The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

So in the forest and planting cultures, there is a sense of death as not death somehow, that death is required for new life. And the individual isn’t quite an individual, he is a branch of a plant. Jesus uses this image when he says, “I am the vine, and you are the branches.” That vineyard image is a totally different one from the separate animals. When you have a planting culture, there is a fostering of the plant that is going to be eaten.

In the biblical tradition, the plant boy is Cain and the flint boy is Abel, who is really a herder rather than a hunter. So in the Bible, you have the herder against the planter, and the planter is the one who is abominated.

Jesus is on Holy Rood, the tree, and he is himself the fruit of the tree. Jesus is the fruit of eternal life, which was on the second forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. When man ate of the fruit of the first tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was expelled from the Garden. The Garden is the place of unity, of nonduality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings. You eat the duality, and you are on the way out. The tree of coming back to the Garden is the tree of immortal life, where you know that J and the Father are one.

In the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John gospels, it is simply mentioned that, at the conclusion of the celebration of the Last Supper, Jesus and his disciples sang a hymn before he went forth. But in the Acts of John, we have a word-for-word account of the whole singing of the hymn. Just before going out into the garden at the end of the Last Supper, Jesus says to the company, “Let us dance!” And they all hold hands in a circle, and as they circle around him, Jesus sings, “Glory be to thee, Father!”

But that’s the transformation of religion to theology. Religion begins with the sense of wonder and awe and the attempt to tell stories that will connect us to God. Then it becomes a set of theological works in which everything is reduced to a code, to a creed.

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.

It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming.

The best part of the Western tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.

You know, it’s very interesting to think of the history of Christianity. During the first five centuries, there were lots of Christianities, lots of ways of being Christian. And then, in the period of Theodosius in the fourth century, the only religion allowed in the Roman Empire was the Christian religion, and the only form of Christianity allowed in the Roman Empire was the Christianity of Byzantium’s throne. The vandalism involved in the destruction of the pagan temples of antiquity is hardly matched in world history.

But marriage is marriage, you know. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn’t that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it’s off. But 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.

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.

“Religion is a defense against the experience of God.”