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Gods within
Joseph Campbell had a vision of an independent “science of myth,” a discipline of depth mythologizing which could stand on its own academic legs. Rather than being relegated to literary, anthropological, and archeological disciplines, Campbell wanted to ground myth on its own mythic substance while privileging a depth-psychological approach. Especially leaning on Carl Jung, Campbell comes again and again to a fundamental insight about the universality of myth—the archetypal figures of myth and legend correspond to psychological factors that are at work in the depths of the collective unconscious mind: “And this is one way of saying that in all of us, in our human activities, deities are operating” (Romance of the Grail, pg. 152).
Whenever a human action shines with the power of the archetypal, it has been transfigured by the power of myth. Archetypal images mediate both outer and inner realities. They constitute a psycho-physical medium of consciousness, indispensable to the cognitive function of the symbolic and its capacity to disclose the reality of the world.
Logos vs. mythos
Images are not outside of language, not even outside verbal communication. For there is a direct relation between images and their meaning; they belong together as integrated wholes in the symbolic order. When we hear a foreign language, for example, we may have the jarring experience of hearing sounds without meaningful images attached to them. Without the resonance of images in our soul, we could not hear the song of meaning in the vibrations of human thought. As Martin Heidegger put it, “Language itself is poetry in the essential sense,” (Poetry, Language, Thought, pg. 72) that is, in the sense that language can reveal the essence of things. Hence, he explains: “Language is not poetry because it is primal poesy; rather, poesy takes place in language because language preserves the original nature of poetry” (pg. 72).
Rather than external opposites, mythological images are internal to words, as mythos to logos and logos to mythos, in the full concept of mythology. We know that “non-verbal” images have the power to speak louder than words. As structures of signification, archetypal images are core channels of meaning and imagination; they constitute the world wide web of our symbolic life as a species.
Archetypal images retrace the order of the collective unconscious; they express the cultural forms of a collective consciousness which casts its shadow on the reality of the social field where it generally becomes unconscious. The collective consciousness and the collective unconscious are one and the same.
Mythic images both hide and reveal the subterranean movement of the universal in the order of conscious thought, a movement that unleashes the power of the creative imagination. Combining the literal with the metaphorical into a single force, it is in the nature of the mythic to become historic.
Mythic images both hide and reveal the subterranean movement of the universal in the order of conscious thought, a movement that unleashes the power of the creative imagination.
The crucible of mytho-history
Mythic images mediate between the literal and metaphoric, the manifest and latent, the ghostly and the real, in the virtual medium of psychic inexistence. For the mythic only “exists” inside the historic. Mythic images are thus historic self-elucidations of the human spirit, caught between the metaphoricity of language and the literalism of fact.
The mythic and the literal are thus not external factors opposed to each other in fixed hierarchy. The metaphorical is not better than the literal and vice versa; one should not be on top of the other, as good is supposed to rule over evil, right over wrong, better over worse. Adapting the words of Jacques Derrida: “It is not, therefore, a matter of inverting the literal meaning and the figurative meaning but of determining the ‘literal’ meaning of [the mythic image] as metaphoricity itself” (Of Grammatology, pg. 15). The mythic image expresses this metaphoricity of the literal itself, which opens up new horizons of meaning and archetypal vision.
Dehumanizing mythology
The human soul as human language, the archetypal Logos, which includes the mathematical and cognitive dimensions, has a demonstrably inhuman reach into the secrets of Nature. This very inhumanity at the same time allows us to peer into the unfathomable workings of nature as revealed by quantum physics, for example.
To speak of the archetypal, therefore, is to lay bare our naked inhumanity. For archetypes come to embody the best and the worst of what humans can do to one another, other creatures, and the environment. In the same vein, James Hillman too was compelled to speak of the “dehumanizing” effect of archetypal experience in general. For better or worse, the archetypal power of the mythic image comes to life in the deeds and misdeeds of human history.
The transparency of the transcendent
Campbell had a beautiful way of expressing this opening of the mythic dimension. Rather than the opacity of the black and white, he spoke of achieving a certain transparency to the transcendent. To this purpose, he bid us look to artists for “These people can look past the broken symbols of the present and begin to forge new working images, images that are transparent to transcendence” (Pathways to Bliss, pg. 20). In their disclosure of archetypal truth, myths are guides and guide posts to help us light our way. The power of their created works is to reawaken our capacity for mythic vision out of the primeval void of the collective unconscious.
Artists are thus specialists in the deployment of the symbolic dimension of myth in the light of what is true; we are molders and shapers of the transparency of language to the shattering experience of archetypal truth. “Thus in the work it is truth, not only something true, that is at work” (Heidegger 54). It is the archetype of the Logos or the “Holy Ghost” or Spirit of Truth that is also at work in mythological creation.
The event of truth in the work of art goes beyond the aesthetic experience of myth. The aesthetic experience is itself made transparent to the operation of the transcendent function of truth, or logos, through which we as human beings evolve. Mythos and logos are not binary opposites or mortal enemies. In their togetherness alone mythos and logos complete the archetypal pattern of true mythology in the crucible of myth and history.
Rather than aestheticizing myth in an imaginary universe divorced from truth, true mythology (vera narratio) emanates from “Its Root Ancient Truth,” as the Maya Popol Wuh has it in its opening pages of creation. The power of myth, therefore, pushes toward the creation of new worlds of truth in time. Rather than a fixed essence, existential truth grows and develops in time. So what Heidegger writes about art is in every sense applicable to the power of true myth defined as: “the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art then is the becoming and happening of truth” (Poetry, Language, Thought, pg. 69).
The transcendence of this event of truth is the real power that sets us free. Rather than correctness or adequation to a thing, the concept of truth in the existential sense becomes a concept of freedom. Truth as freedom in mythic creation opens the creative space in which we learn to become true ourselves. In touch with the event of truth in myth, we experience the transcendence of creative being itself as the spirit of our authentic selves.
MythBlast authored by:
Norland Téllez is an award-winning writer and animation director who currently teaches Animation and Character Design courses at Otis College of Art and Design, Cal State Fullerton. He is also conducting a Life Drawing Lab at USC School of Cinematic Arts. He earned his Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2009 with a dissertation on the Popol-Wuh of the K’iche’ Maya, which he is currently translating and illustrating in its archetypal dimensions as the Wisdom of the Peoples. You can learn more at norlandtellez.com.
This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 3, and Romance of the Grail
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In this bonus episode, Campbell answers questions following his 1971 lecture, "Primitive Rites & Traditions", at Esalen Institute. He first speaks about the differences between male and female rites in various times and places and then gives an overview of his interpretation of the meaning of the "Virgin Birth".
This Week's Highlights
“The logics of image thinking and of verbal thinking are two very different logics. I’m more and more convinced that there is, as it were, a series of archetypes which are psychologically grounded, which just have to operate, but in whatever field is available to them. In the myths, they are represented pictorially. There’s a big distinction to be made between the impact of the image, and the intellectual and social interpretation and application of the image.”
-- Joseph Campbell
Myth and Meaning, 27
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