Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Tradition (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)

by Joseph Campbell

“How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action?...This is something really mysterious, something for which Reason can provide no explanation, and for which no basis can be found in practical experience. It is not unknown even to the most hard-hearted and self-interested.

Metaphor comes from the Greek meta, a passing over, or a going from one place to another, and phorein, to move or to carry. Metaphors carry us from one place to another, they enable us to cross boundaries that would otherwise be closed to us.

Thus, the Virgin Birth, as the reader will learn, does not refer to the biological condition of Mary, the mother of Jesus, but to a rebirth of the spirit that everyone can experience.

Christ, as the reader will recall or rediscover in this book, chose Peter, saying, in effect, “You do not understand spiritual things, therefore, I will make you head of my church.”

Compassion, however, demands much more of our character, requiring that we each make a hero’s journey into the far reaches of the lives of people that seem different from us.

For, as Campbell explains, the End of the World is not a cataclysmic event to whose final judgmental terror we draw ever closer. The End of the World comes every day for those whose spiritual insight allows them to see the world as it is, transparent to transcendence, a sacrament of mystery, or, as the poet William Blake wrote, “infinite.” The End of the World is, therefore, metaphoric of our spiritual beginning rather than our harsh and fiery ending.

The fourth function of traditional mythology is to carry the individual through the various stages and crises of life—that is, to help persons grasp the unfolding of life with integrity.

While times and conditions change drastically, the subject of historical conditioning throughout the centuries, that is the complex psychosomatic unity we call the human person, remains a constant.

“elementary ideas,”

“arch...

Artists share the calling, according to their disciplines and crafts, to cast the new images of mythology.

Metaphors only seem to describe the outer world of time and place. Their real universe is the spiritual realm of the inner life. The Kingdom of God is within you.

It has puzzled me greatly that the emphasis in the professional exegesis of the entire Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythology has been on the denotative rather than on the connotative meaning of the metaphoric imagery that is its active language. The Virgin Birth, as I have mentioned, has been presented as an historical fact, fashioned into a concrete article of faith over which theologians have argued for hundreds of years, often with grave and disruptive consequences. Practically every mythology in the world has used this “elementary” or co-natural idea of a virgin birth to refer to a spiritual rather than an historical reality. The same, as I have suggested, is true of the metaphor of the Promised Land, which in its denotation plots nothing but a piece of earthly geography to be taken by force. Its connotation—that is, its real meaning—however, is of a spiritual place in the heart that can only be entered by contemplation.

These images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have any one absolutely fixed meaning.

Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are called the great religions of the world. In all of these, God made the world and God and the world are not the same.

The goal of Western religions is not to bring about a sense of identity with the transcendent. Their goal is to bring about a relationship between human beings and God, who are not the same.

How in this tradition do you get related to God? The relationship is accomplished through an institution.

In the Christian tradition, Christ is the center because He is true God and true Man. This is regarded as a mystery because of the unity of these two natures. It is no mystery at all in the Orient, where each of us is conceived to be precisely a piece of God.

The God of the institution is not supported by your own experience of spiritual reality.

Tat tvam asi, that is you.”[9]

The question sometimes arises as to whether the experience of mystery and transcendence is more available to those who have undergone some kind of religious and spiritual training, for whom, as I have said, it has all been named completely. It may be less available to them precisely because they have got it all named in the book. One way to deprive yourself of an experience is indeed to expect it. Another is to have a name for it before you have the experience. Carl Jung said that one of the functions of religion is to protect us against the religious experience. That is because in formal religion, it is all concretized and formulated. But, by its nature, such an experience is one that only you can have. As soon as you classify it with anybody else’s, it loses its character. A preconceived set of concepts catches the experience, cutting it short so that it does not come directly to us. Ornate and detailed religions protect us against an exploding mystical experience that would be too much for us.

It is clear that, in Orpheus and Christ, we have exactly the same archetype,

As I have observed before, although I do not know how to prove it, the great insight of St. Paul on the road to Damascus was that the calamity of the death of this young rabbi, Jesus, was a counterpart of the death and resurrection of the savior found in the classical mysteries.

Christ goes past that—“I and the Father are one”—b.c. into the realm of unity from which we have been expelled.

Triptolemus is associated with the bread, the grain, and Dionysos with the wine. These are the elements of the Roman Catholic sacraments of the Mass.

The serpent power is the bite of death to ego that opens the eye and the ear to the eternal.

In the Shintō scriptures one reads that the processes of nature cannot be evil. In our tradition, every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been purified in some manner.

one sees the Deity and at His right stand the three Graces.

Father is Thalia, the abundance who unites the other two. The Son is Euphrosyne, the rapture of love that pours itself into the world. The Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, is Aglaia, who carries us back.

In almost all other systems, the gods are agents, manifestations, or imagined functionaries of an energy that transcends all conceptualization.

What is the meaning of the End of the World?

Not seeing it, we live in the world as though it were not the Kingdom. Seeing the Kingdom—that is the End of the World.

And he says in this Thomas Gospel, “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I shall be he.”

The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Who and what is in Heaven? God is in Heaven. Where is God? Within you.

This idea is the sense of Zen Buddhism. You must find it in yourself. You are it: “Thou art that. Tat tvam asi.” That message from India electrifies us, but, sadly, the churches are not preaching it.

The Heaven to which these bodies of Jesus and Mary supposedly ascended physically is really that to which you descend when you go into yourself, which is the place, if we are still using concretizing terms, out of which you came. And within which you are. And where indeed you are.

What is important? Is it the illumination, or is it the bulb? What is important and of what are these bulbs the vehicles? They are the vehicles of light, or, for our purposes, of consciousness.

What you find is that which was not born did not die but came into manifestation through this body and it is the same thing that is in the bodies of others.

Abelard,

He developed the notion that Christ, in suffering on the Cross, represents that quality of life that evokes our compassion.

The Waste Land is that territory of wounded people—that is, of people living inauthentic lives, broken lives, who have never found the basic energy for living, and they live, therefore, in this blighted landscape.

a deity is the personification of a spiritual power, and deities who are not recognized become demonic and are really dangerous.

For example, when disaster strikes, when you meet with a great ca-lamity, what is it that supports you and carries you through?

And when eyes opened, what did they see? They beheld living things consuming each other, life living on life.

The first function, then, of every early mythology was to teach one to affirm and to participate in that scene.

A basic methodological principle, to be regarded when mythology is being interpreted in psychological terms, tells us that what is referred to in myth as “other world” is to be understood psychologically as inner world (“the Kingdom of Heave...

Eternity is neither future, nor past, but now.

One of the most interesting things about the Bible is that every one of the major Old Testament mythological themes has been found by our modern scholars in the earlier Sumero-Babylonian complex:

Myths that originally had pointed to the goddess as the ultimate source are now pointing to a god!

Since, as even Saint Thomas states in his Summa contra gentiles (book I, chapter 5), “Then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think of God,”