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

by Joseph Campbell

Any activation of the unattended functions tends to be experienced as threatening and is resisted.

Moreover, since the resisted functions are undeveloped—“inferior,” as Jung terms them—they are alien to people’s understanding bo...

we are bound either to one or the other of the opposed terms of each pair, and hence to a knowledge or idea of good and evil that commits us to living as partial human beings.

If you see that the Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth while others do not see it, the End of the World has come for you. For the world as it was for you has indeed ended.

On the rational level, the images are said to be absurd and, therefore, to have no meaning. Our rational system thus breaks their connections and makes their energy unavailable to us, in our lives.

Secondly, our symbols have been rendered neutral by institutional religions that interpret these symbols historically.

We begin with Moses, the symbol of one who goes off alone, leaving his people only to return with a law for them. This is the identical hero journey that we find in all of the old ethnic traditions.

He rejects the economic theory of the spiri-tual life, thereby refuting Bernard Shaw’s notion that one must be economically well-off before one can practice spiritual exercises.

Christ rejects this temptation to spiritual inflation by saying, “You shall not tempt the Lord thy God.”

This mythological Grail was not inside any Church and only the person who had a certain character could find it.

But it is you and your potential character, which has never been seen and which can be brought into being by no one else, that is the life quest in the Western sense. Each individual pursues it in his or her own way.

Spiritually, then, we must all seek the Grail by entering that part of the forest where nobody else has cut a path for us.

The imagery of rebirth is of two main orders. The moon which dies and is resurrected is the chief symbol of this miracle of rebirth in time.