Stephen Gerringer
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Thanks for the link to Jean Shinoda Bolen’s piece on liminality, which is such a useful concept – one that rings true with experience (where one is neither one or the other, but inhabits the In-Between).
This was at Mythic Journeys in Atlanta in 2004; I was able to to attend the same event the next (and last) time it was held, in 2006, and what an experience! The Hyatt-Regency in Atlanta was simply a mansion of myth! I met so many people there for the first time that I’ve come to know and love over the years. The event began with a plenary session – seeing so many hundreds of people gathered in one large space because of a deep and abiding love of myth (and of Joseph Campbell) was so liberating and re-affirming (after years of all of us thinking “I guess I’m the only one in my town”). There were so many luminaries there (whether speaking to the crowds, in panel discussions, individual lectures, workshops, or performances).
There would be a ceremony at 9 a.m. to start the day, followed by “the Big Story” – a myth shared to set the tone for the day’s theme. Then morning workshops to choose from, lunch, afternoon workshops to choose from, dinner, and evening plenary session that was generally a performance for everyone (and other, smaller performances – one was a Neil Gaiman radio play staged live), and Dionysian revelry with drinking and dancing into the evening in one or more of the hotel bars (Emerald Rose performing in the larger one – a dynamic, energetic band grounded in Celtic myth). I recall seeing two nine-foot tall centaurs wandering about the first evening; when I ran into them again the next morning on my way to breakfast, I realized it wasn’t the absinthe that was to blame (several talented actors had been hired to don realistic mythic costumes, but the centaurs were truly the most impressive). And then there were the “after-parties” in hotel rooms into the wee hours of the morning, and stumbling into my hotel room (shared with Martin Weyers from Germany and Phil Spartalis from Australia) to catch a few hours sleep before getting up and doing it all over again.
I had the opportunity to meet Jean Shinoda Bolen and attend a workshop she led on “Illness as a Soul Journey.” Such a tiny woman (well under five feet tall), such a large presence!
I also attended a lecture by David Abram (author of The Spell of the Sensuous, and the person who, at Lynn Kaufmann’s request, got the very shy George Lucas and Joseph Campbell talking to one another the first time they met, at an event called “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space” in tandem with the release of the book of the same name, by performing a magic trick that required them to hold each other’s hands), entitled “The Storied Earth: Rejuvenating Oral Culture as an Ecological Imperative.”
Alas, coordinating and funding a multi-day event with multiple performers, presenters, vendors, and over a thousand attendees is truly challenging (as I learned six years later, when I was a co-chair of the Symposium for the Study of Myth). I’m surprised the organizers were able to pull it off twice – but as an attendee, I enjoyed every minute.
Andy,
Thank you so much for your rich, detailed, elegant reply to my initial questions. It’s a joy to read, and re-read, savoring every sentence, every paragraph, and then taking the time to absorb the thoughts you share, allowing them to sink in and simmer on the periphery of consciousness for a few days
. . . which is part of the reason it has taken me so long to respond – that, plus my tendency towards excessive verbosity, which can sometimes drown out other voices – so I thought I would hang back for a bit and give others a chance to speak first.
You write
As for the role of ritual in enabling the individual to participate fully in the mysterium tremendum, some wonderful insights come to us from the world of anthropology. I work with a research organization called The Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness. Our work is centered on exploring all of the ways humans interact with, define, engage, and interpret the contours of individual and collective consciousness. And several of our founders were insistent on the vital role of direct experience in the process of encountering and relating to nonlocal consciousness. In other words, the vital role of ritual in the process of the transformation of self. Scholars from our group like Edith Turner and Carlos Castaneda insisted that many of the deepest truths of our human journey could not be understood unless directly experienced. To know them intellectually was only a small part of encountering their full transformative potential.”
Intriguing to me how the study of mythology has come to be so closely associated with depth psychology today (understandably so, given Jung’s earnest attention to the archetypal imagery of myth), yet often glosses over the contributions of anthropology – a mistake Joseph Campbell does not make; in fact, his identification of the Hero’s Journey trajectory recurring throughout the myths of so many different cultures owes much to ethnographer/folklorist/cultural anthropologist Arnold van Gennep’s 1909 work, Les Rites de Passage (Rites of Passage); on a related note, Victor Turner is one anthropologist whose fieldwork among the Ndembu in Zambia (e.g. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure) independently arrives at – and serves to confirm – many of the same observations, though without seeming to take any notice of Campbell’s work.
Your observations in your reply to Mythicwarrior, re the intersection of dreams and culture, also relates to the above. I have a whole shelf of volumes on dreams and dreamwork, most written either by Jungians (and a couple Freudians, including, of course, Sigmund himself) or lay people heavily influenced by Jung – but one of my favorites is a collection of essays published by the School of American Research and edited by Barbara Tedlock (Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at SUNY, Buffalo), titled Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations: eleven anthropologist share papers describing their observations of how indigenous peoples, from the Zuni in New Mexico to the Kalapalo of Brazil or the Sambia in Papua New Guinea, experience, share, and work with (or sometimes ignore) dream experiences (which are often closely entwined with their mythologies).
Many of these essays, at least to my mind, go beyond Jung – not to diss Carl Jung’s contributions, which have brought dreams out of the shadows and legitimatized this field of study in the modern world – but these are cultures that have been working with dreams for hundreds if not thousands of years. Understanding, at least to the limited degree I am able, how different cultures have worked with, ritualized, and embodied the imagery they encounter in dream has helped enhance the way I engage my own dream images.
In another post I’d like to follow-up on a few of your observations, but I’d like to take a personal turn here and ask what first drew you to the field of anthropology? How much of your choice was conscious, and how much serendipity? And was your initial focus on “exploring all of the ways humans interact with, define, engage, and interpret the contours of individual and collective consciousness,” or did that emerge gradually over time for you?
I hope you don’t mind the personal questions – but, since we are all drawn here because of Joseph Campbell’s inspiration, I’m trusting taking a brief tangent into how you discovered and followed your bliss (e.g., was it full blown from the beginning, or did it slowly dawn on you as you followed bits and pieces into your future) might shed some light on an important but much misunderstood Campbellian insight.
I find myself circling back to the topic of the thread – e.g., Patrick’s question, “What is money?” Clearly, there’s no objective, independent existence of something called money. Seems it’s a human concept – we invest value (pun intended) in the concept.
But difficult today, if not impossible, for a society to exist without it, given the complexities of economic life, though there have been times in my life when I have not needed much, and it’s never really been a driving force for me.
I’m also intrigued by the emergence of crypto-currencies (like bitcoin and the rest), which I find a touch baffling. (When I first heard the term “mining bitcoin,” I had an image of the Super Mario brothers with headlamps on their helmets being lowered into the bowels of my computer . . .).
There is a lot of mythologizing around money – might be an intriguing concept to explore . . .
James,
I really appreciate the references to Stephen Gaskin’s legendary Monday Evening classes in the hazy, halcyonic days when the Haight was the epicenter of the hippie subculture, and “The Farm,” the commune he founded in Tennessee – one of the few hippie communes from the period that still around today, albeit in altered form. The title character in the Grateful Dead song “Saint Stephen” is said to have been influenced in part by Gaskin
(“Did he doubt or did he try?
Answers aplenty in the bye and bye
Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills
One man gathers what another man spills”)It is intriguing that The Farm tried to do without money, with everybody pooling their resources, share-and-share-alike. That experiment didn’t exactly end well – hence the transformation from commune to co-op, with The Farm serving as the umbrella for several entities that did turn a profit over time.
In my hometown of Modesto, Harmony Enterprises is a thriving tie-dye company created by one of the families that helped found The Farm, then fled during that transition from commune to co-op. They are nice people, but have nothing kind to say about their years-long experience, nor Gaskin’s leadership; though I have not died too deep in those waters, best I can tell their complaint boiled down to the tension between the claims of the non-earners on the earnings of those who worked outside the commune and how that was resolved (I’m not sure which side of the divide they were on).
Intriguing that even one of the more successful utopian communes emerging from the sixties still had to take money into account . . .
Drewie writes
Question number two. Meaning.. Again Campbell said ‘we are not looking for meaning we are looking for an experience of being alive.’ I am also having a bit trouble understanding this because in my experience meaning is what gives life purpose. And I kinda get what Campbell is trying to do here, redefining purpose, and trying to get us to be honest about thinking that there is some kind of objective meaning underlying life but was that his intention or I am missing something?”
I do believe you’ve grasped Campbell’s intention. The problem is with the way that question is generally asked – “What is the meaning of life?” – which implies there is one simple, all-purpose objective answer that applies across the board (Douglas Adams playfully makes the same essential point as Campbell in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when he writes that the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything,” calculated by an enormous supercomputer named Deep Thought over a period of 7.5 million years, is 42 . . . unfortunately, no one remembers what the ultimate question is.)
What is the meaning’ of a tree? of a butterfly? of the birth of a child? or of the universe? What is the ‘meaning’ of the song of a rushing stream? Such wonders simply are. They are antecedent to meaning, though “meaning” may be read into them.”
Joseph Campbell, The Flight of the Wild Gander, p. xii
“Meaning” is a construct of the human mind – a function of how our brain processes information. Meaning is subjective; we won’t find the answer in the back of the textbook.
“CAMPBELL: I don’t believe life has a purpose. Life is a lot of protoplasm with an urge to reproduce and continue in being.
MOYERS: Not true—not true.
CAMPBELL: Wait a minute. Just sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose, because look at all the different purposes it has all over the place. But each incarnation, you might say, has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality.”
Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers
You can’t ask somebody to give The Reason, but you can find one for yourself; you decide what the meaning of your life is to be. 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
You bring the meaning to your own life, which may well be different than the meaning of another person’s life – and dramatically different from the “meaning” of existence for an amoeba, starfish, turtle, eagle, or a virus.
Joe comes close to answering the question of the “purpose of his life” when he avers that each living being “has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality.” But “what is the meaning of life” is a guru question. Joe hated being asked those – he was no guru with the ultimate answer. That may be why he is so appreciated: rather than “This is the Way – walk ye therefore in it,” his work leaves it up to each of us to find our own answer.
Seems a point worth making.
Hello Drewie,
You don’t ask the easy questions, do you? 😉
If you don’t mind, I’d like to start with the question of morality, and then tackle meaning in a subsequent post (so multiple ideas don’t get all tangled up and bogged down in a single post).
In the Power of Myth Bill Moyers does ask Joseph Campbell about the conflict between good and evil, but in relation to mythology. Campbell observes that this concept only emerged in mythology around the fifth century BC, with Zoroastrianism; after the return from the Babylonian Exile, Judaism picked up several key elements that are eventually passed on to Christianity (prior to that, the God of Israel was the source of good and evil – Isaiah 45:7 – “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”)
Campbell did not say there was no such thing as evil – plenty of it – but he makes a distinction between the perspective of the Levantine religions, and that of the other mythologies:
“In the other mythologies, one puts oneself in accord with the world, with the mixture of good and evil. But in the religious system of the Near East, you identify with the good and fight against the evil. The biblical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all speak with derogation of the so-called nature religions.”
Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers
The problem, as Campbell sees it, is with the focus on ABSOLUTE Good opposed to ABSOLUTE Evil. In real life, good and evil are relative: you might think a steak is a good thing, but I’m pretty sure the steer that produced it would have a different take. An act considered evil in Iran is idealized in the United States, and vice versa – and even in the U.S., there are serious disputes about what is Good and what is Evil, especially in religion or politics.
Campbell expands on this theme (from a draft of a manuscript I’ve edited that’s currently being prepared for publication):
Morality is the local and contemporary, and the metaphysical vision is transcendent of that—the ‘elementary idea,’ rather than the ‘folk idea.’ This is the basic problem in religion: relating the ethical notion of good and evil, which is local. There is no such thing as absolute good and absolute evil. This is locally transformed in time and space, and then these two, good and evil, come together in our life.
We have to make decisions about good and evil in life, but in our metaphysical knowledge we must go past, to wisdom.
Now, Nietzsche says the idea of the good man is an inorganic idea. What you have done has been to cut man in half. Every act has both good and evil results. What’s good for the tiger is bad for the antelope.
This is a theme that Wolfram Von Eschenbach brings up in his Grail legend of Parzival. He starts out by saying every deed involves light and dark; all that can be done is to intend the light. But the dark will come out, and I think we have learned that: two world wars that were for one thing have yielded another, haven’t they? We’ve been working for virtue and have achieved something else.
The acts of God are like acts of nature, indifferent to good and evil. Heraclitus is the one who said, ‘For God all things are good and right and just; but for man some are right and some are evil.’
Notice that Campbell emphasizes the difference between the decisions we make in life about good and evil and how we behave, and the deeper, metaphysical underpinnings of myth – which is not to say that Campbell believes there is no place for ethics in religion. Bill Moyers points out to Campbell in the small paperback edition of The Power of Myth that “myths deal with metaphysics,” but religion “deals with ethics, good and evil, how I relate to you, and how I should behave toward you and toward my wife and toward my fellow man under God. What is the role of ethics in mythology?”
Campbell’s response, on page 281:
We spoke of the metaphysical experience in which you realize that you and the other are one. Ethics is a way of teaching you how to live as though you were one with the other. You don’t have to have the experience because the doctrine of religion gives you molds of actions that imply a compassionate relationship with the other. It offers an incentive for doing this by teaching you that simply acting in your own self-interest is sin. That is identification with your body.”
This is the essence of the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” – or, in Bill Moyers’ formulation, “Love thy neighbor as thyself, because thy neighbor is thyself”). Variations of the Golden Rule are found in all major religions, including those, like Hinduism, which don’t automatically assume Good = God = Good.
The difference Campbell finds is that religion often codifies an absolute morality (e.g., the Ten Commandments; the Levitical code; Sharia law) at odds with the reality of nature.
From the same yet-to-be-published draft cited above (drawn from obscure interviews and Q & A sessions):
CAMPBELL: The great health-giving and spiritually supporting attitude is that of yielding to nature, even in its ferocity and its terror. We think the ferocity and terror is evil. It isn’t. It’s part of the operation of what is natural. But there’s a faith in nature that’s involved here which we do not have in our biblical tradition, a faith that all things manifesting themselves in their perfection coordinate to a perfect manifestation in the world. There’s a saying: the processes of nature cannot be evil. That’s a dreadful thought, but realize what the processes of nature involve.
I saw a picture several years ago in an issue of National Geographic of three cheetahs eating a gazelle. The gazelle was still alive. They were at his belly, and the gazelle’s head was lifted. And I said to myself, ‘Do we say yes to that?’ We do.
Q: THE WAY YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT ‘SAYING YEA’ TO IT ALL—DOESN’T THAT RISK CONDONING IMMORALITY?
Sure. That’s what’s tough about it; it’s the essence of the problem. How long can you look at it? How deeply can you see? What can you take? Or are you going to play a little game: ‘Listen to the birds, aren’t they just sweet? Don’t look at the gazelle being eaten by three cheetahs.’
You make your choice. If you want to be a moralist, go ahead. If you want to go love life, do—but know that life is nasty. And it will involve death. Sorrow is part of the world.
SO WE PARTICIPATE IN LIFE’S VIOLENCE?
No, you don’t participate in it, but you can’t condemn it; this is part of life.
It takes an awful lot of guts really to say yes all the way. Do you have the energy and strength to face life? Life can ask more of you than you’re willing to give. And then you say, ‘Life is something that should not have been. I’m not going to play the game. I’m going to meditate. I’m going to pull out.’
Through life and lust one comes to know something. And then there are two ways of knowing it: one, simply in its sensational aspect, and the other in the way of the mystery that is speaking to you through these. It’s the same mystery, birth and death, and this is the way life works.
Then there are two ways of participating. One is compulsively. The other, after you’ve got something of the experience, is to gain control of your dealing with life and death. It’s a delicate walking on the edge. If you do too much to control life, you kill it. The other option is to let life move.
Elsewhere, Campbell, in reference to Eschenbach’s sense that “every deed involves light and dark; all that can be done is to intend the light” coupled with the idea of “saying yea to it all,” is asked what if you are threatened by a poisonous snake? Joe’s response was that you kill the snake: “That’s not saying No to snakes; that’s saying No to that situation.”
The above may not resolve your question, but I hope it helps clarifies some of Campbell’s thoughts on the subject and maybe expands the conversation.
Hello Gregory Walsh!
Sorry for the lag in responding (you may have figured out that discussions in Conversations of a Higher Order unfold at a more leisurely pace than the frenetic speed of social media).
I’ve assembled a few selections related to the çakras, but there are more – one of Campbell’s favorite subjects. Here are a few books, audio lectures, and a video:
Books
The Mythic Image pp. 331 – 387 (published in 1974 through Princeton University Press, you may find this in bookstores)A Joseph Campbell Companion pp. 109 – 116 (or you can purchase and download the eBook and search the text)
Audio Lectures
Imagery of Rebirth Yoga (Lecture I.2.4)The World Soul (Lecture I.2.5)
The Sound AUM and Kundalini Yoga (Lecture II.1.3)
VIDEO
MYTHOS II: The Shaping of Our Mythic Tradition
Lecture 4: The Way to Illumination: Kundalini Yoga and the Seven Chakras (I linked to the Mythos II DVD on Amazon, but the single lecture is also available to stream for $1.99 on Amazon Prime)I trust that helps.
Wonderful news, Nandu!
I would have responded sooner, but health issues have derailed my presence in COHO the past several days; nevertheless, I do want to applaud and support the embrace of your bliss (even if it means you’ll be less present in these forums).
At the same time, like mythicwarrior, my curiosity is aroused. When and if you get a chance, even if months from now, I hope you’ll take an opportunity to drop by and expand on the concept of microfiction, filling us in a bit on where your creative efforts have taken you.
In the meantime,
Bliss On!I have to agree it is so difficult to not look at current events from a mythological perspective, which does so much to deepen and enhance understanding. Unfortunately, considering all the shadow projections that can call up, it is playing with fire to go there.
The dynamic you describe re ritual regicide is one that was followed by god-kings as conscious self-awareness evolved over time and a sense of ego (me, myself, I) became more sharply defined. By today’s standards, I can’t really fault someone for deciding to step back from doing one’s duty by voluntarily submitting to death, and instead substituting a stand-in (though the earliest replacement sacrifices were other humans; the Apis bull in Egypt and similar bovines elsewhere are much more acceptable to 21st century ethics).
However, though in the case of King Minos there is a substitution involved, it’s not to save his own skin, but something a bit more sinister (and, re current affairs, perhaps more on point – definitely a profit motive involved):
“The bull in question had been sent by the god Poseidon, long ago, when Minos was contending with his brothers for the throne. Minos had asserted that the throne was his, by divine right, and had prayed the god to send up a bull out of the sea, as a sign; and he had sealed the prayer with a vow to sacrifice the animal immediately, as an offering and symbol of service. The bull had appeared, and Minos took the throne; but when he beheld the majesty of the beast that had been sent and thought what an advantage it would be to possess such a specimen, he determined to risk a merchant’s substitution — of which he supposed the god would take no great account. Offering on Poseidon’s altar the finest white bull that he owned, he added the other to his herd.”
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (3rd edition © 2008)
Campbell zeroes in on the exact nature of the transgression:
“He had converted a public event to personal gain, whereas the whole sense of his investiture as king had been that he was no longer a mere private person. The return of the bull should have symbolized his absolutely selfless submission to the functions of his role. The retaining of it represented, on the other hand, an impulse to egocentric self-aggrandizement. And so the king ‘by the grace of God’ became the dangerous tyrant Holdfast — out for himself.”
I’ll leave it to anyone so inclined to connect the dots ( a case can be made this is nothing unusual for many rulers in today’s world, though some are more egregious than others).
Your reading of the myth of the Wounded King expands the story so it works for you, which is not necessarily a bad thing. From my perspective, though, that still seems one heck of a stretch that requires projecting assumptions grounded in contemporary culture back into another time and era to find correspondences where none explicitly exist. Kings, for example, didn’t have followers (especially in those pre-Magna Carta days); they had subjects. Choice isn’t really part of it – if you are born into that land, you are stuck with its king, for good or ill.
Amfortas’ subjects aren’t depicted as seeing him suffering in their name; yes, he suffers, but as a result of his own arrogance and action – and, as a result of his failure, all his subjects suffer too (as opposed to Christ, who is blameless and lifts the suffering of his followers by taking their suffering on himself).
A case could no doubt be made today that the nation is in dire straits because of poor decisions by an ego-centric leader, but I seriously doubt “the base” knows (as it seems does everyone in the bewitched castle in the Amfortas tale) that their leader brought that suffering on himself. The wounded Grail King never once tells his subjects how he suffers mistreatment at the hands of everyone against him; he suffers in silence (way at odds with current events!), and waits patiently for another to relieve him of his pain – and the person who does arrive and heals king and kingdom is received as the new Grail King (rather than Amfortas protesting that the throne remains rightfully his).
But then, that’s my perspective, which is bound to differ from yours; myths aren’t like sacred scripture, where there is only one inerrant interpretation requiring a Hundred Years War over whether communion mass is transubstantiation or consubstantiation (either way, one still drinks the wine and swallows the wafer). If your interpretation helps you make sense of the strange, surreal circumstances playing out today, particularly the behavior of the multitude, who am I to argue?
In contrast with the Grail myth, I do find some correlations between King Minos and contemporary actions of some political leaders – but the mythic archetype I find most useful in processing what’s in play today is that of the Trickster – specifically, Coyote. Though we sometimes think of him as relatively benign (perhaps shaped by the kind-of-cute, persistent, ultimately incompetent Wile E. Coyote who launches elaborate schemes yet never succeeds in catching, killing and eating the Roadrunner – reminding me of Barney Fife if he were an animated feral carnivore), many of the myths throughout the southwestern United States where Coyote plays a central role portray him as anything but a sympathetic figure.
Only on rare occasions does Coyote come off well (e.g., stealing fire – or the Sun – for humankind, and even then he exhibits problematic behavior). For example, of 66 traditional Coyote tales collected from Jicarilla Apache storytellers by anthropologist Morris Edward Opler, only two portray him in a halfway favorable light. The rest depict him as self-absorbed, regularly guilty of deception, adulterous, lascivious perversities, grabbing women by the p****y, luring culture heroes to their death, stealing babies, cheating innocents and strangers, hoarding, self-gratification galore, and more. He regularly persuades individuals and whole communities to trust him, pretending to look out for others to get what he wants and then screwing everyone in the process (no principles – wholly transactional, come to think of it). He is especially gifted at fomenting conflict and confusion.
And yet, what he does to disrupt the cultural status quo ultimately works out (though only rarely for Coyote, and not always for those who cooperate or are conned by him).
That last bit is what I take refuge in … lots of chaos and conflict in society right now, a lot of excrement being stirred up and brought to the surface. It very much feels like trickster energies have been in play, especially the past four years as traditions are ignored, institutions damaged, and norms overturned – and yet, despite all that, feels like we are in the birth of something new.
No, he didn’t (but your question does make me want to delve deeper into the geometry of dimensions beyond the three we perceive).
Joseph Campbell believed there are only three steps that are essential to the Hero’s Journey: Separation, Initiation, and Return (as David Kudler, Managing Editor of The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, explains better here). Campbell sets it out upfront in the third section of his prologue to The Hero With a Thousand Faces, entitled “The Hero and the God,” describing these as the “nuclear unit of the the monomyth” (and as a formula common to rites of passage).
Here is Campbell addressing the same in a recorded Q & A session at the end of a lecture on the work of Thomas Mann:
HOW MANY STEPS ARE THERE IN THE HERO’S JOURNEY?
There are three steps. One is leaving the Waste Land and going to the place of initiation. The next is experiencing the initiation, which may be an experience of death. The third is coming back with an amplified consciousness and addressing life, the life of the Waste Land, which is no longer the Waste Land, in those terms.”
Many bright, well-meaning people unintentionally mis-state what Campbell presented on this subject, generally mistaking as steps essential to the completion of the journey the many different elements Campbell describes that can be, but may or may not actually be present. Though Campbell details 17 elements that can appear, he isn’t wedded to that number, as he notes they never all appear.
For example, though the journey always begins with “The Call,”, the next element Campbell describes, “The Refusal of the Call” is sometimes present (e.g., Jonah refusing God’s instruction to travel to Ninevah, so God sends that whale to get him there, or Luke Skywalker initially declining Obi-Wan Kenobi’s invitation to join him in rescuing the princess because his aunt and uncle rely on him),
and sometimes not (e.g., myths where a hero out hunting follows a magnificent stag –”the Call” – deep into the woods, until he finds himself in an ancient grove he’s never seen before, and suddenly is already deep into an adventure before there’s any opportunity to refuse the call).
And then there is the climax of the journey, which can take one of four forms (but never all in one tale): The Sacred Marriage (or Hieros Gamos); Atonement with the Father; Apotheosis; or the Elixir-Theft (or Fire-theft, or Bride-theft).
In Campbell’s own words:
Those are the four ways of experiencing fulfillment: one in the way of the male-female relationship, another in the way of child-parent relationships, another in the way of realizing it’s all yours, and the fourth way of the fire theft. Or bride theft. Or LSD trip—a situation where you go like a thunderbolt with violence to get down there and draw this out, without having prepared yourself. You have the high experience and then, boy, you gotta take it.
DO YOU HAVE ALL FOUR OF THESE EXPERIENCES IN ONE ADVENTURE?
There’s a saying in the Catholic church—when you’ve committed one mortal sin, you’ve committed them all. (Laughter) There are four doors by which you can come into the room and find fulfillment. And when you are fulfilled, all the doors are yours.
IT DOESN’T MATTER WHICH ONE?
One finds different orders of story. For example, in the fairy tales it’s usually the finding of the bride—or sometimes stealing the bride—and the sacred marriage motif. In the Roman Catholic tradition, it’s the atonement with the father motif—and there the woman becomes either the guide to the father in the form of Mary, or seductress in the form of Eve and her children. In the Christian tradition one is not to experience the apotheosis. You are not to think of yourself as the Christ, whereas in the Buddhist tradition that’s the way.” (from the draft of a manuscript currently being prepared for publication)
That’s a large reason why writers, filmmakers, and game-makers find the Hero’s Journey so compelling: the possibilities are endless. In a video game you might “hear the Call” and be presented with a choice right off the bat – follow the Call, or refuse the Call – and the choice you make changes some of the details you experience – and so on at every fork in the road, until you either fail, or successfully complete that arc and move up to the next level. If you make a different choice the next time around, you have a different experience.
In my role with JCF I have occasionally received manuscripts from aspiring novelists or screenwriters who believe they need to include every single one of the “17 steps” they think Campbell demands, which unfortunately creates a bloated, cumbersome, unsatisfying tale. Chris Vogler, author of The Writer’s Journey, recognizes how unwieldy that can be, so collapses the hero’s journey down to a 12 step formula in three acts – each act representing each of the three steps Campbell considered essential – but even that can become a bit of a procrustean bed that leads to lifeless, formulaic productions.
Plugging in the Hero’s Journey, ticking off each of 12 or 17 or more “steps” in the journey (I once received a lengthy email from an individual who was convinced he had identified 1,000 distinct steps!) is no substitute for talent.
You don’t start with the formula and build a tale from there; Joseph Campbell believes the hero’s journey emerges naturally from a tale well-told. J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t consult his pocket edition of Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces and build The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings around that (especially considering Joe hadn’t written his masterpiece when Tolkien started writing), but the HJ arc nevertheless appears throughout his work. And even George R.R. Martin, who intentionally tried to counter the HJ trajectory by letting his heroes fail and killing them off, still wasn’t able to completely escape this dynamic in Game of Thrones.
Similarly, George Lucas didn’t start with Campbell’s work and build Star Wars from that; rather, he started with a story of his own – but Lucas’ experience does indicate the value in an awareness of the hero’s journey trajectory, for when he stumbled across Campbell’s work he could see those areas where he had gotten stuck and painted himself into a corner; Joe’s work helped him figure out where he needed to go.
I do ramble on! Sorry about my extended response to a simple question (ask me what time it is, and odds are I’ll tell you how to build a watch), but I thought I’d take this opportunity to expand on the all-too-common misconception that Campbell is wedded to the number 17 . . .
A well-written paper, Marianne! I played with the formatting a little bit (center alignment doesn’t seem to work for anyone), and I fixed the link for D. Sharp’s “Jung lexicon” so it’s not a raw link and opens in a new window, rather than taking the reader away from COHO.
Intriguing question.
However, we do need to be cautious and adhere to forum guidelines:
5. Avoid Contemporary Politics
Given the volatile nature of contemporary political discourse, we ask that members steer clear of candidates or current political controversies. Forum members come from across the political spectrum. There are other fora across the internet for discussing myth and politics.
As in any discussion forum, there are likely participants on all sides of current controversies – there is no political test required for exploring myth; Joseph Campbell’s work is admired by liberals, progressives, populists, conservatives, communists, and libertarians alike. However, in my experience administering multiple myth-oriented discussion boards on a variety of platforms for more than two decades, any discussions of the mythological dynamics driving current politics, no matter how reasonable the participants are and how civil they begin, soon strike archetypal nerves and trigger shadow projections, drawing reactions pro and con outside rational discussion.
That way lies flame wars — and we are not going there.
That said, in my mind I see a distinction between what you describe as “the cult following the President” (those who, to use his example, would support him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight – the hardcore base or personality cult, many of whom did not get involved in politics before his candidacy), and those whose politics generally align with his.
I wouldn’t say the myth of the wounded king is a basis for the president’s fanatical following – just don’t see that parallel. Amfortas did not have a fanatical following who claimed his wound was inflicted by another so not his fault, nor did Amfortas complain about his wound – no “public declaration of his suffering and ill treatment”: unless asked about it, he suffered in silence.
Amfortas (or Anfortas, in some versions) was raised from an early age for the role of Grail King. He becomes the Maimed King because of his personal failure to live up to the role. The wound he receives as a result is, in Campbell’s words, “in a magical way associated with the waste and sorrow of his land” (Creative Mythology, p. 391).
Plenty of waste, sorrow, pestilence, and grief in our land today (speaking specifically of the United States), but the president’s most fanatical followers do not associate that with any failing on his part. (On the other hand, many of his opponents do.)
There are a number of mythic associations one could make to the current administration drawn from many myths (the Grail King, yes, or the myth of King Minos as Campbell recounts in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, or elements of the hero journey arc in general, and more), but to go there calls up opinions, pro and con, about the policies and controversies of this presidency.
As an aside, though Joseph Campbell had strong political opinions (see the letter he wrote to President Nixon supporting the secret bombing of Cambodia, a neutral nation, once that was exposed: Correspondence: 1927 – 1987, p. 242), he avoided all mention of political candidates or current political controversies, much less what side he might favor, in his writings or his lectures.
Mythology, like biology, is nonpartisan
Excellent question! My immediate reflex is to say no – but then, my opinion should not be considered a definitive answer (we each have to arrive at our own conclusions). And then I might well be biased – so I’d like to unpack that initial reaction and dig a little deeper.
Much depends which definition of “cult” is in play, as well as what we mean by “mythology.”
In addition to the meaning you supply for “cult,” my American Heritage Dictionary lists the primary definition as “a system of religious worship and ritual” (which is how historians, anthropologists, mythologists, and others who study human beliefs over time use the term: the cult of Dionysus, the cult of Isis, the cult of Christianity, etc. – these don’t refer to specific organizations or institutions, but a broad set of beliefs commonly held).
The second meaning listed corresponds to your definition of cult (“a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange”): “A religion or sect considered extremist or false.” That’s generally a pejorative term that includes more than just strange beliefs: cults in that sense tend to be authoritarian with often corrupt leadership, rigidly controlled followers, destructive patterns, and generally rely on a variety of brainwashing techniques.
That meaning strikes close to home for me. I was raised in a strict, authoritarian Christian cult – Herbert W. Armstrong’s Radio Church of God, which changed its name in 1968 to the Worldwide Church of God. HWA, considered an “apostle” by church members, and his son, playboy televangelist Garner Ted Armstrong (GTA), broadcast “The World Tomorrow” radio program and television show daily, offering free literature (including a slick monthly magazine called The Plain Truth). It wasn’t until someone joined the WCG that they learned they had to donate 30% or more of their income before taxes to “the Work” (which paid for HWA’s and GTA’s private jets, five mansions, Rolls Royces and such). Beliefs were indeed strange (British-Israelism – the idea Americans and British are descended from the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel; members forbidden to celebrate Christmas or Easter or Valentine’s Day, which were replaced by the Jewish Holy Days, including fasting on Yom Kippur and removing all trace of leavening from one’s home, including crumbs in the toaster the seven days following Passover; no smoking, no eating pork or shellfish, no voting, no military service, no divorce, observe the Saturday sabbath from sunset to sunset, etc.). Lives of members were strictly controlled (had to get the local minister’s permission to get married, change jobs, etc.), and Christ was prophesied to return in 1975. They had three college campuses (in Pasadena, CA, Big Sandy, TX, and Bricket Wood, England), all unaccredited, to train ministers.
Membership eventually peaked at close to 100,000 believers scattered around the world – not large at all, yet the Church took in more money than Billy Graham and Oral Roberts combined! Of course the leadership (HWA and his son and other top leaders at the Church headquarters) proved corrupt: besides innumerable financial improprieties, Garner Ted eventually admitted he had affairs with over 200 coeds on his college campuses, as well as the wives of other evangelists – and it turns out Herbert W. Armstrong himself had committed incest for decade in the 1940s with his youngest daughter.
After HWA’s death, the cult broke up into several smaller splinters (one, of about 2,000 people, just announced last week that Jesus Christ would return to Earth before dawn on New Year’s Day: they have been very quiet since then).
The third definition of cult in my dictionary is “obsessive devotion to a person or principle.” These are often called “personality cults” – there have been cults of personality centered on Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Louisiana Governor Huey Long, Saddam Hussein, even Donald Trump, consisting of slavish devotion by hardcore followers. I’ll come back to this in a bit, as I believe it is particularly relevant.
In addition to those three definitions of the word “cult,” there are two different meanings for mythology that are relevant. One is “the study of myths. ” Mythology in this sense is a field of research (like history, anthropology, psychology, geography, etc.): mythologists study the myths and beliefs of people past and present (e.g. Joseph Campbell was a mythologist). In this sense, mythology is no more a cult than is history, geography, or anthropology.
The other definition relates to the mythology of a specific people or culture. Campbell defines this as follows:
Mythology is an organization of symbolic images and narratives metaphorical of the possibilities of human experience and fulfillment in a given society at a given time. Myth is a universal language that takes on its own local forms from society to society. It is not just the fantasy of this, that, or another person. Mythologies put the members of a culture in touch with deeper concerns than those of everyday economics and politics.” (from a manuscript currently being prepared for publication) .
This as well is not a cult in the sense of the meaning you provide – mythologies are not a fringe belief of a small group of people considered extreme, but often the prevailing belief in a society. Every culture has its own mythology, as do subcultures within the larger community. Each society has its own unique mythology, in the same way as each society has its own unique history.
It is true that some mythologists, like Joseph Campbell or Mircea Eliade, recognize patterns that appear in multiple mythologies of cultures widely separated from one another in time and in space, in the same way some historians (Spengler, Toynbee, Barzun, etc..) recognize patterns that recur in the histories of multiple cultures – but other mythologists and historians will disagree.
So though mythologists may study the myths of different cults (as do historians, anthropologists, and psychologists), mythology itself is not a cult by the first definition (it’s not “a system of religious worship and ritual”, but studies systems of worship and ritual).
Nor is mythology (when conceived of as “the spiritual beliefs of a people”) a cult in the second sense (an authoritarian fringe belief), though there may be small fringe cults within the broader umbrella (e.g., Christian mythology is a belief system very much mainstream in the societies that embrace it – but there are numerable small fringe movements within Christianity that are considered cults). “Mythology” as a field is not an institution with members who subscribe to a rigid set of beliefs: there is no “apostle” who runs mythology, controls the lives of followers, and excommunicates heretics.
That is why my immediate response is to answer “no” to your original query (is mythology a cult?).
However, there is that third definition – the cult of personality.
That is something we do our best to guard against at the Joseph Campbell Foundation.
Many people who discover Campbell’s work are so enamored of his ideas that there can be a tendency to place him upon a pedestal (which is one reason why Joe resisted writing a memoir or sharing much biographical information – he didn’t want to be considered a guru, nor replace the focus on his work with a focus on his personality). Hence, when JCF had an online Amazon aStore with nearly a thousand titles, we included the work of mythologists who arrived at different conclusions than Campbell, and had a section devoted to “Campbell Criticism.” Indeed, some of the recent MythBlasts take issue with a few of Campbell’s conclusions (mythologist Norland Téllez, for example while acknowledging areas where he builds on Campbell’s work, also notes areas where he believes Campbell’s thought falls short). Indeed, right here on COHO “Why I Disagree with Joe Campbell” is one of the longer threads in our Conversation with a Thousand Faces forum (which is not something an extremist cult would allow).
So generally, no, I would say mythology – whether we are talking the various mythologies of different peoples, or mythology as a field of study – is by no means a cult.
Thanks Drewie (aka Andreas) for the kind words. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on Nandu defining Campbell as a mystic, or mysticism in general?
I thought I would add a comment to bump this up in the queue – and I changed the name of this thread to “How Many Steps in the Hero’s Journey” to draw more eyes. It’s a relevant topic more people need to see (which I think of every time I visit a webpage that declares there are exactly 17 (or 12, as per Chris Vogler) steps in the hero’s journey – but it tended to get lost under the title of the MythBlast (“Separation, Initiation, Return”).
