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

by Joseph Campbell

There we see the animals of Set and Osiris, reconciled in the Christ-child. These two powers, one of the light and one the dark, are united in him. They are giving Him their breath, just as God breathed His spirit.

Osiris and his brother, Set, as well as Mithra, are recognizing Christ for who He is.

In that very earliest depiction, we already find the Catholic idea that the older myths are pre-figurements of the new.

That there was no room in the inn is also an old story. So, too, is that of the infant in exile as the new world is born outside the province of the old. The Massacre of the Innocents is another important motif associated with the birth of the savior.

Kṛṣṇa.

And then he, in a great wrath, issued the order that all young boys under the age of one or two should be killed.

the child exposed to danger, substituted as a child with surrogate parents, whose life is threatened by the tyrant king, and who returns to overcome the latter’s power, and to bring something new to the world.

Because the Jews came out of Egypt, so, too, Jesus is trying to come out of Egypt. He goes then into the desert for forty days, just as the Jews were in the desert forty years, giving us a microcosmic reproduction of the great history of the Jewish race.

Since Christ is to be the world teacher and the spiritual master, His infant deed is that of teaching the wise men in the temple on that wonderful occasion when the parents had to go to Jerusalem for the census.

In the Buddha legend, a yogi arrives and sees the thirty-two signs on the hands and on the body of the Buddha. He says, “You are going to be either a world king, or a world teacher.”

As the Buddha goes forth to the greatest teachers of his time, interviews them, and then goes beyond all of them, so Christ goes to the greatest teacher of His time, John the Baptist, is baptized and initiated by him, and then goes beyond him.

In that century there was a very strong movement on the part of many Jews to Hellenize just as there were many reactions to maintain the old traditions.

However, the officer and guard who were sent in to establish the classical Greek altar in the temple were murdered and a grassroots revolt started.

Judas Maccabeus imposed forceful regulations on the Jewish community and there were bloody revolts against that, followed by an exodus from Jerusalem.

people were claiming the priesthood who shouldn’t have it, claiming the kingship who shouldn’t have it, and war, along with obscenities and brutalities of the worst sort, was found everywhere.

The Essene community, whose members looked forward to the coming event of the Messiah, was founded against this background.

This idea of the Messiah as the herald of the Apocalypse was adopted by the Hebrews from the Persians.

fish idea.

Understood metaphorically, this story tells us that Mary did not give literal Virgin Birth to a savior, but that she gave normal birth to Jesus, who become the vehicle of the Logos at that particular moment.

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” In that moment God did forsake him, and all that died was Jesus again, not the Christ, on the cross.

This journey parallels that of the Buddha, who, after having studied with one after another of the masters, departed on his own quiet quest.

Christ rejects living by economics alone, the course of political triumph, and the inflated spiritual self that would dazzle others with its power.

Tempted to social duty, or political action, the Buddha finally simply touched the ground with his fingertips and the Earth Goddess herself said, “This is my beloved son, who through many lifetimes has so given of himself that there is nobody here, he has a right to this spot.”

This narrative, as we have suggested, is evocative of the orphic tradition which has to do with the fishing of souls and the idea that the world in which we live is, in a way, the waters of the sea. Water’s capacity to reflect in reverse the forms of the heavenly world gives us a basic sense of this symbol, so that we can conceive of living in a mirror world—that is to say, that in it everything is the reverse of what is in Heaven.

Many of these repeat the miracles of Elijah and Elisha, as one can easily discover by rereading those chapters concerning them in the Old Testament. There we find the same miracles, including resurrecting the dead, healing the sick, and walking on water.

will erase myself as he has erased himself, and I will walk across the water.’

The sense of this story and of the miracles is that as the spirit blows over the waters, so anyone who has entirely spiritualized himself can do the same.

In any case, the Miracles in the Christ legend are standard ones. It does not follow that they did not happen, because it is certain, as it has been demonstrated time and time again, that miraculous cures can be achieved through people of great spiritual realization.

Friday being Freya’s day, or Venus’s day, whose creature is the fish.

It is striking to observe the placing of the Easter and the Passover festivals together on the date that had been that of the death and resurrection of Adonis—that is, around the twenty-fifth of March.

The cave in which Christ is supposed to have been born in Bethlehem was also the cave of the birth of Adonis.

When they come out of Egypt, however, they come through water, by passing through the Red Sea. We recall that they entered Egypt through Joseph going into a well.

And Moses is not the hero; the people, the Jewish people, are the hero.

It is characteristic of the Hebrew tradition that the sacred thing in the world, the precious, holy thing, should be the Jewish race.

The emergence of the new thing, the new being, from the land of mud.

So Passover, and Easter, and the resurrection of Adonis are all symbolic of the birth of the self-image out of the earlier darkness.

Judas is the midwife of salvation, the counter-player to Christ. He is the one who delivers Him to His death, and himself then dies in shadow.

You cannot have light without the shadow; the shadow is the reflex of the figure of light.

The role of Ananda, the cumbersome body servant of the Buddha, his relative, and a charming person, as with St. Peter, is that of the one who never gets things quite right, and who is made the head of the church.

There is also in the Buddha tradition the third figure, who is a smith.

Adonis was killed by a boar

So the Buddha was killed by a boar, by the pig.

Thus, the first Redemption theory: Christ as the bait, the cross as the hook, and the Devil cheated.

The second theory is that God the Father was so greatly offended by the sin of Adam and Eve that atonement had to be made for it.

That name is translated “Feathered Serpent,” suggesting the mystery of a personage uniting in himself the opposed principles represented in the earthbound serpent and the released flight of a bird.

Furthermore, on top of the Mayan cross there is a bird sitting, the quetzal bird, and at the base there is a curious mask, a kind of death mask. A number of paintings of the Crucifixion from late medieval times and the early Renaissance period show the Holy Spirit above, in the form of a dove, and beneath the foot of the cross, a skull.

but in medieval Christian legend, the skull out of which the cross appeared to have grown, as a tree from its seed, was said to be Adam’s. When the blood of the crucified Savior fell upon it from His pierced hands and feet, the First Man was, so to say, retroactively baptized, and with him the whole human race.

These are sensation and intuition, which are the apprehending functions, and thinking and feeling, which are the functions of judgment and evaluation.

In Jung’s view, based on his work with patients, we tend to favor in the shaping of our lives but one of the two functions of each pair.