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

by Joseph Campbell

The rules as well as the rituals of such a society put persons in accord not only with their social world, the world of nature without, but also with their own human nature within.

second millennium

Near Eastern realms, “the great reversal,” as I term it. As you know, when you have people who think the world is heating up, their subjective reaction is to want to cool it off. At that period, one observes the beginnings of meditation, the effort to disengage the self from the world.

At that period, one observes the beginnings of meditation, the effort to disengage...

Zoroaster,

Zoroaster was the prophet of the Persians, the people who restored the Jews to Jerusalem, the same Persians who later gave rise to the Chaldeans. The basic idea in Zoroaster’s teaching is that there are two Gods, one good, the other evil. The good God is a God of Light, of Justice, of Wisdom, who created a perfectly good world. His name is Ahura Mazda, “First Father of the Righteous Order, who gave to the sun and stars their paths.” The Mazda bulbs were named after this God of Light. Against him stands a God of Evil, Angra Mainyu, “the Deceiver,” who is the god of lies, darkness, hypocrisy, violence, and malice. He it was who threw evil into this good and well-made world. Thus the world in which we live is a mixture of light and darkness, of good and evil. This worldview is the mythology of the Fall. In its biblical transformation, it is the Fall. There is then a nature world that is not good and one does not put oneself in accord with it. It is evil and one pulls out or away in order to correct it. From this view arises a mythology with this sequence: Creation, a Fall, followed by Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), who teaches the way of virtue that will bring a gradual restoration of goodness. On the last day, after a terrific battle known as Armageddon, or the Reckoning of Spirits, Zoroaster will appear, in a second incarnation, the evil power will be wiped out, and all will be peace, light, and virtue forever. This mythology is surely familiar to all.

Consequently, throughout the Old Testament one reads of the kings who, in the sight of Yahweh, do well to wipe out the nature religions.

In India, for example, after the Indo-European invasions—around the time of the Hebrew invasion of Canaan, in the thirteenth to fourteenth century b.c.—we see a reemergence of the Goddess cult.

The other way of reading the word “transcendent” is that of Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, as the ultimate mystery of being that transcends all conceptualization, beyond thought, beyond categories. That is the notion that is found in the Upaniṣads.

Gnosticism,

Heinrich Zimmer, who used to say, “The best things can’t be told. The second best are misunderstood.”

As the patriarchal mythologies rose in strength they put down the Mother Goddess mythologies. The Mother Goddess mythologies then reasserted themselves, as, for example, in the seventh century back or so in Greece when they rose again in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the wonderful mystery religions.

Kālī, in one of her various forms, is Śakti, the energy that informs all of life.

The first part of the book of Genesis is sheer mythology, and it is largely that of the Mesopotamian people.

The story of not eating the apple of the forbidden tree is an old folklore motif, that is called “the one forbidden thing.”

When you eat the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, however, you know about pairs of opposites, which include not only good and evil, light and dark, right and wrong, but male and female, and God and Man as well.

The question becomes, how do they get back into the Garden?

Jesus says, “Judge not, that you may not be judged.” That is the way back into the Garden.

You must live on two levels: One, out of the recognition of life as it is without judging it, and the other, by living in terms of the ethical values of one’s culture, or one’s particular personal religion. These are not easy tasks.

This idyllic spot is not an historical fact. The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites—man and woman, good and evil—are as holy as that of a god.

You are in the Garden and the tree is the way out. The way out is through learning of good and evil, a process that is symbolically expressed by eating the fruit of that tree.

Look back at the gate of the Garden where stand the two cherubim with the flaming sword between them, and you are out, in exile from the place where all was one.

fear and desire are what keep you out of the Garden. It is not God who keeps us in exile, but ourselves.

One must overcome the fear and the desire. “Regard the lilies of the field,” Jesus teaches, “They toil not, neither do they spin.”

You’ll clean desire and fear from your eyes, and will behold everything as a revelation of the Divine.”

Gospel of Thomas,

It is not about an historical incident but about a psychological, spiritual experience, a metaphor for what is happening to us right now.

God had a Garden, the story tells us, because He needed a Garden. This theme dates back to old Sumer. In their stories, the gods grew weary of tilling the fields and feeding themselves so they created the human race to till the fields for them.

Indian Upaniṣads

Now the difference between that and the biblical account is that God does not divide himself.

Rather he cuts Adam in half, you might say, in the creation of Eve.

Symposium of Plato,

In the Kabbala, one reads that if you live a moral life—that is to say, if your mind is in the right place and you are not a sensual person—then the person that you marry will be the one that is your other half.

The first chapter of Genesis, a much later text, describes a different crea-tion altogether. This text is post-Ezra, and it is after the exile in Babylon and the return to Jerusalem. Here, God creates by the word.

Egyptian text in which God creates by uttering every creation.

There, too, the Cain and Abel story is probably a transformation of that first murder, or separation, out of which everything comes.

Abraham the Hebrew, at around 2000 back

Akkadians,

King Sargon become the first great Semitic emperor, and the story of his birth will sound familiar.

There was a woman living up the Euphrates River who had a little child. She did not know how to care for him so she put him in a little basket of rushes and sealed it with bitumen and set it floating in the river. Pulled out of the water by the gardener ...

“legend.”

First there is sheer myth in the stories of the Creation, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel. All these are pure mythology.

Tower of...

zigg...

These edifices did not threaten heaven, but made available a way for the gods of heaven to descend to receive the worship of the slaves of earth.

A legend is understood as vaguely remembered history into which symbolic themes have been grafted.

The myth is that of the descent of the Patriarchs into Egypt.

Joseph goes to a well.

Water always represents the realm below the field of manifestation, the place of the new energy, the new dynamism. It refers to the field of the unconscious, going down into that realm and coming back out of it.

Who went down, we ask. The Patriarchs went down. What came out? A people.