egyptian myths, the images are the same, and they are talking about the same problems.

Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs.

MOYERS: You talk about mythology existing here and now in dreamtime. What is dreamtime? CAMPBELL: This is the time you get into when you go to sleep and have a dream that talks about permanent conditions within your own psyche as they relate to the temporal conditions of your life right now.

MOYERS: Explain that. CAMPBELL: For example, you may be worried about whether you are going to pass an exam. Then you have a dream of some kind of failure, and you find that failure will be associated with many other failures in your life. They are all piled up together there. Freud says even the most fully expounded dream is not really fully expounded. The dream is an inexhaustible source of spiritual information about yourself. Now the level of dream of “Will I pass the exam?” or “Should I marry this girl?”—that is purely personal. But, on another level, the problem of passing an exam is not simply a personal problem. Everyone has to pass a threshold of some kind. That is an archetypal thing. So there is a basic mythological theme there even though it is a personal dream. These two levels—the personal aspect and then the big general problem of which the person’s problem is a local example—are found in all cultures. For example, everyone has the problem of facing death. This is a standard mystery.

MOYERS: What do we learn from our dreams? CAMPBELL: You learn about yourself. MOYERS: How do we pay attention to our dreams? CAMPBELL: All you have to do is remember your dream in the first place, and write it down. Then take one little fraction of the dream, one or two images or ideas, and associate with them. Write down what comes to your mind, and again what comes to your mind, and again. You’ll find that the dream is based on a body of experiences that have some kind of significance in your ...

MOYERS: Why is a myth different from a dream? CAMPBELL: Oh, because a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you. MOYERS: So if my private dreams are in accord with the public mythology, I’m more likely to live healthily in that society. But if my private dreams are out of step with the public— CAMPBELL: —you’ll be in trouble. If you’re forced to live in that system, you’ll be a neurotic.

MOYERS: But aren’t many visionaries and even leaders and heroes close to the edge of neuroticism? CAMPBELL: Yes, they are. MOYERS: How do you explain that? CAMPBELL: They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience—that is the hero’s deed.

Now, one of the main problems of mythology is reconciling the mind to this brutal precondition of all life, which lives by the killing and eating of lives. You don’t kid yourself by eating only vegetables, either, for they, too, are alive. So the essence of life is this eating of itself! Life lives on lives, and the reconciliation of the human mind and sensibilities to that fundamental fact is one of the functions of some of those very brutal rites in which the ritual consists chiefly of killing—in imitation, as it were, of that first, primordial crime, out of which arose this temporal world, in which we all participate. The reconciliation of mind to the conditions of life is fundamental to all creation stories. They’re very like each other in this respect.

The power of life causes the snake to shed its skin, just as the moon sheds its shadow. The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon its shadow to be born again. They are equivalent symbols. Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again.

Furthermore, the serpent represents the primary function of life, mainly eating. Life consists in eating other creatures. You don’t think about that very much when you make a nice-looking meal. But what you’re doing is eating something that was recently alive. And when you look at the beauty of nature, and you see the birds picking around—they’re eating things. You see the cows grazing, they’re eating things. 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.

Now the snake in most cultures is given a positive interpretation. In India, even the most poisonous snake, the cobra, is a sacred animal, and the mythological Serpent King is the next thing to the Buddha. The serpent represents the power of life engaged in the field of time, and of death, yet eternally alive. The world is but its shadow—the falling skin.

A serpent flows like water and so is watery, but its tongue continually flashes fire. So you have the pair of opposites together in the serpent.

In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised or baptized. The serpent was the one who brought sin into the world. And the woman was the one who handed the apple to man. This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist that has been given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of the Fall.

MOYERS: Is the story trying to tell us that, prior to what happened in this Garden to destroy us, there was a unity of life? CAMPBELL: It’s a matter of planes of consciousness. It doesn’t have to do with anything that happened. There is the plane of consciousness where you can identify yourself with that which transcends pairs of opposites. MOYERS: Which is? CAMPBELL: Unnameable. Unnameable. It is transcendent of all names.

MOYERS: God? CAMPBELL: “God” is an ambiguous word in our language because it appears to refer to something that is known. But the transcendent is unknowable and unknown. God is transcendent, finally, of anything like the name “God.” God is beyond names and forms. Meister Eckhart said that the ultimate and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God, leaving your notion of God for an experience of that which transcends all notions. The mystery of life is beyond all human conception. Everything we know is within the terminology of the concepts of being and not being, many and single, true and untrue. We always think in terms of opposites. But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it.

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. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can’t be thought about. The third best are what we talk about. And myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent.

Fear is the first experience of the fetus in the womb. There’s a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist, Stanislav Grof, now living in California, who for years treated people with LSD. And he found that some of them re-experienced birth and, in the re-experiencing of birth, the first stage is that of the fetus in the womb, without any sense of “I” or of being. Then shortly before birth the rhythm of the uterus begins, and there’s terror! Fear is the first thing, the thing that says “I.” Then comes the horrific stage of getting born, the difficult passage through the birth canal, and then—my God, light! Can you imagine! Isn’t it amazing that this repeats just what the myth says—that Self said, “I am,” and immediately felt fear? And then when it realized it was alone, it felt desire for another and became two. That is the breaking into the world of light and the pairs of opposites.

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.

MOYERS: What are archetypes? CAMPBELL: They are elementary ideas, what could be called “ground” ideas. These ideas Jung spoke of as archetypes of the unconscious. “Archetype” is the better term because “elementary idea” suggests headwork. Archetype of the unconscious means it comes from below. The difference between the Jungian archetypes of the unconscious and Freud’s complexes is that the archetypes of the unconscious are manifestations of the organs of the body and their powers. Archetypes are biologically grounded, whereas the Freudian unconscious is a collection of repressed traumatic experiences from the individual’s lifetime. The Freudian unconscious is a personal unconscious, it is biographical. The Jungian archetypes of the unconscious are biological. The biographical is secondary to that.

MOYERS: You think that the first humans who told the story of the creation had some intuitive awareness of the allegorical nature of these stories? CAMPBELL: Yes. They were saying it is as if it were thus. The notion that somebody literally made the world—that is what is known as artificialism. It is the child’s way of thinking: the table is made, so somebody made the table. The world is here, so somebody must have made it.

MOYERS: You say that mythology is the study of mankind’s one great story. What is that one great story? CAMPBELL: That we have come forth from the one ground of being as manifestations in the field of time. The field of time is a kind of shadow play over a timeless ground. And you play the game in the shadow field, you enact your side of the polarity with all your might. But you know that your enemy, for example, is simply the other side of what you would see as yourself if you could see from the position of the middle. MOYERS: So the one great story is our search to find our place in the drama? CAMPBELL: To be in accord with the grand symphony that this world is, to put the harmony of our own body in accord with that harmony.

MOYERS: When I read these myths, I am simply in awe of the mystery of it all. We can presume, but we cannot penetrate. CAMPBELL: 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.”

MOYERS: Far from undermining my faith, your work in mythology has liberated my faith from the cultural prisons to which it had been sentenced. CAMPBELL: It liberated my own, and I know it is going to do that with anyone who gets the message.

Now, according to the normal way of thinking about the Christian religion, we cannot identify with Jesus, we have to imitate Jesus. To say, “I and the Father are one,” as Jesus said, is blasphemy for us. However, in the Thomas gospel that was dug up in Egypt some forty years ago, Jesus says, “He who drinks from 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 it. The word “Buddha” means “the one who waked up.” We are all to do that—to wake up to the Christ or Buddha consciousness within us. This is blasphemy in the normal way of Christian thinking, but it is the very essence of Christian Gnosticism and of the Thomas gospel.

MOYERS: And what does the idea of reincarnation suggest? CAMPBELL: It suggests that you are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth. But you can live in terms of that depth. And when you can experience it, you suddenly see that all the religions are talking of that.