The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

The Power of Myth

Date read: May 2020

How strongly would I recommend? 10/10

Lasting Thoughts

When I first watched this interview at the beginning of 2020, it shook me. Aspects of it spoke to me on a very deep level. The imperative of the heroes journey. The coming-of-age traditions that are missing in our culture. The power of myths in how we shape the narrative of our lives. It was a treat to read this book after seeing the interview. I’ve been following my bliss since.

Most Memorable Quote

For reference:
The bold highlights are my own emphasis

The blue highlights are passages I found notable or interesting

Introduction 

The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others. 

He [JC] taught, as great teachers teach, by example. It was not his manner to try t talk anyone into anything. 

[“Truth is one; the sages call it by many names.”] 
All our names and images for God are masks, he [JC] said, signifying the ultimate reality that by definition transcends language and art. A myth is a mask of God, too—a metaphor for what lies behind the visible world. 

Ch 1 – Myth and The Modern World 

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves. 

When people get married because they think it’s a long-time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity. If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male or female counterpart. 
— But if are distracted by certain sensuous interests, we’ll marry the wrong person. By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that’s what marriage is.
— Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of the ego to a relationship in which two have become one. 

When I was a kid, we wore short trousers, you know, knee pants. And then there was a great moment when you put on long pants. Boys now don’t get that. i see even fire-year-olds walking around with long trousers.
— When are they going to know they’re now men and must put aside childish things? 

When a judge walks into the room, and everybody stands up, you’re not standing up to that guy, you’re standing up to the robe that he’s wearing and the role the he’s going to play. 

It is a terrifying experience to have your consciousness transformed. 

All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional. A lot of people spend most of life in meditating on where their money is coming from and where it is going to go. 

Eisenhower went into a room full of computers. And he put the question to these machines, “Is there a God?” And they all start up and the lights flash, and the wheels turn, and after a while, a voice says, “Now there is.” 

You strike a match, what’s fire? You can tell me about oxidation, but that doesn’t tell me a thing. 

Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form. 

Ch 2 – The Journey Inward 

God is a thought. God is a name. God is an idea. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery being is beyond all categories of thought. As Kant said, the thing in itself is no thing. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can’t be told because they transcend thought. 

• The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can’t be thought about. 
• The third best are what we talk about. And myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent. 

When you see that God is the creation, and that you are a creature, you realize that God is within you, and in the man or woman who whom you are talking, as well. 

“He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows. For in this context, to know is not to know, And not to know is to know.” — [within the Chinese tao-te Ching] 

The difference between a priest and a shaman is that the priest is a functionary and the shaman is someone who has had an experience. In our tradition it is the monk who sees the experience, while the priest is the one who has studied to serve the community.

Try to explain the joy of skiing to somebody living in the tropics who has never even seen snow. There has to be an experience to catch the message, some clue—otherwise you’re not hearing what is being said. 

Ch 3 – The First Storytellers 

What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle? 

When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature. It’s instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive? How much of it is conscious and intentional? That is a big question. 

You can have a man forty-five years old still trying to be obedient to his father. So he goes to a psychoanalyst, who does the job for him. 

The woman is life, and the man is the servant of life. 

“Be careful lest in casting our the devils you cast out the best thing that’s in you.” — Nietzcsche 

God is an intelligible sphere—a sphere known to the mind, not to the senses—whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. And the center, Bill, is right where you’re sitting. And the other one is right where I’m sitting. And each of us is a manifestation of that mystery. That’s a nice mythological realization that sort of give you a sense of who and what you are.
— You are the central mountain, and the central mountain is everywhere. 

Ch 4 – Sacrifice and Bliss 

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. 

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you re are and what you might be. 
— This is the place of creative incubation. At first, you may find that nothing happens there. but if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen. 

But our life has become so economic and practice in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. 

• You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it. 
• Get a phonograph and put on the music that you really love, even if it’s corny music that nobody else respects. Or get the book you like to read. In your sacred place, you get the “thou” feeling of life that these people had for the whole world in which they lived. 

Going through a ritual day after day keeps you on the line. 

Sit in a room and read—and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. 

• This realization of life can be a constant realization in your living. When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done. 
  • Don’t say, “Oh, I want to know what So-and-so did”—and don’t bother at all with the best-seller list. Just read what this one author has to give you. And then you can go read what he has read.
  • And the world opens up in a way that is consistent with a certain point of view. 
• But when you go from one author to another, you may be able to tell us the date when each wrote such and such a poem—but he hasn’t said anything to you. 

Colin Turnbell tells an interesting story of bringing a pygmy who had never been out of the forest onto a mountaintop. Suddenly they came from the trees onto the hill, and there was an extensive plain stretching out before them. The poor fellow was utterly terrified. He has no way of judging perspective or distance. he thought that the animals grazing on the plain in the distance were just across the way and were so small that they were ants. he was jus totally baffled, and rushed back into the forest. 

[Policeman saving someone from jumping off a bridge]
Schopenhauer’s answer is that such a psychological crisis represents the breakthroughs of a metaphysical realization, which is that you and that other are one, that you are two aspects of the one life, and that your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. 

• Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. This is a metaphysical truth which may become spontaneously realized under circumstances of crisis. For it is, accordion gate Schopenhauer, the truth of you life. 
• The hero is the one who has given his physical life to some order realization of that truth. 
  • So when Jesus says, “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” he is saying in effect, “Love they neighbour because he is yourself.” 

Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don’t get that experience, but suddenly, in war, you are ripped back into being alive. 

• Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror—but, by God, you are alive. 

One fine evening I was in my favourite restaurant there, and at the next table there was a father, a mother, and a scrawny boy about twelve years old. The father said to the boy, “Drink your tomato juice.” And the boy said, “I don’t want to.” Then the father, with a louder voice, said, “Drink your tomato juice.” And the mother said, Don’t make him do what he doesn’t want to do.” 

• The father looked at her and said, “He can’t go on through life doing what he wants to do. If he doesn’t only what he wants to do, he’ll be dead. Look at me. I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life.” 

That’s the man who never followed his bliss. 

• You may have success in life, but then just think of it—what kind of life was it? What good was it—you’ve never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. 
• I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off. 

We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of what you bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth. 

Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. Most people are concerned with other things. 
— They get themselves involved in economic and political activities, or get dragged into a war that isn’t the one they’re interested in, and it may be difficult to hold to this umbilical under those circumstances. That is a technique each one has to work out for himself somehow.

When I taught in a boys’ prep school, I used to talk to the boys who were trying to make up their minds as to what their careers were going to be. A boy would come to me and ask, “Do you think I can do this? Do you think I can do that? Do you think I can be a writer? 

• “Oh,” I would say, “I don’t know. Can you endure ten years of disappointment with nobody responding to you, or are you thinking that you are going to write a best seller the first crack? If you have the guts to stay with the thing you really want, no matter what happens, well, go ahead.” 
  • Then Dad would come along and say, “No, you ought to study law because there is more money in that, you know.” Now, that is the rim of the wheel, not the hub, not following your bliss. 
    • Are you going to think of fortune, or are you going to think of your bliss? 

I came back from Europe as a student in 1929, just three weeks before the Wall Street crash, so I didn’t have a job for five years. There just wasn’t a job. That was a great time for me. A great time? The depth of the Depression? What was wonderful about it? 
— I didn’t feel poor, I just felt that I didn’t have any money. 

There was a wonderful old man up in Woodstock, New York, who had a piece of property with these little chicken coop places he would rent out for twenty dollars a year or so to any song person he thought might have a future in the arts. 
There was no running water, only here and there a well and a pump. He declared he wouldn’t install running water because he didn’t like the class of people it attracted. That is where I did most of my basic reading and work. it was great. I was following my bliss. 

*** Do you ever have this sense when you are following your bliss, as I have at moment, of being helped by hidden hands? 

• [laughing] All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time—namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of tack the has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you don’t know they were going to be. 
• Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. 

Ch 5 – The Hero’s Adventure 

IF you realize what the real problem is—losing yourself, giving yourself to some higher-end, or to another—you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial. When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. 
— And what all the myths have to deal with is transformations of consciousness of one kind or another. You have been thinking one way, you now have to think a different way. 

That father quest is a major hero adventure for young people. That is the adventure of finding what your career is, what your nature is, what your source is. You undertake that intentionally. 

• Then there are adventures into which you are thrown—for example, being drafted into the army. You don’t intend it, but you’re in now. You’ve undergone a death and resurrection, you’ve put on a uniform, and you’re another creature. 

That’s a typical hero act—departure, fulfillment, return. 

You might say that the founder of a life—your life or mine, if we live our own lives, instead of imitating everybody else’s life—comes from a quest as well. 

If the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose to do because you’re enjoying it, that’s it. [following your bliss]. But if you think, “Oh, no! I couldn’t do that!” that’s the dragon locking you in. “no, no, I couldn’t be a writer,” or “No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what So-and-so is doing.” 

Being a parents is one of the most demanding careers I now. When I think what my father and mother gave up of themselves to launch their family—well, I really appreciate that. 

My father was a businessman, and, of course, he would have been very happy to have his son go into business with him and take it on. In fact, I did go into business with Dad for a couple of months, and then I thought, “Geez, I can’t do this.” And he let me go. 
— There is that testing time in your life when you ahem got to test yourself out to your own flight. 

[Myths used to help us know when to let go.] 
Myths formulate things for you. They say, for example, they you have to become an adult at a particular age. The age might be a  good average age for that to happen—but actually, in the individual life, it differs greatly. Some people are late bloomers and come to particular stages at a relatively late age. You have to have a feeling for where you are. 

• You’ve got only one life to live, and you don’t have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it. 

It’s easier to stay home, stay in the womb, not take the journey. 

[Do most myths say that suffering is an intrinsic part of life, and that there’s no way around it?] 
I can’t think of any that say that if you’re going to live, you won’t suffer. Myths tell us how to confront and bear and interpret suffering, but they do no say that in life there can or should be no suffering. 

• When the Buddha declares there is escape from sorrow, the escape is Nirvana, which is not a place, like heaven, but a psychological state of mind in which you are released from desire and fear. 

There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor Fati, the “love of your fate,” which is in fact your life. 

• As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing. Furthermore, the more challenging or threading the situation or contact to be assimilate and affirmed, the greater the nature of the person who can achieve it. The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply. 
• Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself. 
• The best advice is to take it all as if it has been your intention—with that, you evoke at the participation of your will. 

I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or child. 

Ch 6 – The Gift of the Goddess 

Ch 7 – Tales of Love and Marriage 

Spiritual life is the bouquet, the perfume, the flowering and fulfillment of a human life, not a supernatural virtue imposed upon it. 

[Moyer] One has to build up one’s own system that may violate the expectations of the society, and sometimes society doesn’t accept that. But the task of life is to live within the field provided by the society that is really supporting you. 

• A point comes up—for instance, a war, where the young men have to register for the draft. This involves an enormous decision. How far are you going to go in acceding to what the society is asking of you—to kill other people whom you don’t know? For what? For whom? All that kind of thing. 

But marriage is marriage, you know. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A  marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn’t that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it’s off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you’re not married. 

Love itself is a pain, you might say—the pain of being truly alive. 

Ch 8 – Masks of Eternity 

Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there isa dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to the senses. 

There is a form of meditation you are taught in Roman Catholicism where you recite the rosary, the same prayer, over and over and over again. That pulls the mind in. In Sanskrit, this practice is called papa, “repetition of the holy name.” It blocks other interests out and allows you to concentrate on one thing, and then, depending on your own powers of imagination, to experience the profundity of this mystery. 

“Religion is a defense against the experience of God.” — Carl Jung

[How do you love your enemy without condoning what the enemy does, without accepting his aggression?] 
— I’ll tell you how to do that: do not pluck the mote from your enemy’s eyes, but block the beam from your own. No one is in a position to disqualify his enemy’s way of life. 

At Penn Station in New York, there is a clock with the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the tents of seconds, and the hundredths of seconds. When you see the hundredths of a second buzzing by, you realize how time is running through you. 

“Mandala” i the Sanskrit word for “circle,” but a circle that is coordinate or symbolically designed so that it has the meaning of a cosmic order. When composing mandalas, you are trying to coordinate your personal circle with the universal circle. 

• IN a very elaborate Buddhist mandala, for example, you have the deity in the center as the power source, the illumination source. The peripheral images would be manifestations or aspects of the deity’s radiance. 

When you can get rid of fear and desire and just get back to where you’re becoming, you’ve hit the spot. 

The peak experience refers to actual moments of your life when you experience your relationship to the harmony of being. My own peak experiences, the ones that I knew were peak experiences after I had them, all came in athletics. 

[Moyers] You’ve said that the whole question of life revolves around being versus becoming.

[JC] Yes. Becoming is always fractional. And being is total. 

[So whatever it is we experience we have to express in language that is just not up to the occasion.]
— That’s it. That’s what poetry is for. Poetry is language that has to be penetrated. Poetry involves a precise choice of words that will have implications and suggestions that go past the words themselves. Then you experience the radiance, the epiphany. The epiphany is the showing through the essence. 

[So the experience of God is beyond description, but we feel compelled to try to describe it?]
— That’s right. Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have a kind of consistent order and plan, as though compared by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who compared that plot? 

• Schopenhauer suggest that just as your dreams are compared by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your who life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the strutting of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. 
• The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature. 

“When you’re on a journey, and the end keeps getting further and further away, then you realize that the real end is the journey.” — Karlfried Graf Durckheim 

It’s been said that poetry consists of letting the word be heard beyond words. And Goethe says, “All things are metaphors.” Everything that’s transitory is but a metaphorical reference. That’s what we all are. 

“AUM” is a word that represents to our ears that sound of the energy of the universe of which all things are manifestations. You start in the back of the mouth”ahh,” and then “oo,” you will the mouth, and “mm” close the mouth. When you pronounce this properly, all vowel sounds are included in the pronunciation. AUM. Consonants are here regarded simply as interruption of the essential vowel sound. All words are thus fragments of AUM, just as all images are garments of the Form of forms. AUM is a symbolic sound that puts you in touch with that resounding being that is the universe. 

• If you heard some of the recordings of Tibetan monks chanting AUM, you would know what the word means, all right. That’s the AUM of being in the world. To be in touch with that and to get the sense of that is the peak experience of all. 

A-U-M. The birth, the coming into being, and the dissolution the cycles back. AUM is called the “four-element syllable.” A-U-M—and what is the fourth element? The silence out of which AUM arises, and back into which it goes, and which underlies it. My life is the A-U-M, but there is a silence underlying it, too. That is what we would call the immortal. This is the mortal and that’s the immortal, and there wouldn’t be mortal if there weren’t the immortal. One must discriminate between the mortal aspect and the immortal aspect of one’s own existence. In the experience of my mother and father who re gone, of whom I was born, I have come to understand that there is more than what was our temporal relationship. Of course there were certain moments in that relationship where an emphatic demonstration of what the relationship was would be brought to my realization. I clearly remember some of those. They stand out as moments of epiphany, of revelation, of the radiance. 

{Moyers} The meaning is essentially wordless. 

{JC} Yes. Words are always qualifications and limitations. 

{Moyers} And yet, Joe, all we puny human beings are left with is this miserable language, beautiful though it is, that falls short of trying to describe— 

{JC} That’s right, and that’s why it is a peak experience to break past all that, every now and then, and to realize, “Oh … ah ….” 

New Words
aggrandizement
cacophonous
vivifying
duad
acquiescing
nubile
spake
vestigial
vestiges
gentile —the person is not of the same order
amalgamate
emanation
androgyne
connotes
monad
parasol
cherubim
penultimate
ecclesiastical
concretized

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