Stephen Gerringer
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A little addendum: in Lecture II.2.2 of the Joseph Campbell Audio Collection (titled “Hermes, Alchemy, and the Voyage of Ulysses), Campbell notes the following:
In the frame of the canvas, the painter paints. And you look at a painter’s work, you see certain painters tend to certain colors. Others stick to other colors. These colors are projections of the spiritual inflections and moods of the artist himself. He can’t in some cases make it any differently. I remember one artist who was a student of a friend of mine, young girl, her paintings were all extremely dark, extremely dark, and she could never bring herself to paint any other kind of thing, and within three years she had died of a cancer that she didn’t know she had. I mean death was right there in her canvas. And then you’ll see suddenly the painter’s style changes, his whole psychology has changed, and the colors change. He has projected his psyche into the frame, into the colors.”
Here Campbell is addressing exactly the same unconscious dynamic manifesting in my friend Chris’ art!
(Great example of synchronicity as well; I was searching this lecture for references to following one’s bliss, when I stumbled across this snippet.)
Hi Derrick,
I moved your post from the MythBlasts forum (which is focused on discussing the MythBlast essays posted on JCF’s home page) to our Mythological Resources forum. A good place to begin might be to trawl through the reading list Joseph Campbell assigned students in his mythology course at Sarah Lawrence and see which works you feel would be relevant for students today (click on the link to access the list, which is archived in our Mythological Resources database; the PDF shows up in huge print on my laptop, so I’d recommend Zooming Out to view – but I’ll copy and paste Joe’s list below for convenience):
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993.
Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. One-volume ed. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922. Also, abridged from the second and third editions, ed. Robert Frazer. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Karen E. Fields. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Levy-Bruhl, Lucien. How Natives Think. Trans. Lilian A. Clare. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
—. Three Contributions to a Theory of Sex. Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1962.
—. Totem and Taboo. Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Vintage Books, 1950.
—. Moses and Monotheism. Trans. Katherine A. Jones. New York:Vintage Books, 1967
Jung, Carl Gustav. Integration of the Personality. Trans. Stanley M. Dell. New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939.
– .The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life. Translated and explained by Richard Wilhelm, with a foreword and commentary by C. G. Jung. Revised and augmented edition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or, The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane: according to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s English renderings. Compiled and edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda. The Dance of Ṥiva. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 1924. Reprint. New York: Dover Publications, 1985.
The Bhagavad Gita. Trans. W. J. Johnson. Oxford and New York:Oxford University Press, 1994.
Okakuru, Kazuko. The Book of Tea. Tokyo & New York: Kodansha International, 1989.
Watts, Alan. The Way of Zen. New York: Pantheon, 1957.
Herrigel, Eugen. Zen in the Art of Archery. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Lao-Tze, The Canon of Reason and Virtue (Tao Te Ching). Chinese and English. Trans. D. T. Suzuki and Paul Carus. La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1974.
Sun-Tzu, The Art of War. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Boston: Shambhala, 1988.
Confucius, Analects. Trans. and annotated by Arthur Waley. Reprint of 1938 Allen & Unwin edition. London and Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
—. The Great Digest and Unwobbling Pivot. Trans. Ezra Pound. New York, 1951.
Chiera, Edward, They Wrote in Clay; The Babylonian Tablets Speak Today. Ed. George G. Cameron. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
Bible, New Testament, Book of Luke
Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. Trans. James Scully and C. J. Herrington. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Euripides. Hyppolytus. Trans. Richard Lattimore, In Four Tragedies. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1955.
—. Alcestis. Trans. William Arrowsmith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Sophocles. Oedipus Tyrannus. Trans. and ed. by Luci Berkowitz & Theodore F. Brunner. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, Norton, 1970.
Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. R. Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Ed. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns. Bollingen Series LCXXI. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.
—. Symposium. Trans. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato.
The Koran. Trans. N. J. Dawood. 3rd rev. ed. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968.
The Portable Arabian Nights. Ed. Joseph Campbell. New York: Viking Books, 1951.
Beowulf. Trans. Lucien Dean Pearson. Ed. Rowland L. Collins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965.
Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson. Trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur. New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1916. Also, trans. Jean I. Young. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964.
Poetic Edda. Trans. Henry Adams Bellows. New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1926. Also, trans. Lee N. Hollander. 2nd ed., rev. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962.
The Mabinogion. Trans. Jeffrey Gantz. New York: Dorset Press, 1985.
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. New York: Pantheon, 1944.
Adams, Henry. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932. Also New York: New American Library, 1961.
Boas, Franz. Race, Language, and Culture. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1940.
Mann, Thomas. Tonio Krøger, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, in Stories of Three Decades. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.
Thompson, Stith. Tales of the North American Indians. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929.
Opler, Morris Edward. Myths and Tales of the Jicarilla Apache Indians. New York: The American Folk-lore Society, 1938.
Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934, 1989.
Stimson, John. E. Legends of Maui and Tahaki. Honolulu: The Museum, 1934.
Melville, Herman. Typee. The Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, distrib. by the Viking Press, 1982.
Frobenius, Leo, and Douglas C. Fox. African Genesis. New York: B. Blom, 1966.
Radin, Paul. African Folktales and Sculpture. 2nd ed., rev., with additions. New York: Pantheon Books, 1964.
Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. New Paltz, NY: McPherson, 1983.
Glad to hear of the positive response to your paper at the conference (that’s how we start reclaiming Campbell’s academic legacy – one paper and one conference at time, and trust it will eventually snowball).
The Harvest Journal, linked above, which is in the UK, might be the place to start.
Alex,
This slipped past me when first posted. I’ve reached out to some friends with Ph.D.s in mythological studies and/or related fields, and haven’t come up with much, apart from the following suggestions (all are Jungian journals):
Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche
A couple of caveats:
Though there can be some overlap, the “hero’s journey” can mean something different to Jungians than the the story arc Joseph Campbell identifies in myth (Campbell sent Jung a copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces just a few years before the psychiatrist’s death, so when Jung uses the term throughout his work, he’s not specifically referencing Campbell’s analysis).
And then one myth scholar pointed out to me that the problem might not be the Campbell connection so much as the content. The “hero’s journey” concept does not play well throughout much of academia. Indeed, just a few years ago I coordinated a grant writing effort to the National Endowment for the Humanities, applying for one of several “literature & tech” grants available; our idea was to design an interactive program that would help teach the hero’s journey to junior high and high school literature students – but comments from several scholars on the NEH grant review panel criticized the application because they did not recognize the HJ as legitimate.
Indeed, David Miller, Joseph Campbell’s friend, colleague, and a well-respected religious studies scholar, advised us that Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey “monomyth” has been widely rejected within the field of Humanities scholarship: no matter how strong a case we made, even if one or two evaluators were sympathetic, there would always be a loud voice or two on the panel strenuously objecting.
The pendulum will likely swing back at some point, but for the moment submitting a paper to an academic journal that analyzes academic texts through the lens of a concept widely rejected within academia could be a dicey proposition. (That’s not to discourage you from daring the adventure, but did want you be be aware of this bias.)
Curious what prompted your paper? Is this part of your studies for a post-graduate degree, or perhaps related to work in the field of education?
Whatever the genesis, I wish you the best.
Hello Nandu,
You posted this over a year ago (one of our earliest threads in The Conversation with a Thousand Faces forum). I know since then you have been writing stories of your own – and, with the collective tragedy currently unfolding in India, I know you don’t have much time to read, much less participate in forum discussions – but Calasso has such a profound grasp of myth, and this is a lovely book – so I thought I would add a comment to bump this thread up to the top of the queue and give new arrivals an opportunity to see it.
I’m also curious – did you ever get a chance to read Roberto Calasso’s Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India (where he does for Hindu mythology what The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony did for Greek mythology)?
Meanwhile, I am hoping all goes well for you and your loved ones in these difficult times . . .
The Scientific American article is an excellent analysis, jeb13. Now that four months have passed since the January 6 insurrection, seems we are not doing a very good job of following the author’s recommendations. The “offending agent” has been removed, but there are no legal consequences for him (thus far); indeed, he continues to have a lock on the support of his party– so much so that several political leaders who seemed outraged and done with him on January 7 are back to kowtowing.
Leaves me wondering at times if mental illness might be contagious . . .
Meditation in general would be a wonderful topic, though in some other category than the Joseph Campbell’s Works forum, and transcendental meditation, aka TM (which comes to us courtesy of Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi) would certainly be among the many types of meditation discussed.
You could start a stand-alone topic on TM as well, which is one of the most popular forms of meditation, but also a $3.5 billion global business (Deepak Chopra, chief spokesperson for the TM movement in the 1980s, began his solo, independent career in the wake of a power struggle in 1993 with Mahesh Yogi, who was concerned about competing practitioners undercutting the fees charged for TM), which creates an intriguing tension: separating the personal psychological and/or spiritual benefits of the practice from the dollar-driven business that grew up around it is probably not difficult for those who practice TM, but a bit murkier for those outside the movement.
Synchronicity is an endlessly fascinating topic.
One of the most common examples, something most have experienced in one form or another, is thinking out-of-the-blue of a friend or relative one hasn’t heard from in years when the phone rings, and there’s that same individual on the other end of the line.
Of course, in the modern world (grounded in the “rational” cause-and-effect orientation of Cartesian science) we are programmed to write that off as mere coincidence (“Over two billion phone calls are made every day in the United States, so it’s only natural that on any given day many will experience such random occurrences – nothing significant to that all.”)
I’ve also noticed over the years that many people who are vested in the belief that Life has inherent meaning can’t bring themselves to accept the possibility that there may be any significance at all to such common life experiences.
Of course, this ignores the subjective factor, which, as Joseph Campbell points out, is where meaning resides:
People talk about the meaning of life; there is no meaning of life––there are lots of meanings of different lives, and you must decide what you want your own to be.”
(An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms, p. 110)
In my personal experience, synchronicity abounds when I am paying attention to psyche. Jung and Campbell both imply the same: synchronicity is an upwelling from the collective unconscious; the snowballing of synchronicities is often a confirmation from the universe that one is on the right track. If one relaxes the grip of the rational ego, then one becomes aware of the irrational (e.g. paying attention to one’s feelings, or relying not just on logical thought, but on intuition as a guide – which often translates into a receptivity to synchronicity).
If one dismisses coincidences one may experience as lacking in significance and meaning, that reality holds true for them; it’s futile to try to persuade someone otherwise. But what I can’t do is discount my personal experience, anecdotal though it may be – hundreds of examples from over three decades detailed in my personal journals.
One off-the-wall example:
During my decade or so traveling the continent by thumb, I found myself one spring day on my way to Bellevue, Washington, on the north shore of Puget Sound, to check out the scene – lots of creative, artistic energy rippling around up there. Below Seattle (in Renton, home town to Jimi Hendrix) I caught a ride from two attractive, college educated women in their late thirties/early forties on their way to visit their daughters, who were attending the University of Western Washington in Bellevue.
We enjoyed a fascinating conversation over the next few hours. I mentioned that I was from California; turned out my benefactors hailed from the Pleiades star cluster!
Now I’ve been picked up by people from out of state, people from other countries, even people from another hemisphere – but this proved the first ride I’d received from anyone off planet!
(Actually, only the driver was from the Pleiades; the other lady came from the Dog Star – and it was all I could do to muzzle my inner punster, who wanted to ask, “Are you Sirius?”)
Apart from the question of origins, they seemed rather mainstream in appearance and profession – definitely conversant with the ideas of Joseph Campbell, somewhat less so with Jung – very friendly folk who sincerely believed channeled accounts from the Pleiades. Before accepting that ride, such accounts were completely off my radar.
The week after encountering the Pleiadians on the way to Bellevue, I was back in Portland, crashing at the home of a musician in a regional band. While perusing the contents of my friend’s bookcase, a volume entitled “Bringers of the Dawn” – teachings from the Pleiadians channeled by Barbara Marciniak – literally fell into my hands!
Accepting the synchronicity, I devoured the assigned reading, and found it quite enchanting.
(This launched a study of channeled works, from A Course in Miracles to the writings of Shirley MacLaine, Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God, J.Z. Knight’s Ramtha entity, as well as Urantia and even the Book of Mormon, in addition to works channeled from the Pleiades. I am fascinated by the emergence of these “new” myths: where do they come from, and what do they portend? No surprise I found multiple patterns recurring across these works; I will note that each contained multiple nuggets of wisdom common to all wisdom traditions; the danger, as with any revealed scripture, is in reading these metaphors literally – but that’s a post for another thread.)
Having a book “written” by Pleiadians fall into one’s handd would not be a meaningful coincidence for most people – nor for me, had that happened just eight days earlier – but coming in such close proximity to my encounter on the way to Bellevue, definitely an experience of synchronicity for me.
Two more examples, both drawn from dreams during my hitchhiking years:
On one occasion, sofa surfing at a friend’s, with less than ten dollars to my name, I woke from a dream where the right lens of my glasses had shattered (note: I am extremely near sighted and have worn glasses since age ten – I’d be seriously handicapped without them). As I was recording this in my dream journal, I found the image so disturbing that I was moved to take off my glasses and double-check just to soothe my nerves – and as I did so, the right lens fell off in the palm of my hand! The screw holding that part of the frame together was stripped, but I was not conscious of that fact; had I not checked as a result of that dream, the lens would have fallen out at some point that morning and cracked on floor or sidewalk – and I would have been in no position to replace those glasses. Instead, I was able to take my spectacles to an optometrist’s office a few blocks away and pay $2 to replace the screw.
On another occasion, I had hitchhiked down to the Santa Barbara area – my first visit to the campuses of the Pacifica Graduate Institute to check out their new MA/Ph.D program in Mythological Studies (and peruse Joseph Campbell’s personal library). While in the area I crashed with a friend in Isla Vista (the most densely populated square mile west of the Mississippi) attending U.C. Santa, who shared a flat in a converted house with three other students.
While there, my friend and two of his roommates (hale, hearty youths fifteen years younger and in much better shape than me) took me on a hike to the source of Ojai Springs. The trail began behind the campus to the St. Thomas Aquinas seminary near Ventura: the first half mile or so the trail passed through yellow grasslands, then twisted some distance uphill where I seriously lagged behind my young friends (every so often they would pause at a bend in the road and wait for me to catch up). Along the way we encountered a red, white and black kingsnake, and then a horned toad (which I had never seen before); in both instances “Dart,” one of my hiking companions (an anthropology major who was the nephew of the anthropologist Sir Raymond Dart), who had raised several snakes and lizards in his teenage years, carefully picked them up and let us examine them up close.
At this point I was experiencing serious deja vu – but several hours later, on our return, the source of that sensation became clear. My good friend Brent (whom his roommates called “Nag” because he loved Nag Champa incense) and I were walking side by side chatting away, while Dart and Phish (real name also Brent, but his friends called him Phish because he loved that band) were maybe five paces behind us.
Suddenly, Dart called out, “Nag – you almost stepped on a rattlesnake!”
That got our attention. We whirled around – and there, on the trail behind us, was a ten-inch baby rattlesnake! Dart picked up a forked twig and held it behind the baby snake’s head, picked up the reptile, and let us examine the creature. The baby snake’s rattle was shaking furiously, but had only a single segment, so was making no noise at all (something I did not know about baby rattlers). Dart explained that baby rattlesnakes are more lethal than adults. who strike quickly; baby rattlers don’t know to do that, and will instead latch on and pump all their venom into their victim – another fact I did not know.
At this point, I realized why I had the sense this had happened before, and shared that info with my friends. When we returned to to their flat in Isla Vista I pulled my dream journal out of my backpack – and there, in ink, was a detailed account I let them all read describing what we had all just experienced, recorded exactly forty days before!
Of course, I wrote this down at 4 a.m., bleary-eyed and not quite fully awake, so the language was somewhat poetic, but the correspondence is clear. In the dream journal I had observed walking through tall yellow grass, then following a trail uphill where “I lagged behind my brothers” (who in the dream did not resemble my siblings in waking life, but had that same feeling-tone to them); this was followed by finding a snake on the dream trail with the same color pattern as the kingsnake we encountered in waking life, and then, around the next bend, my dream journal records picking up “a snake with legs that looks like ginger root” (my clumsy attempt, at 4 a.m., to describe a horned toad, which I had never seen before).
There were other points of correspondence, but the kicker came near the end of the dream, where I recorded “almost stepping on a baby rattlesnake whose rattle was broken” that was more dangerous than a grown snake (I had no idea baby rattlers only have a single segment that you cannot hear, nor that they really are mor dangerous than adult rattlesnakes, at the time I had that dream).
My companions were blown away by the surprising details, including the sequential order of the dream events, that rang true in their experience!
Non-causal (the dream was recorded well over a month before the waking world experience), significant, and meaningful. Though I never did matriculate at Pacifica, thanks to an insurmountable gatekeeper called Tuition (nemesis of hippie hitchhikers), I have visited the campus often in an official capacity in later years, including multiple projects involving Campbell’s archives, as well as serving as co-chair of the international Symposium for the Study of Myth there in 2012 (which took two years of careful planning and collaboration with Pacifica faculty members).
Definitely counts as synchronicity in my mind.
Somehow you have premonitions of what’s to come, and events unfold in mysteriously appropriate ways, with what Jung called ‘synchronicity.’”
(Joseph Campbell, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words )
Campbell himself offers multiple compelling examples of synchronicity in his life, as does Jung.
How to explain this?
One can look at synchonicity as either something mystical, or as a natural dynamic, depending on the perspective one prefers (not that the two are mutually exclusive).
Jung turns to the collective unconscious. For example, though he often relates archetypes to instincts (which arise from the physical body), elsewhere (such as the Collected Works, Vol. VIII: Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, as well as his essay, “On Synchronicity”), he conceives of archetypes as existing outside space and time, believing them responsible for the “meaningful coincidences” we experience (for which he coined the term synchronicity). It’s difficult to empirically locate archetypes both in the body, and floating somewhere outside Time and Space in the same instant – unless we realize that “instincts” and “inherited structuring principle” and “gods” and even “archetype” are all metaphors for that which cannot be precisely defined, labeled, analyzed, or categorized.
Interestingly enough, quantum physics has opened up new perspectives, where causality – a function of space and time – does not apply at the particle level where time moves in more than one direction and associated acausal events occur simultaneously (e.g., Bell’s theorem and Feynman’s double-slit experiment, which highlighted the wave-particle paradox).
Which brings me to non-teleological thinking.
In the summer of 1932 in Carmel, California, biologist Ed Ricketts (patron saint of marine biology and deep ecology) had an order to fill for 15,000 specimens of gonionemus vertens – “a little pink jellyfish” – which supplied the funding for an expedition to study marine life in the Pacific Northwest. Ed persuaded his friend Joe Campbell to sign on, and the two young men (Campbell at age 28, and Ricketts, 34) spent the next ten weeks together, sailing with writer Jack Calvin and his wife aboard a thirty-three foot one-time naval launch, re-christened The Grampus, exploring tidal pools from Puget Sound to Sitka, Alaska.
Campbell and Ricketts, who were both reading Einstein, Bohr, Werner Heisenberg (“observation determines what is observed”), and other cutting-edge Nobel Prize physicists at the time, enjoyed lengthy discussions on the trip, out of which emerged “the great solid realization of ‘non- teleological thinking ’” (Letter from Joseph Campbell to Ed Ricketts, December 26, 1941, held by the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries). This theory is expounded in greater detail by John Steinbeck and Ed Rickets in The Log from the Sea of Cortez, published in 1941 (hence the reason for Campbell’s letter).
Non-teleological thinking steps outside the western tradition, looking on causal explanations as linear and limited. It does not deny the existence of causal connections, but examines them within the framework of the larger picture. No surprise it was originally resisted by the academic establishment as “populist science” (in much the same way Campbell’s work in myth was similarly dismissed for its populist appeal), though eventually Ricketts’ ideas laid the groundwork for a more holistic approach to science.
It is intriguing, though, that the non-teleological thinking espoused by Ricketts (a biologist), Campbell (a mythologist) and Steinbeck (a novelist) is completely compatible with the concept of synchronicity. The same can’t be said for Newtonian physics, nor the empiricism of Descartes.
At the same time, I do not discount metaphysical and/or paranormal explanations. Indeed, both C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell expressed a fondness for the paranormal and what many today discount as “fringe science.” Indeed, in Changing Images of Man, a futurist study compiled by Joseph Campbell and several other colleagues in the 1970s for the Stanford Research Institute think tank (today called SRI – which gave us the first weather satellite, color television, the computer mouse, solar energy, Arpanet – which we know today as the Internet – the acoustic modem, liquid crystal displays, GPS, ATMs, first email transmission over the internet, not to mention selecting the location of what was to become Disneyland and helping establish the Monterey Bay Aquarium), Campbell and his co-authors made a strong case for scientific research into the paranormal, including biofeedback, hypnosis, dreams, meditation and yoga, psychedelics, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and more (many of which, considered scientific quackery at the time, have now entered the mainstream – such as the health benefits of yoga or psychedelics, biofeedback in brain research, etc.).
Is there a scientific mechanism underlying synchronistic phenomena? Perhaps, and perhaps not. I’m quite comfortable viewing synchronicity as an upwelling from the unconscious. They remain very much a welcome part of my experience that provide invaluable information, though I don’t rely exclusively on synchronicity to chart my course any more than I do logic, emotions, or astrology.
Fun subject.
Another example of synchronicity: the same day Marianne’s initial post on this topic appeared (adjusting for the time difference), this fascinating two hour exploration by multiple scholars, including a Fulbright scholar and a a quantum physicist (as well as Dennis Patrick Slattery Ph.D., a frequent guest in our MythBlast forum), led by Dr. Joe Cambray, aired on the Myth Salon at Mythouse.org: Synchronicity – An Emerging Vision to Guide Us. If you are interested in the subject and have the time, this is worth viewing.
I too see no contradiction here, Drew, at least not from Campbell. Explaining the biological origins of myth is like explaining the biological origins of instincts – that instincts and myth (and everything we experience through our senses) arise from the biological fact that we have a body is not the same as “rationally explaining the mystery of who or what we are.”
The flaw is in mistaking myth for that mystery itself, rather than, like our flesh and blood, a manifestation of that mystery.
The energies that move the body are the energies that move the imagination. These energies, then, are the source of mythological imagery; in a mythological organization of symbols, the conflicts between the different organic impulses within the body are resolved and harmonized. You might say a mythology is a formula for the harmonization of the energies of life.”
— Campbell, interviewed by Joan Marler, in The Yoga Journal, Nov./Dec. 1987 (emphasis mine)
“Mythology is a formula for the harmonization of the energies of life” – that’s my favorite answer to the question “What is myth?” (For example, myths and rites of initiation that mark the coming of age are one example of how mythology places the individual in a given society in accord with nature and the world around them – that’s a function of myth which is very different from making every individual in that society into a mystic.)
Not that difficult to understand, even on the most mundane level: my stomach has one impulse to action, my genitals another – and there are times when the two are very much in conflict. But the argument isn’t just between the reproductive system and the digestive tract, for we also have the brain entering into the fray, and the heart, and even more abstract “organs.”
This thought can be troubling to those who can’t fathom heart or stomach or any organ as more than a machine, or who see nature itself as composed of only inert, soulless matter – which is not how we experience either the world around us, or the world within. When Campbell speaks of the “organs of the body” he isn’t describing cuts of meat on the butcher’s slab, but the miracle and mystery of the organizing principle of life. There is a distinct resonance between organ and organization here . . .
Individual cells grouped together form an organ, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts – and these organs and related bodily processes working in concert also form a whole greater than the sum of its parts, a synergy we call the individual (and this metaphor can be extended from individuals to a society, and indeed to humanity as a whole).
The coordination and organization of the billions of individual impulses within the human body that, taken together, add up to a human life is a mystery, one which we continue to explore from a variety of different angles, from biology and psychology to philosophy and theology – all of which can’t help but overlap and/or bump into one another at times.
Mythology both reflects this elusive organizing principle, and serves as guide when consciousness is at odds with one or another of the elements of our being.
I think Carl Jung’s term ‘archetypes of the unconscious’ is fundamental and appropriate here. The archetypes of myth are manifestations of the nature of man in accord with the nature of the universe. Interpose, before these, ideas derived from man’s limited knowledge of the world, and we have then a system of rational thought. In dream the rational mind becomes aware of impulses of the larger nature, of which it is itself but one organ. Impose the will of that one organ upon the whole, and the imposition has to be by violence.
— Joseph Campbell, in conversation with Costis Ballos in Greece.
Note that Campbell refers to the rational mind as one of the “organs” whose impulses are at odds with those of other organs of the body. Mind – and even imagination – can fit the metaphorical usage of the term.
If my head is exclusively running the show, then heart is neglected – and if belly is in charge, or phallus always gets its way, ignoring cautions of head and heart, then the whole is imperiled. Of course no one “organ,” no one system, is supreme: one just has to fall in love, for example, to realize how little control conscious rational intention exerts
… and then, even sex addicts have to stop and order a pizza now and then.
But describing how myths work, like explaining how digestion works, is not “using reasoning to explain the mystery of who we are.” If anything, it enhances the awe of that mystery. By that measure, understanding that water boils at 212º F and freezes at 32º F would be a similar “contradiction” using reason to explain the mystery: one is free to ignore that “riding the temporal wave of grasping at ever-changing effects rather than living OF the unchanging, ungrasping light of your being,” but taking that literally could lead to blisters or frostbite.
Your point is well-taken, Drewie. I too would agree that “proper” art is mythological – I just didn’t catch that question in your initial post.
My response was not intended to declare “this is the way it is,” but thinking out loud, guided by the distinction Campbell makes in Power of Myth between dreams and myth (both come from the unconscious, but one is in relation to the individual dreamer, and the other is collective, speaking to larger concerns). I did not express myself clearly, as my thoughts, like yours, were in the moment and only half-formed, and so wandered into the weeds.
Mythologies as well as art arise from the unconscious. In your first quote above from Pathways to Bliss, Campbell seems to be saying (at least to me) that all myth is proper myth; when it is teaching a practical lesson, it is not myth, but allegory.
Perhaps the emphasis should be on intention. Mythology in the embrace of ideology, for example, designed to move the populace to action to a specific end, isn’t mythology, but propaganda (the mythology of the Third Reich perhaps the clearest example . . . an attempt to stage-manage myth).
When artists tap into the collective psyche, that is indeed the stratum of myth; the artist serves as a channel for that material to surface, prompting a static response (aesthetic arrest – that “aha!”moment).
I think we’re on the same page here, or not far from it. Alas, sometimes words get in the way . . .
I am with you there, Shaahayda!
There is so much more mythic content available today that I have a hard time keeping up (indeed, even in these forums so many posts are of such depth that one has to take the time to digest and absorb them, then let associated thoughts simmer, brew, and bubble up to the surface before even considering posting a response!).
Much as I love Joseph Campbell, it’s particularly rewarding to see the grand mythic conversation expand beyond just his thoughts and observations (I do believe Joe would appreciate that as well): so many more voices in the mix, as we see in the range of authors contributing to the MythBlast essays, and now these myth-oriented podcasts.
I used to rock out to music in earbuds on my daily walks – but now, I’m just as often listening to podcasts. In fact, I pretty much have to walk during Myth Matters and Myth America – both Catherine Svehla and Leigh Melander dive so deep, and their voices are so soothing, that if I listen to them at night in bed, as I do with some history-oriented podcasts, I’d be pulled into the mythworld of dream before completing an episode.
As for Skeleton Keys, that’s such an upbeat, fun look at the mythic underpinnings of popular culture. And then, of course, Joe’s Pathways podcast lectures are pure gold . . .
Drewie,
You write:
Never thought of the shire as the homeland of our national ideological identity. I am very used reading these symbols mythologically so for me the shire always meant what also other myths depict at the beginning of the story – an unconscious state of mind where the ego is beginning to emerge.”
That’s the advantage of a mythological perspective. It’s rare (I’d go so far as to say never) that there is exclusively one way of interpreting a symbol – so many layers, so many dimensions, and no matter how deep I plumb, there is always more to discover: both/and, rather than either/or
. . . which brings me to an intriguing observation Norland makes in his essay:
So when we advocate for the ‘non-binary’ logic of myth as the logic of both/and over against either/or, we should not forget the full implication of this proposition: that the logic of both/and must include either/or as its internal complementary opposition. Otherwise we remain caught in the literal split of external opposites. True myth thus operates through the logic of both/and and either/or, following the paradoxical logos of the soul, as an upsurge of the mythic imagination into the material light of history.”
Indeed, the “non-binary logic” of both/and versus the binary logic of either/or is itself a dualism (wheels within wheels within wheels!). I wold love to hear more about the delicate dance of embracing both/and and either/or . . .
