Lecture I.1.4 - New HorizonsBy Joseph Campbell

Details: Date: November 21, 1961/1974 Venue: The Cooper Union Location: New York, NY Archive Number: L46, L535

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TRACK 1:  Myth vs. History: a Story at the Lunch Counter

 

Ladies and gentlemen, the other day when sitting ata lunch counter that I like to go to, a little boy about twelve years old came in and sat beside me with his school satchel. And beside him was a still younger gentleman of learning about six, holding his mother by the hand. And they sat on the counter beside me.

And while he was waiting for his order to be filled, my little companion said "In class today, Jimmy wrote a paper on the evolution of man. [laughter] And the teacher told him he was wrong; that Adam and Eve were the first parents."

The lady two seats away said, "Well the teacher was right."

The little boy said—and for this I was going torecommend him for a medal and grant him aid—he said, "Yes, I know, butthis was a scientific paper.

The mother two seats away came back and said"Yes, but those are only theories." [laughter]

And the little boy was up to that one too, he said,"Yes, but they have been factualized. [laughter] They found the bones."

Well, I thought, this is great, but what a teacher.

TRACK 2:  Dissolution of the Medieval World Image

Now, let us try to remember for a moment the wonderful world image that is being destroyed—that is being dissolved, that is disappearing under the impacts of thoughts of little boys like this. 

In the great works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the earth was the center of the universe. There were two views of the earth. 

One—the popular view—saw it as a flat surface like a dish surrounded by an ocean—a cosmic ocean in which demonic beings existed that were dangerous to man; this is an infinitely old notion about the universe. 

But there was a more sophisticated notion than this—namely that of Ptolemy—of the earth as a sphere surrounded by seven crystalline spheres in each of which there was a planet—the planets and spheres after which the seven days of the week are named: the moon and the sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. And each of these sang a song. This was the music of the spheres—they were angels. These were angelic living spheres surrounding the universe. 

And beyond this there was a great heavenly realm where God sat on his throne. And when the soul of man came down into birth, it passed through these seven spheres and picked up at each an element; there were seven elements associated with the seven

spheres. And so our body is a compound of the elements of the universe, and it sings the same song, so to say. 

And the society of the Middle Ages was itself a rendition on earth of the imagery of those seven spheres. The entity of the king, and the entity of the pope—these represented agents of the divine powers. And the society was arranged in a hierarchic way, as it were following the order of the angels and the angelic choirs who sang in the heavens. And in this image there was felt to be a perfect accord between the shape and form of the universe, the well-being of the individual, and the order of society, so that by following the laws of the society, and doing as he was told, the individual both was in accord with the order of the universe, and with his own inward order. And then when death came, he passed readily through those spheres again to the heavenly realm. 

And you know how Dante developed this image in The Divine Comedy, in perfect harmony with the ideas of his time: when Satan had been flung out of heaven for his disobedience and pride, he came like a great flaming comet—Lucifer—and struck the earth and drove right through to the center, and that area that he struck, that great trench to the center, is Hell. And what was driven forth the other side is the Mountain of Purgatory. And it was supposed that the whole Southern hemisphere was an ocean with the Mountain of Purgatory, what now would be called the South Pole [in the middle]. And on the summit of this Mountain of Purgatory was Paradise, the Garden from which the four rivers flow in the four directions. 

Well, now, it is a curious fact, but when Columbus set sail for the lands beyond the surrounding ocean, he had the image of Dante's world in mind, and he writes of this in his journal. 

And when he reached the main land, or the islands of the Indies, he turned southward and he reached the shore; I think this was on his third voyage of South America. And as he was passing between

Trinidad and the shore of South America, he noticed that the quantity of fresh water mixed with the salt was simply enormous. The River Oronoco—this enormous river such as no European had ever seen—was pouring great quantities of fresh water into the ocean, and Columbus thought that this must have been one of the four rivers of Paradise coming from the Mountain of Paradise in the Southern hemisphere. And he noticed when his boat sailed northward, that it went more swiftly than it had gone when it was sailing southward, and he said, "This is because we were coasting downhill from this promontory of the Great Mountain." 

St. Thomas Aquinas, writing of Paradise in the thirteenth century, said, "The reason people have not found Paradise is that it is beyond the Great Seas, or beyond the Great Mountains, and people haven't come to it yet.”

It was literally thought that the notion of the earth in the Bible was literally true. 

Some fifty years after Columbus' shattering—or beginning to shatter—of the mythological geography of the Middle Ages, Copernicus published his paper on the heliocentric universe, placing not the earth, but the sun in the center of the universe.

And some sixty years after that, Galileo's telescope—puny little telescope—verified this situation, and you know that Galileo was condemned by the Holy Inquisition. He was condemned for holding and teaching a theory that was contrary to scripture—just as the little boy beside me, who in 1961 was condemned by his mother for the same fault. This was a very solemn condemnation. Galileo was declared to be teaching false doctrine because his facts were contrary to scripture. 

And I think what we now would say—would have to say—would be that scripture cannot be true since it does not agree with the facts. That is to say, the position is reversed. Galileo’s telescope

was followed by many larger, and today we have these glorious eyes on, for instance, Mt. Wilson Observatory. 

And not only is the sun the center of our little planetary cluster—the sun is but one of two hundred billion stars in a galaxy shaped like a great lens, with hundreds of thousands of light-year distances from one to the other side. 

And not only that, but these telescopes now are finding in the midst of these numerous stars, galaxies—that is to say nebulae, which are further galaxies, more and more thousands and thousands. 

So that actually, the religious experience of awe before the universe, which the medieval picture was supposed to communicate, is transcended billions of times by the image that modern science is presenting to us.

One might say it is a far more magnitudinous revelation than anything the pre-scientific world possibly could have conceived of. And the little story in Genesis seems a kindergarten tale in comparison. 

TRACK 3:  Smashing the Old World History

Similarly, the old history has fallen apart, not only the cosmos of the scripture, but the history. 

Already Sir Walter Raleigh, who was a great mariner, observed when he reached the American shores, the number of the animals here, the new species that had never been named before in the Old World. 

And he thought, “Well, how could you have fit these into the ark?” And it was already obvious that the story of the Flood was a mere myth—that is to say, a theory that could not be factualized. 

Further, the sort of view of human history that Darwin’s evolutionary theory opened up puts the origins of mankind hundreds of thousands of years back. 

We now date the first homonids [to] the time of the first glacial period perhaps six hundred thousand, or some date it one million B.C. And again the little story in scripture has collapsed. There was no Flood; there was no universal flood. 

And if we reckon the first homonid as the first man, his son did not build the first cities. The first cities were not built for another six hundred thousand years. So again, there is a little kindergarten story there that the magnitude of the modern scientific view has simply rendered childish. The experience of awe before the wonder of mankind is now something far greater than anything that the first book of the Bible can give us. 

Still further problems arose with the findings of archeology. 

For example, the period in Egyptian history that is supposed to have been that of the Exodus, is one very well documented in Egyptian texts—the period of Ramses II and Merneptah. 

There is no record anywhere of those seven [sic] plagues. There is no record anywhere of anything even comparable. And the pharaoh who is supposed to have been drowned with his army in the Red Sea—we have his mummy, not down at the bottom of the Red Sea at all. 

The texts in which these stories appear have been analyzed, and they are found to be extremely late. 

The Pentateuch—the Torah, the first five books of the Bible—were edited together of a number of manuscripts as late as the third century B.C. And these documents date from about the ninth century to about the third. 

One notices for instance there are two accounts of the flood in the Bible; the editor was not too careful you might say. 

In one, Noah is told to bring into the ark two animals of every kind; in the other he is told to bring seven pair of every clean and two of every unclean beast. 

Similarly there are two stories of creation: the one in chapter two and the one in chapter one. 

In chapter two, man is created, then the plants, then the animals, and then Eve is drawn from his rib. In Chapter One, first God says “Let there be light,” and so forth and we have the seven days, the  animals and so forth, and man and woman are created simultaneously—these are two stories. The story in chapter one dates from about the third Century; the story in chapter two dates from about the ninth century. 

Moreover, comparative mythology—anthropology has shown that comparable stories appear all over the world. 

When Cortez arrived in Mexico, he and his company who had come, among other things, to carry the faith, the cross, and the one true religion, found so many parallels to their own belief among the Aztecs that they were hard put to explain it. 

Here were great temples representing the spheres of the universe, like the medieval Mountain of Purgatory. There were thirteen heavens with choirs of angels, nine hells filled with demons, and there was a deity Quetzalcoatl, whose symbol was the cross, and who died and was to be resurrected. 

The padres invented two theories to explain this phenomenon. One theory was that St. Thomas, the Apostle to the Indies, had reached the American shores and had preached the gospel. But that being so far removed from the center of truth—namely Rome—the doctrine deteriorated, and what they were observing was a degenerate development of their own teaching. 

The other theory that was proposed by many, many of the serious thinkers was that the devil was throwing up parodies of the Christian teaching in order to frustrate the mission. There were stories of the virgin birth, death and resurrection and the whole treasury of motifs. 

Furthermore, when in the nineteenth century systematic studies were made of the religions and mythologies of mankind throughout the world, innumerable parallels were found: China, with the Buddhist heavens and hells; India with the Hindu heavens and hells and purgatories; and then looking back into the deeper, darker backgrounds, ancient Egypt had its stories of like kind—the mythology of Osiris is actually a model for the mythology of the Christ. 

Now, in each of these cases, each of these great civilizations regarded itself as the center of the universe, regarded the barbarians, or Gentiles, as aliens in God’s domain, [and] regarded themselves as the bearers of the mandate, so that we have a number of symbolic centers representing the center of things. 

And in the modern world, these are being smashed along with that wonderful image of the medieval universe. 

TRACK 4:  Society’s Choice: Tradition or Truth?

Now this is a very serious affair. It is serious because these symbolic worlds were the supports of the civilizations, of the moralities of the civilizations, of the self-confidence of the civilizations, of the vitality and creative power of the civilizations. And with the cutting down, the frustrating of the self-confidence that derives from images of this kind, there is a disequilibrium within the society itself. 

And everyone is challenged in his loyalty—are you going to be loyal to the tradition, to the form, to the morality and myth of your society, or are you going to be loyal to truth? They are two different things. 

This is the problem in teaching; this is the problem in bringing up your children; this is the problem that was beside me there at the lunch counter. 

The parents—and the teachers in those cases—were on the side of society: of the past, what has been achieved.

And I think one can say that it is the tendency of society in general to take the position of re-asserting its authority, even against the truth. Societies that have chosen this pattern—they are the more numerous in the world. They are distinguished by the positions, liquidations, annihilations of all who speak out the truth is a crucial problem. 

And one just has to know how far the truth goes; one has to realize how far it goes in shattering—it shatters the whole thing. The myths are myths from top to bottom—they are in terms of the fact world, untrue. 

TRACK 5:  Psychology and the Shifting Attitude toward Myth

Now, there is another science that has come to play on this theme, and this is the science of psychology. 

There has been a wonderful, extremely interesting development in the past forty years in the attitude of psychologists to these mythological matters. When you read the great work of Frazer, ¨The Golden Bough—the first editions of the first volume around 1890—you find a completely negative attitude towards the myths. He describes them as “mistakes that were made by people who didn’t know enough.” His formula is that because ideas happen to be associated in people’s minds, they imagine them to be associated in fact, and they try to relate to the world in terms of their own imaging, and the imaging does not correspond to the world of fact. And he says, “These old ideas are doomed to die with the new world of scientific discovery.” 

Then we have the period of Freud, the end of the ‘90’s and the first two or three decades of this [twentieth] century. And he sees the myths as manifestations of the unconscious. Myths for Freud are, so to say, public dreams, and dreams are private myths. And the only difference between a religion and a neurosis is that the religion is more popular, and the person with the neurosis feels isolated. But they are both manifestations of compulsive imaging out of the psyche. And the art that depicts these images are symptoms, as it were, of the psyche. And for Freud this was all very morbid. 

Another point of view is that of Jung, who saw these rather as assistants to human life. Human consciousness is out of touch with the dynamics of the body, of the unconscious. And these dynamics are made manifest in the myth; they are as Freud suggested, projections. 

“But,” said Jung, “through a dialogue with these, one can come to know one’s own self.” One can come to terms with the greater horizon of one’s own self. And the society that dwells with these is

feeding the deeper realms, the deeper strata of the human psyche, so that a positive attitude has been taken to the myths. They serve man, they create his world for him, but they do not correspond to any facts. 

TRACK 6:  The Impact of Science on Myth

Now, as I’ve said, many societies resist the truth, and insist on their mythology. What happens to such societies? 

What, one may say, is the negative aspect of the impact of science on myth? What happens to the society that refuses to accept it? There is a history of this situation. 

As you know, the first beginnings, really, of hard-headed looking at things is with the Greeks of the seventh and sixth centuries [B.C.] 

And by the period of Alexander—the fourth and third Centuries—there was quite a scientific academy, and quite the scientific tradition, and the attitude of science had already been developed.  Alexandrian science was carried across Asia, across Persia, as far as to India. And the influence went actually into India, and into China from those areas. 

But every single one of the Oriental societies—that of Persia, and Iraq, that of India, that of China—had its revelation of truths. And the objective, realistic, inquisitive, experimental attitude of the Greek was rejected. 

One of the most interesting examples is the example of Islam, the Mohammedan world, which shared with Rome and Europe the Greek heritage.

And for the first couple of centuries of Islamic history, there was a wonderful fermentation of science; the eighth and ninth and tenth centuries in Islam are wonderful. 

And then the authority of the Koran, and the authority of the Sunnah—the group, the consensus, the people “who are always right,” as Mohammed said, “and are consequently always wrong”—they won. And the scientific spirit was extruded, it was squeezed out, and Islam went dead; it’s been dead since the twelfth century. 

But the European spirit which received the message openly, at least in certain of its important characters, who were willing to fight their way through the resistance. 

Europe grew, and there is a line of wise men, of roshis, of sages, I would say, from the period of Leonardo on down, which is unmatched in human history. And the magnitude of the revelation of the marvel of the universe that the West has brought into being, and the magnitude and richness of life here is something totally unknown in the realms that hung on to their old traditions. 

One finds that historical development in the Orient takes place as a result of invasions.

Each group has its fixed tradition, and the one that wins establishes its tradition so that the history is in crisis— where there is a much more organic development in the Western line, and this is the result of having accepted where the problem of truth […]. 

TRACK 7:  Science: the Continual Quest

But now when one says truth as a scientist one is being sentimental, because really the wonderful thing and the great

challenge of the scientific revelation is that science itself does not pretend to be true. It does not pretend to be final.

It is simply an organization of working hypotheses—hypotheses that seem to take account of the facts, as we now know them. But is there any intention to stay with these facts? No. There is a continuous quest for more, as though one were eager to grow as though the life of man, and of society here, were to be based on new things, on change, on transformation, rather than on petrifaction and rigidity. And so we don’t know anything. And even science itself is not the truth; it is only, so to say, an eagerness for the truth no matter where it may lead. 

And so here again we have a still greater revelation than that of anything the old texts have to say; the old texts comfort us with horizons. 

They tell us that a loving, a kind, a just father is out there. According to the scientific view nobody knows what is out there, or if there is any out there at all. There is just a display of things that our senses bring to us, and we are dealing with those. But what lies beyond is an ultimate mystery, and it is a mystery that is so great that it is going to be inexhaustible in its revelations. And man has to be great enough to receive it. 

There is no thou shalt anymore. There is nothing you have to believe, nothing you have to do. 

And if you want to play the game of the Middle Ages, go ahead, but don’t tell anybody else that that’s the only game there is. Or if you want to play the game of the Chinese Mandate of Heaven, go ahead—those are all lovely games. And the scientific game, after all, may not be any truer, but it is vaster, and it takes in a bigger range of facts and experience. 

So it is this terrific moment that we face; it is a moment that has been maturing so to say since the days of the Greeks. And since the days of the Second World War, it has gone through all the planet.

TRACK 8:  Myths Integrate Individuals into the Group

It was Durkheim—and after him a great school of sociologists—who said that the primary function of myth was to integrate the individual in his group. 

In this context, mythology supports and infuses in the individual what Radcliffe-Brown has called a system of sentiment, so that each individual within the group may be depended upon to respond in an anticipated way, in an expectable way to the stimuli that the group offers, and that the world offers—the creation of a homogeneous, team-working group that will function adequately as an organic unit in the world. 

And you will notice that the authority for the group’s attitude is usually that of the divine, which was the source of awe. There is an intimate relationship between the authentication of the group’s attitudes and the relationship to the ultimate mystery of being. Mythology has served to create such individuals in relationship to the problem of the local group. And again, relating him ultimately to this sense of mystery and awe, which the universe itself inspires. As I’ve said, it is the function of the myth, it is the function of the rituals to which the myths are rendered, to create and maintain a system of sentiments that can be depended upon to coordinate the activities of the people of the group. 

Now it will be obvious that there are certain aspects of the social order that are constant to all societies. 

For example, there is the biological family unit of parent and child, adults and infants, male and female, and the relationship that this system presents. 

This is the nuclear unit, so to say, that Freud has discussed at great length, and that inspires most of the psychoanalytical writing. 

Then there is the problem of the authority in the group: the individual who is installed through ritual arrangements in a position of authority, and acts now, not as a mere individual representing some portion of the group, but as a super-ordinated coordinator of the activity of the group. 

On the other hand there are certain aspects of the social orientation that vary. 

For example, in a primitive hunting society, all of the sentiment, all of the ideals, all of the emotions with which the individual must be infused, differ greatly indeed from those required in a sedentary peasant community, or in a primitive planting community. Here we have differentiating factors which cause societies and their mythologies to differ, whereas against these we have unified principles which tend to make the very mythology, and systems of the world seem related. 

TRACK 9:  Birth and Rebirth: Myth and Individual Development

Now, with respect to the individual and his development, there is an inevitable system of problems that every mythological order must face. 

It derives from the fact that man, of all animals, is the longest and slowest in development. The first twenty years of the individual’s life are years of maturation. And it isn’t until twelve or thirteen,

and even in primitive societies, that the individual can take care of himself somewhat. He is consequently, for the first great portion of his life, psychologically in an attitude of dependency. 

Then at puberty, or on reaching the age that his society regards as that of the step towards adulthood, he must totally transform his psychology. He must assume an attitude of responsibility. He must be the one who will accept the responsibility for action, and not assume the attitude of dependency. 

One will notice that in every society in the world, this threshold is a threshold of tremendous crisis around which great rituals are built: the rituals of puberty—the puberty rites—where the infantile ego, the infantile attitude is liquidated, and death, so to say, of the child is brought about ritually, and the rebirth of the adult—now a totally re-structured individual—is affected. 

The rebirth must be in terms of the requirements of this particular society. There is no society in the world that tries to bring forth man-qua-man; they want to bring forth the man who will function in this particular society. 

Now with respect to the problems of this particular society, and the bringing forth of an individual who will operate in it, there is a universal formula: namely, this is the society—all others are indifferent to us. 

One notices—and now here I am announcing my theme for the evening—one notices bounded horizons: the horizon of the group, the tiny little clan, the larger village, the still-larger tribe, the nation—each with its boundary, its horizon. 

And with respect to the sentiments in the individual that must be handled in the rite, the tendency—the inevitable tendency is to try to bring the sentiment of love and affection and benevolence into

play on the in-group, and to project upon the out-group all of the attitudes of aggression. 

This has been the formula throughout the history of man. There have always been in-groups and out-groups, and all of the rites have been devoted to the—what might be called—mythological task, representing ours as the good society, and the other as the barbarians, or the gentiles. 

The next phase in the development of the individual which must be taken care of, comes in the later part of life. 

Again, man has a long and gradually-creeping-upon-him old age. He lives a longer period of life in old age then any other animal does, even in maturity. 

So there is this next problem of mythology—to help the individual face the approaching darkness and mystery of death. 

Man is the only animal in the world that knows and anticipates his own death and must face it in his mind, lest he become disoriented. And you know what all of the myths do? 

They place a happy land beyond death so that the individual may go through that door with confidence. 

This is—pragmatically considered—a valuable image. It enables the individual to move through the later days of his life with courage, without fear. That is to say, as most of us are unable to face death quite fearlessly, we have to have a story told to us to carry us through, like telling a child some story to carry him through a terrible ordeal. 

TRACK 10:  Myths Work as Poetry

These functions then, mythology serves. For all individuals, there have been functions to this day. And it does not matter whether the stories told are true or false—they work, just the way the movie or a play works upon you. I know that many of us like to feel that the stories that we read are true stories. There are for example true-story magazines. But many of the stories in True Story Magazine are not true at all. [laughter] And yet we enjoy them that way just as well. Now I would like to propose that mythologies serve whether they are true or false. 

Dante, in his analytical work the Convivio, said that there are two ways of regarding the literal aspect of a mythological image: one is the way of the poet, and the other is the way of the theologian. 

The poet sees the literal story as a beautiful fiction through which a truth is communicated allegorically. 

The theologian sees the story as a fact through which a truth is communicated. 

Both of them point to a superior truth through the story, but for one the story must be true—he likes true story magazines; the theologians like true-story magazines. And artists like fiction. 

My own personal definition of mythology—of religion—is religion is a popular misunderstanding of poetry. [laughter]

Well now the poetry works, and so does the true-story magazine. 

And I have reviewed very briefly the working—the operation of these images now in organizing the society by telling you that this is the good society, and that it is good to do this, and not good to do that, and that that is the bad society, and you are doing a good thing when you kill its members. [laughter]

The other function which the fictions serve is that of balancing, coordinating, and giving enriching imagery and food to the psyche. 

TRACK 11:  No Death: Mythologies of the Primitive Hunting Cultures

Now let me move to the great transforming principle: that of cosmology—the view of the world. And in this phase of my talk I propose to take you on a long trip, very rapidly by jet, as it were, through the main stages in the development of the mythologies of the world. 

The first stage is that of primitive societies of which there are two chief types: one is the society of the great hunt—the society largely vanished now, which populated the great animal plains of Europe, North Asia and North America. 

In these societies, the total good of the community was derived from the animal world. 

The people ate nothing but meat; there was very little else to eat. They were following these great herds around. The clothes that they wore were made of animal skins. The lodges that they lived in were made of animal skins. The fibers that they used were made of animal sinews. And every day was a day of killing, killing, killing. 

Furthermore, the winning of the food—the bringing home of the bacon—was the work of the male. And in these societies, the aggressive, masculine principle was predominant. Woman was a kind of secondary factor there, who gave birth to children. And the man had many wives so that there would be lots of women to carry the luggage. These are nomadic societies by and large, masculine oriented, warrior people living in blood. 

One cannot compare their relationship to the animal world to ours. For them, the animals were living beings just as they were. Sometimes, and in some relationships, even more powerful and wonderful than men. 

We today have the attitude derived largely from the biblical point of view that man is an absolutely superior being, and the problem of the animal salvation and animal suffering is no problem at all. We do not worry about the animal; it’s a lower form of life. Not so for these men who were killing animals all the time. 

And so a mythology comes into being to protect the psyche from the impact of what it is doing: it is continually killing. 

And the mythology of all of these races is based on the idea that there is no death. The individual comes and goes. When you kill him, all you do is take his body off—his life goes back. You must not take the blood. The blood goes into the ground and the life is in the blood, and the animal will be back again. In fact, in many of the rituals in which the animal is dismissed, reverence is paid to him, and there is a little prayer which goes:

If you will do us the favor of coming back again,

We will give you the favor of another departure ceremony

[laughter]

Similarly, the individual is thought, the human individual, to be everlasting, to go back and forth through the veil of mystery that is the wall of space. 

Here is the mythology of no death, great stress on the individual as an eternally enduring creature, and great stress also on the individual’s power—this is a civilization, or culture world of shamans and warriors. 

TRACK 12:  Life through Death: Mythologies of the Primitive Planting Cultures

In the equatorial zone on the other hand, of the great jungles, the importance of the male is not so great. This is the area of the primitive planting cultures, the work largely of the women. 

And one finds in these cultures a divinity that is largely of the female order: the goddess of the earth who produces children, produces plants, produces food, produces everything. 

And the individual does not matter; he is of no more importance than a fallen leaf. Anyone can pick a banana, not everyone can kill a mammoth. In the mammoth-killing cultures, the individual of skill is important. In the equatorial cultures, the individual really does not matter—what matters is the endurance of the group with this death, death, death all around, and yet nevertheless new beings coming into the world. 

In these societies, there is a mythology of life through death. 

There is a fundamental myth which I will tell very briefly that one finds throughout the equatorial area. It is as follows: In the beginning there was a time when there was no death, there was no begetting, and there was [sic] no individuals. There were only a sort of transformations of form in a kind of dream-like fluid state.  However, on one occasion, one of these strange beings was killed, cut up, and the body buried. And from the buried body there came forth the food plants that people eat today. This was the first death in the world. At the same time, there came forth the sexual organs, and generations came into being, so that death and generation balanced each other. 

Now in these societies, we have a terrible ritual atmosphere. It is an atmosphere of repeating that original death. The life of the world lives on death. 

This is not a society that says there is no death; this is a society that says death inheres in life, and you are living on it all the time. 

Now we know that it was about 7000 B.C., and only about that time, that this attitude of the planting world moved north into the sphere of the hunting cultures. 

It was about that time that the Neolithic—the food-planting, grain-raising, herding cultures of the world—developed. Formally the northern people had been food collectors, now they have become food gatherers, and the Neolithic dawns, so that a new era for mankind comes before us. 

No longer the ranging hunters, and the simple planting villages of the tropics, but good, strong, sturdy societies in, first, the Near East—Palestine, Syria, southern Turkey and Iraq—and then from there spreading out to the great oceans. Thus, the primitive mythological world. 

TRACK 13:  Cosmic Harmony: Mythologies of the First Cities

Now I come by a great leap to the backgrounds of our mythology. 

Our mythologies come out of these two that have already been stated: the great myth of the willing victim, the divine being who offers himself, and is the food for all, whose flesh is meat indeed, and whose blood is drink indeed; and the myth of there is no death. 

These are joined in our mythology. 

As a result of the growth of rather large communities, there took place a new thing, namely a specialization, a professional specialization of castes. And within this, and the important caste, was the priestly caste, which was concerned with regarding the heaven, and coming to know precisely when the weather was going to be good for the crops, and how man must organize his society to conform with the possibilities that nature offered. 

And a great idea occurred to these men at this time, which has inhabited all mythological thinking ever since: namely that the order of the cosmos—the mysterious mathematically predictable passages of sun, moon and planets—were somehow a model for man to imitate. 

And we have the little cities imitating the form of the cosmos: the king as the moon-king, the queen as the sun. The idea—the inhabiting idea here is that there is an inevitable, mathematical order of the universe—a destiny that all beings must follow. It is illustrated in the stars, and as we know from astrology, the stars influence us, and influence society. 

So we have man, the microcosm; the universe, the macrocosm; and the society, the mezzocosm between all rendering the one great song. 

Now this my dear friend is the idea of life and universal law that is maintained to this day in the great traditions of the Orient: the notion that there is a cosmic harmony in which all beings participate, and that the mythological society illustrates it.

And to give what seems to me to be the essential theme of this, it is as follows: that there is an ultimate mystery beyond all things—a transcendent mystery which is manifest in all things, and at the same time inhabits all things. It is at once transcendent and immanent, and we are it. 

And the individual comes into touch with truth insofar as he is able to forget himself as an individual, insofar as he is able to think of himself as a cell participating in this great organism—all things, all beings are divine. 

This is the essential myth of the Orient to this day. And there is a truth here. This is not the truth that science attacks—this truth can live through any science. And it is the truth beyond the told story, so to say. It doesn’t matter whether the story is true or false; the notion that is rendered through it is a kind of truth beyond the story itself. 

TRACK 14:  Man’s City: Mythologies of the Humanistic West

Well, now, in the West something entirely different happened. 

And it happens, we can date this also precisely: 2500 B.C. with the coming of the Semitic nomadic people from the Arabian desert areas into the zone of the great cultures. 

These were comparatively primitive people at this time. They did not have great learned priesthoods studying the organization of the cosmos. They were warrior people who understood the power and function of the individual. And it is at this time that a totally new theme appeared in the mythologies of the Near East. 

It is this: that man is not divine; that man and the creator are not of the same essence. 

God created the universe; God created man; God and man are not the same. This is a fundamental idea that inhabits now all of Western myth, and distinguishes it from the Oriental. 

The goal of the Oriental thought—properly Oriental thought—is unity: that man should experience his identity with divinity. 

At about the same time as the Hebrew development of—well let’s say from Joshua to Ezra—we have in Greece a quite different approach—exactly the same period from Homer, let’s say to Plato. 

And it is this namely, that man’s city is not God’s city, but man’s. 

The notion in the Near East is man is under God and his city is God’s city, and his society is God’s society. The notion of the polis in Greece was that there are values in the society which are human values, and these can stand on their own. 

And it is from this that there developed in Europe an essentially humanistic orientation: the notion that rational thought could bring about a world befitting man. 

TRACK 15: Separation of the Social and the Spiritual

And now I am going to turn from that abruptly to our problem in the European and Western world as it has developed to the present. 

It is a situation that is a result of the coming together in Europe of these two points of view: the point of view of the Levant—of let us say Ezra, and the point of view of Greece—of let us say of Pericles. 

The view of Ezra is that this is the good society; he makes a very strong point of this, and differentiating it from all the others, the horizon of the group is here very strongly enforced with a tendency to world-expansion. 

The idea of the Greek on the other hand was that there may be a human city with people of quite different attitudes living within it, and this was carried on in the Roman tradition in the development of Roman law, and the idea of the citizen there. 

And now to return to the name of Dante. There is a wonderful passage in Dante’s Convivio where he speaks about the interplay in Europe of these two ideals: the ideal, as he says, of Jerusalem, which for him was carried on in the idea of the church; and the idea of Rome, which for him is carried on in the idea of the Emperor. He says, “These are the two arms of the almighty, and they are not to become confused.” He spoke out strongly against the political ambitions of the Pope, and said that the church’s function is not social; the church’s function is spiritual. And it is the function of the King, the function of the secular government, to take care of worldly affairs. And these two worlds work together in the way of spiritual inspiration, the reference to the mysteries of awe and so forth, and in the way of social organization.

In other words, the function of society has been removed from the mythological by the Greeks, and the Romans, and the Europeans; it has become a secular affair. 

Furthermore, says Dante, “If you have two friends, and one of them is truth, truth is the friend that you must honor.” 

In other words, he was already pointing toward the Renaissance, when the claims of archaic science, which inhabited the whole mythology which he himself presented, were to be challenged and broken up. First, wonderful Copernicus putting the sun in the middle; then the discovery that the planets were revolving not in perfect circle, but in ellipses—this broke Aristotle and Plato and Ptolemy’s universe to bits. 

TRACK 16:  No Horizons: the Mythic Enterprise of Today

The universe was no longer, as I said two weeks ago, the little circle. It is now boundless; there is no protective horizon of the universe where man may feel comfortable. We don’t know what the universe is, where it is, what it is, what we are, what meanings there are—that’s all gone. We can no longer say love is to be held at home, and hate projected abroad. 

In other words, the whole mythological structure can no longer work in terms of this dualism between in-group and out-group—there is no horizon there either. And with the individual, as Jung has said—and this is one of his great statement’s—“The individual is no longer to identify himself with the archetypes of the group.” 

This is a totally different notion—a much more complicated one about the individual and his relationship to mankind than anything mythology has had to face before. And this is the problem, it seems to me, that our clergy, and professors, and moralists have faced: not working to defend disintegrating mythologies, but working to find how the imageries that have supported men in the past can be applied to this quite new, quite wonderful, quite adventurous enterprise of today. 

Thank you.

Lecture I.1.5 - The Vitality of MythBy Joseph Campbell

Details: Date: 1974 Venue: Unknown Location: Unknown Archive Number: L537

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TRACK 1: What Myth Do I Live By?

 

The title of the series that I am lecturing on is Civilization and Its Discontents. And since my own special passion is mythology, I have the feeling that one of the great reasons for the discontent is the failure in vitality of the myths by which people are being expected to live.

It was some sixty-five or so years ago that Dr. Jung—after completing the work that has been translated under the title Symbols of Transformation, and having worked while laboring on that through a great mass of mythological material—came to this thought: What is the myth that I am living by? He said, “I realized when I finished this, what a thing it was to live with myth, and what a thing it is to live without one.” And he said, “I propose to myself the discovery of the myth that I was living by, as my task of tasks.”

So one can ask what has happened that so many today are living without a myth?

Many perhaps may feel that they are living with a myth—the myth of whatever the religion is that they have been brought up in, or have chosen to make their own. But there’s something essentially incongruous about archaic mythologies in the modern world. There has been such a tremendous transformation of life and of the laws for living and of the environment that we are in, that none of the older traditions can possibly have the impact on us today that they had when first offered.

Mythologies after all are the product of poetic insight and inspiration. And the insight properly should be congruent with the world in which the people are living to whom the mythology or imagery is addressed.

TRACK 2: Biblical Mythologies: Metaphor Interpreted as Historical Fact

Consider one of the principle characteristics of our mythologies—I am thinking of the biblical mythology whether of the Hebrew or the Latin Christian traditions. The characteristic of these mythologies, the mythology of the Bible, is that the imagery of myth is, in these, interpreted as having historical reference.

The real reference of mythology is to the spirit, to the psyche—right in here. The way a society grips its members, and holds them to the tasks of the society, is by enabling people to project their own inward mythic potentials into the context of the society in which they are living.

But when the context of the society has changed, then we need a new mythology—the same great themes, because there are permanent, universal themes which are the base, the ground of all

mythological lore. But these themes then have to be related to an environment in which the individual is living.

Now the characteristic of our biblical mythology is that all of its images ask you to believe in them as though they had happened physically—it is as though they were newspaper reports, chronicles of things that happened. And then when scholarship today finds that these things could not have happened, that indeed did not happen, what happens to the mythology? It is removed. It is discredited, so that the word myth today to most people means a lie.

And that is because our myths are—in a certain sense—lies, in that they ask us to believe factually—concretely—what is not true. Now when this happens the mythology is taken away.

But the function of a mythology is to integrate one’s conscious life with the dynamics of one’s unconscious life. And with the mythological vocabulary taken away by which the consciousness communicated with the unconsciousness, we are, as it were, split apart. And a schizophrenic crackup is the result of a consciousness that has lost its grip in the conscious world because the energies that kept it there became involved and stuck in the unconscious, and there is no communication—the person slips down into the abyss.

 

TRACK 3: Carl Jung and the Mythic Imagery of Dreams

Now Jung, in his early years as a psychiatrist, was in the Burghölzli Sanitorium in Zurich working with schizophrenics. Freud had as his principle clientele, you might say, neurotics. A neurotic is a person who is still in the conscious world and is in

relationship to his unconscious in a rather desperate way. But a psychotic is one who is cracked off altogether, and he’s down in that realm of the mythic archetypal forms.

And Jung was completely acquainted with the—you might say—atmosphere and scenery of that domain. And he found it was the same as the domain of myth.

When people—it is not as fashionable now as it was a couple of years ago—find themselves taking LSD suddenly out—they have brought forth an unconscious load that their consciousness could not handle; they too slipped into that domain.

This is the domain of mythic images—it lives in us; it’s good to be acquainted with it. And when a mythology with which we are living does not operate on us, we lose this contact.

Now what did Jung do when he asked himself what myth he was living by? He had been interpreting people’s dreams. He suddenly realized one does not interpret dreams. One lets the dreamer interpret the dream because there is no single vocabulary, no dictionary of dream images. Each person’s dream is his own, in a certain way.

There is one level of dream, then, that is personal—these are the little dreams.

But then every now and then there comes bursting forth a dream that is not personal at all. The dreamer has struck a level that has been struck before by others: a level of the basic human confrontations with life, and its mysteries.

The human being is the only animal in the world that knows it is going to die, the confrontation with death. The meaning of life in the face of death—does it have a meaning? And if the mind goes looking for meanings, and you are living by meanings, and have

never learned simply to live by being, you may be greatly upset by the challenge of death.

TRACK 4: The Moonwalk as a Mythological Event

Another challenge that the animals do not face is that of the cosmos. And with the amplification of our knowledge of the cosmos, what we have to be related to by our mythology is the cosmos in which we are living now.

This is why for me, in the present context of life, the moon walk—and I’ve said this before to Cooper Union audiences—the great event. It has eliminated publicly, for the world, a whole context of archaic mythologies that do not serve us anymore.

But it has not worked only negatively in canceling what was. It has opened the poetic prospect of an experiencing of the cosmos, as it now can be experienced. I’m going to repeat a couple of thoughts because they seem to be important that I put into the Myths to Live By in this context. That first moment when that first foot came down on the moon—it was a long time ago now, curiously—but this was quite a moment.

And the Italian poet Guisseppe Ungaretti wrote a poem to this moment. The Italian magazine Epoca showed a picture of him: a wonderful little old man pointing with great excitement at the screen of the TV set that was bringing this picture thousands—tens of thousands of miles to his room. And he said, “There never was a night like this before in the history of the world.”

The thing that strikes me is that scientists in Houston, Texas knew exactly how much energy to put into those rockets to bring them in a course that could be predicted, around a space that no one had ever visited before.

This makes vivid a problem that Kant asks in his Introduction to Metaphysics: “How is it that the geometrical calculations that I make in this space here, will certainly work in that space there?” How is it that the space field is so consistent that one can be certain with apodictic certainty, the calculations made here will also work there?

It was known exactly how much energy to put into those machines—exactly what direction to pitch them in—to bring those young men back within a mile of the boat that was waiting for them in the Pacific Ocean. And yet no one knew how deep the dust was going to be on the moon when that foot descended.

Space is something that lives in our mind, and it is the same space in our mind as it is out there. We have, as it were, all space within us.

TRACK 5: One World: You Are the Source and Creator of the Gods

All of the earlier mythologies saw the moon and the planets and the sun and the stars as representing a different order of being altogether from that of the earth. We were, of course, material world; that was a world of luminous energy and light.

Now we know absolutely that the same laws work there as work here; there are not two worlds there. Furthermore, the deities that were thought to live up there we now know have been projected from our own psyches out onto that space, so that everything that we attributed to the gods and to the yonder spiritual world comes right out of our own selves and is right here.

And man was not breathed into the earth—man came out of the earth, and the earth came out of a galaxy, and the galaxy came out

of space. We are, as it were, sitting here and standing here: the organs of consciousness of the very earth itself—that’s what we’ve come from, as a flower comes from a stem.

And so out of space, the earth has come. And out of the earth, we have come with a consciousness to know the world—what we are to know, and what we have inside are exactly congruent.

This gives a totally new pitch to the accent, a new focus to the mystery of being—it’s right here now. Now this is an old story really, it’s been said time and time again by others. You will find it in the Upanishads, the ninth century B.C.: “Worship this god, worship that god, one god after another. Where is the creator of the gods? The creator of the gods is one’s own self. Look to your self, and follow it as you would follow the footsteps of a lost cow. By following those you will find the source of the gods.”

There is a precisely similar line in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The soul of the dead is called Osiris, because it is one with the ultimate being of the universe. And there comes a moment when, in the chapter on the opening of the mouth, we read, “I am yesterday, today and tomorrow. I have the power to be born a second time. I am the source and creator of all the gods.” This is an old theme that has come back again in a new sense.

And meanwhile there have been what might be called exoteric, popular mythologies telling us that the gods are out there, that they created us from clay, they created us to be their servant, we are to obey and to serve them. On the contrary, they are the projections of our own consciousness, and we are to burn them up if we can’t use them, and bring forth others that are good for today. This is an old story too.

TRACK 6: Jungian Psychology: Personal Fantasies, Mythic Images

So what did Dr. Jung do? He thought, What was it I enjoyed most when I was a boy? That was the time when you were spontaneously living out your own dream, your own fun; the world had not pushed in on you. And he recalled that he had liked to build little cities of stone.

And so he bought a piece of property, and began building a house of stone—with his own hands. And as he was doing that, putting the stones here and there, his fantasy world began developing.

And so he began writing out his fantasies, not as you would write a work intended for other’s to see—rather corny stuff, but it’s what comes slopping out at first. Then it became richer and deeper, and he began to draw pictures of the figures that were coming.

Then he began to find that these pictures that he was drawing were comparable to the great religious pictures of the Orient: the mandalas. He was the first to start working his own mandalas.

And very soon discovered that through the realm of myth—of dream, rather, he was himself moving into the sphere of myth. This gave him a basic principle for the psychological work. And I think that it is one that we can all live with. He calls it amplification: Amplify your own fantasies by finding in the field of the cultural heritage of mankind analogous images. And these will pull you out; they will depersonalize your life. And that is what the function of myth is.

 

TRACK 7: Myth’s Dimensions: the Inner and Outer Garments

Now I was reading shortly before coming here a work by Abraham Maslow, a wonderful psychologist, a very important psychologist, one whom I most delight in reading. And he was speaking of what he called a “hierarchy of values for which people live,” and the hierarchy was as follows: survival, security, personal relationships, and self-development. Fortunately I was reading those only a day or so ago, and then I began thinking of this lecture today, and I went back to those and I thought, Well those are exactly the values that have nothing to do with mythology.

Mythology is the law of giving yourself, losing yourself. A person who lives by a myth is fascinated by an aspiration for which he will sacrifice security, for which he will sacrifice even his life, for which he will sacrifice friends and everything else. The myth-driven person is in some sense a kind of fanatic.

The fanatic actually, however, is a rather raw type. He is not seasoned in the field. He is like a convert to a new religion. He is all just so full of it he doesn’t know how to integrate it with life. He is a kind of sophomore.

You know this one—where the idea has overloaded the mind, and the person is blown. And it doesn’t take much of an idea to blow some people. [laughter]

Myth then is what comes out of a transpersonal dimension of your own life. And the big problem after it has struck you is to integrate it back into life.

Now I know that in our world today, there is a great, great zeal for self-exploration—turning inward, and meditation. And I have seen some rather bad results, because it has made the person too much interested in him- or herself. And the person forgets others.

Paul Tillich said that “One’s god is one’s highest concern. That is your true god, that which you would die for, that which you would

sacrifice for. And if you sacrifice others for yourself, for your own development, then what would you say was your god.”

In a marriage for example, you have to ask yourself what in this marriage is the precious thing. Is it I, or is the marriage? If it is not the marriage, then you are not married yet.

One result of meditation very often is that it introverts the person to such an extent that the person separates from the one to whom he had committed himself before. I have seen many marriages go on the rocks this way.

 

Now the problem that all of the great masters give us is that of finding the inward way and holding to the outer way. This is a formula that the old Sufis worked out in the following way: they spoke of wearing the outer garment of the law—that is to say, the order of society in which one is living—and wearing the inner garment of the mythic way.

Now in order to find the inner garment you have to take off the outer garment and let it go. There is a long season very often of inward turning this way, and throwing the world away.

But unless you can put the other garment back on again, you haven’t really come to the sophistication that lets you know that this is that, and that is this—that this outer garment is the outer reflection of the same laws and principles that you’re finding within, so that you should be at ease somehow in the two worlds. This is an old mythological story.

TRACK 8: Mythologies Shape Civilizations

Now let me just say a word about mythology and civilization. One of the marvelous experiences in travel of course is to come into a new mythological province. One goes to Japan: everything there has grown out of a mythology that is different from the one that you grew out of. And you get the flavor, the quality of this in every detail of the life.

Mythologies shape civilizations. Every civilization on the face of the earth has been shaped by a mythology. And the people who live in that world live in the atmosphere of myth.

I noticed when I was in India: the squalor, the horrible poverty—you can’t believe it. It goes far beyond anything that our words refer to here—and yet a curious quality of peace, and even bliss. Why? Because those people are accepting and living in a myth that supports them.

A religious person who has experienced a terrific calamity—everything ripped away, comes home and finds, let’s say the home burned down and children burned and everything else. How does one survive a thing like that? That will let you know what your myth is. The religious person can very well say, “It’s God’s will.” And I’ve seen that happen. And such a person can survive an experience that another would not have survived.

Now what is it that you survive on? What is the support of your life? What would hold you up in a thing like that?

When I tell people—they ask, you know, “What is it you are interested in?”

And I say, “Mythology.”

They say, “Oh yes, I read Bullfinch. I thought it was lovely [?]”

I say, “Well, I’m interested in Bullfinch, “ but I say, “Do you believe in God?”

Well, you know, ninety-five percent of the people in the United States believe in God. I read that in France thirty-five percent believe in God, but sixty percent believe in Hell. [laughter] Now, I can’t work that out—except that France is the place, you know, of the existentialists for whom life is hell. And whenever the concierge or your hotel servant speaks to you, they say “La vie est dûr”—and so life is tough there. And they believe in hell, but not in God. That’s a great one. [laughter]

Well, this is a question to ask. “And the God that you believe in, is it a personal God?”

“Well no.”

“Well then it’s a transpersonal power. Is it mental? You know, a great intelligence?” This is a grand idea that a lot of people have. Great intelligence. Well, it doesn’t look so darn intelligent to me, just cause it’s orderly—it’s stupid. It was a great Irishman [John] Scotus Erigena who said, “The quality of God is, that he doesn’t know what He is doing.” And it just a drive of the will. And He finds out—and that’s the job of the Son: of you and me.

Because what we are is the incarnation of the Son—the knower. And the degree to which we are capable of knowing the Ultimate measures the degree of our approach to ultimate Godhood—which can be pretty close. You can get there pretty close and still look sort of young and fresh and enjoying things.

So we have the civilizations growing out of mythologies, and these are mythologies that convince the people within them that they are finding their fulfillment within the world in which they are dwelling.

Now something happened to our world a little while ago. Let’s think what the old Medieval myth was, which really was the life of the Medieval civilization so that people between the year 1150 and

1250 built most of the great cathedrals in Europe. They put everything they had into that absurd task.

Mythology asks for absurd tasks—think of the Egyptian pyramids. I mean the economic interpretation of history just doesn’t confront the pyramids. [laughter] And that was the beginning. In fact, the economic concern is ego concern with survival and all that, which is the non-mythological concern, and it has never built a civilization—it has never built a cathedral.

What builds the civilization and the cathedral is a mad aspiration of some kind. And as long as that lasts, people are pulling together. And if you don’t have an aspiration, then the only other thing that will pull people together so they will do something is fear. Either aspiration or fear, and then people will work together. But let them not be scared, and not have something crazy pushing them, then just their thinking of survival, security and you know what else.

The myth of the Middle Ages was of Man’s Fall, of all being born in Original Sin as a consequence. When they die they will go to hell unless they are saved. They are saved by the Savior Jesus who was crucified, and founded the Church, nd through the Sacraments of the church, salvation is achieved.

This supported an enormous institution: the Church, and the whole civilization of the Middle Ages was based on this. And when that belief disintegrated, the culture disintegrated; it has disintegrated now.

We are in what is called a wasteland. T.S. Eliott put his finger on it, back there in 1922, I think it was. What is a wasteland? It is a wasteland of people living without aspiration, going through the routine of their lives, doing things they are told to do because they don’t have the courage to do something they want to do, which would be a little bit insane.

We are in a realm that I would describe as a terminal moraine of myths. There are no end of destroyed mythologies around us.

 

TRACK 9: Myth As Make Believe

But the interesting thing about a mythological image is that you can interpret it in your own way. And I would say the way to build your myth is to follow your fascinations.

One can see looking at the young people today the myths they are living by. I mean everyone is going around in a masquerade. And the only ones that are hard to take are the one’s who take their masquerade seriously. The real wonderful thing is to play the game—that’s as man has developed always.

In the very early days of our human race, people made believe they were animals, and that is how societies began. You have totemism; you have masked dances; you have all kinds of animal games that people are playing. And these are supposed to invite the animals—and they did.

Then people began playing that they were plants, that if they buried themselves they would be born again—something like that. And so you played that game.

Then about the middle of the fourth millennium B.C., it was realized that the planets moved at a mathematically determined rate through the fixed stars. And the great concept emerged of a cosmic order. And the cosmic order was illustrated in the sky, and it must now be repeated on earth. And so people began making believe they were stars and suns and moons.

People take these make-believe games very seriously; does the monarch or the cleric see that he is playing a role?

We still take it seriously when somebody comes in wearing a crown saying, “I’m the sun girl,” or something like that. [laughter] But kings and queens do this in all seriousness in terrific pomp. And it’s astounding how seriously things like this are taken.

I had the experience some years ago of drawing up to the curb in my car. A little boy was standing there in great rigidity. I was about to close the door and he said, “You can’t park here.”

I said, “Why not?”

He said, “Because I’m a hydrant.” [laughter and applause]

Well sometimes when I see clergymen, I wonder what they think they are, and how seriously they take it.

Now it is no accident that we say, “Make believe.” Get it? [laughter] People are playing a game: this is a myth world that we’re playing—the game that man was made for certain purposes and that’s what we’re doing.

Now somebody comes in and says, “Oh they’re all nonsense.”

“Well you’re a spoiled sport. You’re spoiling the game. Get out of here.”

It’s like somebody who would start running back and forth while other people try and play a tennis game running back and forth on the tennis court, busting up the game. There is nothing nuttier than playing tennis, but it’s great fun and you believe it’s worth winning—otherwise you wouldn’t work so hard.

So this whole thing of getting a belief into a life is the function of myth. Now some beliefs are silly, [and] some are very deep, and I

want in the concluding part of my talk, to speak about some of these depths. I want to speak about these depths in two contexts: one, that of the Hindu, and another, that of a recent contemporary Western psychological approach to the problem.

TRACK 10: The Word AUM: the Sound of the Universe

The great summary book of the Upanishads—it’s a small text—is the Mandukya Upanishad. And it is in this Upanishad that the word AUM is explained—what it means. AUM is the sound of the universe. It is the sound that is heard when your imagination wakens. It is the sound that converts an animal into a human being.

On one level of life, we share the experiences of the animals: we sleep, we lust, we fight—that is our animal life. Then there may come the awakening of awe—a sense of mystery in the world—and that is when the sound AUM is heard.

 

TRACK 11: The Letter ‘A’: Waking Consciousness

The sound is pronounced starting in the back of the mouth: A-U-M.

A is said to represent waking consciousness. This is worthwhile what I am going to tell you now. A is waking consciousness. In the world of waking consciousness, subject and object are not the same. I see you, you see me—we are not the same. A is not not-A. A rational, Aristotelian logic prevails.

The objects are gross objects—they are not self-luminous. They do not shine of themselves. They have to be illuminated from without. There are only three things that shine of themselves—or there were

in the ancient world—the sun, lightning and fire. And these are regarded as the entrances—the gates to the world beyond the gross world in which we live.

TRACK 12: The Letter ‘U’: Dream Consciousness

U is associated with dream-consciousness. There is another logic here. And you know very well that your dreams are deeper and closer to you than what you see in waking life. They are the very intimate noise, you might say, of your own existence.

In dream consciousness, the subject and object seem to be different from each other, but are not. You see the dream, and it is a surprise to you—but you made the dream. And it is right here on that dream level that these two levels of consciousness that I have been talking about meet—waking or seeing or witnessing consciousness, and the consciousness of your being.

Dreams are self-luminous, they shine of themselves, as gods do. Myths are public dreams. Dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth world in which you live. But just as in dream, the subject and the object, though they seem to be separate, are really the same.

So also, you and your god—you seem to be separate, but you’re really the same. Now this god that I am talking about is not the One that you’re told to have as your God. I’m sure that from this place where I’m speaking many people have had God delivered to them. But, what is the god that actually you find in your own deep vision?

The passage is from dream to vision to the gods, and they are you—all the gods. This is an Indian word I am speaking about: All the gods, all the hells, all the heavens are within you.

Now we’re taught that God and man, in our normal Biblical tradition, are not the same. This is a mythology of the waking consciousness position This is important: our mythology has all been interpreted into waking consciousness symbols. And this is why suddenly the Oriental teachers are so attractive to us now. A lot of them are absurd human beings, but they have really something to deliver here. And what they have to deliver is this—that god is in you. It is not something that happened somewhere else a long time ago; it’s in you.

When you go into this great cave in India—the Elephanta Cave on an island in the harbor of Bombay—there is a tremendous image at the back wall. It is a great three-faced form, which I’m sure most of you have seen. It’s about nineteen feet high and nineteen feet across. In the center is an absolutely impassive face; at the right is a masculine profile; at the left a feminine profile: man and female—aggression and erotic bliss. And in the center is eternity—that mystery from which the pairs of opposites proceed—from which male and female proceed, from which life and death proceed, and so forth and so on. When you are looking at that figure, you are looking at god—the god within you.

In the Sistine Chapel in Rome you look up and there is that beautiful thing on the ceiling by Michelangelo of God creating Adam. Yet when you look at that you’re not supposed to think God is there and Adam is there. You are supposed to think this is a picture of something that is to supposed to have happened somewhere else a long time ago.

That is one kind of religious experience: putting your deity way out there. But this Indian cave—you go into the dark, it’s the dark of your own heart, and it’s in your heart that your hands touch the feet, so to say, of the divinity. And it is there that you see the divinity, and what you feel is, Shiva, is here. Shiva is I. And that great word Shivo’ham—“I am Shiva—is the ultimate realization.

Whereas in our tradition, if anyone says “I am God,” he’s either a maniac, or a great, great saint. And in either case, he will be killed.

Christ was killed when he said “I and the Father are one.” Al-Halaj was killed nine hundred years later when he said, “I and my beloved are one.” This was regarded as impudence.

Yet in these traditions that work on the dream level, this is the truth of truths—this is what the gods and myths are all about.

So find them in yourself, and take them into yourself, and you will be awakened in your mythology and in your life.

So much for U.

TRACK 13: The Letter ‘M’: Dreamless Sleep

M closes at the lips. M represents the level of deep, dreamless sleep.

In deep dreamless sleep consciousness is still there, but it is covered over by darkness.

But suppose you could find that consciousness. Suppose you could go into deep sleep [while] awake—that is the goal of yoga, to go awake into that sphere where there is consciousness but consciousness of no specific thing.

TRACK 14: The Silence Surrounding the Syllable

All of our words refer to things and relationships of things, things either in the field of waking consciousness, or things in the field of dream consciousness.

The ultimate is not of things; it is shear uncommitted, undifferentiated consciousness, and this is what is known as the silence that surrounds AUM.

So AUM is said to be a four-sound syllable—A, U, M and the silence around it: A, the level of waking consciousness; U, dream consciousness; M, deep sleep; and the silence, that out of which the world comes and back into which it goes.

Now, just one more point. When I’m looking at you, I’m looking at the past. That is to say, what I see before me has happened. Waking consciousness deals only with what has happened. Science deals with things that have happened. It can predict only what will happen if what will happen repeats what has happened.

The absolute novelty—[that] science cannot predict.

Dream consciousness is the present: it is becoming; it is your very becoming. And the person with an intuition on that level can intuit the destiny of nations.

M—deep sleep—holds all that is future, because the future can come from nowhere else but the energies of the psyche.

These then are the levels of waking consciousness—science, rational life, perfectly good! But don’t try to interpret dream in terms of reason, and don’t try to interpret religion in terms of reason. The religious imagery is telling you what is becoming; reason tells you what has become, and is going to have some surprises as it always has had surprises.

If you just want some good laughs, read some of the predictions in newspaper columnists of thirty or forty years ago and you will find that it has no relevance to what happened. The mystery of life is what is on the level of dream.

 

TRACK 15: Stanislav Grof and the Levels of LSD Experience

Now let me turn from this to a contemporary psychologist who seems to me to be the one of whom you will be hearing not very long from now. This is the man, Stanislav Grof, who has been treating deep psychosis and so forth with LSD treatments for something like fifteen years. He is at the Maryland Institute of Psychiatric Research, which is one of the two places in this country that is allowed to administer LSD. It’s done very, very carefully with controlled doses and by people who know what is going to happen, and in a controlled environment. And as a result of all this, he has been able to discover levels of people’s fantasizing.

And what these levels represent are levels of expanding consciousness. The first effect, as everyone who has ever taken these things will tell you, is an astonishing sense of presence: objects begin to shine, to be fascinating—things that you took for granted.

There is a story I’ve heard of four bridge players who were made to promise before they received a shot that they would play a game of bridge after they received it—these are bridge fiends, they’ve never done anything else in their life but play bridge. [laughter]

All right—they were given a slight dose just to kick them up a little bit, and the cards were dealt out, and when they opened the cards they sat there, fascinated. They didn’t play bridge. This is what is known as aesthetic arrest. [laughter] They were held. And what it represents, if nothing else, is a new activation of consciousness.

We live with things thinking only of their uses—even our friends. But the experience of regarding somebody—I’ve had this happen with students, this stupid thing sitting in front of me week after

week, and then one day my mind blanks out, and I suddenly see, Why this is a presence, this is a miracle! It doesn’t matter: as a student, nothing; as a human being, nothing very beautiful either—just a mug there. But, oh, my heavens, what a miracle! Well, you don’t need LSD to have that happen.

So the first level of activation is this of aesthetic arrest. This is what happened to Dante when he beheld Beatrice. Here was an object that normally would have been one to evoke erotic relationship. It wasn’t what happened. He saw a miracle.

This is what happened to Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, when he saw the girl in the stream—suddenly a miracle of what something is. This is seeing the person as though it were a dream. And when we are in love with somebody we say, “You’re my dream,” or “You’re a dream walking,” or something like this—you know, you get poetic as well as we can, and try to go past the rational realm. You might say, “Darling, you’re like a rose.” And then the next time a new inspiration comes, “You’re a swan.”

And she being what she is, a stupid little thing, “Well, make up your mind, which is it?” And this is a girl with no possibility for a religious life. [laughter]

The next level of experience is one of psychological agony. This is the level of a Freudian analysis. When the consciousness expanding begins to bump up against all the taboos that have been built into you, and there is this agony of guilt and nausea—horrible experiences before you break through that.

This is the reliving of your personal unconsciousness: the reliving of your personal agony, your personal taboos, your personal experiences—this is what is regurgitated, sort to say, in a Freudian analysis.

 

TRACK 16: The Four Stages of the Birth Experience

Then there comes another level in these experiences, and it’s a level of re-experiencing your birth, because you did have an experience there—you did indeed. Mother did too, but you’re the more important one right now.

And Grof has found four stages in the birth experience, which have been relived by his patients. And he has checked and checked and checked on this, so this is no nonsense. He calls these the basal birth models—basic prenatal models.

The first is that of the fetus in the womb. There is no sense of I or not-I; there is just a being. There is no subject and object. This is the experience most like that of the mystic quenching the dew drop to the sea: “Neither I nor thee; we are both gone.”

The second stage is when the uterus begins to vibrate and the pains of the mother begin. There is no way out. Suddenly there is ego in trouble. The first experience we have of ourselves is of ourselves in trouble. And this can last quite awhile, and there is considerable terror.

And if the person finishes in that condition—let’s say if the drug wears off and that’s the condition the person comes out of it in—the person is in danger of a suicide. It will be a quiet suicide, pills or drowning or cutting the wrists or something like that. It is the experience of the existentialist: life is nothing but pain—birth is pain, death is pain, nothing but pain between. La vie est dûr.

The third stage is when the cervix opens and the birth begins, and this is a tremendous exercise. There is a collaboration between the mother and the child in a certain extent; there is a sense of

something doing—getting somewhere. And it is violent, it’s ugly—there are foul odors and experiences.

This is the level of the sadomasochistic attitude. And if the person comes out in this state, the person is in danger of blowing things up, of blowing himself up—he is a dangerous person.

The fourth state is that of birth itself. Suddenly light, and suddenly an object: mother—the first divinity, and the only divinity finally, really. I mean this daddy thing is a joke compared with mother. [laughter]

He’s no good there.

 

TRACK 17: The Stages of Birth as Mythic Moods

These four states are states that underlie whole life moods; they also underlie different mythologies.

Now, here is the interesting thing: people in the states two and three—these are the ones of pain, anguish, violence—their fantasies are almost exclusively those of the Judeo-Christian tradition—crucifixions, an angry god, a punishing god, tortures, hells, all kinds of violence.

And just you read the Old Testament with that in mind and you’ll see it’s a pretty good show—the tension between God and man, who are not the same. God made man to be his servant. You have disobeyed, you deserve punishment. All you deserve is rebuke.

But when they get to either stage one or four, the images are of the Orient. The peace of nirvana in the womb; the bliss of relationship to the mother goddess. In the East, the whole universe—the sphere

of the universe—is the womb of the goddess. And the deities and all names and forms are within her bounds; the gods are her children.

This is a primary mythology. This is the mythology from which all our mythologies come. But when the Hebrews came into the world of the goddess, in the second millennium B.C., they took the myths of the goddess and converted them into myths of the god. They did—this is a historical fact. And all of these father images just don’t quite convince who wants Abraham bosom. [laughter[

Whoever heard of a man giving birth to a woman. That serpent in the garden—he knew where he was. He was an old, old deity: Ningishzidah, who was the consort of the goddess, and Eve was that consort. The serpent and Eve make a better pair than Eve and Adam. [laughter] The serpent and Eve were at the tree of bliss. Adam and Eve are out there in the rough, having a tough time. So that’s what comes when the goddess goes in the wrong direction.

But this finding of Grof’s I think is fascinating. And what you will find from it is that the religion that you were taught committed you to a certain attitude toward life. You think it’s tough because your religion’s imagery says it’s tough. Or you find it blissful, and something you can rest on.

 

TRACK 18: The Final Stages: Rapture and the Ground of Being

Finally, after this stage of experiences which we have all had, the person has gone past his personal life into the life of transpersonal experiences, one comes to suddenly a stage of understanding it all. You can’t talk about; it’s just the rapture of seeing—knowing what

it is all about, and that it is good and that it is great and for all the pains and all that, nevertheless it is as it is. And it is a marvel. And the pains and the pleasures are not the ends you live for, but just the rapture of this beholding. They come to this.

And finally there is one stage still further beyond this one of symbolic rapture, is that of a kind of metaphysical sense that you have struck the ground, and you have found the root of being.

These are experiences people have had and they correspond to those of waking consciousness, the stages of mythic dream, and the deep sleep and the rapture beyond it.

Lecture I.2.1 - The Thresholds of MythologyBy Joseph Campbell

Details: Date: November 3, 1967 Venue: The Wainwright House Location: Rye, NY Archive Number: L172

Links: Download this Lecture Discuss this Lecture

TRACK 1: The Three Basic Attitudes of Myth

The first place then that—just say—that mythology in general serves four functions: the first, and basic function might be said to be that of reconciling consciousness to existence—to life. 

When you realize that life was present on this planet for literally millions and hundreds of millions of years before consciousness emerged, and the eye and mind beheld what is here, and when you think of an infant before its consciousness comes to flower already doing the major job of its life—namely producing a body out of a couple of little cells, bringing forth this miracle, with all of the organs already functioning, none of these organs having asked consciousness what it was functioning for, it being the job of consciousness rather to find out what the body is all about you realize that there's rather a split here between the monstrous thing

that life is. Just consider its basic character: it consists of living by eating other lives. Its main character is monstrous. And when consciousness becomes aware of this, there is this sense of terrific awe and horror, but also fascination and recognition, because that is what we are. 

Now the mythologies in general take two attitudes toward this. One is that of affirmation; that is to say, reconciling consciousness to the nature of existence. And the other attitude I call the great reversal, which is that of turning all the positives into negatives and rejecting it, saying, “This is something that should not have been; better pull out.” 

Remember Schopenhauer's statement: “Life is something that should not have been.” The Buddha's saying: “All life is a fire.” There is the fire of passion, fire of fear, fire of this, that and the other aspect of life—quench that fire. Nirvana is the quenching of the fire. 

So we have in general two basic attitudes of the myths that we're going to illustration—one of that of horrendous affirmation, and the other that of no less horrendous withdrawal. 

Now it is one of the characteristics of our contemporary world that we don't face these two alternatives, but try to say, “Well, I will affirm life. I don't like people who don't. But I'll affirm it on condition that it reforms and makes itself go the way I and my mind and my friends feel it ought to go.” 

Of course, there can be a softening down of the horror of life. We don't go butchering our way through unless we have to face it out in a war. But the basic character of life cannot be changed, that's all there is to it. And the final attitude must be either of affirmation of life as it is, or rejection of it. These in general are the two positions. 

TRACK 2: The Four Functions of Mythology

The second function of a mythology and religion is to present a single cosmological image, an image of the cosmos, and image of the universe, of the world and of life within it, which will render the sense of this mystery that we ourselves are, and will communicate and maintain the fascination and awe, and in the positive religions, the sense of gratitude for all this in the individual. 

[The] first function is to reconcile consciousness to existence or to reject existence. The second function is to present an image of the universe through which the sensed meaning, or power, or nature of life will be rendered. 

The third function is to validate and maintain a certain given moral order, and it is here that the mythologies differ greatly from one place to another. 

And the fourth and final function is to harmonize and deepen the psyche—the psychological structure and experience of the individual. 

You may call these: first, the truly mystical aspect; second, the physical or scientific or cosmological; the third, the sociological; and the fourth and final, the psychological functions of myth. In the great living traditions, all of these functions were served simultaneously and harmoniously. 

However, we now have realized that the order of laws that govern the stars and the planets and the spaces of the universe is not to be taken as a model of the government of society. Nor are the laws that are prudent for a social organization necessarily the best and deepest for the psyche. The modern secular state does not pretend

to divine authorization—its laws are simply conventional, whereas the older societies pretended, and some of them actually supposed that their laws were divinely given somehow, and were part and parcel of the universe. 

 

When we look at the old mythologies, the old religions, the laws by which the society is governed are regarded in general as being as inevitable as appodictically given, so that you can't get away from them as the laws of nature itself. The laws of the Hebrew tradition for example, are supposed to have been delivered by the same divine being who created the world, so they have the same source, and no one can ask himself “Does this make sense, is this the way people should behave, is this a reasonable mode of conduct?” One is to obey, obey, obey as given. Similarly in the Orient, the laws of the society are regarded as part and parcel of the laws of the universe. 

TRACK 3: Elementary and Folk Ideas

Here then is the first point: there are four levels on which mythology is going to function. 

Now the second and third—that is to say the image of the cosmos and the order of society—vary greatly from place to place, and from time to time. This brings about a picture of great difference as one reviews the whole scene. 

On the other hand, this monstrous mystery that the consciousness has to be reconciled to, has remained the same forever. And also, the structure—the main nervous structure and organic structure of the human physique—has been the same at least since the ordination  caves of 30,000 B.C. So these constitute constants,

whereas there is within the historical field, greater variation in the modes through which these constants are rendered. 

Well, the old German medical man, who was one of the first and greatest in the survey of the whole field, Adolph Bastian. He called the universals—the constants that appear throughout mythology—the elementary ideas. And we can call them the elementary ideas, or the basic universals. And the different culture modes through which these ideas are inflected in terms of the needs and patterns of the different social order, he called the ethnic ideas, or the folk ideas. 

TRACK 4: India and China: the Two Great Eastern Domains

Now let me first say a word too about certain basic divisions of the folk idea—there are four great domains in the old world, the world from which our own traditions come, through which we see the universals manifesting themselves. 

If you divide the European-Asian hemisphere at Iran—at Persia—the world will fall into two great departments. 

Eastward of Iran, eastward of Persia, there are two main creative culture zones. One is India, and the other is the Far East. If you look at a map, you will see that both of these are cut off from the rest of the world. India is surrounded on two sides by the sea, and the coasts are not endowed with great harbors, and were very, very dangerous for small boats, and northward are the Himalaya Mountains—so that new influences have come into India and been assimilated very easily. There has been no massive impact on India until very modern times with the modern Western industrial world, walloping [?] in. Likewise China was cut off by the great deserts to the West. 

So these two zones, India and China, have been extremely conservative in their culture character. And they have maintained

—to the very present in their traditional forms—the basic style of religion of the old Bronze Age. Both of them were first settled in the style of the high civilizations in the period of the Bronze Age. India—the first datings for earliest India are now about 2500 B.C., and the earliest datings for China about 1500 B.C. (China is the youngest, not, as is often claimed, the oldest of the old civilizations.) 

So the main mode of mythological thought that was characteristic of the Bronze Age, before the coming of the Age of Iron, is what we find in China and India. 

TRACK 5: The Levant: Birthplace of High Civilization

Westward of Iran, now, we again have two great creative culture zones. 

The first is the Levant, or the Near East. This is the zone where high civilization first originates. It is there that the arts of agriculture and animal husbandry were first developed about the ninth millennium B.C. This is what made possible the establishment of settled communities, and the growth of rather large communities. 

Where these large communities developed first was in Mesopotamia, and then Egypt, and then Crete. Mesopotamia—the earliest cities appear about 3500 B.C. That is a thousand years earlier than in India. And it is at that time, in that place, that the art[s] of mathematical reckoning, of writing, of calculating the movements of the planets mathematically and accurately, first came into being. 

It was at that time that professional priests, whose whole lifetime was devoted to observing the heavens, recognized the movement of the planets through the constellations. They are the ones who first recognized the mathematical regularity of this process, and

conceived the notion of a cosmic order, a mathematically impersonal inevitably moving cosmic order, to which the agricultural world had to submit. They watched the stars for the moments for planting and for reaping. And they also conceived the idea that that heavenly order should be repeated on earth, and the society itself became an imitation of the heavenly order. 

We still celebrate our religious festivals according to the astronomical calendar. The king, the queen, the members of the court assumed then the garments of the heavenly spheres. The kings—if the moon was the principal divinity, the king wore the horns of the moon; if it was the sun, he wore the golden radiant crown of the sun, and so forth and so on. This notion of as it is in heaven, so shall it be on earth is the basis for the forms—the culture forms of the earliest civilizations of man, and these were carried to Egypt, to Crete, to China and to India. 

TRACK 6: Europe: an Accent on the Individual

The other great creative zone in the West is Europe. 

Now Europe is the great homeland of the high Paleolithic. Those glorious caves in France and Spain of Lascaux, Alta Mira, El Castillo and so forth, date from 30,000 B.C. There was nothing like them anywhere on earth for tens of thousands of years. And the whole ethos—the whole mode of life experience, of the Paleolithic hunt—is just right there in Europe right up to very, very late times. 

Now, when you consider the nature of the hunt—how it depends upon the prowess and courage of the individual, how it matters greatly whether an individual can or can not face the fight—you will see that on the base of a hunting culture style, individualism and individuals’ powers are highly respected. 

Whereas the opposite point of view prevails in a large community, particularly a community agriculturally based. Anybody can till a field—individual talents are not greatly honored. And the individual is always subordinated to the will and good of the group. Whereas as in the hunting culture, the whole good and well-being of the community depends on the individual. 

You have just two totally contrary points of view here. 

Now Europe and the Near East are very close together. And they are united furthermore by this wonderful Mediterranean. So there has been great commerce back and forth, and there has been great collision between these two totally contrary world views. 

TRACK 7: The Warrior Influence of the Indo-European and Semitic Peoples

Furthermore, we have not only these two—Levant and Europe—but we also have northern people and southern people coming in collision with each other. The European and Levantine fields have been fields of great cultural upheavals, great changes, great transformations. It was in this area, for example, that the art of riding a horse—of hitching horses to a very light war chariot—was developed. This developed in the Northern European plains about 1800 B.C. And with this brilliant military arm, the northern people—the Indo-European or Aryan peoples—were invincible. It was at that time that a whole new outgoing of a single order of life is to be recognized in the mythologies of the world. 

Against this, in the south, we have another nomadic warrior people: the great Semitic people of the Syro-Arabian desert. And they, just about the same time that the Aryans were appearing on the scene about 2500 B.C., they too were raiding in in absolutely ruthless conquests. The Old Testament tells you the story—the Book of Joshua, and the Book of Judges is a picture of the kind of sudden attack: there is the little peaceful town in a valley and

suddenly a cloud on the horizon—a dust cloud—and it happens to be a Bedouin swarm coming in, and the next morning everybody is dead in the streets. 

These collisions now of Levant and Europe, and the northern warriors, and the Semitic desert warriors brought about, as I say, transformations that were not matched at all in the other parts of the world. 

TRACK 8: The Impersonal Cycles of the East

Now with respect to the metaphysical or basic religious attitudes of these domains—eastward of Iran, both in India and in China—we have, as I say, the continuation of the old Bronze Age position. The notion is of an absolutely impersonal mathematical process of coming into being and going out of being, coming into being and going out of being. As the day, as the year, so also the eon. There never was a time when time was not. There never will be a time when time will cease to be. 

There is no personality responsible for this, it is a basically impersonal concept. And all of the deities who come into being with the world are simply the agents, the personifications of the powers that operate ruthlessly. Prayer can do no good. You cannot pray to an inevitably moving machine to stop—it is going to go on. 

With respect to what lies behind this—the force that lies behind it—no human concept can touch it. The Indian Upanishads say time and time again: “There words do not reach.” No concept, no image, no category of thought can touch that mystery. 

To ask, as we do in the West—personifying the whole mystery of God—to ask: “Is this just? Is it merciful? Is it wrathful? Does the

God now like me? Does it like these people? Does it prefer those?”—this, from the standpoint of this position, is utter childishness. This is to project human sentiment, human categories, human emotions on something that is no thing—that actually is antecedent to all things, that is the energy and being that cannot be even called “being” because being is already a category. “Is it? Is it not?”—those are categories of thought. And as the Buddha says, “It both is and is not. It neither is nor is not.” No categories can reach it. 

Now, that which is thus transcendent—transcendent of all definitions—it lies beyond picturing, it lies beyond naming. To say, “I know it, I have it in my book, it's name is so and so, and it says this to so and so,”-—this is, from this standpoint, sheer idolatry. It is to reduce to a concept, to a conceptualization that which lies beyond all this. Nevertheless that which lies beyond all this is your own very mystery and being. It is immanent. It is in anything we have here. The problem is a being of this glass is exactly the problem of the being of the universe—it is exactly the same mystery. The fact that you know how to use this, the fact that somebody may know how to make glass out of sand and heat and all this kind of thing, this does not take away from the fact that it's an utter mystery that this should be in existence. And what it is, who knows. So you can take anything, put a circle around it, and say, “I don't know what it is.” And with that, you open a dimension of awe that is the first experience of religion. Rudolph Otto,  in his wonderful little book The Idea of the Holy, names this experience of awe—of cosmic dread—the basic religious emotion. And from the standpoint of the Bronze Age, Oriental position, this is a perspective that can be opened through anything—anything then becomes eligible for worship. I've seen a little child worshipped. I've seen a stick worshipped, and a stone, in this sense. 

TRACK 9: The Personified God of the West

Now when we move from that realm to the West, and to the Western religions which are not Western religions in the full sense of the term; they are Levantine religions, the religions that have been brought into Europe from the Levant. 

We have a quite different point of view. The main religions in the Western world now are Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All of them from the Semitic fields, all of them from the Levant. And in all of them the ultimate mystery is personified as God—God, who is and who has certain qualities. It can be named and has been described. Just consider what we have to regard now: God creates the world—these are not the same. 

To say, as the Indians say, “I, in my own essence am that mystery”—Tat vam asi, thou art that, you are it—to say that on this side of the line is the final end, basic heresy. These are two totally contrary world religions. 

TRACK 10: The East: Religions of Identity

I would call the Eastern religions religions intending identity—religions of identity. The whole—well, the ultimate religious goal is to bring about in the individual the realization— not the thought, the realization—that he is that. He is it. In his essence, in his being, he is that mystery. Not the he that he thinks he is, not the he that is named, not the he that came into being and goes out of being, and his friends liked him or his enemies don't like him, and all those qualities, but that mystery about himself which is like the mystery of the glass. To realize this as being of your essence is the goal of these religions. They are religions intending your own realization of identity. That is why the typical posture in the Orient is that of in-turned meditation. Whereas our religions are religions of address, religions of relationship, and the typical posture is outward turned of relationship to something that is not of this world. 

 

Now this split, this division between the worlds of thought in which all the universe is divine, is a manifestation of that mystery; and the world in which this divinity is separated from the world—these are the two radically opposed religious views now competing in the world. 

TRACK 11: The West: Religions of Relationship

I call the Levantine religions religions of relationship. How is the relationship to the God achieved? It is achieved through one's identification with a certain social order. 

Our religions are religions with terrific stress on the social group to which you belong. Consider for example the Hebrew religion as the starter—this is the earliest of this triad. God, named, has a convenant with a certain people: that is a relationship. It is only through birth as a member of that race that one is in proper, direct and authorized relationship to God—all others are out. This is an absolutely exclusive position, and it involves a group. 

Contrasted with this, the Indian situation—in so long as you are in the world, great stress is placed in society. Great stress is placed on your obedience to the laws of society for your own good in that you are eliminating your own ego emphasis. But finally, you quit the society, go into the forest and are alone. Only in your own solitude can the ultimate be reached. 

Whereas in the Hebrew tradition, only in relationship to the minyan can God be properly worshipped—ten males of the Hebrew tradition are necessary. These I would call the extremes of the gamut of religion in the world. 

Take next the basic Christian idea: namely that Jesus is true God and true man. This we regard as surprising—as a miracle, as a

special thing— whereas in the Orient everything is divine as well as secular. This unique—“I believe in God the Father Almighty” and all this, “His Only Son”—through our humanity we are related to Jesus, and through his divinity he relates us to God. And it is only through participation in the sacraments of his church founded by him, that one.... Extra ecclesiam nula salas—no salvation outside the church. 

Here again we have this exclusive position with great stress on the social group to which you belong, and the privilege, you might say, of that identification. So I would say, instead of religion of identification with the divinity, you have here a religion of achievement of a relationship to the divinity through identification with his group. 

And now look at what has happened. The claims of this tradition to special divine authority have been called into question by science and historical scholarship—there is no doubt about it. The problem of most Western minds today is this: having been deprived of the sense of divinity in themselves by the church, they now have been deprived of the sense of the claim of the church by science—and so we have what is called alienation. And this quest now for roots again, I think, is the main quest of which I, at any rate, have become aware of in my viewing of students, and adults, and just lost people. 

TRACK 12: The Levantine Religions in Europe: God vs. Man

So much then for the four great domains. I haven't named the fourth, really: namely Europe. Here we have brought now to Europe the Levantine tradition. 

In Europe we have faith in the human being. Consider for instance the main position of the Levant. When we have two terms, God and man, there comes a final question as to your ultimate loyalty—is it going to be God, or is it going to be the man? Is it going to be

to the mystery of God, or to the ideas and ideals of man? Now for the Oriental [sic], this conflict, look at that: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday we are with Prometheus. And Sunday, for a couple of minutes with Job, and the next Monday on the psychiatrist's couch wondering what is the matter. 

These are two absolutely irreconcilable, absolutely contrary points of view that we pretend to have brought together—and we haven't resolved this. The European races, with their individualism and humanism—Greek, Roman, Celt and German—had this system brought in upon them. 

And if you study the history of Christianity in Europe, it's outstanding characteristic is heresy: battles against heresy, fight against heresy, this way and that—and finally heresy won. With Protestantism, the individual conscience was to be the judge, not a social authority that tells you what you are to believe. 

Now it is my view that in this present world of this present minute, we are facing the hour of decision: man against the authority of a group that claims divine authority—and we have plenty of those groups, and they are all getting together cozy here and there. And it just seems to me this decision has to be recognized and confronted. 

So much then for the four points of view. Of course, in the Orient, this conflict between God and man would be regarded as ridiculous. Since they are both, they represent simply two aspects, two ways, two modes of manifestation of that one which is the one in all of us. Its cosmic manifestation and its human manifestation with the cosmic values, and the human values in apparent conflict, but ultimate accord—somehow, somewhere beyond the path of opposites. 

So much then for this phase of my review: first, the four functions of mythology; and then the four domains in which the inflections—local inflections—of the mystery of being have been rendered. 

TRACK 13: The First Threshold: from Dependency to Responsibility

I want now to speak about that aspect of the mythological heritage which is constant: namely that which depends upon the human psyche—the human being in his growth and life. 

In relation to psychology, the function of mythology and ritual is to carry the individual over the thresholds of his growth, flowering and decline. The human being has the longest infancy of any animal in the world. It is twelve years at least before the individual is able to take care of himself at all, and the maturity of the physique is not reached until the early twenties. 

Meanwhile, an attitude—a psychological attitude—of dependency has been established. The individual responds to threats and so forth with a turn for assistance, or protection, or advice to the parent. 

This attitude of dependency then has—at a certain moment somewhere in early or late puberty—to be transformed into an attitude of self responsible conduct, responsibility. All of the reactions of the psyche which originally were of a dependent order have to be transformed into reactions of responsibility. And the neurotic might be said to be one who in later age is spontaneously reacting still in the way of dependency, and has to correct himself to say, “Look, act your age.” And then you have this correction of his spontaneous response. The person who has effectively crossed the threshold is one who immediately assumes the responsibilities of his time and place. 

Now, the first function then of the myths in relationship to the development of the individual is to affect that transition from dependency to responsibility, and in the primitive cultures this is affected in the initiation rites. In these rites, the whole psychology of the youth is transformed. He is himself brought into the position of the father by a ritual death of the infantile personality, and resurrection then of the adult through rites of terrible emotional stress and power. The basic images to which he is to respond are transformed in this sense for him. And I would say that in our present culture world, the function of the Freudian psychology has been largely that. I think we can say that Freud's function has been to help people pass from the psychological posture of childhood to that of maturity. But then there comes another time. 

TRACK 14: The Latter Thresholds: the Loss of Powers and Death

The human being is the animal that has the longest period of old age—the longest period of increasing senility, and loss of powers—and is the only animal that facing this, knows that he personally is to die. This is the only animal that has to face death consciously, and face it over many, many years with increasing weight. 

The myths have to help us over that threshold too—the threshold of the loss of powers. You might say no sooner have we learned what the society wants us to do, then they have found a younger generation ready to do it, and you are beginning to lose not only your confidence, but your job. Just when you are good, you are out. So this is a little crisis as well. 

Now, all societies have to face this. The age classes are the most constant phenomenon in primitive societies—the childhood group, the mature group and the aged group. They help the aged along by making them think they are the wise ones, you know, in the old societies—and we don't even have that advantage. 

So I would say that the psychologist who in our world has dealt most successfully with this second problem has been Jung—this is in fact the concern of Jung. Now there are papers that Freud wrote to the profession—to young psychiatrists—in which he states, “Don't even bother with anybody over the age of thirty-five, there is just too much to do, too much to take apart, and there is nothing left, there is no energy to put back together again the pieces that you have left around”—where that is exactly where Jung becomes interested. 

And the contrast in the two psychologies stems from the totally contrary problems that are faced [with] when we are dealing with a young person who hasn't grown up yet, and dealing with an older person who has to face this loss of security that comes. 

What it is, is that certain functions of the psyche have been left undeveloped. How do those functions come into play? The most obvious way to bring them into play is the old way that would have been right thirty years ago, but that is not the way to bring them into play now. And so, this problem of integrating the psyche—in terms that are appropriate to its stage of life and all—is the great problem, as Jung says,  of culture—of civilization—in the last half of life. 

TRACK 15: The Stages of Life: India

Now, in connection with this—since I've been talking about the Orient and the Occident—let me very briefly summarize first the Oriental, and then a very handsome Occidental view of the four stages of life. 

To begin with, let me describe the Indian view. The main principle in India is that in the middle of life there is to be a radical change and division that is provided for by the society, and by the patterns

of the society. The first half of life is to be lived in the village—in society—performing the duties of one's caste. The second half of life is to be lived in the forest performing yoga: casting off the duties of life, casting off the aims of life in society, and devoting oneself to totally different life circumstances, [to] totally different life disciplines, to the ultimate task, which is a different ultimate task from ours [in the West], by the way. 

Now each of these two stages of life is divided in half, the first half of each being devoted to learning—to the disciplines of preparation—and the second half to fulfillment. Now the orthodox age-dates are fifteen years. This is fifteen years, thirty years, forty five, and out. The Indians have a shorter life span to look forward to normally than we have. 

The first stage is that of the student. The student is to be chaste—is to devote all of his attention and energy to the guru, the teacher. The word guru means something very different from what teacher means in our culture. The guru is not only a communicator of information and teacher of disciplines, he is a model for life—he is a moral model. The student is to try to imitate him, to identify with him, to be as the guru is. The student then submits himself completely to his guru. 

Then, at the age of fifteen or so, comes the stage known as the householder stage—grihastha, “the one standing in the house.” The marriage is consummated. Now, here—these two people have never seen each other before. There has been nothing like what our young people have—this problem of “What am I going to be? What are my values? What do I think of that? what is my idea of a wife or a husband?” No, the family makes the arrangement. They've never seen each other before; it doesn't matter. Now the first duty of the household is to produce children—this is in honor of the ancestral cult. And so by the time the father reaches middle age—thirtyish, or so—there is a son in the house eligible to take

over the duties of his [that is, the householder’s] dharma. He gives over his dharma—his virtue, his duty—to his son in a beautiful rite. All of the rites, by the way, are beautiful—marriage rites, transferring of duty rites. What one does is identify oneself with the cosmic principle of which one is but the microcosmic manifestation, and so you are living, as it were, as a vehicle of cosmic power. 

Well, now comes a time of going to the forest. A woman may go to the forest— the father properly should go to the forest. I've asked Indian women what do you have to look forward to? In your childhood, you are obeying your parents and in your maturity you are obeying your husband. If your husband dies and you don't throw yourself on the funeral pyre, you are obeying your oldest son. What do you have to look forward to? They've all answered—I've asked four of them this—“We look forward to becoming mothers-in-law. When the daughter-in-law is brought into the house, there is somebody we can boss around.” This will give you a sense of the flavor, and who would give that up for the forest? 

So the father goes off alone. Furthermore, it is said in many texts that women are not particularly endowed for yoga—they have too much life in their bodies. Yoga is a masculine madness. It is an attempt to cut out the last vestige of a desire or feeling for life at all, just to cut it. The extreme aims of yoga are hardly realized by people who in a dilettante way go in for this business. Just think of it: throughout life you have obeyed your duties according to your caste—that is what you have devoted yourself too. You have not asked, “Would I like to do this? Would I like to do that?” You have done your duty. That means there has been no development of ego—there has been a squelching of ego all along. 

Then you go to the forest. You have a very light ego to crack, so to say. What has to be done there? You might recall, That moment was lovely, this moment I did not like. You are now to erase all

sense of difference between what was nice and what was not nice—what is painful and what is pleasurable. That is why [yoga involves] these mad ordeals: so that you would become used to pain—so that you would become used to agony, so that it wouldn't make any difference to you, so that your life milieu would be agony. And so then what of pleasure? What that would be would [be] simply a loss of the thing you have now got used to, namely pain. The indifference and finally the breaking, so to say, of the very grabbing of the self to life—and you dissolve. 

The third stage then, the first in the forest, is that of learning to break the hold on life. 

And the fourth stage is that of the one who has broken it. He is what is called released. Shankaracharya, the great saint of the ninth century, declared that “a man who is released is like a burnt string that looks like a string, but if you blow on it there is nothing there.” These saints wandering around look like human beings, but there is nobody there. There is no sense of an individual in that body. When he goes into the forest, he gives up his virtue—he gives up his dharma, he gives up his family and everything. And now he is going to just wait for the body, as they say, to drop off. This is the basic Oriental idea. 

TRACK 16: The Stages of Life: Dante

Now in contrast to that, let me conclude by reviewing the four ages as described by Dante in that wonderful work of his The Convivio. In the last chapters of The Convito of Dante, he says, “Life falls into four stages.” 

Now he was thirty-five in the year 1300. His dates are 1265 to 1321. It was a theory in the Middle Ages that 1300 was the middle year of the world—the world had been created somewhere about 4000 or so B.C. And we are in the middle year now. So Dante—the middle year of Dante's life (he took 35 as the mid-year of life)

fell in the mid-year of the world's life, and he had his decent to Hell, Purgatory, and ascent to Heaven on the Good Friday to Easter weekend of that fabulous year. So he united his individual curve with the cosmic curve of all that kind of thing—we have a straight line through. 

He says, “Life divides at thirty-five.” Now the first quarter of life—he gives twenty five years to that. The first twenty-five years of life he calls The Period of Increase and Adolescence—that of growing up and increase. And the virtues of those years—they sound rather strange in relation to what we have been seeing lately—they are obedience, sense of shame, grace, and beauty. Those are the virtues of youth—albeit [circa] 1300. 

The middle period, Maturity, stretches from twenty-five to forty-five with thirty-five as the mid-point. These are the years of fulfillment of your role in society, as society understands them. The virtues are reason, courage, love, and loyalty—and courteousness. But at the thirty-five age, a crisis occurs. This is the crisis symbolized in Dante's Divine Comedy of individual realization of those truths which were suggested by the tradition in which you were brought up. Let's say you just don't accept tradition. Tradition leads you to a moment of your own personal realization of truth in the mystery of being. 

We come then to the period which he calls Of Age, from forty-five to seventy. This is not a period of retirement to the forest. This is not a period of self-erasure. In the course of your twenty years of maturity, you have come to your own judgments, your own realizations, your own evaluations, and now you put them into affect in the world. This is the age for the senators—for the governors, for participation in the government, or for teaching; this is the age of giving. 

First was growth, next was maturity and fulfillment of your role, and now it's the age of giving of your wisdom—your own wisdom,

not repeating traditional wisdom. And the virtues now are of prudence, and wisdom, magnanimity, generosity. It is generally one of giving, unloading, giving your treasure to the world. 

And then from seventy onwards, this is the period that he calls The Period of Departure. And it is typified as follows: looking backward over the span of your life with gratitude, and looking forward to death as a return home. There is that sense of appreciation of the void and the abyss, and yet of appreciation for life. You leave life in a nice balance, not resenting your departure, nor resenting what life did to you. 

Now to conclude this little survey, this little contrast of Oriental and Occidental aims here, I think you can see something of the Jungian thing in the Dantean picture in contrast to the Indian. 

TRACK 17: Nietzsche's Three Transformations of the Spirit

Let me just repeat—some of you must know this—the three ages that Nietzsche names in Thus Spake Zarathustra. These are vivid and they fit this very well. 

The first stage of man and of the spirit he calls the Age of the Camel. The camel gets down on his knees and says, “Put a big heavy load on me so that I will have something really to carry—I'll have a job to do.” And when the camel has been thoroughly loaded with duties and jobs and lessons and teachings and so forth, it gets to its feet and it trots out to the desert where it becomes a lion. 

The lion is the second transformation of the spirit, and this lion attacks and kills the dragon who's name is Thou Shalt. The dragon Thou Shalt has a thousand golden scales, and on every scale is written a law—some of these laws going back to 3000 B.C. The lion kills the dragon; there are no Thou Shalt's anymore. This is the battle of the middle of life—that thirty-five year old one that I spoke about. 

And from then on, when this has been achieved, the lion is transformed into a child. Spontaneity of its own inner life is its directing power, and it is comparable to a wheel rolling out of its own center—not pulled by a string, but with the motor power in its own hub rolling: ein aus sich rollendes Rad—a wheel rolling out of its own center, says Nietzsche. 

These are the three transformations. And again the free spirit is the one who has achieved freedom. But first—and this is the big point in all these matters—the first stage is that of learning something, working and giving, to giving your energies and time to what you are taught to do.

Lecture I.2.2 - The Inward JourneyBy Joseph Campbell

Details: Date: March 4, 1970 Venue: The Cooper Union Location: New York, NY Archive Number: L308

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TRACK 1: Parallel Imagery in Mythology and Schizophrenia

Some three or four years ago, I was invited to deliver a series of lectures at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, on schizophrenia. By the way when you phone Big Sur from New York, the New York telephone operator says “Big Sewer.” I had lectured there the year before on mythology, and apparently Mr. Michael Murphy, the Director, thought there was some connection. But since I didn’t know anything at all about schizophrenia, I phoned and said, “Mike, I don’t know anything about schizophrenia. How would it be if I lectured on James Joyce?” And he said, “That would be fine.” “But,” he said, “I’d like you to lecture on schizophrenia just the same. And so I’m going to arrange for you and Dr. John Perry of San Francisco to give a dual talk, the two together, on schizophrenia.” Well in my youth I had had the great good fortune to kiss the blarney stone, which is worth seven Ph.D.s, and so I thought, “Okay, why not.”

Then Dr. Perry sent me a copy of a paper that he had written on schizophrenia that had been published in 1963 in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. And to my

great amazement I found that the imagery of the schizophrenic paralleled almost point for point the themes that I had rendered in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, back in 1949, which was based simply on a comparative study of mythology. It had nothing to do with psychoanalysis, or psychology, but it was simply a synthesis of the materials and imageries of the mythological traditions of mankind, delineating the main constant motifs that did appear in all. These are universal archetypal themes in the mythologies of mankind, and from this paper of Dr. Perry, I discover that they are produced spontaneously from the broken-off condition of a complete schizophrenia, complete psychosis, a person who has lost touch entirely with the context of his society and is functioning out of his own base. Very briefly, the main pattern is one of cut-off, or departure, from the local social order; a retreat inward—backward in time, as it were, and inward into the psyche; an encounter—a series of terrifying experiences; and finally, if fortunate, encounters of a symbolic kind that center, harmonize, give new courage to the individual; and then, a return journey. This is the pattern of the myth. This is the pattern that came up in these images of the psyche.

TRACK 2: The Schizophrenic Journey

Now it was Dr. Perry’s thesis that in certain kinds of schizophrenia, the best thing is to let the process continue, not to abort the psychosis—not to perform any psychiatric operations such as shock treatment or anything of the kind that will abort the psychosis—but to help the person along. In order to be helpful, however, the doctor has to understand the imagery of mythology. He has to understand what these signs and signals are that this person, totally out of contact

with the rationally-oriented individual, is trying to bring forth in order to establish a contact. A psychosis from this point of view is an effort to recover and restore a lost balance. And let the person go, he has tipped over, but help him through.

Well, while I was out there, I had some very exciting—for me—conversations with Dr. Perry, and our dual statement—the talk we gave together—was for me a very great experience. And it started me thinking more and more about the immediate import of this material which I had been dealing with in a more or less scholarly, academic, personally enthusiastic way, but without any sense of its possible import for people in trouble today.

TRACK 3: Psychosis and Shamanism

Then, Dr. Perry and Mr. Murphy gave me a paper by a Dr. Julian Silverman, which had appeared in the American Anthropologist in 1967, on schizophrenia and shamanism. And there I found something very interesting again. Because, of course, when one studies primitive mythologies, the imagery of the mythological world derives from the psychological experiences of the shamans. The source of the imagery of primitive myths is the shaman’s psychological crisis. The shaman is a person, who in his early puberty, has cracked off—broken off and gone into what we would today call a psychosis. Another shaman is sent for—a mature shaman is sent for—to help him through this. And by interpreting the gestures and so-forth of the young psychotic, he brings him out of it.

Now let me just tell you the story of one shaman situation that is described by Rasmussen, the great Danish explorer, who in the early 1920s went across the north of North America: a man of great human sympathy and understanding, who was able to talk with the shamans whom

he encountered in Northern Canada and so forth, along the Arctic Circle—very simple societies—and understand and appreciate their experiences and what they had undergone. And there was one man who told him of what had happened to him. When this shaking and retreat from the world came on, his parents knew that the best thing to do was send for a shaman to help him through this. And this shaman, according to this account, put him on a sled and took him out onto the wastes of snow; built a tiny little igloo, hardly big enough to contain him; lifted him from the sled onto a skin in the igloo and left him there for thirty days; and brought him, every ten days, some tiny little bit of food and water. And he said, “I died many times during that time, but there came to me experiences that one can come to only in solitude and in silence.”

TRACK 4: The Voice of the Universe

Another shaman who Rasmussen met in Alaska told him of a similar adventure into the silence.

Now this shaman was in trouble with his community. Shamans have a very dangerous job, because if anything goes wrong anywhere, people blame it on the shaman—they think he is working magic. Anyone who has powers that other people don’t have is likely to be an object of jealously and, you know, suspicion. And so this old fellow had invented a number of trick devices and mythological scare theses to frighten people and keep them at bay. Rasmussen knew that this was all fakery, and he said to the old man, “Isn’t there anything you believe? Isn’t there anything that is honest and sincere in your life?” “Oh yes,” he said, “but I have to protect myself with this hocus pocus. But,” he said, “I’ll tell you what is true: I’ve heard the voice of the universe.

And it is gentle, and it is kind, and it is like a mother speaking; or, it is like the fall of snow; or it is like children laughing and playing. And what it says is: ‘Do not be afraid of the universe.’” He had had the kind of experience that one hears of from the great mystics—these are very simple men.

TRACK 5: Symbol and Psychosis: Essential vs. Paranoid Schizophrenia 

Now Silverman, in his article, has found analogies with certain kinds of schizophrenia. It was from this article that I learned that there are two quite different orders of schizophrenia: one, he calls “essential” schizophrenia; and the other, he calls “paranoid” schizophrenia.

Now with essential schizophrenia, you are approaching the shamanistic attitude and crisis. It is one of withdrawal from the impact of experience in the world. This happens spontaneously. There is a narrowing of concern and focus, the object world falls away, and invasions of the unconscious content overtake and overwhelm one. This he calls essential schizophrenia.

Paranoid schizophrenia is just the opposite: the person remains extremely sensitive to the environment, but interpreting it all in terms of his own projections. That is to say, his own terrors, his own fears, his own sense of being assaulted from inside he projects outward, and he thinks the world is assailing him. This is not the one that leads to the kind of inward experience. This leads to a person being a kind of lunatic in the outer world. The other is a very pitiful thing to observe: a person who he fighting these terrible struggles with the psychological energies within.

Now what is the difference between the essential schizophrenia and the case of the shaman? The difference is this: the shaman does not reject the social order and its forms. It is actually through them that he comes back, and he reinforces them. His symbology is at one with the symbology of his culture; or, on the other hand, it comes back to re-inform the culture world when he has remitted, or returned, from the crisis. Whereas in the psychosis, there is a break-off, and there is no communication with the symbol system of the culture. The symbol system of the culture is not helping in the psychosis. The shaman, there is an accord.

TRACK 6: LSD, Psychosis, and Mysticism

Well, then in New York—this all came in a quick series in my experience—a psychiatrist in New York, Dr. Mortimer Ostow, invited me to be discussant to a paper that he read before a society for adolescent psychiatry here in New York, in which he was dealing with LSD, psychosis, mysticism, and what he calls “antinomianism”—well that is to say, the anti-social attitudes which are rather frequently advertised in the papers and TVs today as associated with our youth. Well this was an extremely interesting affair, because here a whole new phalanx of thought came in, all in association with these same themes.

Now what turned out here was that, as I’ve analyzed it since and discussed it with Dr. Ostow, the LSD retreat inward relates somewhat to the essential schizophrenia situation. The antinomianism, as he calls it, is more like the paranoid schizophrenia; that is to say, a sense of threat from outside, and the society or the establishment is absolutely… You know, there is a break—there is no communication with it, and all that, and it is interpreted only in negative terms, and

not in terms of any understanding of what it is really about—so that you have, you might say, a lunatic asylum without walls: people are out in the street that ought to be in the bughouse; but this is a kind of violent outwardly directed action. The LSD thing is fascinating in relation to this: it is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, so to say, with the hope and expectation for spontaneous remission, which doesn’t always occur. Yoga is also an intentional schizophrenia: one breaks off, turns inward. And the mystic process, as well, is very similar.

TRACK 7: Mystical vs. Psychotic Experience

Now what’s the difference between the mystical and the psychotic experience? They plunge into the same waters, there is no doubt about it: the symbolism is just the same. And I want to speak about it in a little while, what it is. The difference is that the mystic, with the instruction of a master or because of his own native talents, is able to swim in those waters—he does not drown in them; whereas, the schizophrenic has gone in and has drown. Can he be drawn up? They are the same waters.

Now let’s ask ourselves: “What are those waters?” They are the waters, as I say, that are imaged in the universal archetypes of mythology. And I have been working on this all my life, and I can tell you there are these universal images: they are the same all over the world. They are interpreted differently in the different traditions. They are given different emphases, different rational applications, different social concerns to support; but the images are the same, and they come in the same relationships to each other.

What do these represent? These are the images that in the psychology of Jung are called the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Now what he means by the collective

unconscious is those powers that derive from the biological instinct system of man.

TRACK 8: Instinct in the Animal World

All animals operate instinctively, as well as in terms of relationship to the immediate circumstances of their activities. They are impelled by powers which they did not think out, but which really govern their lives. So is man so governed. It is these powers that manifest themselves through these archetypes.

Now with respect to animals: I remember seeing… I remember having seen a very interesting nature film—I think it was one of the Disney films—of a turtle laying her eggs in the sand—oh, about thirty yards from the waters. And some days later, out of the sand—and the camera was there—come these tiny, little, just-born turtles, about as big as nickels. And they, without a quarter of a second hesitation, started right for the ocean. They didn’t hunt around and say, “Now what would be a reasonable place for me to go now?” Nor did they make any mistakes, and first go fumbling into the bushes, and then say, “Oh,” and then turn around—“I’m meant for something better than this.” They went like that. And meanwhile, the seagulls said, “Boy, there they are.” And these dive-bombers started coming down on these tiny little nickels that were trying to get to the ocean. And these little fellows knew darn well that that’s where they had to get; and they went as fast as their little legs—and the legs knew what to do; they knew that their eyes were made to show them where to go: the whole thing was in perfect operation, with a whole little fleet of little tanks going for the water. Well now, you would think that for these little turtles, these terrific breaking waves would be terrifying, and those silly gulls up there, not frightening at all. On the contrary, they went right

into the water, and they knew how to swim. Meanwhile of course the fish start at them.

Life’s tough. When people talk about going back to nature, they don’t really know what they are doing. Now this whole system was exactly there.

There have been some very interesting experiments that I’ve mentioned, I think, here before, made on little chickens that just hatched from the egg in a little chicken coup. If a hawk flies over the nest, those little things run for protection. If a pigeon flies over, they are not concerned at all. Where did they learn this? Who’s acting when the little thing says, “Oh, here he comes, I go.” And the psychologists have made little imitation hawks out of wood and drawn them across the coup on a wire—the little things run for shelter. If the same hawk is drawn backwards, they don’t move.

Now these are called “innate releasing mechanisms.” And this stimulus sets going a system of action, which is built into the central nervous system. There are such in man as well; and this is what is meant by instinct—the complication of instinct. If you will read, for example, some of the life histories of parasites, you won’t believe it. Read the life course of a hydrophobia parasite, and you won’t think that a human being is worthy to be host to such a genius. But they know what to do, where to go, and how to set people mad.

TRACK 9: Mythology: Reconciling Nature and Culture

Now in the human being we have an instinct system, and it is pushing us. But we have also a culture system. Now the peculiar thing about man that distinguishes him from all other animals is that he is born twelve years too soon. No mother

would wish that it should not be so. But, nevertheless, there are these twelve years of utter dependency that the child is committed to. It is during those ten years, or twelve, that the child is turned into a human being. It learns to walk, as its people walk. It learns to speak, to think, to cogitate in the vocabulary of that local language. It learns to respond with enthusiasm to certain signals and with fear to others, which are not natural, but are socially oriented and socially functioning signals.

A mythology is the context of nature and culture signals in such a close amalgam that you can hardly distinguish them from each other; and they work on the psyche as naturally and spontaneously as the stimuli of nature on an animal.

A functioning mythological symbol is an energy evoking and directing sign. It does not have to pass through the brain and be interpreted there. It works like that. [He snaps his fingers.] The brain, however, may interfere and short-circuit it; and when that happens, the signals are not functioning. Or, one may become conditioned to a system of signals which are present only in a very small portion of the environment: for instance, people who are brought up in quite special sects which… who do not participate in the culture forms of the rest of the environment, they can never learn to participate in the culture except in its small dimension—the small dimension of their local family, and so forth. That person is disoriented in the larger world altogether.

There is a very important problem families face: to know that the signals that they are imprinting on their children are signals that are not going to alienate them from the world in which those children are going to live. They have to be in accord with at least the progressive, decent aspects of the world into which they are coming. So, we have this terrible

problem in the human system of signals delivering messages to our psyche, which may or may not relate us propitiously to the environment. And when the signals do not relate us to the environment, we find ourselves in what in the mythological world is called a wasteland situation: the world does not talk to us; we do not talk to it. When that happens, the individual is cut off and thrown back on himself; and it is then that this crisis occurs, which may be called the psychotic break-off.

TRACK 10: The Four Functions of Mythology

Let me—before going into this history of the break-off, the crisis, and the return—just say another word or two about the functions served by a functioning mythology. They are fourfold: there are four main functions that a traditional, operative, healthy, mythological system serves.

The first is what might be call mystical function: to awaken and maintain in the individual a sense of awe and gratitude for the mystery dimension of the universe; and not to be afraid of it, but to recognize that it is his own mystery dimension as well—that’s what that shaman meant when he said, “Do not be afraid of the universe.” It is terrible. It is monstrous. It is the kind of thing that makes existentialist Frenchmen say, “It is absurd.”

The second function of a mythology is to present an image of the universe—an image of the universe which works in terms of the knowledge and science and seals of achievement and action of the people of that time—and through that cosmological image, there comes the dimension of mystery as well. Now when a mythology, like that of most of our inherited religions, is based on a cosmology—as I pointed out last week—four thousand years out of date, there is a discontinuity there, and we are being introduced to

a world that is not our world at all. This kind of inheritance is, you might say, a guide to schizophrenia.

The third function of a mythology is to validate, support, and inculcate the norms of a given, specific, moral order—that of the society in which the individual is living

And the fourth function is to carry an individual through the stages of his development.

TRACK 11: A Womb with a View: Mythology and the Stages of Development

Now the first stage is, of course, that of the child in utter dependence on his family—for twelve years. On the earlier biological levels, there is a condition comparable to this: the condition of the marsupial—you know, kangaroos, wallabies, and opossums. These are not placental animals—there is no placenta, so that the little fetus cannot remain in the womb after the yoke of the egg has been consumed. And so it must be born before it is at all mature. And after eighteen days, the little kangaroo is born, and spontaneously, through instinct, it crawls up to its mother’s pouch, attaches itself to a nipple there, which swells in its mouth so that it can’t get loose, and there it is in a second womb: a womb with a view. Now I think it is important to realize that one of the first functions of mythology is to serve as a womb with a view. And it doesn’t matter whether it makes rational sense or not. What matters is: Does it keep the little developing psyche cozy? Does it furnish it spiritual, emotional, feeling nourishment? Does it help it to grow up to be a kangaroo in our society and not in that of some other part of the universe or time of human history? The mythology has to bring this little thing to maturity; and then the aim is for the little thing to step out, to leave the myth—to be, as they say, “twice born”—to leave the myth behind.

Now one of the unfortunate things about our religious institutions is that they ask not to be left behind. They ask to keep control of you all the while. And you know what happens: it blew up back there in the fifteenth century, and it has been trying to piece the pieces together ever since. The goal is to grow out of the myth. And then, of course, as soon as you learn what your society wants you to be able to do—of course, in our world, just think of the Ph.D.: you are in the womb until you are forty-five years old. I noticed on TV, when professors are asked to answer questions, they hum and haw and [he clears his throat] and all this, and you have to got to figure out yourself whether they are having a crisis of some kind or whether they are just trying to find words for exquisite thoughts; but when a baseball player or football player is asked some very difficult question, he answers it with ease and grace. He graduated from the womb when he was nineteen and was the best pitcher in the league; but this other poor chap, he has been sitting under an auditorium of professors and, even though he’s got his Ph.D., he is still looking to make sure that they are going to give him the right credits for everything he says.

Then no sooner do you learn what you are supposed to do in your society, then you begin to drop the ball: a little stiff; it’s getting harder to do things. And they say, “Well, go sit aside”—you know, old age pensions and all that kind of thing; and you have got to find what to do with your psyche then: that’s the period of the nervous breakdown—when you go into an unprepared unconscious; and you drown there. It’s very much better, during the early years, to begin to learn what the scenery is going to be when you get down there. And then you learn: “Ah, here he is. This is God the Father.” And then you think: “Oh, yes, this is the dragon. Now I know how to kill him, and when I do, I just take a little bit of the

heart and nibble it a bit.” Then you know how to behave when you encounter these monsters.

TRACK 12: Schizophrenic Journey: Regression and Crisis

Now with that little preparation, let me tell you what I found out about the psychotic crackup through reading these works, and through then meeting a couple of real psychotics.

The first experience one can call the “regression,” the regressus. There is a sense of split—this is the way it begins: the person sees the world as two orders, and one part of it dropping away; and he is in another—it moves away. He sees himself in two roles—this is very interesting. One role, the role of the clown—that is the outer role that he plays: a joke, making little of himself, the fool, the one kicked around, the patsy. Inside, he is the savior, and he knows it.

Next, we have an experience—and this is described very vividly in a number of accounts—of terrific drop-off and regression backwards: backwards in time, biologically backwards. People have the experience of going back into animal consciousness, animal forms, back to sub-animal forms, even plant-like forms. You know the legend of Daphne, who turned into a tree: that is a psychosis. The person she couldn’t face—the life crisis—cut herself off and went back. A person goes back in his own biological past also, even back to the womb, and becomes a little… a little infant. But then, following this, and in the course of it, there come great feelings of uniting with the universe—what Freud calls “the oceanic experience”—feelings, also, of new knowledge: things that had been mysterious to you are fully understood; ineffable understandings come through; and they do—this is no fooling, these are coming through.

I’ve been amazed to read accounts of these experiences that parallel Hindu mythology perfectly. The person gets a sense of having lived many lifetimes, of having lived forever. A person has actually united his consciousness, or what’s left of it, with that consciousness of the species, the consciousness of biology, the consciousness of the rocks and plants out of which we’ve come; and he is one with this, which has indeed been forever, and—as we all have been—it goes back into this world. Then there comes a sense of a terrific task and danger to be mastered; also, of divine presences that will help one through this. And, if one has the courage to go on, there come the final crises.

TRACK 13: Schizophrenic Journey: Sacred Marriage, Father Atonement, Seeking the Center

There are four typical file crises, and these will vary according to the kind of difficulty that led the person to the experience.

For instance, a person who has been brought up in a home with very little tenderness, very little love, very little care for him, but only authority and rigor and “do this, do that,” or tumult and wrath in the house—drunken father raging around the place, all this: this person is seeking a reorientation, a re-centering in the center of love. And the culmination there will be the discovery of a center in himself of tenderness, of love; and that will be his discovery. We can call this the discovery, in terms of the image of the sacred marriage, (of) the union of the pair of opposites in the erotic loving way.

Or if it has been a household where the father has been a nothing, no force in the home at all—where there has been no sense of father authority and someone of the masculine order whom you can respect, but a kind of mess of domestic

details and feminine concerns—the quest will be for a father image. And this will be what will be found: the motif, not of the union in marriage, but of the discovery and atonement, so to say, with the father.

Another point of problem is when the child has felt himself to be excluded, a person with no family, let’s say; or a person who has been treated as though he were outside the family. I’ve noticed this occasionally when there is a second family—a marriage, and another family comes off: the excluded one, the earlier one, is outside. One seeks center, and there comes the sense of having found the center, of having been the center, and being the center. Dr. Perry told me of one case, a schizophrenic who was absolutely cut off, nobody could communicate with him at all. And this poor, mute person, he drew a little circle; and he just put his pencil in the middle of the circle. And Perry said to him “You are in the center, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”—and this started it.

TRACK 14: Schizophrenic Journey: Apotheosis and Psychosis

Now there is a very interesting example of a psychosis of this kind in the next to the last chapter of Lang’s book The Politics of Experience. It is an actual account of psychosis by an adult man who went in and out; and he gives an image of the fourth kind of crisis to come: a sense of great light; a sense of a terribly dangerous light to be encountered—ultimate illumination you might say. This is almost the Buddha light, or the light that is described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

In that work, there is a very vivid account of this ultimate crisis in the psychosis. The man imagines himself to be in a three-story house—that’s the three-story universe of the Old Testament, the old mythological image. He (is) in the middle, beneath most people—those who are not in the run of the

quest. In the middle, those seated like himself, waiting for the illumination—you might say, waiting for Godot; and above, the realm of higher power and light. And he said, “Life is a test and an opportunity to learn to make the next step on this journey and go up to the light, because,” he says, “everyone has to get to the top. And the creature at the top is God. And God is a madman. He is mad because he has total knowledge, and this is absolutely excruciating what he knows.” That is the image that in Buddhism is called the bodhisattva. That is the image of Christ crucified. That is the image of Prometheus to the rock. That is the image of Loki tied to the rock. This is the crucified one, the one who knows the sufferings of all mankind; and life is suffering, it is monstrous, it is horrendous. Can you absorb that and say “Yea” to it? That’s the final thing. That’s the final crisis. And he, at this moment, had the feeling “This is too much. I will explode.” And there’s a very thrilling passage there: he said, “I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to come out of this.’” He sat on the edge of the bed for fifteen minutes, simply pronouncing his own name, and he came out of his psychosis. This is the remission: when the thing is so terrible, and you (are) aware of where you are a little bit, there is spontaneous remission. If not, you will go through and never come back. That is what the yogi seeks who seeks release, who seeks absolute absorption in the atman as the ultimate deliquescence of ego.

TRACK 15: Schizophrenic Journey: the Return

There now comes the problem of return. There is a great sense of coming back. One can see an image of this—a very vivid one—in the Odyssey of Homer, where Odysseus has gone down: he has gone past the realm of the lotus eaters; he’s gone through the eye of the Cyclops; he’s gone into the realm of elation of Aeolus and into the realm of depression of

the Laestrygonians; and by Circe he has been introduced to the underworld, and gone past that to the world of the sun. And when he comes to the world of the sun—that image of light—the boat smashes, and the waters carry him right back home to Penelope—after a little stop off with Calypso for eight years. But he finally gets back there.

So, there comes now a reversal of the whole imagery of the regression. There it was from outside to inside, from time to eternity, from eternity to non-being; and now it goes from non-being, to eternity, from eternity to time, from past time to this time, and back.

And what is the image now? The images of rebirth, second birth: a new ego comes forth. This is an ego that is not bound in on its own little self. It is an ego that is the reflex of a larger self and carries those energies of the large instinct system into play in relation to the contemporary world. There’s no fear. You are not afraid of nature or of it’s child, society, which is just as monstrous as nature—it can’t be otherwise, wouldn’t exist otherwise. And the ego is in harmony with this, in accord with it; and these people say, “Life is richer. Life is stronger after this great crisis.”

The thing is to go through it somehow. How one goes through it without going down and cracking up, cracking off and collapsing… It doesn’t mean that you are not allowed to go crazy for a little while, but the thing is not to remain there, somehow to come back.

Now there’s always the danger of what is called “inflation,” and this is what happens to the psychotic: he identifies himself with the mythological image. The trick is to get in relationship, to get in play with it; let the energy that it carries feed you without identifying with it; to understand that we are all saviors in our functioning in relation to our friends and to

our enemies. We are savior figures, but we are not the Savior. We are all mothers and fathers, but not the Mother, the Father. We are local manifestations of these powers—certainly. Look what happens: I teach at a girl’s college just at that time when girls are beginning to find out that they are girls, and just what it does to people, for you to walk in the room. Well when these children begin to think “This is I,” are they wrong. It’s that wonderful thing they are living in, that body that’s growing up around their little egos, that’s making all the impression. The little thing living in it saying, “Oh, look what I’m doing,” is very often not very, let me say, impressive.

TRACK 16: The Divided Divine: the Young Man and the Elephant

Now, to give a little Indian story to conclude this little sermon. There’s a story of a young man who was told by his guru, by his teacher, “You are divine. You are what is known as God.” Oh, what a wonderful thing to be told, what a wonderful thing to learn. And he went and meditated on this and found himself one with eternity—Tat tvam asi, “You are It.” So, the World is It also. So, filled, elated, with this wonderful inspiration, he goes for a stroll down the road. And coming toward him is an elephant, with the paraphernalia of these beautiful elephants and all painted up; and on the back is the howdah with some people riding in it; and on the head is the mahout, the elephant driver. And the young man walking down the road, the elephant coming, and the mahout shouts, “Get out of the way.”

And he thinks, “I am God. The elephant is God. Should God get out of the way of God?”

Meanwhile, of course, the moment of truth is coming along; and these wonderful elephants… The elephant just wrapped

his trunk around this sublime creature and threw him off into the dust. Well he was injured physically, but much more deeply spiritually, and he comes back in this bebattered condition to his guru. The guru sees this coming in, and he says, “Well,” he said, “what happened to you?”

“Well,” he said, “you told me… I face… an elephant.”

“Yea.”

“You told me, ‘You are God.’”

“You are God,” says the guru.

“The elephant is God.”

“The elephant is God,” says the guru.

“Should God get out of the way of God?”

“Why didn’t you listen to the word of God calling to you from the head of the elephant to get out of the way?”

You’ve got to know what world you are moving in at the time. It’s one thing to go into bliss—sure, that’s one aspect, and it’s a darn true aspect, it’s a reality, it’s no fooling. But this is a reality too. That Cadillac coming down the way is God also. And it’s a good idea to watch out for the dual, as well as unified, aspect of this divine thing that’s the world we live in. With that little thought, thank you very much.

Lecture I.2.3 - Confrontation of East and West in Religion By Joseph Campbell

Details: Date: March 11, 1970 Venue: The Cooper Union Location: New York, NY Archive Number: L309

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TRACK 1: Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West

Well our topic tonight is the “Confrontation of East and West in Religion.” And when I was a student back in the twenties, one never would have thought that in the seventies one would be talking about religion. At that time we were all perfectly convinced that we were through with that. The science and reason… the war had been won—the First World War—the world had been made safe for the rational world of democracy, and so forth. Aldous Huxley in his first phase, Point Counterpoint, was our hero; (and) Bernard Shaw and people like that. But in the midst of all this optimism about reason and the light, there appeared a work, 1921 and (192)2, that was disturbing, and that was Spengler’s Decline of the West. And about the same time, within a span of five years, there was Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain; there was Joyce’s Ulysses; there was Eliot’s Wasteland; there was Proust’s Remembrance of

Things Past. Those were great years. But what the story of these works seemed to say was that, with all of this rational movement and progressive achievement and illumination of the dark quarters of the world, there was something beginning to disintegrate in our Occidental system itself.

And I think of these, that Spengler’s was the most disquieting. It was based on the concept of an organic continuity—a morphology of history: that a culture has its years of use, its years of fulfillment; its years then of beginning to totter and try to hold itself up with rational reasoning and organizations; and then a sort of petrifaction and decrepitude and no more life. And in this view of Spengler’s, we are at the point of passing from what he called the “culture” to the “civilization” period—which is to say, from a period of spontaneous and wonderful creativity to a period of anxious formulations and the beginning of the end.  When he sought for analogies in the Classical world, our moment today in the mid-twentieth century corresponded to that of the classical world in the second century B.C.—the period of the Carthaginian Wars; the decline of the culture world of Greece and the rise of Rome, Caesarism; and what he called the “Second Religiousness”-—politics based on providing the people with bread and circuses; and a general tendency toward violence and brutality in the arts and pastimes of people.

Well this came out in the twenties, and it has been something of a life experience to watch the not-so-gradual coming into fulfillment of the world that Spengler wrote about. And I can remember we used to sit around and discuss this, and try to find how you

could beat it down, and try to find what the positive things were in this moment of crisis and transition. And Spengler himself said that in the period of transition from culture to civilization there is a dropping of the culture forms. This is astonishing to be teaching today students that find the whole history of our civilization irrelevant: the forms are “dropped”—now that’s the word they use. And they don’t seem to have the will to encompass it all: kind of, one thinks—on the negative side—a kind of failure of will. But then one thinks about the matter in another way, and thinks of the concatenation of new problems and new influences to be absorbed. And one can then understand that the energies are brought forward here; and perhaps we could think of Spengler’s concept: not only are we dropping the culture forms, but we are beginning to shape the civilization forms and this is a great moment on that head.

TRACK 2: Frobenius: the Three Stages of Human Development

And then there was another author who thought of civilization and culture in terms of morphological processes, and this was Frobenius, whose name is anathema among our American Anthropological Society people. His concept was of three great total stages in the human development. The first, a primitive stage, as we call it—before the emergence of the high culture forms with monumental art and literate philosophy and historical writings, with developed mathematics, and so forth; that second stage, of the literate civilizations, beginning about the middle of the fourth millennium B.C.—what he

called “the monumental stage”; but then this wonderful moment of ours, as I pointed out in my first talk here in this series, that of a global world: no longer the little province-oriented civilizations—when you think how tiny the Egyptian, how tiny the Mesopotamian, how tiny the Indian, the Chinese, the European in comparison with this global world that we are in now—Frobenius  had the idea that we were in the beginning of another great, and perhaps, final phase that would last for thousands of years of the human race. And that seemed to be very exciting as well. And so I confront this problem with these two men in my mind, and think of this as being a moment, so to say, in the life course of humanity itself: passing from the period of maturity to a period of age—with a new kind of wisdom which comes with age—which we, whether we are young or old, now have to function to serve as organs of this great, great, new stage in our civilization. And with this the case, what we notice when we turn to the world of religion is a most fantastic disequilibrium.

TRACK 3: The East Speaks to Us Today

All of the traditional religions are in great disorder. Their concepts do not hold. And yet there is a very great religious fervor, not only among young people, but older people as well. The religious fervor however is in a mystical direction. And the teachers who seem to be saying most to many, are those who’ve come from a world that was formerly thought of as inconsequential in this great human development, a world that had dropped off and represented only

archaic and outgrown modes of thinking. We have the teachers from India, we have the teachers from Japan, and we have also the old Chinese sages-- all of these saying something to us.

Now last week I spoke of the disintegration of a psyche in the West in terms of schizophrenia, where not being able to keep up with the demands of the outside part of our civilization—that is to say, what is called the “establishment” or the “institutions” which make terrific demands on us—a person cracks off and sinks into the abyss of his psyche and gets lost there. And I pointed out that what he encounters there are exactly the archetypal forms and motifs that are the basic forms and motifs of the religious traditions of the world. And I said, and I’ll say again, that these forms are the same everywhere. Basically the archetypes of religion, the archetypes of meditation, the archetypes of schizophrenic discovery in the interior of the psyche are the same everywhere. But they are given different emphases in different parts of the world. Why is it that the emphases that have been given to these in the East are saying more to most of us today than the emphases that were given in the West? This is a little point I’d like to discuss at the opening now of this talk.

TRACK 4: The Plains Indians and the Extermination of the Buffalo

I think of a very interesting analogy to our contemporary situation, which occurred on the

American plains—the American Indian plains—in the 1880s and (18)90s. As you possibly remember, that was the time—hardly 100 years ago—when the railroad was put across the plains, and the buffalo killers were sent out to kill off the buffalo herds to make way for the new world of planting culture that was moving into the great plains—the wheat growers, instead of the buffalo killers. And another function of this killing off of the buffalo was to deprive the Plains Indians of their food supply, so that they would really have to submit to life on the reservations and be corralled and put away.  And the Indians then were deprived of what had been the central symbol of their plains religions: namely, the buffalo. The relationship of the human community to the animal community which supplied its food was the central pivotal thought of the social religion of these people; and with the buffalo gone, the basic image was gone, and the society no longer had the capacity to integrate the individual with nature and his life through the mythological symbols of the cult. The religion was suddenly archaic within four years; and it was then that the peyote cult—the mescal cult—came up from Mexico and flooded over the plains with a great, great success. Many accounts… And they would eat the buttons… There would be a great lodge; everybody would gather in the lodge with prayers and chants and so forth; and then they would start eating these mescal buttons, and seek within themselves what had been lost to them in the society.

TRACK 5: Mythological Symbols: Turning You On

Now as I said last week, the function of a mythological symbol is to awaken the energies of life. It is an energy-awakening and releasing sign. Not only does it awaken your own life energies and make life something that turns you on, as we say today, but it turns you on in a certain direction which makes you function in the context of the society. Now when the symbols are no longer associated with the social order, but have cracked off, the zeal of the individual is disassociated from the society—there takes place a sort of pathology of the symbol. Now Dr. John Perry, whom I mentioned last week in connection with the schizophrenia, uses a term: “affect image.” This is exactly the counterpart of the phrase I have been using “an energy-awaking and directing sign.” A mythological symbol is an affect image. It is an image that hits you in a place where it counts. It doesn’t talk to the brain and have to be interpreted. It talks directly to the psyche so that there is an immediate response. There is a resonance within you to the image. We won’t try to discuss how that comes about—there are many theories and many ways of explaining this—but it is a fact that mythological symbols when properly rendered, turn you on.  When rendered in a social context that is alive, it relates you to the society and turns the whole society on. When the symbols no longer are effective, there is a disassociation of the individual from the society. Now there can be a drop out here.

TRACK 6: The Four Functions of Mythology

A mythological symbol serves four main functions as I pointed out last week. The first is that of relating

you to the ultimate mystery of existence. Existence is mysterious, and that’s the wonder of it. It is monstrous, and that’s the marvel of it.

The second thing the mythological imagery does is present a total image of the universe; but that total image of the universe must be up to date. A religion that carries a symbol system that is four thousand years old is not going to turn anybody on. It’s got to be in relationship to this fabulous universe that we experience today. In that sense our traditional religions have dropped off. How about the Orient? Anyone who has read any of the Oriental myths and images of the universe has read of a cosmos with galaxies and galaxies—in fact, the cosmos that we have. Furthermore, that imagery is simply to relate you to the marvel of the universe. Whereas in our tradition, the universe is simply the cloak of a divine being who is outside of it, in the Orient the divinity is right in the universe itself.

The third function of a traditional mythology is to validate and maintain a certain social order: this specific social order in which you are functioning. The social order that is represented in our tradition is quite archaic. We are in flux as far as our morals are concerned. The problems of today are not those of the first and second centuries B.C. They’re totally different; and those commandments and so forth that we carry with us as luggage, just don’t convince. And anyone who stands up to talk about them is just not talking to today. Our society is secular, not religiously based. The order of law is not divinely inspired. It is arranged by people reasonably sitting down and saying what would be a reasonable aim for

life and how do we achieve it: what kind of institutions would achieve it? So there is a secularization of our society, a secularization of our universe. And two of the functions of mythology have been taken over by the secular sciences.

The fourth function is the psychological one of carrying a person through the crisis of his life, and that’s now the function of psychology. Clergymen are going to psychoanalysts to learn how to carry on their pastoral function of advising people in their psychological developments.

So, just as for the American Indian—the buffalo dropped away, and with it their public social mythology—so for us: the world has moved past, and our mythology has dropped off, and we are turned inward; and the Oriental people are the ones who are teaching us how to turn inward in this adventurous quest of finding again those images in ourselves, which the society can no longer render to us.

TRACK 7: Martin Buber: an Anecdote

Now let me tell three little anecdotes to illustrate the problem of East and West in religion.

Back some fifteen years ago, Dr. Martin Buber was over here in the United States lecturing; and a group of scholars like myself, who were interested in comparative religions, were invited to hear a special series of lectures in one of the rooms up at Columbia. And this eloquent little man—he’s a remarkably small man with, however, a magnificent presence: he had

this charisma people talk about; and when you realize that English was his second language, it was almost incredible to imagine a man lecturing with such eloquence and fluency and zeal. But I was becoming—as he was lecturing about the history of the Old Testament and the Hebrew people—I was becoming more and more unable to understand what he meant by a certain word he was using. So, to tell you ahead of time, the word was “God.” I didn’t know what he meant by this word— whether he meant that mystery which is somehow thought of as responsible for this magnitudinous universe; or that specific local character, Yahweh, whom one encounters in the Old Testament; or some kind of person with whom Martin Buber himself had conversations. Because he said at one moment—he broke off his talk, and he looked pained—and he said, “It pains me to speak of God in the third person.” (laughter)

Well when I communicated that little remark to another Jewish philosopher from Tel Aviv, he said,   “Sometimes he goes too far.” (laughter)

So, with this word slipping around like that, I had the impudence to raise my hand; and he very generously looked at me and said, “What is it?” I said, “Dr. Buber, there is a word being used here this evening I do not understand.” “What is that word, Mr. Campbell?” I said, “God.” Well, his eyes opened, and he said, “You don’t know what God means?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know what you mean by God. You’re telling us this evening that God has hidden his face, that God no longer shows himself to man. But I have just come from India…” And I had been there the year before and just come back. …and I said ,

“people there are experiencing God there all the time.” And he looked, and his hands went out, and he said, “Do you mean to compare?” And at that moment, Dr. Taubes, who was the emcee, cut in, and he said, “No, doctor…” Don’t say this, you know. “Mr. Campbell just wants to know what you mean.” (laughter)

Well, Dr. Buber, he sort of backed away and took a second stride, and he was going to wipe the whole thing off, and he just said, “Well, everybody has to come out of his exile in his own way.”

Well that was an awkward remark, because the Orient is not in exile from its God: the God is imminent within you. He isn’t out there; and you haven’t been cut off. You’re not cut off. The only point is you don’t know how to turn in and get to it. It’s nobody’s fault but your own; and the problem is not a problem of Fall and atonement, or exile and coming out of exile. It’s a psychological problem totally, and it can be solved. This is fantastic—this difference. And that story just got into me, and I said, when Johnson Fairchild asked me to talk here, “This is the story that’s going to help me to communicate the difference.” But I have another story.

TRACK 8: A Hindu Perspective on the Bible

A little Indian—Hindu—friend of mine who was here in New York for a number of years, he was a very pious Indian. He was a worshiper of Vishnu. And he came to me one day, and he said, “You know, when I visit a foreign country, I like to acquaint myself with

their religion.” And he said, “So I bought myself a Bible. And I began reading the Bible, starting at the beginning.” And now comes the word. He says, “I can’t find any religion in it.” (laughter) Now, I dare to tell that story after having told Dr. Buber’s. This is reciprocal disregard. What is for one, “religion,” is for the other, “not religion.” Well I knew quite a bit about Hinduism; I knew quite a bit about Biblical religion; and I said to my little friend—and he was a little chap—I said, “Well, I can understand that.” Because if you don’t have the idea that the history of the Jewish race is a religion—is a religious story—but just the history of that race, well then, there isn’t much religion in the Bible for you. When I tell this story to my friends—I like to tell it to them—they say, “Well what about the Psalms?” Well, from a Hindu standpoint, turn and read the Psalms. What they say for the most part is: “God, you are on my side, and you are going to knock my enemies around.” And this is just the opposite to what a Hindu would think of as a religious sentiment.

TRACK 9: The East: Identification with the Divine

In the East, the ultimate divine mystery is absolutely beyond personification, absolutely beyond naming, absolutely beyond categories. You cannot ask, “Is God merciful, just, wrathful? Does he like these people and not those?” This is anthropomorphic projection of human sentiments on an ultimate mystery. But that mystery which is absolutely transcendent is the mystery of your being as well: it is completely imminent within you. And you have that saying from the Chåndogya Upanishad: tat tvam asi, “you are it.” But not the “you” that you name,

that your friends like to talk to, that came and went, that you are holding on to, that you are protecting: that is not it. So there’s a dual meditation: neti neti, “not that, not that”—not anything I can name. And when you have erased everything about yourself that you cherish, that you would protect, you come to the realization of your identity with that anonymous being which is the being of all things. And the Gods, who are simply personifications for your thinking: they don’t exist. Personifications of the powers of nature are personifications of those same powers, because you are a thing of nature within yourself.

I remember a talk by Suzuki once, where he started by contrasting the Western with the Eastern point of view with respect to God and man and society. And this is the way he started:  “Man against God. God against man. Man against nature. Nature against man. God against nature. Nature against God.” He said, “You’ve got these things split apart, split up.” In the East, these are all phantasmagoric reflexes of that ultimate mystery which transcends all and cannot be named. But we’ve named our God. The aim of these Oriental religions is to experience your identity with that which is the ultimate mystery of all being; your identity with it, not as a concept—I can deliver that to you here; but to have an experience and a realization deep within you of your identity with that divine power, and then to move and live on that. The word “Buddha” simply means “one who has waked up”: waked up to the fact that he is that divine Buddha consciousness, basically, and that his value is his power to radiate that consciousness—just as the value of a bulb is the power to radiate light, so

is that our value; and what’s important about the bulb isn’t the glass, it’s the light. And what’s important about us isn’t the body and the nerves, it’s the light that shines through them.  And when you live for that instead of for protecting the bulb, you are in Buddha consciousness.

We don’t have that idea. In the Biblical religion, God made the world, God made man, and they’re not identical. In fact, the preaching of identity is the prime heresy in this tradition of ours. When Christ said, “I and the Father are one,” he was crucified for that. When Hallaj, nine hundred years later, said the same thing in Islam—“I and my beloved are one”—he was crucified for that. Whereas, that is the whole point in the East.

TRACK 10: The West: Relationship to the Divine

So what do our religions ask for us, or give to us? Not the experience of identity with God, because that is the heresy—that’s the mystical thing, and that’s why our religions are afraid of the mystic: he comes out with this realization. In our religions, we are given a chance to relate to God—a relationship to God. And how is the relationship established? Through a certain, specific, holy society. In Judaism, God has a covenant with a certain people. How does one become a member of that group? It was defined yesterday and printed in the paper this morning: by being born of a Jewish mother and by honoring the covenant. And nobody else is in on that. And that is the only relationship to God that God himself has

initiated and cherishes. And in the Christian religion what is it? Christ is true God and true Man. That’s supposed to be a miracle here. In the East that’s true of everybody. So this is incarnation number nine billion, nine billion, nine billion thousand, and so on. Through our humanity, we are related to Christ’s humanity; through his divinity, he relates us to God. Well how do we get into relationship to Christ? Through a social order, through Baptism, through membership in his church: again, the social situation. Our whole introduction to the images, the archetypes, of the soul, of mythology, is through these two claims of two social groups. And both of those claims have been disqualified today, and everybody knows it.

TRACK 11: The Problem of Churches and Temples

Now, what is the problem about churches and our temples? Do they have to disintegrate? Can’t they help people anymore? Of course they can help people. They can help people by giving them these symbols. The rite, the ritual, is what counts in a religion. A ritual is an opportunity to participate in the archetypes of the soul. A ritual is a manifestation and ordered organization of mythological symbols; and by participating in the rite, you participate in these symbols. Where the churches and synagogues go wrong is by telling you what the symbols mean. The main thing is that they should be there. Now look at what’s happening in the Catholic Church. They had—past tense—one of the strongest, most magnificent, ritual situations in the modern Western world. Now they have vulgarized it. They’re translating it into English—not very good English. It

was in great Latin. And when you are in a church, and this Latin comes out—and if you want to know what it means, it’s on the other side of your prayer book, so what do you have to have it translated for? A person’s notion of God is a function of his own spiritual magnitude. And so just because everybody mentions the same name—I mean, Christian’s all say Jesus, and the Jews say Yahweh—no two of them have the same concept of God. They can’t; there are different capacities there. So we have this total conflict and distinction.

TRACK 12: Bhagavad Gætå: the Yogas of Philosophy and Psychological Transformation

Now having made that point—and I think I have—let me say a word about what you do positively to bring these things into action in your life; and I’ll start by saying a word about the Indian methods, and then try to show what we require that the Indian doesn’t give. The great text of the Indian tradition, of course, is the Bhagavad Gætå; and there four yogas are taught. Yoga simply means “yoking the mind to the source of the mind”: consciousness to the source of consciousness. And one yoga is the yoga simply of philosophizing. And this consists in distinguishing the subject of knowledge from the object of knowledge. I know my body: I am not my body, I am the witness. I know my thoughts: I am not my thoughts, I am the witness. I know my emotions: I am not my emotions, I am the witness. With that you can drive yourself out of the back of the room. (laughter) And then the Buddha comes along with one more blow: he says, “There is no witness either.” (laughter) That’s the way of jñāna , as it’s called, or philosophizing.

Then there’s the way of a sort of psychological gymnastics: that yoga where you sit in the lotus posture and breath in through your right nostril and hold, and out through your left, and then in through the left and hold—all this kind of business—awaking the kundalini energy of the psyche, bringing it up and all that. This is an exercise, a kind of psychological exercise that brings about transformations of your psychological character.

TRACK 13: Bhagavad Gætå: the Yoga of Devotion

Then there’s another kind of yoga, which corresponds to our worship: it’s the yoga of devotion. You live with devotion to some being who amounts to your god. Now an old lady came in to see Ramakrishna one day, and she said, “Master, I find I don’t love God. I just have to admit it to myself: I don’t love God.” That was a very good religious act. And he said, “Well is there anything you love at all?” She said, “I love my little nephew.” He says, “There you are: in your service to your nephew, that’s your god.” This goes back to a story of Krishna with the cowherds. They’re going to have a ceremony of worship to worship the Lord of Heaven. He says, “That’s not your god. Worship your cows. That’s where your devotion is. That’s what you honestly revere. Worship your cows.”

There are five degrees of worship. The first is that of servant to master: “Oh Lord, you are the master, I am your servant; tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.” That’s the norm for religious attitudes. The second is

the attitude of friend to friend: “Oh Lord, you are my friend.” That’s the attitude, for instance, of the apostles to Jesus; that’s the attitude of Arjuna and the Pandavas to Krishna when he was among them—this is a higher degree of religious capacity. The third is the level of parent to child, where the God is the child: that’s the mood of the Christmas crib; that’s the mood of taking care of your little nephew; that’s the mood of cultivating this little infant, which is your concept of divinity, and bringing it to adulthood and fulfillment. The fourth love is the love of husband for wife and wife for husband: this is the way of the nun who wears the ring of her devotion to Christ; it’s the way of husband and wife—or properly should be. And then what would the fifth and highest form be? The highest form of love is illicit love,. With illicit love you have sacrificed the reputation that you have in society; you have sacrificed your place; you have sacrificed your virtue; you have sacrificed everything for love. And as Ramakrishna says, “If you love God that way, you can say, ‘God, I have given up everything for you, now come through and show yourself.’” And he says, “He’ll do it.” “Or,” he says, “She’ll do it.”  Because God can be either male or female. I mean to think of God as finally… even in the world of biology, sex doesn’t come along until about ten billion years after life gets started. So this little quibble as to whether you think of God as male or female doesn’t count. So these are the loves.

TRACK 14: Bhagavad Gætå: the Yoga of Action

And then there’s finally the great way of action. This is the great yoga of the Gætå. When Arjuna is about to engage in battle, is about to initiate a battle, he has… The God drives him between the battle lines, and when he sees the men whom he admires on the two sides, and realizes he’s about to precipitate a battle and their deaths, he drops his bow, and he says, “Better that I should die here than that I should initiate this battle.” And Krishna says, “Whence this ignoble cowardice? What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know that you are a noble, that protection of justice and virtue is your function? Don’t you know that those lives are mere phenomenal apparitions and that you can’t do anything that I haven’t already done?” And then Krishna shows himself as the Lord of the World, with those two armies flying into his mouth and crashing like grapes over his tusks. He has many arms, many heads: he’s suddenly transformed into a monster. And Arjuna’s hair rising, he says,  “Who are you?” And he says, “I am black time come here for the annihilation of these armies. Get in there and do what has been done, seen to be doing. Perform your duty. Now!” That duty concept in the Orient means duty as given you by your caste. Arjuna was a noble, his duty was to fight.

TRACK 15: The Guru in the West

In the West we don’t think that way anymore, and this is why the Oriental guru concept doesn’t quite work here and can’t. Our notion of a mature individual is of a person who does not accept the sheer dictates of society as a child accepts them from a parent, but one who through his own judgment—and I mean experienced judgment, not

simply having gone to freshman class and heard that this is good and that’s bad, and then coming out on Professor Bebop’s side—but through your own experience, to have come to a mature judgment, a value judgment. You are then to work in terms of your own self-responsible judgment. And duty here does not mean what it means in the Orient. It does not mean accepting what’s given to you. It means evaluating, developing an ego principle, which is the principle of observation of the empirical environment, your relationship to it, and making a judgment. That in the East is anathema. Just as here, in our religions, the notion “I am the eternal” is the great negative thing that we don’t recognize, so in the East, the idea of the individual with a peculiar destiny of his own is a concept that does not exist. Freedom—the word “freedom,” moksha  in Sanskrit—means freedom from being anybody: liquidating your ego. Our idea is not liquidation of ego. Our idea is dissociating the ego principle from the little pleasure principle, and having it objective, and transcending egoism through the judgments of your ego function—quite different idea. And many of my professor friends tell me students these days, they don’t want a teacher, they want a guru. The guru accepts responsibility for the student’s life—for the student’s moral life. The student tries to be like the guru. Well I answer my professor friends and say, “No, that isn’t true, because they don’t have the virtue of an Oriental student.” The virtue of an Oriental student is sradha, absolute faith in the guru. I said I’ve never taught a student West of Suez who had absolute faith in his professor. Criticism, judgment—that’s what we ask for, and the student brings it. So this is a more

complicated situation than that other. Nevertheless, reading these Oriental works, coming in touch with that Oriental world, awakens in us the notion of how the inward way can be followed, how it can be brought forward up into action.

TRACK 16: We Dance: Getting Through the Concept System

Now, approaching my conclusion I have one more little anecdote; and this is again about East and West, and it is the clue to how the East can really talk to us in what seems to me to be a most instructive way. I was over in Japan at a big congress, an International Congress of the History of Religions; and one of our leading philosophers here in New York—a charming gentlemen, who knew very little about the Orient, but he was over there to represent the West—he had gone with us to many Shinto rites… the Japanese Shinto religion. And he had visited many Shinto shrines. And in the Congress were many Shinto priests; one named Hirei, a very learned and wonderful gentleman, spoke English very well. And our friend said to him, he said, “You know, I’ve been to a good many of your ceremonies now, and I’ve seen a good many of your shrines, but,” he said, “I don’t get the ideology. I don’t get the theology.” Well Japanese don’t like to disappoint you, and so Hirei just went, “Hsss, ahhh, tss… We don’t have ideology. We don’t have theology. We dance.” (laughter) Now what that means is that they have gone past the concept system, and that’s what we’ve got to do. They’ve gone through that to significant imaging. And the art image transcends meaning. You ask any

artist “What’s your picture mean?” and he’d give you a look. It’s it itself. If that doesn’t talk to you, you haven’t got your wires right. You don’t ask what a dance means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what the world means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what you mean, you enjoy it. But it’s all horrendous, you know that too. Life eats life. Life is terrific, and that is all part of the joy of it. It’s through your active imagination that you bring up out of your abyss those concepts which you meet in dream and vision—bring them into your life, while you hold yourself to the world in which you are. You may break off, temporarily, for the purpose of getting deeper in touch, but anyone who breaks off with the thought of not coming back has really lost the boat. He can flounder… you can go up to Connecticut and buy a dog and a pipe and, you know… (laughter) …do little pictures, and then think ten thousand years from now these will be discovered, and these will be the ones. This you can do, play that game. But to be in the play of this wonderful moment... 

TRACK 17: The Face of Glory: Shiva and the Nature of Life

And now to conclude I want to give one more Indian myth, and it’s a myth that has to do with the nature of life. Shiva, the great God, had a beautiful Goddess as his spouse, Parvati. And a demon came to him one time and demanded Shiva to hand over Parvati to him. Well, all Shiva did—he didn’t say a word, he was speechless—he just opened that eye in the middle of his forehead, and “Poof!”—a lightning blast came out, and there was on the scene another demon, who had come out of the blast. This was a lean demon with a lion-like head and hair waving to the quarters

of the world, and his nature was hunger. And he was there to eat up the first demon. Well the first demon thought: “What do I do now?” And so, he threw himself on Shiva’s mercy. Now when you throw yourself on a God’s mercy, that God’s got to take care of you. So the God had to take care of the monster. And so the hungry monster said, “Well, whom do I eat?” And Shiva said, “Eat yourself.” So indeed he started to work. He started with his feet, and he came right up the line, and when his teeth went chopping right through his belly, right on up through  his neck, until all that was left was a face. Shiva was enchanted. This was a perfect image of life which lives on life—and the monstrous, horrendous aspect of life. And this mask, which is all that was left, Shiva said, “I will call you Kirtimukha, face of glory. And you will sit above the door to my temple. And anyone who doesn’t worship you, anyone who doesn’t admit life is monstrous and glorious and can’t be changed—that’s the way it is— can’t come to knowledge of me.” The first point of knowledge and illumination is the recognition of the world as is. And then it’s this golden, golden world. And people who think: “Oh, correct the world first, and then I’ll be illuminated. Then I can get my own psyche.” The sort of thing that Lang is saying: “Correct the society, and then correct yourself.” All societies are evil. All societies are sorrowful. All societies have inequities. But your point—your main point—is to be illuminated. Recognize things that way, then go to work if you want, but that is the first recognition. Now this is the great lesson: the horrendous nature of life, and the glorious character of it—in that monstrous Kirtimukha over the shrines. You can’t

really know the God until you know that, recognize it, and humbly pass through it.

Lecture I.2.4 - Imagery of Rebirth YogaBy Joseph Campbell

TRACK 1:  The Sun and the Moon: Two Orders of Rebirth

In my first talk, I tried to suggest something of what seemed to me to be the function served by traditional mythology, saying also something of the way in which our own tradition has sort of slipped, so that the communication is not as effective as it might be. And I tried also at that time to suggest something of the distinction between the Oriental and Occidental ideals of the life, the ideal life of the individual, first in relation to society, and then in relation to self discovery. And then last evening, I was speaking principally about the difficulties when a tradition, as it seems to me is the case with ours, is not rendering its message, how one may fall away from this, and I took the phenomenology of schizophrenia as an example. Now with the schizophrenic, you have a person drowning, sort to say, in the ocean of the imagery of the instinct system.  What I want to talk about today is the miracle of the person who knows how to swim in this.

And when we come to the question of rebirth, the image of rebirth is of two main orders-- that which is symbolized, sort to say, in the moon which dies and is resurrected, and is the chief symbol of this miracle of rebirth in time-- the moon sheds its shadow as a serpent sheds its skin. And so the serpent plays the role also as a symbol of this same principle of the life which is reborn from its own death. The moon, the horns of the moon, are seen rendered in the horns of the bull. And so the bull in traditional mythology also is associated with this symbology of death and

rebirth. And the sacrificial bull, the sacrifice of the bull, is symbolic of the sacrifice of that mortal part in us which leads to the release of the eternal.

Now the other idea of rebirth is that of not coming back at all, not being reborn here, but passing beyond the spheres of rebirth altogether to a transcendent light. And the typical image for this is the sun. The sun is all light. The moon carries darkness within it, but wherever the sun goes, there is no darkness, there are only the shadows of those forces that do not open to its light. And so the image of the sun door speaks of another time of rebirth-- the return of the lost one, the one lost in the sphere of shadows and time to that eternal root which is his own great root. The animal symbolic of this, as the bull is symbolic of the moon, is the lion with his great radiant solar face. And as the sun rising quenches the moon and quenches the stars, so the lion roar sends the grazing animals scattering. And the lion pouncing on the bull, which is a motif that you will see in primitive art, particularly in the Middle East, and Persian art, is symbolic of this business of the sun rising and quenching the moon.

In contrast to the serpent, we have the eagle, which is the solar bird. And so we have these parallels-- eagle against serpent, lion against bull, sun against moon. The great mythological figures of the early mythologies of the vegetal rebirth of life every year, coming back, coming back-- such figures as Tamuz, (71) Adonis and Osirus are associated primarily with the bull symbol. But when we come to a figure like the Buddha, who represents the transcendence of all reincarnation whatsoever, we have the lion symbol.

And if you look at the Buddha thrones in the art of India, you will see it is a lion’s throne. And the Buddha’s message is said to be the lion roar. Now what I want to talk about today is how to learn to roar like a lion. 

TRACK 2:  Yoga: a DefinitionThe great first text in yoga, the prime classical text is called The Yoga Sutras. “Sutras” is a word related to the  word “suture,” thread, when the doctor sews you up after an operation is a suture-- that’s the same root as the Sanskrit “sutra.” The Yoga Sutra is a kind of summary textbook of the main laws and principles of yoga. It is ascribed to a semi-legendary figure named Patanjali (89)-- Anjaly is this posture, _____(Patak)(90) means fall, and the name is said to come from the fact that when a great saint brought his hands together, this particular Saint Patanjali, fell in the form of a small serpent and was caught in the hands of the Saint who became his guru-- now you can take that or leave it.

The first aphorism of The Yoga Sutras is a definition of yoga, and I will give this as an opening suggestion. “Yoga is the intentional stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind.” The word is actually mind-stuff, mind-substance. Yoga is the intentional stopping of the spontaneous action or activity of the mind stuff. The notion is that within the gross matter of the mind, there is a subtle substance that takes the forms of what we experience. We see each other here because there is an echo in this substance in our minds which takes the forms of what we see and hear as well. And when you move your eyes quickly you can see how rapidly this substance changes

form. Now the difficulty is that it will not stop changing form. Even when we want to rest in one thought, the mind goes rippling on. You can test it for yourself, put your watch down, and decide to hold in your mind one thought, or one image for fifteen seconds. And you will find that almost immediately you are having associated thoughts-- you are not fixed on one thought.

Now the goal of yoga is to make this mind-substance stop moving that way. And you may ask yourself “Well what is the point of this?” The point is illustrated by analogy with the surface of a pond blown by a wind. When the pond surface ripples, and you look into it as though you were looking into a mirror, all you see are broken forms. The clouds above are not perfectly reflected. The trees round about are all broken up. And so it is when our mind is in movement, like the rippling surface of a pond, all that we see are broken images. But let the wind be still, and the water cleared of all sediment, and you will see perfectly reflected the forms which formerly had been only broken in your experience. And so it is when the mind is stilled in yoga, all these broken reflections which we are, are gathered back to the image of which we are the broken reflections. And one sees not only the reflected sky, but also down into the water depth, down into the water depth of one’s own being, and the image beheld then is the form of forms,  that form which in all of us is broken. Now when this is experienced, the fascination is completely absorbing. And it may be such that the one who beholds it would not wish to return to see the broken forms again-- then he remains in that fixed contemplation, and as they say, the body drops

off. He has been returned to union with that which he indeed is. That which we call our ego, that which we think of as ourselves, is but the broken reflection of that which is our true self. And the discovery of that true self, is the recovery of union with our own being.

The meaning of the word “yoga,” it is from a Sanskrit root yug(149)  which means “to yoke,” to yoke something to something else, to yoke your daily waking consciousness to the radiant solar consciousness, which is called in the Buddhist tradition, the Buddha consciousness. 

TRACK 3:  Kundalini Yoga: Awakening the Coiled SerpentNow in the early Medieval period in India, a very richly interpreted and experienced system of yoga called the “Kundalini Yoga” was developed. Kundalini means “coiled up one,” and it is a feminine noun. What it refers to is the spiritual energy of the individual, which is conceived of as the serpent biting its tail in the form of the Ouroboros (161). At the root of the spine, so that the energy which ought to come up the spine and suffuse our whole being, is lost to us-- it is simply, as it were, in seed at the root of our body. And the goal of this yoga is to wake that serpent and carry it up the spine.

Now you’ve all seen pictures of yogis and you know how the thing goes. One is supposed to sit in something like a lotus posture, perfect balance with meditating gaze just about at the plane of the nose, so that you are not distracted outward, nor lost inward. And then you begin to breathe very regularly, the regular breathing, settling and steadying the thought. You are to breathe in through the right nostril for a certain number of beats

assigned by your guru, and imagine that breath is going right down the spine, clearing your channel. And then you breathe out after holding breath for a certain number of counts through the left nostril, imagining the breath is coming up through the left side of the spine. Then you breathe in through the left nostril and so on.

While this is going on, that breath is suffusing the body, actually changing the chemical systems a little bit, something like what LSD does, and activating the serpent. Now the serpent starts up. There are from the root of the spine, to the crown of the head, inclusive, seven points. And at each of these points which are called lotuses, or wheels, there is a transformation of the whole personality and psychology of the individual practicing this yoga.

In the last century, there was a very great yogi who’s name was Rama Krishna, who was a sort of virtuoso in bringing the kundalini serpent up the spine. And his devotees would say to him “Oh master, how is it when the kundalini comes up the spine, how does it feel?”  Well he said “Sometimes it feels like a mouse scampering up. Sometimes it’s like a monkey jumping from branch to branch. And as he  comes to these lotuses, these lotuses which are hanging limp. As they are touched they open and they shimmer and shine.” Then they would ask “Oh master, how is it at the second center”, the third, the fourth, the fifth.” And as he would get up toward the sixth and seventh, he would go into ecstasy and pass out and not be able to say very much about it.

Now not being a yoga, but only a scholar, I am going to be able to tell you what goes on as you go up the

seventh chakra, and that is my purpose this afternoon. 

TRACK 4:  The First Three Chakras: Governing Outward-Directed LifeThe first chakra at the root is called Muladhara, which means “root based.” At this level, the energy, the spiritual energy is simply, as they say, gripping, holding. It has no joy, it has no ecstasy, but it won’t give up. This is just sheer being, hanging on to being. I think, when I think of this, as a kind of dragon. Dragons you know, we have a good deal of biology and zoology about the dragon, we know their habits. The dragon tends to guard things. And he usually has these guarded in a cave. And when you take a kind of count of what he tends to guard, it happens to be either beautiful girls or gold, or both.  Now dragons don’t know what to do either with beautiful girls or with gold, but they just hang on. There are people like this-- we call them creeps.

Now the second chakra, this is called spahistana (233), her favorite resort. You must know that this serpent is a female serpent-- it represents energy. And in the Indian system, the active energizing principle is regarded as female. And the languid one, the one that wants just to be let alone, is the masculine. Now this active female serpent is on the way up to join her spouse in the lotus at the crown of the head. The second lotus then is called “her favorite resort.” And this, as you will probably have guessed, is at the level of the sex organs. At this level, one’s whole psychology is Freudian. All the aims of one’s life are really symbolic of one’s sexual desire. And all of one’s frustrations are interpreted in

these terms. So that on the level of the second chakra we can say, Freudian psychology is perfectly acceptable-- that’s okay at this level.

The third chakra is called manipura {252)  which means the “city of the shining jewel.” And this is at the level of the navel. I don’t know whether you were about very much this summer, but I had the notion that this was the year of the manipura. At the level of the navel, the whole aim of life is to consume things, to ingest it, to make it your own. This is the level of the will to power, the will to dominate, the will to win. Or ________(Adlerian)(262) psychology, or the Nietzschean will to power.

Now according to the Indian view, these three first chakras are the chakras on which normal human life and history are based. These are the urges that govern life outward directed. All the aims of life, all the fulfillments of life, are the result of outward directed energies and actions. These are the levels of what I’ve thought of as natural materially-oriented man. 

TRACK 5:  The Fourth Chakra: Meeting of the Religious MysteryAnd now we come to the fourth chakra, which is at the level of the heart. You know in religion, the heart is the important level. It is here, as they say, that the devotee’s hands touch the feet of the Lord. This is the point of  first meeting with the religious mystery. The experience of life on the first three levels has really no valid religious claims, it is only at this level that this begins. And the name of this chakra is anahata.  That literally translated means “not hit.” What it means is, the sound that is not made by two things striking together. All the sounds that we hear

are made by two things striking together. My voice, the sound of the air striking the laryngial chords.

Now what is the sound that is not made by two things striking together, which is heard when the kundalini reaches the fourth chakra. This is the sound of the energy of which the world is a precipitation. It is antecedent to things. As we know now from our modern physics, the material world is a precipitation of energy, the atom explosions have proven that. And matter is simply, as it were, solidified energy. Well the energy antecedent to the apparition of matter has a sound, and that is the sound that is not made by two things striking together. And what is that sound? That sound is aum.  

TRACK 6:  AUM: the Four Letter SoundNow in Sanskrit, the syllable aum, the sound o is analyzed into two sounds, a and u joined, au, uh, um. You see this written om and sometimes aum. When written aum, it is called the four letter sound. Now I’m going to explain what the four letters are. When you pronounce this syllable a starts in the back of the mouth, u  sound fills the mouth cavity, and then m  it closes at the lips. You move the sound mass forward. All words therefore are simply fragments of aum. This includes all the sounds of all words. Consonants are regarded simply as stops. All the vowel sounds are included in aum when it is properly pronounced.  Thus, all the words and their meanings, all the sounds that we hear, are broken inflections of aum, just we are all broken inflections of that one image. Aum is the sound value of that image.

Now that is allegorically interpreted as follows-- a is associated with what is called “waking consciousness.” That is the state of most of us here. When consciousness is awake, what one sees seems to be separate from oneself-- subject and object are separate from each other. The bodies that we behold are gross bodies made of gross matter called _____(sahula)( 339)  which changes form very slowly, and is not self luminous-- it has to be lighted from without to be seen. On this level, Aristotelian logic prevails. A is not B.

U is associated with dream consciousness. Now when you move into the level of dream consciousness, all the laws of logic change. There, although you think you are seeing something that is not you, it is actually you that you are seeing because the dream is simply a manifestation of your own will and energy-- you created the dream and yet you are surprised by it. So the duality there is illusory. There, subject and object, though apparently separate, are the same. Now the realms of the gods and demons-- heaven, purgatory, hell, are of the substance of dreams. The gods are of the substance of dream so that the mythology of the world is the dream of the world. And if taken objectively as though there were gods, well then they are the counterpart of your dream-- this is a very important point-- dream and myth are of the same logic. This is a point that we are getting in our psychiatric works now-- Freud, Jung and Eric Fromm and so forth. Now since the subject and object seem to be separate but are not separate in the dream, so the god that seems to be outside of you is not different from you. You and your god are one. Now we are moving to something very

interesting. All the heavens and gods are within you and are identical with aspects of your own consciousness on the dream level.

Now we come to the m. This is the level of deep dreamless sleep. Here, consciousness has been covered over by ignorance, by darkness.  This is the realm out of which consciousness then will reappear. But the fact that we are not conscious of it does not mean that it is not there. But it is not consciousness of any thing. There are no differentiated things. It is called an “undifferentiated mass” of consciousness. The goal of yoga is to go into that realm of undifferentiated consciousness awake. And when one does, what is there experienced is undifferentiated consciousness. We don’t have a counterpart to this concept in our Western vocabularies. It doesn’t even have a name in India, it is called simply the fourth state, and that is the fourth letter of the syllable, the level of silence. Because all the words that we speak refer either to waking images and logic, dream images and logic, or ignorance. We do not have words for this, and so it is the ultimate silence, but it is that which we are. 

TRACK 7:  Identification with the Divine: the Aim of Oriental ReligionsNow the whole aim of Oriental religions in contrast to ours, is to bring about in us an experience of our identity with that void which is no void. It is beyond all description. That which is true being and mystery of all things, is beyond naming, beyond imaging. So that any name or image that pretends to be the

name image of the ultimate divine thing is a false name and image, it is an idol.

The goal of these religions is to help us realize that that being which is beyond transcendent of definition, is our own being. And you can take anything, any object, and regard it in that dimension of its mystery. You can take any object, put a ring around it, and regard it not in its system of relationships as serving a purpose, as made of certain substances, but just in its mystery as being, and the mystery of the being of this watch, is identical with the mystery of the being of the universe. So any stick or stone can be taken as a basis for mystery, contemplation.  The goal then of these religions is to bring about a realization of this identity of yourself with that which comes as an experience.

Now to set our own position against this, the normal position in the West, we say “God created the world, and God and the world are not the same. Creator and creature are not the same.” So our religions do not strive for the experience of identity, in fact that experience is the prime heresy in the West. Our religions intend the rendition of a relationship, the relationship of that which is not God to God. And this relationship is achieved through participation in what is is taken to be god’s chosen society, or the founded church. In the Hebrew tradition, God has a covenant with a certain people, and the relationship to God is through membership in that group. In the Christian tradition, Christ is true God and true Man which is regarded as a mystery here.  In India, everybody is true God and true Man. And the whole goal of the

religion is to realize that divinity in yourself. So here we have intention that is very different from anything we conceive of in our religious traditions. When you have heard the sound of God, this sound of the divine in all things,  it is absolutely everywhere-- you are fascinated by that. And this properly, in the Orient, is the sphere of art. It is the rendition of that sound, that radiance, through whatever is contemplated. That is what art is about. 

TRACK 8:  The Fifth Chakra: Purgation Now having heard it through all things, the next aim is to experience it directly and fully, without the intermediary things. And so we move now from the fourth chakra to the fifth, which is here at the level of the throat. Now this is called Visuddha. The s will have a little ______ accent over it. That word means “purgation.” This is the level of purgatory, purging away the interfering gross experience, and coming directly to the pristine, pure image of God, and sound of aum. It is the realm of spiritual exercises-- the exercises of the yogi. And as you can see, what we are doing here is turning the energy of the third chakra, the aggressive chakra, against ourselves, purging out the interferences, the laziness and so forth that keeps us away from the divine, beatific vision. 

TRACK 9:  The Sixth Chakra: Beholding the Divine And then at the point between the eyes, which is called ajna, both a’s being long a’s, which means

“command,” the center of command, the soul, the energy beholds in full radiance, the beatific vision. That is to say, the vision that I spoke of when the water stands still, the form of forms beheld. Now the Indian word for this is “Lord,” “Ishvara.” And any God can be taken as this Lord. The image that you have held in your mind as the image of God is what will there be experienced, be it Yahweh, Shiva, Vishnu, or the Goddess, be it Christ or the Trinity or the highest image of the Buddha. Any will be all right. And what beholds it is called the ________(Jiva), the living entity, that Jiva which has gone through many incarnations and is the soul of your own existence. Here, the subject beholds its proper object. At this level the erotic principle of the second chakra, finds its goal-- the true beloved, the beloved that our soul intends is God. And anything short of that is simply an inkling of what the experience of God would be. Now, says Rama Krishna, speaking of this, we’re only at the sixth chakra and we are in heaven now. Well “what more do you want,” we might ask. This level beholds, however, an image that has characteristics, qualities. This can’t be the whole thing. Furthermore we are separate from it, we have not experienced identity with it. And so, there comes the effort for the final realizations. Now in this kind of thinking, heaven is the last and final temptation. The Yoga Sutra says when the stage has reached this level, beholding the divine, and the divine landscape of the heavens with the holy sages and saints and all, if he thinks so much as “I have made it, I am here, this is my bliss,”

he goes right down the scale again, because ego has been enforced. Rama Krishna said that the experience is as though you were to see a light through a pane of glass. It is the agony of the moth that is trying to reach the flame and only bangs against the glass. He wants to reach the flame and become the flame, and burn away his separate entity by union with the flame-- and that is the goal of the mystic. And so you withdraw the pane of glass, and both are gone-- there is no God, there is no one to behold, there is no subject, there is no object-- we are in the realm of that silence. This is the ultimate goal of all Oriental intention. 

TRACK 10:  Maya: Passing from the Sixth to the Seventh ChakraNow we come to a very strange mystery. What is it that happens as you pass from ajna, the center of command, where the serpent power reaches the highest level within the realm of manifestation, and what is called the “thousand petal lotus of the crown of the head,” sahasrara, it means thousand. What can we say of this strange thing that happens between here and here, so that here there is nothing. You cannot say a thing either is or is not. The things are no things, there is nothing there. And here, where below which all things dual. This line is the mystery of maya. The word “maya” is from a root ma--these a’s are long a’s-- which means to measure forth, to build forth. Maya  is what builds forth the world. Maya is said to have three powers.

The first power is called the “obscuring power,” -- it obscures the radiance of the ultimate. The second power is called the “projecting power,”--  it projects the world of broken forms. The third power is said to be the “revealing power,” -- that is the power rendered in art, when through the forms we experience the radiance. Now exactly the same things can be experienced either in their obscuring or in their revealing aspect. When you are studying things in the spirit of the first three chakras, the obscuring power is working. But when in art, the radiance is experienced, and the fascination of the art object is that of discovering your own true radiance there-- because there is only one radiance, and that is the radiance of full consciousness-- then you have the awakening and the opening of the lead, so to say, to full realization.

TRACK 11:  Radiance through the Forms: Three Mythological Images Now in these images, these themes are translated into mythological images. The upper ultimate light may be depicted as the father. Then this line, maya becomes the mother, through whom the energy of the father becomes incarnate.  That is the imagery, for instance, of God the Father, Mary, and God the Son, and the Holy Ghost representing the actual energy that is transformed from Father to Son through the Virgin. That is the role played by the Indian Goddess Kali. She, in her role of projecting power, is the one who

projects all forms into being. She in her role as the revealing power, is rendered in the form of a horrendous destroyer. Because she destroys the self-existence of things and unites them to their source. She is depicted with one hand in the “do not be afraid” posture, another in the “boon bestowing” posture, another holding a sword, another holding a head that she has just taken off. And she has a kilt of arms and legs, and a necklace of 72 bleeding heads. And her great red tongue is out to lick up the world to which she has given birth. And she is black as night, because she is that mothervoid out of which all things come and back to which it goes. And it was to her primarily that the great holocausts of animal and human sacrifice were offered in the great period of India’s religious life. Or, this mystery may be depicted as the God Shiva, particularly in his dancing form as Nataraja. He is shown with one hand holding a little drum-- it is a little hour-shaped drum. That drum going tick, tick, tick, is the veil of time, which shuts out the dimension of eternity. Eternity is not a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Time thinking is that which shuts out the eternity dimension. So when you think “Shall I be alive after death,” you are thinking in temporal terms. That is the kind of thinking that belongs to the moon symbol. But when you realize that eternity is right here now, and that the possibility of your experience is to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, here, now, so that that which you are was never born, and will never die-- then you are thinking and experiencing in terms of the solar mystery, the solar life. So this little

hour-glass shuts us away from eternity by bringing about the creation of the world of time and ourselves within it. This left hand of the God holds a flame which is the flame of illumination, the solar flame, which burns away the veil of time. This is the hand of creation, this is the hand of destruction. This is the hand of bringing you into the sphere of illusion, this is the hand of opening your consciousness. Another right hand says “don’t be afraid.” And then the other left hand is in what is called the elephant posture, or the teaching posture, where the elephant has gone through the jungle, all animals can follow. Where the great teacher has gone, all the disciples can follow. So what does that hand do? It points to the left foot which is lifted, and that foot means “release,” whereas the right foot is down on the back of a little dwarf who’s name is ignorance. The right foot drives us all into this realm of ignorance, the left releases. Creation, destruction, don’t be afraid because, though there is incarnation in ignorance, there is release.  The head is perfectly still-- this is called “the drop,” the bindu , that point through which eternity breaks. The right ear has a man’s earring; the left a woman’s. This is the sphere where the pairs of opposites come forth. In the hair, is a skull meaning death, and there is a moon meaning rebirth. And there is a little female form that represents the River Ganges, which carries the grace of the heavenly knowledge and experience into the world of being. And the whole figure is surrounded by a great oriole of flame. This is the dancing God that fills the entire universe and dances in every atom and in every cell of your body. And you are that Shiva-- that is the ultimate statement “Shiva ______,” “I am that Shiva.”

 So now we’ve reached the top. 

TRACK 12:  The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Buddhist Symbology of Beyond And now I want to speak a little more about the symbology here. I have spoken about it in Hindu terms, I want now to speak about it in Buddhist terms. The great text, and if you can get hold of it do, it is in paperback, it is The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as translated by Evans Went (181). There is a very fine introduction, a multiple introduction, one by Evans Went, one by Sir John Woodruff, who’s one of the greatest English explainers of the tantric systems, the systems that I am talking about here. There is a commentary also by Jung, who points out the relationship of all these symbols to our Western psychology. It is a marvelous, rich, very wonderful book. Now this book tells about the forty-nine days that elapsed between death and rebirth. The goal, however, is not to be reborn, so that if you can stop the descent to rebirth, well and good. Beside you, as you lie dying, will be your chaplain, the Lama, who has been your spiritual guide. And he will tell you where you are on this mythological journey into the realm beyond the realms of waking and dream consciousness-- beyond waking, it’s really mostly dream consciousness that you are in.  The notion is that at the moment of death, you behold the light, the void of the light, the radiance of the light. If you are not ready, however, you can’t hold to it, it is so

terrifying, because you want to hold to your own personality and it blasts you. So the Lama will be saying when the last breath is breathed, you are now before the Light, try to hold to it. I’ve taught you how to do it, now go to work and hang on. But if you have read Aldous Huxley’s Timeless                       , it’s based on this book. A man dies, and instead of holding to the bright light, he remembers the lovely body of his mistress, and that brings him down pretty fast.  This is the experience of the seventh chakra, the top. TRACK 13:  The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Descent through the Chakras  Now if you fail here, you come down to the level of the sixth chakra, the level of the radiant, beneficent aspects of the divine. And in the Buddhist system, these will be represented as Buddhas, Buddhas of various amplitude. The first is called Vajrachana, (221) it is a Buddha holding the thunderbolt which symbolizes illumination. And then we come down the scale to the Buddha of the East, of the South, of the West, and of the North. And then to all five of these Buddhas together in the form of a great circle withVajrachana  in the center. The Buddha of the East is called Vantratara (227), the one who supports the thunderbolt, and he represents the integrity of the illuminating experience. The Buddha of the South is called Radmasambhava (225) the one born of a jewel. And he represents the radiance of beauty of illumination. And the Buddha of the West is Amhitabha, the Buddha of inexhaustible radiance, and he is the great Buddha of love and

compassion. And the Buddha then of the North is called Amogasiti, and he represents the Buddha of directed effort. Each of these has a color associated with him-- white in the East, yellow in the South, red in the West, green in the North.  And if you still haven’t been able to release yourself from the fall, you come to the stage then of the fifth chakra Buddhas, and these are horrendous. Now when you see the Buddhist thankas, those Buddhist long pictures from Tibet, you’ll see many horrendous-looking figures with great swords and terrifying faces, often with many faces, often standing on great monsters, and holding many weapons in their many hands, and embracing their consorts because the male and female principles always work together there-- there is no notion of God or anything like that as being exclusively male, as we have in our somewhat patriarchically prejudiced tradition. Here the two principles work together. And these horrendous figures, are the one’s who are smashing our hold on our selves. The beneficent ones would have released us if we could have let go. Now we haven’t let go so now comes real force. But the thing to realize is that these horrendous ones are the same as the beneficent ones, only in the more brutal aspect, because we have been brutal in holding on to ourselves. And again, we get the five in the regular series going on down. On this level, now here’s an interesting point, they represent vices-- the vice of egoism, the vice of pride. But the vice of pride is simply the negative aspect of the virtue of beauty. The vice of lust, which is the negative aspect of the virtue of compassion. The vice of jealousy, which is

simply the negative aspect of the virtue of directed intention or effort. And so by carrying through our vices, we can achieve redemption. And the Lama will say, “Remember these are simply forms of your own mind consciousness.” TRACK 14:  The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Judgment and Rebirth Then we come, and here is the crisis, we are getting pretty dangerously close to rebirth now, we come to the fourth chakra, and this is the chakra of judgment-- do you remember, this is where the devotee touched the feet of God, and now he may lose the feet. Here is where we stand on our campus, between the realms of contemplation and the realms of what is now being advertised as activism. The whole thing will be lost if you respond to what are called the “karmic winds,”-- these blowing breaths that cry “kill, kill.” There is something to be gained, there is something to be lost. You have to hold to the thought “nothing to hold, nothing to gain, nothing to do.” If you lose that, there will build up behind you a wall of three powers, and then you cannot go back. And the three powers are stupidity, malice or anger, and desire or lust. Those are what moves the world, and we are moving down now.  At this point, the Lord of Judgment appears in the form of a great ox with many hands-- this is a figure you see all through the Tibetan tradition.  And his minions will come and you will find yourself carved to pieces, your guts torn out, all the torches you can possibly think of in the Orient-- there’s quite a little glossary of tortures-- will be enacted upon you. And you have to think “These are simply manifestations

of my own thought.” If you can’t think that, you start for the finale. At this point, Freudian psychology appears, namely the soul in the descent begins to see males and females copulating. And at the third chakra level, the Lama is saying “Try not to get between them.” And if that is lost, then comes this very interesting experience of delight in what’s about to happen. And what you find is, if you are to be born now as a male, you will love your mother, find yourself loving your mother, and hating your father. Did Freud teach us anything? And if you are going to be born as a female, you will find yourself hating your potential mother, and loving your father.  And then after all this, having gone for 49 days through all the plagues and the supreme consciousness down to this, this little squealing thing is born, and thinks it has come new into the world. But within it is the whole thing again. This is the Oriental concept now that underlies the cults that we see. This is the aim-- to find that in yourself.

TRACK 15:  The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Two Possible Responses Now there are two responses. Suppose you have found the light, and have contemplated this still pond. You may let the body drop off, close the eyes, as it were, and unite with this central transcendent realization.  Or you may open the eyes, and take delight in the play of forms, seeing through them the one form-- that is the attitude of world affirmation as it includes the affirmation of every single thing, even the monsters.

 When I was in India I listened around awhile to see who the wise man would be that I would choose to have my principle sort of mystical discussion with. And I chose one who had lived in the world. He had been a policeman, which is not regarded very highly in India, and he was, nevertheless, a great saint. And I was introduced to him and went into the room where he was seating, and there was a chair for me to sit in, and we greeted each other respectfully, and he asked “Do you have a question?” And I had the good fortune to ask him the question which he had asked his guru when he first came to him. And so we had a fine conversation. And what I said was, what I asked him was, “If, as we know, all things all Brahman, are this divine energy, then why do we renounce the world, why do we renounce vice, why do we renounce stupidity. Why do we not see the divine shining through the most brutal, the most horrendous, the most stupid, the darkness?” And he said “For you and me, that is where it is.” 

TRACK 16:  The Tiger and the Goats: an Indian Anecdote Now to conclude, let me just tell a little Indian anecdote--they’re awfully good anecdotes-- this has to do with animals. It has to do with a tigress who was-- some of you may know this story-- starving, very hungry. And she was pregnant on the point of bringing forth her little one. And she comes upon a herd of goats and pounces very strenuously on the herd, and brings about the birth of the little one and her own death. The goats scatter, and when they

come back what do they find? They find a just born little tiger, and it’s dead mother. Now they have very strong parental instincts these animals, and they adopt the tiger, which grows up thinking it is a goat. It learns to eat grass, it learns to bleat. And as you can imagine, since neither grass nor bleating are proper to tigers, it was a pretty miserable specimen of its kind by the time it reached adolescence. And just at this critical moment of passing a threshold, the herd is pounced upon by a great male tiger. And all the goats scatter, but this little thing is no goat, this is a tiger, and he’s standing there. And the big one looks and he says “For heaven’s sake, you’re living here with goats.” And the little thing goes “Baaaaaaaaa.” And he nibbles a bit of grass. The big fellow was utterly mortified, whollops him a couple of times, and finally picks him up by the neck and takes him to a pond, perfectly still, no wind. The little fellow looks in, and for the first time in his little long life, what he sees is his own true face. It is not a goat’s face, it’s a tiger’s face. And the big fellow, the guru, says “Look, you’ve got a pot face like mine, you’re a tiger, you’re not a goat.” Well the little thing bleats a few more pitiful times and at last the big one, thinking he’s really getting somewhere with him, takes him again by the nap of the neck to his cave, where he has recently killed a gazelle, the bloody remains of which are all over the place. And so he picks up a chunk of this delectable goody and he says to the little fellow “Here, have a chunk.” Well the little one backs away. He says “I’m a

vegetarian.” So with his mouth forced open, he has this stuff shoved down his throat, and he gags on it. And the text says “As all do on true doctrine.” So with that, and this new experience going through his veins, he feels a new heat, a new life, and automatically, spontaneously, his own tiger nature awakened, he gives a tiger stretch, and out of his little throat comes a sort of preliminary tiger roar-- the tiger roar A921. And the big fellow says “There we are. Now let us go into the forest and eat tiger food.”  Now I like this story, and I tell it to my students, and the answer I get is “Put a tiger in your tank.” So this is what the story tells. We are all tigers living among these goats. So go into the forest, and in the forest of the night, find the tiger shining bright in your own deep depths.  

Lecture I.2.5 - The World SoulBy Joseph Campbell

TRACK 1:  Yoga and Depth Psychology: Three Points of Connection

Well as I pointed out last week at the opening of my talk, there are three points at least that make it possible to speak of yoga and our own depth psychoanalysis, depth psychology in the same breath. The first is the recognition that all of the pantheons of the world, the divinities, the heavens and hells and so forth, are projections of psychological images-- that is to say what we think of normally as metaphysics and theology is here interpreted as psychology, as a function of the psyche. And the second point is that the energies which are expressed and rendered in these images, are the energies that determine the direction and the course of a life. The images that fascinate-- fascinate because they link into one’s own dynamic processes. And so they are in a sense images of destiny, they are images that determine your existence. This is what in India is termed Maya , that image world of illusions and of emotions associated with the illusions which move us against our intentions very often. And the third and last point that I mentioned, was that with the coming to consciousness of the implications of these images, the penetrations of the energies to the energy sources, one can illuminate one’s life, relax it, and give it a sense of spontaneity and scope in its movements that can be termed “release,” release from the compulsive force of

destiny, and the rendition of a state of free determination. 

TRACK 2:  The Great Ladder: Review of the Seven Chakras Now I went through the great series, the great ladder, or heaven ladder of the seven chakras, or lotuses, or centers of the kundalini yoga. And since I see a number of fresh faces here this afternoon, I want very briefly to review this since it is going to serve as a base for the beginning, at least, of my discussion today. This notion that the energies of the spirit, the energies of the psyche are concentrated in a series of subtle nerves, so to say, not the gross nerves of the anatomical table, but subtle nerves of a subtle substance. And that they can be thought of as concentrated at the base of the spine in the normal, unilluminated state, is the first point here. And this base is called the root base, muladara, where the energies of life simply grip existence without any zeal, without any glory, without any radiance, but simply hanging on to existence. And then the yogi, through his breath and concentration and poise of body, seeks to activate this coiled-up one which is represented as a serpent wrapped around itself, and bring it up the spine through six more centers. The so-called second center, svadisthana, (56), her favorite resort, is at the level of the sex organs. And here the whole zeal of life, the whole sense of life is of the erotic order. One might say that at this level the psychology is exactly Freudian, where the whole interpretation of the energy of life is sexual.  

At the third center then, at the level of the navel manipuri  (62), the city of the shining jewel, the energy is aggressive and concerned to consume and conquer to itself the world. Now in these two centers, second and third, the energies are outward directed-- the satisfactions, the zeals, the ends and aims of life are outside.  And then comes that wonderful fourth center at the level of the heart, where the sound is heard that is not made by two things striking together, the sound, that is to say, of the energy of the world Brahman , atman , the energy of which the world is a precipitation. The sound of that energy which is antecedent to things, is heard here. And the zeal then, mind and all, are inward turned. We have an interiorization of the imageries, no longer outward directed except as the outward world reflects this. And this sound which is heard in the heart is heard throughout the world, it is the sound a u m . From then on, the zeal is to cleanse one’s consciousness of the interference of the phenomenal world, and come to a direct confrontation with that sound, and with the image that is in accord with it.  At the fifth chakra then, at the level of the larynx, this is called vishudha  (85) the purgatorial or cleansing one, one is in exercise so to say, as a monk. In religious zeal, turning that power factor which was present in the third chakra, to work on one’s self conquering one’s outward going tendencies, turning all inward, concentrating inward, and finally coming at the sixth chakra between the eyes here, to the ultimate vision of the Lord of the

World, who is the figure I hope to speak about today, that human form of the divine which transcends the human-- but here for the human being is made manifest, so to say, in one’s own image. And at this point, the soul Jiva (96) beholds the Lord, Ishwara , and this is what, in our Western terminology, is heaven. The soul has found its proper love, and so the zeal, so to say, of the second chakra, the erotic, has here found its true goal in the sixth chakra, between the eyes.  But the soul and its beloved, the Lord, are two here. And the ultimate goal is to transcend duality-- and this is the great point-- and that is achieved only at the crown of the head where, as it were, a dividing glass is withdrawn from between the soul and its beloved, and both are gone. For there to be a object, there must be a subject of knowledge, and a relationship between them. At this sixth level, everything is relationship-- relationship of I to thee, of the soul to the beloved. But beyond that there is what we, in our language, can only call identity. And yet it can’t be called identity because it is beyond categories altogether.  Now it is this that I want to speak about today.  

TRACK 3:  Maya: Mother of the World This strange thing of the passage from six to seven, as though there were a line here of mystery between the sixth and the seventh chakras, where something impossible to think of takes place-- namely all

phenomenology is transcended, and with that all subjectivity as well. Schopenhauer speaks of this in The World   As Will and Idea. He says “If we could only understand how it is that that which is one becomes many, how that which is no thing, becomes things.” What he calls the “world knot.” If we could understand that, we would understand all, but it cannot be understood. Now that line there which I am imagining is Maya , it is when the inner light, the ultimate light, which is no light, comes into manifestation that this Maya veil is passed. I once saw a little kitten that found itself reflected in a mirror. The mirror was without a frame and was standing against a wall. And this little creature saw itself in the mirror, and thought it was another. And its back went up in that usual way, and its hair stood out, and it began stalking this animal. And as it showed aggression, so did the other. And it went at it and at it and then got passed the mirror and there was no other animal there. And it came back and there it was again. And this went on, it was a marvelous thing to see, and went the other direction and again the other thing disappeared. And then it started looking behind the mirror for what would have been there, and of course there was no one there but itself. It had lost its object, it didn’t even think of itself really as a subject. And I though “Well good gosh this is an image of Maya  exactly.” No one can say what Maya is because this side of Maya we live within its atmosphere, as fish do in water. But that side of Maya, there is no one there to know anyhow. So when you come back, it is just as mysterious as anything you can imagine. 

 Maya is said to have three powers. The first power is called the obscuring power-- it shuts out, as it were, the white light of eternity. Or you might think of it as a prism now-- the white light strikes the prism. The second power is called the projecting power. Here the forms of the world are projected, just as through the prism, the seven colors of the rainbow are projected. Now no one who had never seen white light could imagine white light from looking at the seven multi-colored lights. However, if these seven are arranged on a disk, and the disk is made to spin, you will see the white light again. And so we say Maya has a third power, namely the revealing power. Maya in mythological language, is the mother of the world. This is the feminine aspect. The white light is neither masculine n  or feminine because it transcends polarities, it transcends dualities. Whereas this side of the prism, this side of Maya, is where we find male and female, and the pairs of opposites. This is the base of the matriarchal religions. All forms, even the form of God the Father, are within the womb of Maya. We are within her womb. It is the womb of space, time and causal relationships, what Kant calls the “Opriory forms of sensibility.” This is exactly Maya, and this is exactly why following Kant, Schopenhauer was able point for point to interpret the Indian terminology in Kantian terms. Brahman  would be the Kantian ding an sich (183), which is no ding , which is no thing. It transcends all categories. Both the forms of sensibility, and the categories of thought are enclosed within the womb

of Maya, and so God, as we speak of him and think of him and name him as well. The Lord of the World is seen at this point, the sixth, which is below this level of Maya’s domain. Now there is a lovely little Madonna, a 15th Century Madonna in the Museum of  Clueny (193) in Paris. She sits with the Christ child on her arm, and the globe of the universe in her left hand. And her chest can be opened as a cabinet-- she opens out like this (visual). And within one sees God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, and the whole choir of heaven. The whole imagery of the heavens, of the hells, of archeology is enclosed within her, and this image is exactly the Maya image. So much then for this projection. TRACK 4:  Continuous Creation: the God and Goddess in Embrace Within her domain then, we come to the imagery of the Lord. And this imagery may be in either masculine or feminine form. It is one of the curiosities of our Western religion that we insist on the ultimate divine being imaged in masculine form. Since the ultimate is beyond pairs of opposites, why this? The Indians speak of one’s chosen deity, one’s own peculiar psychology is what determines the image that will speak to one most eloquently and carry one on.  Now the prime image, the prime divine representation of the soul of the world, the image of the world, is the goddess herself. And with respect to living beings, she is both their mother and their consumer-- she brings us forth, she takes us back.

And from the standpoint of the individual afraid of death, she is therefore a horrendous aspect. But in so far as our worship of her can relieve us of the commitment to our bodies, and relieve us of the fear of death-- give us rather the sense of returning to our source-- she can be said to free us from this little ego ring that binds us in. And she is depicted as absolutely black-- her name Kali means that. She is that  beyond all imaging, that darkness, that mystery out of which all things come, and back into which they go.  And she is depicted as standing on the prostrate white form of her spouse, namely Shiva, whom I’ll be talking about in a minute. He is represented in this dead form, as it were inert, in the sense of being symbolic of that transcendent, which begets us through the goddess. This is the couple that is represented in the most common object of worship throughout India, namely the symbol of the Lingam Yoni , the male and female organs in conjunction. And this symbol is always represented as though the lingam was penetrating the yoni from beneath, as though the abyssal mystery were injecting the energy of life into this womb of the world within which we are. And standing before such an image, we are to think of ourselves as contemplating the mystery of the pouring of energy, the energy of being into the sphere of being which is the goddess womb.  Now in these religions of the East, as I said last week-- we do not have the idea of a personal creator who determines to create, and so brings about an

initial moment in cosmic history, and finally is there when the world ends. There is no beginning for time, there is no end for time. Time thinking is thinking involved in this womb-world and does not touch the problem of eternity. Eternity is not a long time-- it is another dimension-- it is that dimension which time-thinking shuts out from us. And so there never was a creation, but there is a continuous creating going on. This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, all over the place here, and throughout the building. This is a sense of the whole universe as alive, the whole universe as a moment, you might say, of procreation, and that is the sense of this wonderful mystery of the image. But it can be represented also in the form of a God and Goddess in embrace. This is the Shiva/Shakti image, the God and his Shakti, or his consort.  TRACK 5:  Shakti: the Female, Activating Energy This wonderful word “Shakti” which applies to the female in relation to the male-- that is what it means. A man’s wife, a man’s consort is his Shakti. The word means energy. The male, you might say, is a placid being, and what he wants deep inside is just to be left alone. And then this aromatic mystery goes past, and he is stirred. As James Joyce says in Finnegans Wake,  “She whispers to him of such and such and so and so.” And he thinks “Well it would be nice again.” And so we have a new world, another world. He is stirred and becomes active. Woman, this is quite contrary to our normal Western and also to the Chinese view, where the female is

recognized as the mask principle, the inert, and the male is the active. Here the male is the inert one, and the woman is the activator. Rama Krishna speaks of the male and female principles as water quiet, and water rippled. And we have this actually in the first verse of the Bible where the spirit, or wind of God, broods over the waters and whips the water into action. It is that activation of the water, the water active that is the world creation. And in that act of water, what we see are lights coming and going, coming and going. Those lights are ourselves, and we think of ourselves as this light to be preserved-- and here I am, I’m gone. The texts are going to tell us, no don’t identify yourself with that little shimmering light. Identify yourself with that source of light which is reflected in this shimmer with which you have identified yourself with. Well the Goddess may be pictured, and she often is, as a quite horrendous, horrifying phenomenon. There she stands in a heroic attitude with her tongue out long, some times down to her waste, red and threatening, to lick back the blood of her creatures. It is she who gives birth, it is she who licks back the world. One right hand will say “Don’t be afraid, nothing’s happening.” Another will either be in the boon-bestowing posture or hold a little bowl of milk rice. She is the Anapurna, the one full of food giving, giving, giving of her abundance. Then her left hands-- one will have a sword of death, and another will be holding a head that she has just cut off. And in fact, it is to her that most of the great sacrifices took place-- beheadings of animals and human beings. And immediately turning the beheaded head to her

altar so that the fresh foaming blood, as ambrosia, would flow back to her. And at her shrine she will see the channel to carry the blood back to its source in her. And she will have a necklace of skulls. And her kilt will be of arms and legs that have been amputated, and we address her as “our dear mother. “  Now in the West, we tend to make our beneficent divinities beneficent, and our malignant, malignant. The main point in these Eastern images is that both terms are present in the same image, as they are in life. Godfried of Strasborg (336) in his wonderful Tristan says “They tell me there are those who seek only happiness and peace. Let God give them peace. I seek the life that has both bitterness and sweetness simultaneously.” And that’s what we get in these wonderful Indian images in particular. And the power with which this dual aspect of life is rendered, and we are asked to acquiesce in it, is something that is very telling when one experiences it.  TRACK 6:  Shiva and Shava: the Two Attitudes of Yoga Now the consort of this goddess is Shiva, probably the oldest worshipped divinity now extant. He is the Lord of the Lingam, that is to say he is the symbol of the procreating God. And he is shown in some later images in two forms simultaneously. The Goddess who is our mother is seated upon him. And he is in two forms beneath her-- one form turned away, and another turned toward her. The form turned toward her has his eyes open, and that is properly Shiva. The form turned away has the eyes closed, and that

form is called Shava (361), the corpse. The one turned away has absorbed both Shiva and Shakti back into himself. The two that we see are projections from that one.  Now these represent the two attitudes of yoga. One may have the yoga of world quitting, leaving the world. As they say in the Upanishads, the way of the fire, of the flame of the fire, which carries us to the sun door, and through the sun door out.  Or in contrast to that, the ever-returning father principle fathering the world, returning, returning, returning-- the way of smoke, which leads us to the moon, which dies and is resurrected, dies and is resurrected. There are two images of eternal life-- one is the image of eternally-recurring, eternally-returning, and the other is the passage out of this returning round altogether. The way of smoke and the moon, the moon coming and going, coming and going, or the way of the flame, the sun door and exit. Shiva, in the attitude of the Lingam, represents the returning principle, the world preserving, the world creating, the world generating principle. In his other attitude as yogi, and he is the Lord of Yoga, covered with ashes, with matted locks, unkempt hair. His garlands being serpent garlands, drinking from a skull with his trident in hand, concentrated deeply in yoga, quitting the world. Canceling the force of Maya he represents that other attitude.  These two divinities, Shiva and his Shakti, are certainly the prime divinities of India and their history goes way way back. 

 

TRACK 7:  Vishnu, Padma, and Brahma: Creation of the World Another form of a much more genial sort is Vishnu. The principle representation of Vishnu is as a human form reclining on a serpent-- this serpent’s name being Anantaá(401), which means unending. This is a serpent of seven heads, and it is floating on the cosmic ocean, that symbol of the world energy out of which all proceeds. The ocean is the first verse of the Bible. The water, the serpent and the human form reclining on it are equivalent figures in elemental, animal and human form respectably. But they all symbolize that dark source out of which all comes.  Now one may think of that source as the bottom of a pond. And then one may think of a lotus coming up through the waters of that pond and opening on the surface. So it is in the Vishnu image. Vishnu there is dreaming. He is dreaming the dream of the world. He is dreaming his own Maya world, and it emerges from his navel in the form of a lotus. Now this lotus is the symbol of the universe itself as divinely given.  The word lotus Padma  is the name of a Goddess Padma, and she is the consort of Vishnu. Originally undoubtedly, she was that lotus herself. She is the world. Her womb is the lotus of the world within all beings are. But with the patriarchal emphasis of the latter Indian tradition, she was removed from the lotus, and you see her in the images now as the good Indian wife massaging her sleeping husband’s foot. But there is a little secret there-- it is that massage

which is stimulating the dream. She is still Shakti. And what is he dreaming about-- her.  But instead of having her on the lotus, there is now put this masculine God who’s actually a rather late invention Brahma . There he sits with his four faces facing the four directions, imagining that he is creating the world. These then are the three deities-- Brahma, who is the creator in the light world-- he is all light and radiance, Vishnu, the dreamer of the cosmic dream. And just as all the figures in your dream are aspects and portions of yourself, so are we as figures in Vishnu’s dream, aspects of portions of Vishnu. We are all identical in Vishnu. And the goal of our yoga is going to be to realize ourselves in that identity. And then there is Shiva in his form as the Lingam in relation to the Goddess Shiva Shakti, or as the yogi. And next week I am hoping to have some slides showing Indian art, and I want to develop the themes of Indian iconology from that. And there will be Shiva there in another aspect-- Shiva the dancer, and I’ll save that elucidation for next week. 

TRACK 8:  The Origins of Indian Imagery Well now comes the question as to the antiquity of these images. Also, are they native to India? And this is a very deep and very interesting question and problem. The earliest dates that we have for the archeological culture world that is that of India are from the period

of around 2500 to 1500 B.C. This is the period of the so-called Indus Valley Civilization in Northwest India.  Looking Westward, this is the period in the Near East of ancient acade (474) and Mesopotamia. The period of Sag(474) in the first, to Hammurabi about that time in there. In Egypt it is the period of the middle and early late kingdoms. And it is the period exactly of the great temple period, or rather palace period in Crete. Now it is interesting to note that Shiva’s symbols as the trident, and the bull, and the Lingam-- these are exactly the symbols of Poseidon, who is the principle divinity of ancient Crete. And there is no doubt about it now. Both of these worlds, Crete and India, received their civilization from the much older high civilized domain of the Near East. The archeology now of Iran, Syria and Turkey in particular is going back thousands of years earlier than this 2500 B.C. date in India. It goes back to 7500 B.C.-- that is five thousand years-- as many years as there is between India’s beginning and the present. As I said last week, all of the high civilizations stem from this beginning. And these divinities that are living today in India, and who’s implications have been developed in these glorious philosophies, have their roots back there. India has continued and developed an inspiration with respect to a poetic image with respect to the order of the world that is the first of the great high culture worlds. Another level of thought comes into the West somewhat later. 

TRACK 9:  The Four Ages: an Impersonal Image of the World Now what do we have in this image in the way of an image of the world?  We have an image of a totally impersonal power-- this is the Brahma power-- that moves the world through great cycles as that lotus comes from Vishnu and goes back again, comes and goes in a great cycle like a flower’s cycle. So the universe comes and goes. And the principle image is of the ages, as we know them, of gold, silver, bronze and iron. In India these are the images of the Age of the 4, the 3, the 2 and the 1. In the Age of the 4, the Goddess of Virtue was standing on all four legs, the Golden Age. At that time human beings were born in couples. You didn’t have to look for your soul’s companion. Furthermore, the rivers ran with wine and milk, and the trees rippled beautiful melodies. And the whole world, the soil itself was sweet and sugar to eat. People were very, very happy in those days, and they didn’t have to think “What should I do,” they acted virtuously automatically. Then there came the Age of Silver, or the 3, when the cow of virtue was standing on only three legs. This time people were not quite so virtuous as say they had to pause a minute to think how should it be done, or what should I do. But they would act virtuously even so. They were not as tall or beautiful, but from our point of view now they would be divine. 

Then comes the Age of 2, when the cow of virtue is standing on only two legs. Well you know a cow can’t stand on two legs. So at this time a prop is brought into being, and this is the period of the scriptures, of little writings that tell you how to behave. This is the period of the coming of religion into the world. Religion was unnecessary before because people acted spontaneously, righteously and correctly-- now they stand corrected. And finally of course there comes the Age when the cow is on only one leg. This is our unfortunate time, the Age of the mixture of castes, when nobody knows his own true nature. And the worst of it is people won’t read the scriptures, and when they do they don’t understand them. This is an age of deterioration and very rapid deterioration. And if you want to have any proof of the deterioration, just look at everything that we call progress-- it is an exteriorization of life. The machines are taking over. And everything that we in the West talk of as evidence of progress is, in terms of this archaic tradition, evidence of decline. So the world is getting worse. Furthermore, once it has gotten to be just a kind of porridge of indistinguishable non-entities-- the worst thing that can happen is this mixture of caste-- then the God will take the dream back, the dream has faded, it’s gone. And after a period of incubation, it will come forth again in its glory. So there is nothing you can do about it friends, and that’s the way things are. There is no such thing as initiative. You cannot do anything that has not been done a million times

before, because there is this eternal recurrence, eternal recurrence, eternal recurrence. There is no point for the individual to make a specific effort. His real function is to obey the laws of the universe as communicated to him by his society. And if he can’t do that he becomes a nothing, and just disintegrates. The castes are compared to the limbs of a body-- the Brahman caste, the head, the Shatriya or governing caste, the shoulders and arms, the Vishiya (615) or third estate, the wealthy caste, the torso, and the serving caste the Shudra (618), the legs.  Now what would happen to a body if the feet said “I want to be the head,” or the head said “I want to be the heart,” or you know... What do we call that when it happens in a body? We call it cancer. And so what we call democracy is from this standpoint, cancer. There is however a very special occasion when the caste differentiations can be transcended, and that is occasion of certain kind of worship when one goes past caste. That means in one’s mind one has gone past the realm of Maya altogether, and united oneself with the transcendent power.   [Side Two]

TRACK 10:  Historical Images of the Indus Valley Civilization Now let me speak very briefly. I want to do this, brief though it must be, as a kind of preparation for the slides for next week, the historical evidence we have for the development of these ideas in India. First, the Indus Valley Civilization. Two considerable cities, very much like the cities in Crete, geometrically laid out, appear in India about 2500

B.C., obviously in plantations. They did not grow there, they were brought in from the Iranian plateau, and obviously also for the exploitation of a very rich land, a land very rich in natural resources. Within these cities-- and they were pretty darn materialistic-- they’re just laid out in a very mechanical way. There is very little art. There are a few tiny little images in contrast to the magnificent art of contemporary Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Crete. This is rather slight. A few little images, but most important, a number of seals about 1 1/2”  square for sealing documents. And it is on these seals, a certain little bar relief tells us of the imagery of this period. The most conspicuous figure on these seals is the bull, the same bull that you see walking around the streets of Calcutta today. It is that sacred bull who is the consort of the goddess cow. This is the goddess, and this is the bull whom we know from Egypt, from Mesopotamia and from Crete. This is the bull that in Egypt is identified with Osirus, the god who dies and is resurrected, the ___________(Apus Bull 027), who represents that energy of life, that divine appropriated energy of life that brings forth forms. The horns of the bull-- I’m speaking now from the standpoint that we can arrive at through comparative study of these contemporaneous cultures-- the horns of the bull are equated with the horns of the moon. And the moon is that sign in the sky, of death and resurrection beyond death, the eternal recurrence. The moon remains the high symbol of the dead and resurrecting god. Even in the Christian image, Christ is three days in the tomb, the moon is three days dark, and the dating of Easter is always made in

relation to the full moon. The moon can also be thought of as a cup which fills with ambrosia. In the tropical world, the sun is fierce and burning and desecrates the vegetation. The night moon sends down the dew, the ambrosia, the amrita , the drink of immortality which refreshes life. And this is equated with the vital energy of the bull, so that the bull and the moon. And the moon maybe sort of as a cup-- you see it fill every month, and then unload its ambrosia on the earth and fill again. Furthermore, the moon sheds its shadow, just as a serpent sheds its skin. And so the serpent, sloughing its skin, and the moon sloughing its shadow, are equivalent. We have the moon, we have the bull, we have the serpent--these are equivalent symbols. And that serpent is exactly the serpent of the kundalini that we brought up the spine last week. Against the moon you have the sun, which represents that fierce burning, fiery power. And the animal equivalent to the sun, is the lion who’s wonderful face is a solar face. And he pounces on the bull just as the sun does on the moon. And the bird associated with the sun is the eagle, or the hawk, who pounces on the serpent as the sun pounces on the waters. These are prime images that come back and forth. Shiva has the moon in his hair, and Vishnu is shown on the serpent. But Vishnu is also shown flying on the sunbird Garuda. These are symbols that are already indicated in the ancient Indus culture. Also there are Lingam-Yoni symbols there. Also there is the symbol of a tree, with a certain specific kind of leaf, a kind of heart-shaped, or spade-shaped leaf, that is the leaf of the bodhi tree, the tree under which the Buddha

sat, which in Buddhism is called the “immovable point,” that center point, that hub around which the whole ever-proceeding vortex revolves. F Finally, we have one sign in the Indus Valley world that does not appear in the West, and that is a number of seals showing a yogi, a seated yogi. These date from about 2000 B.C. and are, as far as our archeological evidence goes, the earliest signs of a yogi that we have. What is the origin of this-- who knows. 

TRACK 11:  The Aryans: the New Attitude of a Warrior People In the Indus culture world there are two great racial groups-- one is the group that came in from the Western zone, sort of Mediterranean type, and the other is the Ostroloid Race (075), the race that can be traced all the way from Northwest India right back down through South India, out into the islands of the Pacific in a big broad way. It may well be that this yogic attitude comes from shamanistic principles going way, way back. At any rate, the evidence fades out there in darkness. All of these elements in the Indus culture survive in popular Hinduism to this day. The notion of the ever-evolving world, the world against which there is no use fighting-- acquiescence, acquiescence, acquiescence in the laws of the universe that are given from a source that cannot be touched, and the imagery of the still point and yoga, and so forth. Against this, about 1500 B.C. there comes a totally new race-- these are the Aryans. They are of exactly

the same period as Homer’s Aryans entering into Crete. There is a precise parallelism here. They bring many of the same divinities, the same heroic attitude. These are the people who invented the war chariot drawn by two powerful forces. It is at this moment that the horse appears in history, and he gives to these men a terrific fighting power, so that they are not acquiescing in the will of the universe-- they have found a will in themselves and they are showing it. Anything they want they can get. And they have their shamans, their magicians, their Brahmans. It was their rites that can cause the gods to do what is wanted. Now when you have several people, as you had in the earlier culture, trading people and planting people, you have divinities who can be worshipped in this specific rock, this specific tree, this specific lake or pond. With the great ranging nomads you have divinities who are everywhere-- the broad stretching earth, the over-arching heavens, the winds, the sun and so forth. And these are the gods of these Vedic Aryans, very much like the gods of the Homeric Greeks. This is the period also, by the way, of the invasions of Canaan by another warrior race, the Semites from the Syro-Arabian desert. And just as in the Bible, so with these Aryans, the powers of the soil, the fertilizing powers, and the people who worship them are despised. What are revered, are the Lords of the Thunderbolt, and the warrior ____(arms)(111). The words in the Old Testament, “cities that you did not build you shall inhabit. Fields that you did not plant, you shall reap,” are words that befit these warrior people who do not cultivate

the soil, ask Mother Earth to bring forth, but evoke and invoke the God of Thunder and Weaponry. And their rights have to do with the triumph of their race over the people whom they are invading. 

TRACK 12:  Brahman Altars: the Whole World is a Sacrifice Now the Brahmans would build their altars wherever they went in symbolic form. And then they would invoke the deities of the pantheon with hymns. And the principle divinity for the rite was the fire of the altar called agni (121), a word related to our word “ignite.” Agni was called the mouth of the gods-- he is fed with the sacrifice. And the gods are then fed by Agni, and the gods then will cooperate with their human cousins and worshippers, and give them the victory they seek.  This is the mood of the Vedas, these hymns for invoking and giving power to man, invoking the gods and giving the god’s power to man. The date for the Vedas, for the completion of the Vedas as we know them now is about 1000 B.C. And shortly following this, they’re very much in the spirit of the Greek Homeric rites. Shortly following this comes a point, something the Greeks never developed, which is entirely Indian, the so-called Brahmanates (132), or the theological writings of the Brahmans. The thought that came was this-- since through our rites we can control the gods, therefore our rites are stronger than the gods, therefore we are stronger than the gods. The power

now is taken away from the pantheon and put in the hearts of those from whom the pantheon stemmed. And there is a wonderful series of works somewhat dry, but extremely exciting in another sense, of comparison-- the elements of the rites, how do these relate to the elements of the universe, how do these relate to the elements of the psyche. Universe, rite, psyche-- they are all of one accord. And by manipulating the rite, we manipulate these forces. And then comes the final question-- well what is the nature of the rite-- that will tell us the nature of the universe. And this is what the nature of the rite is. There is a fire, and into the fire is poured a sacrifice. That sacrifice is called Soma (149). It is an intoxicating liquid like wine of the Greeks. It is pressed from a plant. That plant is refreshed by the dew of the moon. The moon is the celestial bull. It is as though you had the divine procreating energy of the bull caught here, and were pouring it into the fire. Next, when you take food to your mouth and eat it, the fire in you consumes that food just as Agni consumed  Soma (155) , therefore eating food is a sacrifice. It is exactly the same as that other. And then you die, and you are thrown to the flames, either the flames of the funeral pyre, or the flames in the bellies of the worms, the vultures, or the hyenas. And you who were Agni, now become Soma. And then we come to this wild Dionysiac (160) thought. The whole world is a sacrifice, a burning sacrificial fire into which an inexhaustible, divine sacrifice is poured forever. This notion of out of the death and

burning comes life, is a basic notion that underlies the great sacrificial rites in the Indian tradition. One step more now-- since that fire is within you, why bother with the Brahmans. Come into the forest, sit down and seek it in yourself.  TRACK 13:  The Upanishads: Interaction between Two Traditions And here comes then the great period of the Upanishads, which I believe can be safely said to be the most sublime religious writings in the world. They date from about the 8th Century B.C. on.  And what has happened? The idea of the yogi, which did not exist with the Hindus, with the original Aryans coming in, has now combined with the Aryan tradition. There has taken place an interaction between the two peoples., and a very deep new problem comes along. How do we coordinate these two ideals-- the ideal of virtue, the ideal of the society, the ideal of work for the world, and this idea of yoga. The date for the Buddha, 563 to 483 B.C. can be taken as the date of the climax and crisis of this conflict. The Buddha was not a Brahman-- he was of the Satriya caste, the second caste. And in the Upanishads themselves, we have texts. The earliest Upanishads _______________(187), which show that the original Brahmans never knew anything about this. They got the doctrine from great kings. These are very interesting texts. One Brahman goes to teach a king, and the king says to him “Teach.” Then

the Brahman begins teaching him and the king says “Oh I know all that, I know all that, I know all that.” Finally the king shows him a man asleep, and he speaks to the man asleep and the man doesn’t answer. Then the king kicks the man asleep and the man wakes up. And the king says to the Brahman “Where was that man’s understanding when he was asleep?” And you get this doctrine of dream and deep sleep that I spoke of last week. It is from the natives of the land who were there before the Aryans came that these doctrines that we now revere as India’s great doctrines, really stem.

TRACK 14:  Jainism: Quenching the Desire for Life The most crude, the most primitive and harsh of these yoga doctrines, is that of the ancient Jain tradition. The great Jain teacher Mahavira was a contemporary of the Buddha. But he had been preceded by 23 other Jain teachers. The one before him, Pashvanata (208) had lived probably in the 9th or 8th Century B.C., and before that another and another. The Jain dates like all Indian dates are simply wild. They carry us back before the sun came into being, but anyhow there is no doubt about it that this is an extremely ancient yogic tradition. And the aim of this yoga-- now here is a very important point-- is death, literal death, but a death not before you have quenched in yourself all desire for life. If you kill yourself out of resentment, or out of discouragement, you’ll be back. You must have quenched everything in you. And the wonderful scheduling of vows, so that you limit what you do, stage by stage by stage, until finally you limit the

number of steps you will take a day, the number of mouthfuls you will eat until finally you go out like a light. It’s extraordinary. This is the prime religion of ________(Ahinsa)(226), of non violence-- not to hurt any living thing because the whole world is a living thing. You see in Bombay there are very few Jains left around Bombay or ______(Medhabar)(229) area. You see them wearing like doctors going to perform an operation, a kind of cloth in front of their mouths, not to breathe in little insects, or furthermore not to breathe the air in too hard because then you will hurt the air. If you fall into water you don’t swim, you’ll hurt the water that way-- float ashore. Don’t drink anything at night because there might be some little thing in it. Don’t pluck through from the tree, that kills it-- wait for it to drop. And even that is really pretty crude, eating a fruit. Finally you get so you don’t eat anything, you just learn to consume the air and you go out. The notion is that there are two principles-- the soul and matter, and they are linked. And what you are trying to do is disassociate yourself entirely from it, clean yourself of karmic matter and become a perfect bubble and float, rising to the top of the universe as a bubble disassociated from the world, and there remain for all eternity beyond this round, this round. 

TRACK 15:  Buddhist Doctrine and the First Two Yogas Now in contrast to that, there is the Buddhist doctrine, which is rather psychological than physiological. What is to die is the zeal for life, is the

Maya commitment. Ignorance is what leads to desire. Desire leads to action. Action leads to deeper ignorance. Ignorance leads to desire. Desire leads to action. How do you get out of this? Well you can attack it either in the way of attacking desire, or action, or ignorance. The principle Buddhist way is to attack the ignorance way. But you can also become inactive or control your action, or you can also regulate your desire. Now I want to talk about ten more minutes on the yogas, these different ways of breaking this ring.  The first yoga called Raja Yoga is one I spoke of last week, which is really a psychological exercise for extinguishing in yourself these impulses, and illuminating the body. I won’t go through that anymore.  A second order of yoga is called Jhana Yoga , the yoga of knowledge, ________(Viveka)(270) of making distinctions. This is philosophical yoga, not the exercise so much as the mental working out and making of distinctions. The basis is this-- distinguish between the subject and the object of knowledge, and identify yourself with the subject. I am not my body. I know my body, I am not my body. I know my emotions, I am not my emotions. I know my thoughts, I am not my thoughts. You can drive yourself out the back of the room that way. And simply identify yourself with the subject. And this is what you get in Sankya (281) , I am that pure subject of knowledge. And the Buddha goes one step further. The Buddha says “There is no subject of

knowledge either.” With that you’ve gone past anything you can think. 

TRACK 16:  The Yoga of Devotion: Five Orders of Love Then there comes the great yoga of devotion. This is the only yoga in which a god image is involved. And this will be anyone of these gods I’ve spoken of, and your relationship to the god. And your relationship will be that of basically love. Now there are five orders of love.  The first, and simplest, and crudest, and that of most religious attitudes, is of servant to master. “Oh Lord you are the master, I am your servant. Say what I am to do and I shall do it.” This is the order of the normal religious devotee.  Second, is the order of friend to friend. In the Christian tradition, this would be the relationship of the apostles to Jesus. In the Indian imagery it is the relationship of the  Pandhava Brothers (303) , the heroes of the Mahabarata to Krishna, who was their friend. The third-- and this requires a more developed spiritual person to be able to assume this friend to friend attitude toward the divinity-- the inner companion, the divine friend.  The third, is the attitude of parent to child where the god is the child. This is the attitude of the Christian at the Christmas crib, where the divine Lord is being cultivated in you. This is the Lord who is to be born in your heart, and to be nourished there and brought to maturity. In the Indian tradition it is the charming

little stories of Krishna as a child--  they call him the “butter thief,” that naughty little boy, beloved by everybody. His mother one day was told by a friend “Little Krishna has been eating mud.” And she goes out and slaps him and opens his mouth to take the mud out and clean his mouth. He plays a trick on her. As she was gazing into his mouth she saw the whole universe there. She didn’t know who he had been up to that point, her hair stood on end. And then he did her another favor-- he wiped that recollection out so she should forget it.  The fourth level of love is that of husband for wife and wife for husband. This is the attitude in the Christian tradition of the nun to Jesus-- she wears a wedding ring, she’s the bride of Christ. And in the Indian tradition it is the proper attitude of the wife to the husband-- he is her Lord and in her service to him she is in service to God. With respect to this I might say that since in the Indian tradition the divine power is imminent in all things, you don’t have to worship an imagined God-- anybody can be it. A woman came to Rama Krishna one time and said “Master, I am sorry but I can’t love God, I don’t, I can’t say I do.” “Well,” he says “is there nothing in the world that you love.” And she said “I love my little nephew.” He said “There you are. In your service to him you are in the service to God.” That matches also Krishna’s advice to the cow herds who were singing praises to Indra, the Lord of Thunder. He says “What about the cows. Those are your support. Worship them.”  

So the final order of love, what would that be? Had servant to master, friend to friend, parent to child, husband to wife. The highest form of love is illegitimate love, illicit love. In marriage you have the respect of the community, you have a job, you have life. But when you fall in love madly and furiously so that everything is given up, everything is lost, reputation and everything else for love, that is love. And says Rama Krishna, “When you love God that way, and everything drops off, you can say “Come through now. I’ve given everything for you. Show yourself to me.” 

TRACK 17:  Illicit Love and Ethics: the Contrast of East and West Now this brought about, this vishnuistic (362) idea of the ranges of love quite a little series of moral discussions in the 11th and 12th Centuries. The great example of illicit love is our Krishna, after he grew up a little bit and began playing his flute in the woods of Vrindavan (368). And then all the young wives at night, first they would hear that flute in their hearts, their hearts would open, and then their eyes would open. Then they would look to see if their husbands were aware, and then they would get up and sneak out to the forest. And then that wonderful dance took place, which became the principle topic of Indian devotional literature in the period that for us is the high Middle Ages. It is a very interesting thing. This literature came to culmination in a work by a young poet Jayadeva (377), 1175, which is exactly the date for the flourishing of the Tristan and Isolde story in Europe. And these two traditions are of exactly the

same essential sense, except that the contrast of East and West is very vividly present. The Indian is extremely lush, and Krishna dancing sometimes with 6000 gopis at once, turning himself into 6000 forms is something a little more, well, mysterious let me say than Tristan moping in the wilderness for Isolde. Furthermore, in the Indian there is always the religious mood, as to say the woman becomes symbolic of a divine presence. Whereas in the Western tradition, she is herself. There is no symbolism here. There is a secularity, a secular attitude, and a person to person attitude which is very, very different. Finally, this brings up another point that the Oriental religions ask us to go past virtue, to leave dharma, to leave virtue behind. They are metaphysically oriented, psychologically oriented. Our religions stress the ethical in a way that is transcended actually in the ultimate religious experiences of the East. And so I have given three of these yogas now-- the Raja yoga and what may be called psychological gymnastics, the meditative or contemplative or rather philosophical yoga of distinguishing between subject and object, and the devotional yoga of the love for God. 

TRACK 18:  The Karma Yoga: Act without Fear or Desire And now there is one more, and this is the great yoga of the Bhagavad Gita, the karma yoga. Briefly, these young five brothers, the Pandhavas (414),

had forfeited their kingdom in a gambling match. And they had come back to claim it from their cousins who held it. And the two armies lined up on either side of the field, were simply waiting for Arjuna, the leader of the Pandhavas to blow his war trumpet to start the affair. And Arjuna said to his chariot driver who was his friend Krishna, “drive me out between the two lines so that I may have a look. “And with the God as his chariot driver, he looks right and left, and he sees admirable men, friends on both sides. And suddenly what he was about to do overwhelmed him and he dropped his bow and he says to Krishna “Better that I should die here than that I should precipitate this conflict.”  And Krishna said to him “Whence this ignoble cowardice. Do you not realize you can’t do anything. Those forms that you kill are mortal, but the immortal portion is untouched. What was never born, never dies. Rains do not wet it, fire does not burn it....” and so forth, all those wonderful words of the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of the Lord. And he touches Arjuna’s eyes, and Arjuna sees his friend suddenly transformed into Kala, the masculine form of Kali-- black time-- this terrific majestic monster with many, many heads and tusked mouths, many weapons, and those two armies pouring into his mouth like grapes smashing there. And Arjuna’s hair stands on end and he says in a trembling voice, “who are you?” And he who had been his friend said “I am black time, here for the licking up of the world. Those men whom you thought you were to kill are dead. Get in there and perform your function, your duty, your role as warrior

prince to support the world in its process.” Then he turns himself back to the charming Krishna again. And the point is of course, among other points, that we are all that Kala, with all that inside us. Then he gives the instruction of how to act, and here’s the formula-- act without fear or desire for the fruits of the action. Fear or desire either for yourself or for others, but simply proceed in the order of life. And since as we pointed out last week, in the ultimate illumination all pairs of opposites are transcended, are left behind. And this world as we know and experience it is the perfect lotus world-- this is nirvana, as it looks. These actions, whatever they are, are the actions of the divine power. This carries one step further-- the actions of lust, the actions of pleasure are also yoga. And you have the formula, yoga is yoga, delight is yoga. The whole world as it lives is a manifestation of this radiant mystery, and we do not see it. 

TRACK 19:  The Tiger and the Goats Now to conclude, let me just tell a little Indian animal story. Their stories are great, and they illuminate things (snap fingers) like that. This is of a tigress, and some of you know this story I’m sure-- it was a favorite of Rama Krishna. She was pregnant and starving. And she came upon a little herd of goats, and in her zeal she pounced too hard, the goats scattered, she brought on the birth of her little one and died herself. The goats came back to where they had been, and they had very strong parental instincts. They saw this tiny little just-born tiger with

its dead mother, and so they adopted it. The tiger grew up thinking it was a goat. It learned to eat grass, it learned to bleat. It couldn’t see itself in a mirror so it didn’t know that it wasn’t a goat. Of course grass isn’t good for tigers and so it was a pretty miserable specimen of its kind by the time it reached adolescence. And there was at that time that a great big male tiger pounced at the same little herd, and the goats scattered. But this thing after all was a tiger, and he was standing there. And the big fellow looked at him and he said “What, you are living here with goats?” “Baaaaaaa,” said the tiger and he nibbles a bit of grass. Well the big boy was mortified-- what a shock to find his species in this condition. And he gives him a buffet or two and gets only these silly bleats. In desperation he picks him up by the scruff of the neck and takes him to a quiet pond. Now as I said last week, the idea of yoga is that the rippling of the mind should stand still and be like a quiet pond, and then you would see the perfect image. So the little fellow looks into the quiet pond. The big fellow, the guru, looks in too. Now the guru says “Look at that face. You’ve got the pot face of a tiger. You are not a goat. You are like me-- be like me.” Another silly bleat, but something is sinking in. Again he’s picked up by the neck and taken to the tiger’s den where there is a recently killed gazelle, all bloody and nice and yummy, and the big fellow takes a big chunk of this stuff and shoves it at the little one. The little one backs away, “I’m a vegetarian.” “Come on now,” says the big one, and he shoves this stuff down his throat, and he gags on it.” And the text says “As all do on true doctrine.” Well he gags alright, and it gets into his veins and all  and he

begins to feel something going buzzing along that he’d never felt before-- the right food. And spontaneously his own tiger nature gets hold of him and he gives without even knowing it, a tiger stretch, and a little tiger, I can’t call it a roar, but it’s something perhaps maybe that, enough for the big fellow who knew roars to recognize it as a possibility.  The big fellow says “There we are now. And now we go into the forest and eat tiger food.” The moral is that we are all, everyone of us, tigers living among all these goats. And my students say when I tell them this story “Put a tiger in your tank.”  

Lecture II.1.1 - The Function of MythologyBy Joseph Campbell

Details: Date: August, 1969 Venue: The Esalen Institute Location: Big Sur, CA Archive Number: L267

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TRACK 1:  Misinterpreting Our Mythological Heritage

To approach the problem of mythology and its relevance to contemporary life within three weeks of the moonwalk really

sets up the problem in a very emphatic way. It was four hundred and twenty-six years before that that Copernicus announced the heliocentric universe: 1543. That was the first cosmological concept that was not based on the visual experience of man on Earth; and it separated our intellectual understanding of the cosmos from our visual experience of it and made inevitable the ultimate coming into a manifestation of the mythology—or, rather, the field within which mythology must operate—which came into being on July 20th of this year [ED. – 1969; Campbell is referring to the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon].  Now that heliocentric universe is something that has been visually experienced by hundreds of thousands of people, and all of your children are going to take it for granted. This extension of earthly experience to what were formerly thought to be totally different cosmic bodies simply brings before us all what Galileo worked out when he applied the principles of ballistics and the movements of propelled bodies on Earth to an interpretation of the orbits of the… of the planets and other heavenly spheres. Now, as you all undoubtedly remember, the inquisition roundly, thoroughly and explicitly condemned the heliocentric universe as being contrary to Scriptures and consequently untrue. This was done quite clearly and emphatically. Luther also condemned Copernicus as simply a clown trying to refute Scripture. Well, what we can say now is that the scriptural interpretation of mythology has been completely refuted by these events. It stunned me to hear on Christmas Eve, from three men circumnavigating the Moon, those words from the first verses of the Book of Genesis—which everyone whom I’ve talked to felt were immensely moving coming from that distance—“In the Beginning…” and all that sort of thing, based on a cosmology inherited from the Sumerians of the fourth millennium bc, with a three-layered universe with waters beneath, waters above, and the firmament separating

these. We had just heard from the three explorers that the Moon was very dry—there was no water up there at all—and then they went on with this. Now this discontinuity between the religious heritage and those epithets and phrases and images which are driven into us in childhood, so that when they come up later they stir the whole range of our nature with a sense of glorious poetry, are so far out of touch with our own cosmological knowledge that one can only say that, when mythological symbols are interpreted in that manner, they simply are being mis-interpreted. And the first point I want to make is that one of the great problems of our relationship to the mythological imagery is that they have been consistently interpreted in historical, geographical, and cosmological terms; and we now have refuted all of those interpretations, and so the imagery of our mythological heritage has been disqualified for us. It seems not to be of any real relevance to contemporary life.

TRACK 2:  Mythological Symbols: Their Origin and Purpose  A point that I want to bring up in these talks, and which I think will help to make all this work for us, is that the origin of the mythological symbols is not pseudo-scientific, pseudo-historical. They spring from the psyche. They are not the consequence of observations; they are the consequence of observations misinterpreted through projections from the human psyche. And these symbols, which have great significance psychologically, have, as a consequence of their interpretation as history and cosmology, been taken away from us. They no longer are working. From my point of view, the imagery of myth is the imagery through which our own nature— our unconscious nature—communicates with our consciousness; and they have in the past—when the symbols have been received simply and naively, without criticism—operated to keep the conscious

programs and life in touch with the unconscious motivations. But when these symbols are removed—as they have been for us—there takes place a disconnection. We hear all over the place these days of alienation, and in terms of the concerns of my science and thinking, one can interpret this alienation as the consequence of the loss of those vehicles, or instruments of communication, by which we would have kept our consciousness in touch with our own group nature—and then we seek the nature in other ways: going back into the country; or becoming, as it were, primitives; or, one way or another, leaving the world of our civilization to go back and find roots—as though those roots are outside. The roots are really inside, and they can be found by way of these… of a restoration, a reactivation, of the real communication which these symbols originally rendered.

TRACK 3:  The Impact of Space-Age Imagery Now let us… I’ve spoken of the… the [laughs] discontinuity between the Christmas message and the… the fact of those men flying around the Moon. Just about the time they were delivering that message, they had delivered also one of the most stunning pictures, I think, a modern intellect could have tried to accommodate itself to: namely, the earthrise over the moon. This was even more stunning than the image of the Earth, which they had taken at this, that and the next distance; but this… this business of another plane for the human eye and mind to rest upon and see its own Earth coming up, and realize that we are on this bubble floating around the cosmos—there we got it; and our children are getting it; and it’s no longer a merely intellectual concept of a heliocentric universe played against the experience of the senses. It is now an experience of the senses.

That fantastic movie—2001,which I’m sure a number of you have seen—of this space journey into the field of the planet Jupiter, I think… I was sitting in a theater when I saw this, with a lot of kids around me. They knew everything that was going on there; they could name what this and the other element was, which for me was a novelty; for them, it’s as much a ground of their basic human experience as for us of getting into an automobile and out again. So, another field of images has come in. Mythologies that operate, that function and are vital, are always up to date scientifically. They represent an integration of the experience of the environment with the experiencing subject: the psyche of the local individuals; but when the science has moved away from the cosmology of the mythology, the mythology is dead. And our traditional mythologies are, for most of us, utterly dead; and all one has to do is see and know something of the confusion of the various clergies to realise this: they are in full retreat and greatly disturbed about the problem. I remember hearing a story years ago of an old lady who looked at the moon through a telescope and then said, “Give me the Moon the way God made it.” Now we just have to ask what God that was that made the Moon as she knew it; and that was the God of this refuted Biblical cosmology. But this doesn’t mean that the imagery of the biblical tradition or any other archaic tradition is refuted. What is refuted is the cosmological interpretation of it. When I started as a young scholar teaching courses on comparative mythology, my ambition was to break down the religions of my students; and I found that the results of my teaching were exactly the opposite to what my intention was. Their religions were already either broken down or non-existent, and the experience of the meanings of the symbols sort of reactivated their heritages for them and put them back in touch, I’d say, with the rich traditions out of which they’d come.

TRACK 4:  Awe before the Great Mystery: Mythology’s First Function Now let us, in order to do this thing systematically, review what be might said to be the leading functions of mythology. This is an elementary point; it’s the ABCs of the whole subject. What are the functions that mythology has served? How many of these can be served today? And those that are not being served by our mythological heritage are being served by some other aspect of our heritage, and let’s try to see what it is.  The first function, one might say, of every mythology has always been a mystical, metaphysical function: that of awaking in the mind and spirit of the individuals a sense of awe before the mystery of being itself. This is the mystery dimension, and the first function of mythology is to communicate that—so that in the field of mythological forms and of the rites by which those… you participate in those forms, you are made aware, experientially, of the ultimate, absolute mystery of the universe, which cannot be caught in words. It absolutely transcends all conceptualisations, and it breaks past all fields of meaning. The world, the universe, life, being itself is absolutely without meaning. It is antecedent to meaning. Meanings are the mental interpretations, and these vary. These are what vary: the meanings given. Now not only the universe itself, but also the imagery of myth, is intrinsically without meaning. It is a being statement; and the experience of the… you know, getting turned on, or the ripple or buzz, comes when all of your meaning interpretations smash, break up, and what has been called the “mysterium tremendum et fascinans”—the fascinating tremendous mystery of this whole thing—comes zooming through. Now it is a tremendous mystery, and it’s an appalling, monstrous mystery.

TRACK 5:  Śiva & Kirtimukha: Life Lives on Life

Just think of the nature of life itself: it lives on life. The prime image of life is this consuming monster which would not be there if it were not consuming life. That’s the sense of the image of the ouroboros consuming its own tail and eating itself.  There’s a fantastic Indian myth of this great deity Śiva—he has three eyes, you know; this [gestures] is the eye of inner knowledge, but also thunder power. And Śiva was approached by a monster, who demanded possession of Śiva’s consort, Parvati. And Śiva, in a moment of great wrath, simply let a blast go forth from this eye; and there, materialized, was a monster avid to eat, to consume. Well, monster number one was… one-upmanshipped by this second monster, and appalled by what confronted him, he threw himself at Śiva’s feet—throwing himself on the god’s mercy. Well now—in, you know, metaphysical, let’s say, ethics—when that happens, the god of course has to protect; so being asked to protect, the god did indeed protect. So, well, monster number two says, “Well, what about it? You brought me forth simply as a creature of hunger. What shall I do now? Whom shall I eat?” So Śiva had a brilliant thought, he says, “Eat yourself!” [laughter]  So the deity did, he started with his hands and feet, and he went right up the line—and Śiva looked at this with great satisfaction—and finally all that was left was the face.  Now, this face… Śiva said, “This is utterly admirable, and I’m going to have this face as the guardian of my temples.” And you’ll see in many Indian temples this strange mask with tusks, but no chin—he’s already eaten that much [laughter]—and it’s just what’s left on top there as a symbol of what life is: and this is called Kirtimukha, which means “shining face,” the wonderful face of glory. This is a symbol of life; this is the ultimate thing about it: it’s a monster; it’s an avid, avid, grabbing, eating, self-consuming thing. Life is a self-

consuming monster. Well, now, the sensitive intellect becomes aware of this. [laughter] TRACK 6:   Affirming or Negating the Horror of Existence Now, this has been in being for something like two billion years before any sensitive intellect’s eyes opened and saw what was going on. Meanwhile, the possessor of this sensitive intellect has himself grown up in his mother’s womb, is born with a lot of organs already avid for what their various duties are, and he starts to work to try to interpret these and to correct them according to his own sensitive understanding [laughter] of what should be. This is what is known as alienation. [laughter] This person is alienated from his own character, his own nature—so that one of the functions of myth has always been to reconcile consciousness to this monstrous thing which is the precondition of its own existence. This involves rites—particularly on the primitive level—that are absolutely appalling. The whole thing is demonstrated right before you there, and you are to be enthusiastically participating, saying, “This is what I am doing.” Now, of course, when we relegate all of the horror part of our existence to special little areas like slaughterhouses and so forth—so that all we get is the beautiful, delicious dinner that we got tonight: didn’t have to go out and eat that animal alive in the field—we may feel no real impact of the horror of our own existence: what it implies for other beings.  The primary mythologies are absolutely affirmative of this. I… I’ve been reading and thinking of myths for a long, long time, and I cannot think of a single—what we call “primitive,” or “primary”—mythology that is negative to this. And the initiation rites of young boys, exper… they render the experience both on the boy himself and in what he sees. Some of the Australian rites are almost incredible: what those kids go through when they’re twelve, eleven, thirteen

years old. One of the more unappetising aspect is this of the older men bleeding themselves, and the boys live for weeks on men's blood—they’re weaning them from woman’s food, the mother milk; and the boys, along with the men’s blood, are receiving manly wisdom. The mythology is communicated through this. The woman gives birth to a nature being. The men’s blood gives birth to a culture being: someone who has been integrated in the culture heritage, but always in the way of these horror experiences and the infliction upon the boys of—what for, I think, most of us would be—practically unendurable pain. However, at a certain time in human history and the date is somewhere around the seventh century bc, we begin to get evidence of strong negative reactions to this. The prime word is from Schopenhauer that epitomises this attitude: “life is something that should not have been.” It’s a mistake, a cosmic error. And when this comes, we get a system of myths having to do with withdrawing from it all. Now, these are the two primary mythological orientations: that of affirmation, with gratitude, with joy in participation, with rapture; and that of absolute withdrawal. TRACK 7:  Correcting the World: Our Zoroastrian Heritage The third position is that of correction. Now this mythology of correction, which is the one that most of us inherit, is characteristic and, I think—as my own understanding of all these things goes—local to the Near East. The earliest example of it in the records is in Zoroastrianism, the Persian religion of Zoroaster. This is a new thing in the history of mythology. The dating of Zoroaster is extremely obscure and uncertain. There are two main theses—there are always two theses for any… anything in the scientific world: one is that he should be dated somewhat early, perhaps 1100 bc, and the other is somewhat late, somewhere around 600 bc. There are reasons for this which I won’t go into now; both of

them are very convincing arguments. In any case, it is in the period of Darius—the great Darius I, about 525 to 486 bc—that, with the establishment of the great reach of the Persian empire, that this religion becomes the imperial religion of ancient Persia. The basic thesis is this: that the prime creator created an absolutely good world, a world of pure light—consequently an invisible world; of course, to have anything visible you have to have light and shade. So this wonderfully pure, invisible world was a world of absolute perfection in its first creation. The Lord of Light, Ahura Mazda, is the creator of this world. Then comes the negative power, the antagonist, the teacher of the lie; and he, jealous, attacks this world and renders it light and dark. There is a prime good creation, then a Fall: this is the Fall; and it is as a result of that Fall that the world of visible things comes into being. I say, in contrast to the Biblical story where you have the world first and then the Fall: the world itself is a production of the Fall. And the Fall is not blamed on man; it is prehistoric, in the absolute sense. It is before historic time comes into being that the Fall took place. Now, the world as it exists, then, is a world of the interplay of light and dark. These two great powers—Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, the dark—are in counter-play in the world as it exists. And each of us is invited to participate in the battle of the gods, on the side of Ahuha Mazda, to eradicate evil and assist in the restoration of the good world. This is a thesis that brings in the concept of a progressive history taking place, and you are invited to participate in that history. This religion—the notion that the world can be improved; the notion that we are improving it; the notion that it is precisely this society, this community, this religion that is the improving one—leads to a kind of progressivism, but also to an imperialism. This power is imposing its will on all other powers; and doing all the things of horror which have to be

done in order to be alive at all, it is nevertheless moving toward the illumination of these conditions.  Now this is the thesis that comes into the Old Testament in the formula of the Fall and Redemption. It’s just about contemporary with the Zoroastrian movement, and the relationship of the biblical to the Zoroastrian is not really known. They’re in exactly the same area, the same field. As you all know, it was the Persian Cyrus who restored the Hebrews to Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity and so forth. Isaiah II, the second Isaiah, celebrates Cyrus the Great, the antecedent of Darius as the… the…  almost-messiah of the Lord Jehovah; and Jehovah had been his inspiration and so forth and so on. So these two are very closely, closely related. However, in the biblical tradition the blame is put on man, instead of on a cosmic force; and this sense that, in living the life that we have to live in order to be human beings at all, we are somehow in exile, which was brought on by man himself, is another inflection of this thesis of the Zoroastrians. Then this comes down into Christianity as well; and we have the whole theme of Fall and Redemption through Christ, and the movement then toward the Second Coming—which is also there in Zoroastrianism—when the lion will lie down with the lamb. That wasn’t very good… would not be very good for a lion or anything having to do with the leonine in human or other nature. So we had these three approaches to this first mystery, this first function of mythology: relating man to the ultimate mystery of existence. One, the affirmative one of the prime mythology; second, the negative one of the world-rejecting mythologies, which has its strongest statement in Jainism in India—Jainism and certain aspects of aesthetic Hinduism and Hinayana Buddhism. These are the prime religions of this absolute negation: the world cannot be corrected and must be just rejected. There is also a very strong strain of this in certain aspects of Gnosticism, which come along very

strongly in the first centuries bc and the first five centuries ad, and then has a resurgence in the medieval period in the Albigensian tradition of Europe. Then there is the third mythological approach to this first function of reconciling consciousness with the world: that, namely, of the restoration of a perfect life, which will not have the characteristics of the life in which we live. So that in this tradition, what we take to be life is regarded as simply a prelude to a total transformation of the world and of human life through the activities, usually. of a single community: a church, a race, a nation.

TRACK 8: A Coherent Cosmological Concept: Mythology’s Second Function The second function, then, of all mythologies—and the first, I’ve said, is this metaphysical, mystical function of relating consciousness to preconditions of its own existence, either positively, negatively, or in the way of correction—the second function is the cosmological function. This is the one that has been taken over for us by science. It always was in the hands of science, only proto-sciences—not as exact as ours, but nevertheless, in their own day, essentially, scientific: based on objective observation and drawing conclusions from what was observed. We can point to three great stages, actually, in the development of these cosmological concepts. First, we have the basic, non-literate, primitive traditions. For these people, the prime themes in the mythologies have to do with the extraordinary in experience—not the norms of experience, but what is extraordinary: the coyote or the beaver that doesn’t act quite like other coyotes or beavers, the one that has an exceptional quality; the rock that has a curious, fascinating difference about it; the tree that stands differently from others—those exceptional experiences.

However, with the emergence in the Near East in the ninth millennium bc of societies based on agriculture, where a large community—an increasingly large community—established in one place could grow up with other possibilities in life besides that of questing for one’s food, the observations of the heavens became more and more consistent and accurate. By the fourth millennium bc, little cities began to emerge in Mesopotamia: Ur, Uruk, Larak, Nippur and so forth—a whole little constellation. And it was in these cities that, because of their size, a differentiation of human functions came into being.  In a primitive community, all the adults are in complete control of the culture heritage: they are equivalent adults. In a city community, you have specialists: professional priests, professional governing people and bureaucrats. You have professional trading people, professional peasants, servants of different sorts—so that you have a constellation of people of different types; and the problem of the culture is to integrate all these in the sense of being one community, one being. The professional priests in the fourth millennium bc—you can think of the date 3500 bc as the approximate one for this—were the originators of writing, of mathematics based on the decade and on the sexadecimal system of the sixties—which we still use for measuring circles, whether circles of space or circles of time; and it was they, through observation of the heavens, who first recognized the movement of the planets at a fixed, mathematically-determined rate through the constellations of the fixed stars. This concept of an impersonal, mathematical order was the first concept of a cosmological consistency that mankind had ever conceived of; and this was the moment fascinating of that period: that concept of a cosmic order to which the human order ought to adapt itself. And so we have this fantastic charade of human beings pretending to be planets

—the king wearing the sign of the sun or of the moon, whichever the dominant male divinity happened to be in that culture’s town; members of his court wearing garments that simulated the garments of the heavens; the court procedure highly hieratic; and the most fantastic thing: at certain conjunctions of planets, an eon was regarded as having ended, and the king and his entire court were killed. It was in the [nineteen] twenties that Sir Leonard Woolley excavating the Sumerian city of Ur, which was the city of the moon god, came upon graves where the whole court had been buried alive—the king and his court; the queen—this is the basis of suttee—following the king, as the planet Venus follows the moon or the sun in descent, as the evening star, and then, as the morning star, leads him out again. This is the main idea of suttee: that the wife, as the planet Venus, and the… On the suttee stones in India celebrating women who have “become satī,” as the Indians say, you see the hand: that’s the hand of the planet Venus, the symbol of Venus, who has gone to resurrect her husband and bring eternal life to both of them around again. This concept of the human society imitating the heavenly society we still follow in our rituals. Our religious feasts are based on the calendar. This concept, then, of society following the cosmic society comes into being. That is the dominant cosmology of all of the high religions, East and West. TRACK 9: No More Horizons in Our Unbounded World Now in our world today—this Moon trip that I’m speaking about—the basis for that cosmology has been knocked absolutely out. Our little Sun: one member of a galaxy of which the Milky Way is the rim. One hundred thousand light years it would take to pass through that galaxy, and this little Sun is revolving like a planet in that great swing of this revolving multitude of stars. And then one looks and sees a certain kind of fuzzy-looking star, and the astronomer tells you that is another galaxy; and then another; and something

like a billion galaxies have been identified; and this prodigious universe is out there: it’s another world.  Furthermore, the agricultural base—Mother Earth and all that—of the earliest societies, which was the base for human civilization from about the ninth millennium bc up to our own lifetimes, is now erased. This is an age of mechanisations; and these little horizons… Even the horizon of China, the horizon of India, the horizon of Rome were little horizons compared with what we have now. There are no horizons now. There is no such thing as a bounded world anymore. The Communist world—this reactionary bunch of stupid people—are trying to bound their world. They have machine guns to see to it that their world is bounded, and Berlin Walls. This is an attempt to restore something that’s no longer possible.  The open horizon, the open world, the letting things in, the trying somehow to get your laws to accommodate—accommodate all the various new things that are pouring in. Just think what’s come into the domain of what used to be European law. We have Asia; we have Africa; we have the tiny, little cultural centers of the Micronesian islands—all with claims; so that we have mini-states as well as macro-states now, each with its claims, and laws trying to encompass this, instead of liquidating those that don’t correspond to a fixed system. And this, I say, is a transformation as great as that of the Moon transformation.  My thought is that, just as from the old cosmologies of the simple tribal peoples there was an enormous [step] to the vast cosmologies of the monumental cultures, so we are right now experiencing in our own lifetime a step as great: from the monumental to the mechanized world, to the no-horizon world, to a world that makes the sort of multiple nature of old Hellenistic civilization look very simple. This is the challenge of the time: not to erase people, not to push them down, but to let them in and have this multiple play;

and in our scientific thinking: relativity. There are no absolutes; and we always have to realise this. This seems to me to be one of the mistakes of the existentialists—as though there was any such thing as existence. There is no such thing. Every being has its own experience of existence, and there is a relativity there. You can’t tell me I’ve got to experience Camus’ nausea when I don't experience it, and that he is in a superior state because everything makes him sick. [laughter] The… Suppose you try to compare that nausea with someone else’s joy in being, and the… We're not to say who’s the higher and who’s the lower here any more than we can say what’s up and what’s down in relation to the star Betelgeuse. The whole thing is loose. So much, then, for the cosmological function of mythology. These transformations have taken place, and we are in the midst of a transformation. Now, lest you feel encouraged, let me tell you that it took something like four thousand years for the mythologies relevant to the agricultural world to achieve something like a consistency and a life-governing power. We are in the world of change.First function of mythology: what I’ve called the metaphysical or mystical; second: the cosmological, presenting an image of the universe through which the sense of the mystery will be communicated. Now in the normal language of science that sense of mystery is sterilized out. This does not mean that the world that science reveals to us is impotent to render mystery. I’m sure that, when we think of these galaxies and all, we are aware of the mysterium tremendum in a way that goes far beyond anything represented in the Sumerian mythology that was recited to us from the Moon.

TRACK 10:  Validate a Specific Social Order: Mythology’s Third Function The third function of a traditional mythology is to validate and support a specific social order. Every one of the mythologies

that has come to us has come into being in the context of a given specific society. Now those societies were, for the most part, pressed: there was no margin for allowance; everybody had to conform; and the disciplines through which conformity was enforced were very serious and ruthless. To read—for instance, in the texts of The Institutes of Vișņu or The Laws of Manu—the punishments that were normal for people who broke the fantastically complicated law systems of India’s traditional caste heritage would just lift the hair on your head: the image of people just being broken to pieces.  And this is something that in our world has been left behind with the humanistic tradition of the Greeks. Our society is revolted by such things, and there has been a consistent effort to ameliorate the punishment side of the legal and social heritage began releasing people in a certain way. Of course there are moments when things move the other direction and so forth, but just looking in a big broad way, the kind of generosity, you might say, that inhabits our laws is something that would hard… would never have occurred—and it hasn't yet occurred—to anybody in the Orient. They don’t know what to make of it. The individual was being shaped on a procrustean bed to the demands of that society. There was no allowance for “What would you like to do? Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief?” You know: “What do you want to be, sonny?” None of that. The laws are given, strictly enforced, and anyone who can’t follow is liquidated. To get back to the little Australian initiations: little boys that did not do as they were told, who just had ideas of their own, were killed and eaten. Well, this is one way to get rid of juvenile delinquents, but it’s also a way to eliminate some creative possibilities; and these societies, as a result, were relatively static. One of the characteristics of our own humanistic tradition is tha—in our better moments, at any rate—we expect the individual to be critical of his society, to be critical of his teachers, to be

critical of the values that he has inherited, and innovate, change, transform.  I notice in our universities and other centers these days a great enthusiasm for the Guru Principle. Everybody now wants a guru, and he wants his professor to be a guru. The guru is an absolute authority, and he tells you what to do, and you do it; and he is not asking you what you would like to do—this is just exactly the opposite of the direction of occidental humanistic education. Our professors and teachers are communicators of information, for the most part, and you can take that information and use it in your own way. In class, one expects a student to criticize, and we ask for essays in reply which will develop the ideas presented in terms of the student’s own thinking.  This is not the way things go in the Orient. It’s rather a thing to teach an Oriental class and have the information come back to you as though from a tape recorder that you've produced; and you will not get criticism as a teacher from the students, unless your point of view differs from that of a guru whom they prefer. [laughter] Then they’ll give you his criticism of what you said, but you don’t get that thing.

TRACK 11: Our Rapidly Changing Social Orders Marriage: the husband and wife are provided by the family. Even marriage brokers in the newspapers in Delhi—New Delhi today… columns of advertisements for wives—these are advertisements put in by families and by marriage brokers; and the young couple that meets is meeting for the first time. There is none of this challenge to individual judgement, individual criticism. “What is it I'm going to be? What kind of husband or wife should be mine?” Or, “Who is it just sets me crazy?” This doesn’t matter there: the wife and husband are given. When you have a child, you can’t predict whether it’s going to be male, female, genius or idiot. When

you have a husband or wife given you, you don’t know whether it’s going to be a lunatic, a monster, or a lovely sweet creature; and you have to take it as it comes. I remember Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, who was a great advertiser of Indian ideals in the last generation here, was asked, “Well, suppose a woman’s husband turns out to be a monster. How should she behave?” And his answer was, “Just because he has forfeited the virtues of a male life, she should not forfeit those of womanhood. She must adore him, serve him as her lord.” Well, there’s a whole institution that I found in Bombay, instituted by a French woman married to a Parsi, to rescue girls who had come screaming: [coughs] these were outcasts of society; the old, strict society had nothing for them—no sympathy for them, nothing.  Also the social order has changed—mythology as the authorization of a social order, which in all the old traditions is regarded as derived from an uncriticizable authority. In the biblical tradition, that deity who is supposed to have been the creator of the universe is also the one who delivered the law on Mount Sinai, and those laws are as uncontrovertible as the laws of the universe. Similarly in India—where you don’t have the idea of a personal creator, but the idea of a universe that has been in being, has been in being, has been in being forever—those laws which are the laws of the universe are the laws of an Indian society; and these laws cannot be changed. Look at the situation of our poor Pope, who thinks that the law delivered by some miracle to him and through the Church, telling us about birth and birth control: they’re fixed laws; no matter what the good or evil of society as humanistic thinking may evaluate it, this is a law that has to be obeyed. Well, they were wrong with respect to the order of the universe, they may be wrong with respect to the order of the marriage bed. This, however, is a hard thing for clergies to recognize.

The old social orders are broken. There are no fixed rules. Society changes. It’s changing very fast. What were virtues today are the… yesterday, are the vices of today; and so we have an open order, morally. Mythology has nothing to do with this any more. TRACK 12:  Guiding a Person Through Life: Mythology’s Fourth Function The fourth function of a traditional mythology is to carry an individual through the crises of his life: from infancy to maturity to age. Here is a function that has hardly varied through the millenniums. With the changes of cosmology, with the changes of society, the individual has nevertheless, as a human individual, always had to go through a certain curve. The first fact about the human being as an animal is that he is born twelve years too soon. Mothers will say, “Thank God for that,” but it brings about a very difficult situation: the child is dependent for twelve years at least—even in a primitive society; and this attitude of dependency is fixed in the psyche. “What will Mother say? What will Daddy say? Who will help me now? What should I do?”  Then at a certain crisis of puberty, the individual is expected to assume an attitude of responsibility for his actions. I am Daddy. I am Mother. We might say that a neurotic is a person who did not make that crossing, who in middle life is still in fear or in dependence upon a parental image and cannot assume for himself the total responsibility for his action and does not feel responsible to anybody else, except as he chooses to be. The neurotic situation presented: his first experience is dependency, flight, “Where’s Mother? Where’s Daddy?” Then he has to think, "Well, for heaven’s sake, I’m Daddy, I’m Mother.” and get going.  So there’s this ambivalence, this pull in two different directions. The function of all the primitive rites of puberty was to carry the individual across that threshold, and insofar as our society is failing in this because of the rejection of the

rites, we have a greater problem of neurosis than any primitive or traditional society would ever have had.  However, there comes a moment in mid-life when the sun begins to go down. Just about the time you’ve learned what the society expects of you, you begin to fail in strength and competence. Furthermore, there is a younger, livelier generation coming along that is doing it better, or prob… perhaps, in our world, has invented other things to do; so that everything that you have learned to do is already a matter of archaic, historical interest. [laughter] The problem then is: What are you going to do with this emotion, this energy, which nobody wants any more? It goes in. The problem of the mythology is not only to carry the individual from dependency to responsibility, but also from responsibility to “nobody needs me any more”: self-sufficiency. Now the way that this is done in most old societies is by giving the older people a sense of authority, which people may or may not take seriously. When something is to be done you go to the elders—the senate or something like that—and they express themselves; but they take so long to do it that the thing is already done [laughter] before they comment or something like that. The person has to be carried psychologically out the door.  I think when I think of this of a story I have heard of the old Barnum and Bailey circus, which used to have these great tents, you know? And they had one tent with the freaks in it; and here you would have, you know, the fat lady, the midget, the tallest man in the world, and all this kind of thing. People would pay to get in there, and they wouldn’t go out, so the place was piling up with people; and nobody could think how to get rid of them, until somebody came up with this bright idea: instead of having the sign “exit” up there, put up another sign, “to the Grand Egress,” and [laughter] everybody would go out. You would think you were going to

a certain experience, and the main thing has been accomplished: you were out. And so this is what our religions have done also: over the door, you get a picture of where you are going, and what does it matter whether you get out or whether you’re any place or not. We’ve got rid of the old man without him going nuts on our hands. So, the mythologies have had to affect this carriage of the individual through his life. And as I’ve already said, in our world, there is an additional problem that comes in that second stage, the stage of responsibility. In all of the old traditions, the notion of responsibility was that the individual would become the representative of the values of the culture as they stood.

TRACK 13:  An Anecdote about Gurus Now, let me tell you a little anecdote about gurus. The guru would be the communicator of the values of the culture. The student was to accept what the guru said without criticism. The principal virtue of the student in India is sraddha, which means perfect faith in the guru, who must be, as it were, a perfect carrier of a light that shines through. He is, as it were, a glass without any imperfections, so the light comes beautifully through. Now this is the story of a student who came late one day to the regular sessions—the whole day had to be spent with the guru—and the guru roughly says to him, “You’re late. Where you been?” “Well, I live on the other side of the river, as you know. The river is in flood today, and I couldn’t ford the stream any more, and there was no boat, so I'm late." “Well,” said the guru, “did the river go down? Did a boat come?” “No.” “Well, how did you get here?” “Well, I thought, ‘My guru is my god. My guru is the vehicle of eternal light. He has erased himself, and the light comes

pouring through him. I’ll simply meditate on my guru, identify with my guru, and walk across the stream.’ So, what did I do? I said, ‘Guru, guru, guru,’ and here I am.’ Well, of course, this touched the guru deeply, [laughter] and it was something that was the kind of thing he would have hoped for, you might say. But then when the student went, it continued to bug him, and he thought, “I’ve got to try this.” [laughter] So he goes to the river, and of course what he says is “I, I, I,” [laughter] and of course what happened was he drowned.  Now, the reason he was a guru was that he wasn’t there. The spirit—the pure wind of spirit—can walk over the water, and any being that can walk over the water is a being who is not of gross object as most of us are. Now that guru had communicated to his student the pure light, and he had received it from his guru, who had received it from his guru, who had received it from his guru, and this goes on back, back, back.  That’s not what we want [in the West]. That’s not what we ask for. That’s not what we train for. We train a person to develop his imperfections, his peculiar nuances of personality and talents. That thing which was never in the world before is what we want people to become; and this brings about this… troubled? Certainly: greatly disturbed, but greatly productive world, in contrast with which the old worlds just seem to be petrifactions. TRACK 14: Different Laws Govern Psyche, Society, and the Stars How can a society survive when it’s asking people to be individuals? This is the… this is the great How?—sociologically, psychologically. The problem—and this is one of our mythological problems: the imagery that will enable a person to develop himself without violating the requirements of the society. In the old world there was an exact duplication: macrocosm, the cosmos; microcosm, the little

cosmos of the psyche; mesocosm, the in-between cosmos of the society. The society imitated the forms of the mathematical movement of the cosmos. These were regarded as precisely the forms that move the psyche of the individual. You have a harmony here—so that by studying the stars, you learn the laws of society; by studying the laws of the society, you learn the laws of the individual. What do we have today? We know that the physics of the cosmos are not the laws that govern society; there’s another plane of law here. We know also that the laws that govern society are not the laws of the individual psyche, so that those goods which an individual experiences and knows to be goods for his psyche—true for him, valid for him—he must not interpret in terms of a categorical imperative as the laws which ought to be the laws for all mankind, or even for his own neighbours. Objectively, to study the laws by which a society may become: they are optional; they are conventional; they are not absolute. The laws by which my psyche is to develop are not those for yours or yours. They’re different; and neither the psyche nor the society is governed by the laws that govern the stars—and we don’t even know what those laws are. The whole thing has split. These wonderful three—cosmological, sociological, psychological, which in the old systems were one united uni—are now apart from each other. And we’ve got to learn—not only learn, but learn how to render in these communicating media of the symbolic world—the mystery of this disintegration of what for the old monumental world was one great mystery. TRACK 15: The “God Idea” Today Well, so much for my little talk, really. The moonwalk has done it; formerly, this other perspective: the laws of earth up there on the moon—and none of these having anything to do with the laws of pure psychology or sociology. This is the base out of which the symbolic heritage of the old myths, which are interpreted in these cosmological and sociological

ways, have to be re-read. Let’s think in closing of some of the images that our youngsters have in mind, and we ourselves: cosmology, space voyages. Just think of it: you’re not just walking down the stream or down to the stream, you’re not just going from one town to another, you’re going from earth to the moon and back. It’s a commutation now— already they’ve done it three times. The sociological situation: a pell-mell of inbuilt heritages. In a single city, we have Catholics; we have Protestants; we have Jews; we have people from Oriental culture backgrounds—we now have big communities of Buddhists, for instance, in Hawaii. The simple saying on our money: “In God we trust”—well, suppose you don’t have a god? There’s no god in Buddhism. Well, there’s a whole second-class citizen situation right there. When you pass the coin you don’t trust God at all; you trust your own immanent mother light.  With respect to the individual and the god idea, Jung has noticed in the symbols coming from the dreams of his patients that (and he uses this line)… I think many of you know the symbolism of the mandala: the cosmic circle as a psychological device—where in the old traditional mandalas there would be the symbol of a god, there tends to turn up in his patients’ mandalas, the human symbol. Not a god, but humanity as the prime centre of concern. Tillich coined the wonderful term “God is your ultimate concern.” What the individual can find in himself through watching his life, through thinking about his life, and through other symptoms; what he can find in himself to be actually his ultimate concern—that is his god. If it is your child—and I dare say, for many the child is the ultimate concern—that child is your, what the Indians would call iṣṭa-devatā— ‘your chosen deity.’ It is the vehicle of your relationship to the divine principle. Your relationship to that little creature is your relationship to god—to your actual god. The theoretical God

of the church is not operating in you. This relativism with respect to the god image is very important in our time. TRACK 16: From Horizon-Bound Cultures to Global Civilization And now to conclude, I always think of Spengler when I look at what’s going on in the world today. I became acquainted with Spengler some forty years ago; and it was in those days, a great shock: what he had to say. What he had to say was that our… the momentum of our culture—the culture period of creativity, prime creativity; what he called the North European or Faustian culture: culture symbolized in the Gothic cathedrals, in the Baroque palaces and so forth—has reached its apogee, and it is going into what he called “civilization.” We are actually in his judgement at that point of transition from culture to civilization, which the ancient world of Rome and Greece arrived at at the time of the Carthaginian wars—where the period of Greece was gone, and the period of Rome comes in: the great mass culture, the hard fist of Caesarism and so forth; what the people want is simply bread and circuses and the authority of a strong fist against a formless mass—according to him we are moving into that. With respect to the arts, one is taking down the culture forms—they no longer serve; they seem to be inhibiting us—throwing them out. And in the arts: more violence, more violence; no more the sensitive thing. Well, when one heard that forty years ago, it didn’t seem likely; but as one has watched, it is what is happening. Now, one can feel negatively about this, but one should not feel negatively about anything going on. You’ve got to grab it, and move into it, and note the positive thing. And so, not only are the culture forms being taken down, but the civilization forms are being found and built which will be the guiding forms of the next five, six hundred years—the last years, perhaps, of our civilization.

Then I think in relation to this, also, of the further word of Leo Frobenius—who was a contemporary of Spengler’s, and they worked a little bit in relationship to each other: namely, that the culture forms of the high traditions are now no longer possible. There will not be a new, independent, horizon-bound culture. We now have this global world; and we have moved from the whole world of monumental culture which starts back in those ziggurats of 3500 bc, we've moved from that to a totally new world of mechanism—not monumentality—mechanism, intercommunications. And you can see it in what’s happened just as a result of the air service: we can go from here to India in less than two days; whereas when you read the accounts of the Chinese voyages leaving Zhongshan to go to India to visit the Buddhist shrines there, it took them seven years just to get to India over dangerous, dangerous country. No separations any more. And then such novelties as the atom bomb, which gives people a sense of fear of death; then they get in their cars and drive eighty miles an hour unafraid of death and smash up on a lamp post long before the atom bomb has come along. This theoretical fear of death that comes from fearing the atom bomb seems to have nothing to do with the actualities of life. This is a mythological problem to face. Next, with respect to the more moral life: the wonderful pill. This has changed everything within five years, in the way of the relationship of the sexes to each other. And finally, when I hear of a new city being built under the sea just outside of Kobe, Japan, and of dolphins being used as mailmen to bring the messages down, I think we’re coming into something… but we leave the old myths pretty far behind.

Lecture II.1.2 – Mythology East and West

TRACK 1:  The Four Centers of High CultureI thought I'd talk today this morning in a broad general way about the main differences between the Oriental, which carries largely the matriarchal themes, and the Occidental, which carries largely the patriarchal, uh themes. The Oriental and the Occidental traditions. In, uh, in my view the division between east and west should be drawn at uh, in a vertical line though Persia, uh, through Iran. Eastward of Iran there are two great creative culture centres. One is northern India, and the other is China and, uh, the Far E- uh, the Far East. Westward of that watershed there are again two great creative centres in the tradition of the high cultures. One is the Levant or the near East, which includes in this concept Egypt, and the other is Europe. Now when you consider the two Oriental centres you recognise immediately, look at this, that, uh, they are isolated. Uh, north of the Indian zone are the great Himalayas, and southward and around it are the oceans, so that in the early periods new influences coming in would have to be very slight in their impact and could easily be assimilated to, uh whatever culture form happened to be there before. Likewise, when you consider China, the great deserts to the west of China have, although new influences have come in, have made them comparatively slight so that again in China we have this phenomenon of the absorption of new influences. This is, uh, conduced to a conservatism in these two worlds that is, uh, utterly amazing. In contrast to that, when you think of the two Occidental domains the Levant and Europe, they are in close proximity. Furthermore there is the

Mediterranean, this wonderful waterway over which commerce has gone. Uh, think also of the, uh nature of Europe. In the north there are the Baltic peoples, in the south the Mediterranean, the Asian world presses in, and communications back and forth have been continuous and extremely disruptive, and wherever you have disruption you're going to have new creation. There has been a movement here. Uh, likewise, there have come in the raiding peoples, the northern Aryan herding peoples, and from the Syro-Arabian desert zone the great Semitic invasions, again a herding, raiding warrior people, so that you have collisions here back and forth and many new influences coming, not only of peoples but also of culture elements. The Iron Age commences in the near East and Europe almost a thousand years earlier than in these other domains. Other certain, uh, in-inevitable cultural and warrior qualities that come from the use of iron, which is, is available in, in, in abundance, uh, that [laughs] can't possibly appear in a world the, the, where the weaponry is of bronze which requires copper and tin, tin being a very rare element in all of this, uh, uh, there are great changes. [04:18]Now, uh, let us look at the East first and, uh, this conservatism. What is it that is conserved? We have to ask, when do the high culture forms first appear in India and the Far East? They appear in the early Bronze Age. The early date for the arrival of high culture forms in India is about twenty-five hundred BC, two thousand five hundred BC. For their arrival in China it is about 1500 BC. The first, uh, Chinese, uh, dynasty that is, uh, documented historically and archaeologically is the Shang, which is now being

dated 1523 BC, 1523-1027 BC is the Shang period. As I pointed out yesterday, the, uh, origins of the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures are in the Near East, in the Levantine area, and they are brought into these, uh, more eastward domains and become established there as the basic culture forms of the high cultures, four thousand years later than in the Near East. Meanwhile, the Near East has moved on to something else. [05:49]

TRACK 2:  The Oriental Universe: Impersonal and Transcendent Now [coughs] with respect to that first of the mythological functions, the metaphysical dimension, how is it interpreted in the old Bronze Age world? How is it interpreted in the later Iron Age world of the West? I spoke, uh, yesterday briefly of the discovery, the recognition, by the priestly observers of the skies in Mesopotamia, the observation that the planets move in a mathematically-determination motion and pace through the, uh, zodiac signs, the fixed stars of the, of the heavens, and this recognition of a mathematically-determinable inevitability and process brought about the idea of an impersonal force. Now this is the fundamental thing in the whole of the Orient to this day, an impersonal force underlying the whole phenomenology of the universe. It is noted that this impersonal force carries us through a day of certain light, light and darkness. This is the solar cycle. A month of a certain length, a lunar cycle of light and darkness, which is again mathematically-predictable. A year of a certain

length, of, uh, light and darkness. And this led to the intuition of a still larger cycle which we call the eon, of the cosmic coming into being and going out of being. According to this view, there was never a beginning. There is a beginning only of each cycle, which then dissolves into abyssal waters and out of which then comes the next cycle just as day comes after day after day. This cycling, this cyclic concept of time, had no beginning and will have no end. There was no Creator, there is no Creator God. Furthermore, there is no God in our sense of an ultimate personage. Now, human beings in order to think have to think in certain categories, and one of the most popular categories is anthropomorphised , anthropomorphic personification, so that people normally think of a, of a god, of a presence, and we do have hundred of images of Indian gods, but these gods do not stand as a final term in the way that Yahweh stands as a final term. They are simply accommodations to human thought which point past themselves at to utterly transcendent, unnameable, undefinable, inconceivable mystic mystery. That's the ultimate point in these Oriental traditions as it was also in the Mesopotamian. This terrific, impersonal, you can't pray to the sun to stop. It won't. You can't pray to the cosmic order to change. It won't. There is consequently an attitude of absolute acquiescence in what is taking place, and the aim of the religious disciplines is to make the individual acquiesce. [09:12]Now with respect to the nature of this ultimate, there is no nature to it. It is beyond description, beyond names, beyond all categories, and when you realise that the categories of “being” and “not being” are

categories, you realise you can't say either it is or it is not. When you realise that the terms “many” and “one” are categories, it neither is one nor it is many, you just can't talk about it. Now to ask as we do, is the Divine Power loving, wrathful, pleased with me, preferring this group to that group? This from this standpoint is anthropomorphisation of a mystery that transcends human concepts. This isn't loving, it isn't wrathful, it isn't any of this, and so what we're doing from the Oriental standpoint in projecting these questions and relating ourselves to them is simply anthropomorphically misinterpreting, and by that short circuiting of the whole mystery. It is therefore absolutely transcendent, transcendent of definitions. Now this word “transcendent” in theological discourse, uh, has two quite different senses. When we speak of god as being transcendent we mean that that personage which we name “god” is outside of the universe. It transcends the universe, there's a kind of, uh, spacial transcendence, whereas as I'm using it and as it refers to Oriental thinking, what is meant is all categories are transcended, even that of being outside or inside. [11:12]

TRACK 3:  Thou Art That: Mythic Identification in the East Now the next point is that that mystery which transcends all conceptualisation is the mystery of our own being. [coughs] We are part and parcel of the universe itself and the mystery of the universe is the mystery of ourselves, is that while it is transcendent it is also, in a very deep and fundamental sense, imminent. That which is transcendent in the sense in which I'm speaking is also imminent in the same

sense. And so we come to that key formula from the Chandogya Upanishad of about the seventh or eighth centuries BC, “Tat Tvam Asi”. You are it. That mystery which you seek to know, which you look for outside, which you project into personifications such as Yahweh, is your own very being, and looking for it out there you are losing it because you are committing yourself to a notion of relationship, of dualities, of entities which absolutely obscures the, the mystery. [12:34] The fundamental aim, therefore, of all of the Oriental aspects of culture insofar as they are traditional, whether it is philosophy, art, sociology, law, anything, is to bring you to an actual realisation in experience of your identity with that mystery, and I call this mythic identification. The aim of all these systems is to bring about not simply the concept, which I'm sure we are all able to grasp, but the experience, which is something quite different again, as the root of one's life, of identity with that which is no that. This is what is meant by the fundamental Buddhist concept anatman, there is no self. That thing you are protecting as your self is no thing. So if we were to be rendering this algebraically, in algebraic terms, we could write a=x. A, you are anything else at all, are exactly that mystery. However, not the you that you think of as you, not that entity born in time with a certain complexion, with a certain set of friends, with a certain identity as we're saying now, peculiar to itself. That is not x. And so we come to this curious oxymoron, this curious absurdity, this curious self-contradictory statement. A does not equal, does equal x. The a that you think

yourself to be is not it. The Sanskrit term on this is neti-neti, n-e-t-i, not it. Na means not, eti means it. Na-eti, neti. I am not my body. I know my body, I'm the knower of the body, I am pure consciousness. I'm not my thoughts, my feelings. Can drive yourself round the back of the wall this way. You are not anything of yourself that you think of as yourself, and that which transcends all this thinking is exactly the you that is the basic you, which is identical with all things and yet the concept identical can't rest with that. [15:22] 

TRACK 4:  “I Am That”: the Prime Heresy in the West Now when you compare this with our Occidental forms, we come to a very interesting contrast. The, um, religions of the west, as they now stand, are all derived form the Levant. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are sister religions. They are all rooted in the thought that has come to us through the Old Testament. The Old Testament is grounded in earlier Levant, most importantly the Sumero-Babylonian complex. In these, the idea of distinction between man and God is fundamental. God is the creator, man and the world are the created, and creator and creature are not identical. In fact, what one finds when one reviews the western religious traditions is that the realisation or the belief, “I am that”, is the prime heresy. It is for that that people are crucified and burned. When Christ said, “I and the Father are one,” that was blasphemy, and according to the texts as we receive them it was for that that he was condemned to crucifixion. Nine hundred years later, the great Sufi mystic Hallaj said exactly the same

thing and received exactly the same punishment, he too was crucified. [17:11]Uh, just as a kind of interlude, let me say a word about Hallaj's crucifixion. Hallaj was a true Muslim, Sufi, and at the same time had reverence for the Koran and the, uh results of Koranic thinking. He gave a little story to illustrate his, um, situation. A moth sees a flame. A moth falls in love with the flame. A moth flies to the flame, flaps around in it, singes its wings and goes back to its friends and says, “I found the most marvellous thing last night,” and tells them all about it. What it wants is to be one with that flame, that is its principal need, and so the next night it does indeed fly into the flame, catch fire, burn, and become one with the flame. [Unclear – 18:15] to extinguish its body. Hallaj intentionally made the statement clear that “I and my beloved are one” and the orthodox tradition extinguished him. And so the function of orthodoxy for the mystic is to kill him. That is its virtue. For that he thanks it. One can ask oneself quietly whether that might not have been the aim of Christ himself. I mean, Hallaj throws a light back on the mystery of Christ's activities that, uh, is certainly worth considering very seriously and not simply rejecting. The world in its brutal character, in its self-confident character, in its, uh, worship of certain categories which is cares for, uh, is in the service of the destruction of the mystic, you might say, and that is its divine function. This is the way Hallaj would put it. [19:23]TRACK 5:  The West: Relationship to the Divine through Holy Society 

Well now let us consider this. Since creator and creature are not the same, and since the experience of identity is the prime heresy, in the religions derived from the Levant, all that can be done in, uh, this context of quest is to render and experience a relationship to the divine, so that in algebraic terms one would write a r x, a is related to x. How do we become related to the x in these traditions? Now remember, it is in the Levant, it was in the Levant that the earliest great high civilisation forms developed. Very important in these was the society. The way we become related to god is through participation in and identification with his holy society. In every one of these cases, the peculiar local society regards itself as in a very special way divinely endowed. The god, since he is personified, who is the creator of the world, has also committed a certain group of people to his service, and this distinguishes them from every other group, and no other group is in relationship to the divine. This underlies every one of these traditions. [21:05] Let's consider Judaism at the beginning and we can go on down the line. God has a covenant with a certain people. No other people participates in this. How does one participate in the covenant? By being born a member of that group, born of a Jewish mother to put it right on the ground, and the, then participating in the covenant, honouring it, observing its laws, and these laws were delivered specifically to a certain man in a certain place at a certain time, and no one else has it. In the Christian tradition, Christ is true god and true man. This Christians regard as a mystery. In the Orient, as I've shown,

everybody can say this of himself. The aim is to be able to say that of yourself, or I can say it of any of these bits of paraphernalia in this room. This is it, that divine mystery which lives in all things is the base of this chair that I'm looking at. You can take anything, a stick, a stone, a dog, a cat, draw a ring around it, put it there, cut it off from all your knowledges of relationship. What is it? Anything can become the focal point of a meditation on the mystery dimension. This whole universe is a revelation thus, not of god but of that divine mystery which transcends conceptualisation as god, and it's everywhere in all things. In these other traditions, on the other hand, we have a special revelation, not a universal revelation. The universe reveals to those who know this god the models of that god's works, totally different kind of universal revelation. When we speak of god being everywhere, this is not the same as saying that god is all things, IS all things. In the Christian tradition one speaks of man being made in the image of god. In the Oriental tradition, you are a manifestation of the very energy of god, and that energy is you, not god. God himself is a manifestation of that. Christ is true god and true man. Through our humanity we are related to Christ, through his godhood he relates us to god, but how do we get related to Christ? Through membership in his churches. The un-baptised are out. In Islam, it is the Koran as the word, the ultimate word of god. Now in Islam, the prophecies of the Hebrews and Christians are recognised but they are, as it were, precursors of the ultimate terminal prophecy, which is of Muhammad. This is a totally different affair from the Oriental. [24:17]

TRACK 6:  Job and Prometheus: Loyalty to God or to Man? Now when you have two terms like this, god and man, you [come to? Unclear 24:18] an ultimate decision. Where is your ultimate loyalty? To god, or to man? The characteristic point of view of the Levant is ultimate loyalty to god, and this is primarily illustrated in the mystery book of Job. This is the, I, I would say, uh, the deepest chapter of the Old Testament. Uh, God behaves outrageously in relation to Job, judged in human terms. You remember the bet with the Devil, uh, Job, God was saying to the Devil, “Have you considered Job? What a wonderful man he is,” He was himself quite pleased that Job was pleased with God. And the Devil [coughs] was the wiser one, and he said, “Well, you just give him a few troubles, you've been treating him pretty fine, and see what happens there,” so God said, “I'll betcha,” and he Devil said, “I betcha,” God said, “Go to work.” So, you know where it ended. I've just come from Hawaii where they make necklaces made out of little beads called Job's tears. The uh, uh, story of Job is a, is an enigma. His friends came and in good Orthodox tradition, uh, said, “Well, you've been a bad boy, that's why you're getting this, that's the old story.” Job said, “No, I haven't been.” He was exactly right, it was because he had been good that he was getting, which is a strange thing. And, uh, in his virtue and in his knowledge of his virtue, he challenged God. [Unclear 26:08] Now did God say, “Look, Job, I had this bet and, uh, you've been great, uh, I won”? No, he didn't do that. Did he say, uh, “Look here, now,” and then did he try some

circumlocutions, some way of, you know, making believe that the made, this thing made sense? Nothing of the kind. All he said was, “Are you big? Could you fill Leviathan's nose with harpoons? I did. You try it, you little worm. Who are you, with your small range of mentality, to question me?” [26:46] Well, this fits the Oriental view. What is man, that he should in his conceptualisations try to interpret the mysteries of being? But the Bible doesn't go with the Orient and say, “You are exactly what I pretend to be, namely the Divine.” Not at all. And poor Job, he said, “My ears have heard of thee, now my eyes behold thee, I'm ashamed that I judged.” So in this dualistic relationship of man against God or God against man, Job renounces the humanistic judgement and does not condemn God but gives him praise and worship. No Greek would do that. No Greek ever did that. Consider Prometheus, pinned to a rock by a big boy, Zeus to wit, who could easily have filled Leviathan's nose with harpoons, and just as outrageously this punishment, and in the great Easterly [unsure 28:03] representation of this, a little delegation comes to Prometheus and says, “Apologise. He'll, uh, let you go.” And Prometheus's humanistic answer, he did not abdicate his human judgement, he said, “You tell him I despise him. Let him do as he likes.” Uh, now we can say of course that Prometheus was himself a sort of, uh, transcendent being and not a mere human being, but the main point is that he did not abdicate the human judgement system, he stood on that. Also we know how in the Hellenistic period and thereafter, the Greek deities lost stature, and in Aeschylus the

concept of Zeus becomes totally transformed into something much more in the Oriental style. Zeus is air, Zeus is earth, Zeus is the worlds between, Zeus is all things. This is the brahman idea, the idea of the divine presence in all things, so that in the Greek mystery cults you have a, a move completely in the direction of the Oriental discovery and recognition of a transcendence, and you can read this in, um, well, Apuleius' Golden Ass, where, uh, and the end of his ordeal the hero is worshipped as a god, and all a god is a recognised manifestation of this mystery. [29: 32] So we have in this Western world these two poles, the Orient, the Levantine acquiescence in the theological mystery, and the humanistic maintenance of the human stand against it. The great hubris, this means don't challenge. Doesn't mean honour it. You don't challenge a sleeping dog, but you don't get down and worship it just because it could bite you to death. Uh, you are prudent in relation to the divine, you might say, as understood in these terms. [30:14] TRACK 7:  The Split Being: an Indian Inflection Now, uh, let me speak of a certain myth that is shared by all three traditions. You may not recognise it in my first designation of its character in relation to the Indian tradition. In the first of the Upanishads, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, there is this wonderful story of the origins of being it starts with the self, which is no self, at a time which was no

time, but this being who was no being at a time that was no time said in a language that was no language, “I am.” Aham. Aham is the Sanskrit for “I”. Course he had to speak Sanskrit because, uh, just as, uh, Yahweh spoke Hebrew, these two sacred language are antecedent to the universe. It is out of these words of these languages that the universe comes into being. People say that Yahweh created the world out of nothing. This is not true; he created the world out of words. He said let there be light, bing, and there was light, and one reason why my Jewish students every time I sneeze say “Bless” instead of “God bless you” is that by pronouncing the name of God you are bringing God into, into the place. That's why the holy name must not be pronounced. When you pronounce it he, he's there, and who are you to do that? You could blow up. There's, uh, uh, this, uh, Sanskrit has the same virtues. The Sanskrit language and the Sanskrit roots are antecedent to the appearance of the universe. Logically antecedent, I have to say. Since the universe had no beginning you can't put it there in time, but it is logically antecedent to the universe. So, uh, this self who is no self said, “Aham,” and immediately he was aware of himself as a self. That's the beginning of limited consciousness. With the concept I, aham, all mistakes, all illusions, all confusions begin. Well, his first thought as soon as he had said “I” was to preserve this “I”, and he thought, “I'm in danger of death. Someone is going to kill me.” And then the thought came to him, “Well, since I'm the only thing there is, what is there around to kill me?” That was a fine, logical conclusion, but then immediately he was filled with the desire that

there should be another thing around. Oh, let there be something else. So fear is the first reaction to being something, and desire for something is the next. Fear and desire were the immediate consequences of the experience of “I”. Well, you know what desire does. It brings about what is desired. Out of oneself it comes. He swelled, split in half, and there she was. Then he, as the text says, united with her, and she thought, “How can he unite with me, since, uh, we are the same substance?” and she turned herself into a cow, he turned himself into a bull, that was the answer to that. She turned herself into a jenny ass, he turned himself into a jackass, and, uh, that was the answer to that, and so they reproduced all beings down to the ants [laughter] and, uh, when, after this, uh, had been accomplished, he looked around, he thought and said, “All this am I.” And the fact is that all these beings were identical, identically his substance, and he was all beings. [33:55]TRACK 8:  The Split Being: a Judeo-Christian Inflection Now let's, uh, move a few yards further, a few inches further west on our map, and we come to Israel and chapter two of Genesis. There is a young man, uh, very young indeed, uh, with all the desires of man, and, um, he's pretty unhappy and lonesome in the garden that had been prepared. God brings him all the animals and he names them all and God's looking to see what would be a proper companion for this lonesome Willy and, uh, finally God has the brilliant idea of putting him to sleep and bringing forth the rib. As Joyce says, “the cutlet-sized consort”. [laughter] Uh, there she stands and, uh,

here we are. [laughter] The, um, point here is that it was not God who himself split in half into two beings and reproduced the world, but an entity, God's creature, that was split in half, and so this whole dual, duality of our existence and experience has no reference to God, whereas in the Oriental system it has indeed a reference to the divine mystery because we two who have come from the Moon, and the Moon always lets us know this, even today, the, uh, the mystery is that we two who seem to be separate are one, and that is the basic of the whole sexual mystic tradition in the East. Through losing yourself in sexual union you have recovered the experience or a, an inkling of the experience of your identity, not only with that one who is opposite but with all opposites. [35:45] TRACK 9:  The Split Being: a Greek Inflection Uh, now we, let's move just a little bit further west and we come to Plato's Symposium in Aristophanes' wonderful myth of the beginnings of things. Now of course in that, uh, wonderful Greek world the, uh, whole sexual relationship was [unclear 36:05] more complicated than it was in the primitive times, or maybe not. At any rate, there was respect for the homosexual relationship. And so we have three kinds of human beings at the beginning in Aristophanes' little legend. Three kinds of human being, all twice as big as human beings are today. There were those that lived on the moon and were made of man and woman in union. There were those that lived on the sun and were made of two males in union. There were those who lived on the Earth and were

consisted of two women in union, what now are two women, but these were one being, and they're beautifully described. They had, of course, four legs and four arms, and, uh, two heads, uh, in opposite directions and so forth, and when they wanted to move all they did was kind of go around like spinning wheels, with all these wonderful arms and legs, and they were tremendously powerful and they had the idea of storming heaven and all, and, uh, Zeus and Apollo became nervous about them and decided to cut them in half and reduce their powers by half. And so they performed the surgical operations, and Plato, or rather Aristophanes describes them rather amusingly when the two have been cut of course there's a big gash there so they pulled it together and tied it together and that's the navel, then they turned the head around so it was facing where the, uh, the cut had been, and so forth and so on, and no sooner were the couples separated and surgically repaired in this way than sit down and embrace each other and just, uh, sit there absolutely immobilised. The one ultimate thing that we all want is that situation. So the deities said, “Well, no work's gonna get done this way and these poor creatures are going to starve to death,” so they separated the matched couples, and in quest for each other a lot of work got done, and that is what we call civilisation [laughter] and this is, this is Sigmund Freud's theory as well, that everything that's done that isn't sexual congress is sublimation or, you know, substitute for that final aim. [38:17] Well, that is simply a sexual reinterpretation, uh, of the whole ultimate aim, namely to know of our

identity with that which is our full being. Uh, here again it is the gods that cut the two apart. We have in both of these cases the god, uh, man duality, but in the Jewish case the, uh, the aim, the, uh, what can I say? The, the virtue is attributed to God, and whenever man does something against him we come in on God's side, but when [unclear 38:53] with the gods, they're on man's side, and the gods are afraid of man, uh, and perhaps they are. Now with that single myth we have one tradition that has been threefold inflected in terms of three different meaning systems and value systems. The myths speak of the same mystery. The meaning attributed to it differs in the different cases. I think there's a pretty good example of, of, what I was, uh, suggesting yesterday, namely that myths, like being itself, is without ultimate meaning. Life has no meaning. Meaning is a concept system, a category system, and the mystery lies beyond that. [39:46] TRACK 10:  The Imagery of Paradise, East and WestNow let me go on from this. The imagery of paradise. The recovered garden, the recovered experience of Eve, eternal bliss. You remember shortly after Eve was born, that next day occurred and Adam looked over and said, “What's this going on here? She's talking to the serpent.” That, as we'll learn later, was her earlier consort, uh, she's found her old boyfriend. And Adam comes over and says, “What's this?” and she says, uh, Eve says, “It's, tastes good, it's good, it's forest.” So he eats the fruit. Then shortly later, God, who walks in the cool of the day in that same

garden, seizes the little pair and he says, “What's going on here? You've got leaves on,” and they, uh, say, “Well, uh, something has really happened,” and God next says, “Lest they should eat the fruit of the second tree, the Tree of Immortal Life, now that they know of duality, good and evil, let us put them out of the garden.” What they became aware of in eating the fruit was duality, just as the Sanskrit self who said aham became aware of duality, and they were there lost in fear and desire. They had cut themselves off from the divine innocence in becoming aware of duality, but then aware of this, if they had eaten the branch of the tree that held the fruit of immortal life, immortality that they should never die, they would be equivalent to God, and God himself said, “Let they, lest they become as one of us.” You know, Elohim is a plural. Uh, there's a kind of, uh, rather obscure concept for us there. The, uh, the God who is one and all at the same says, “Let, lest they become one of us let us put them out of the garden,” then he put at the garden gate two cherubim with a flaming sword to keep them from the garden, to keep them in the world of duality. [42:14] During the war with Japan, there appeared in a New York paper a, uh, picture of a Japanese temple guardian, you know those great figures that [unclear 42:23] looking quite fierce and ferocious with sword and flashing eyes, one with mouth open and the other with the mouth closed, and, uh, under it the newspaper wise men had written “The Japanese worship gods like this”. Well, I knew enough to know that those gods were the guardians of the

gate, and that the whole aim of the religion was, and the whole invitation was, “Walk through the gate, and there you will find the Tree of Immortal Life,” with the beautiful Buddha representing the mystery of the tree, teaching the mystery of the tree, with his right hand up saying, “Don't be afraid.” And this irreverent thought occurred to me: it is not they who worship a god like that, but we, because our God says, “Don't walk past the boys at the gate.” And what is that tree in the garden? It is exactly the tree under which the Buddha sits, and when you look on your Sumerian seals you'll see that tree. It is always a palm with two fruits: one, the knowledge of good and evil and duality, and the other of immortality. [43:41]TRACK 11:  Christ on the Cross; Buddha under the TreeNow, in the medieval Christian tradition, the cross is called Holy Rood. It is identified with that second tree in the garden. Allegorically, Christ is the fruit of that tree. In the Communion meal where we eat Christ, we are eating the fruit of eternal life and eating exactly the fruit of that tree and are experiencing eternal life. And Christ is celebrated in the Middle Ages in a kind of European way as the hero who broke past the gate, and there are hymns saying, “Praise to thee who broke past the gate and opened again the golden way to the tree of paradise.” So, Christ on the cross, Buddha on the tree, are equivalent figures. These are the same myth. [44:54] The moment represented in the crucifixion where the world of matter, which is always symbolised by the cross, to which spirit is linked, pinned in the

crucifixion, this tree is exactly the tree under which the Buddha sat, and the moment of the crucifixion is symbolised in that form of the Buddha where he is seated with one hand touching the earth, that's known as the earth-touching posture, I'll have something to say about it later. It is at that moment that he transcended the temptation of the deity known as love[? Unsure 45:32], death, karma, Mara, who came to tempt him at the tree. Those same two emotions which had filled Aham, filed the being  that said “I”, namely fear and lust, desire, were transcended by the Buddha. Under that tree, that god who is the god of the world, namely the one who said “I”, comes to him in the form of a tempter, and the tempter presents to him his three beautiful daughters. These are the temptations to lust. Their names are Desire, Fulfilment, and Regret. Uh, if the Buddha had thought “I” he would have experienced they, but there as no I there. There was only identity, so there was no desire. He was in what's known as the Immovable Spot. Next, karma, lust becomes Mara, death, and he throws at the Buddha his army and the Buddha was absolutely not there, he was one that was no person any more, so that the weapons thrown at him when they entered the sphere of non-entity became transmuted into lotus blossoms, and he was, as it were, worshipped. Since neither desire nor fear could move him, the tempter assumed the form of karma, duty, virtue, and like a sociologist said, “Young man, what are you doing sitting under this tree here? You are a prince, after all, the world is in trouble, get in there, help your neighbours,” and so forth. Now what do you do when some pompous ass like that comes along? The, he

was riding on an elephant the whole damn thing. The Buddha simply touched the earth with his hand. Society is second. Nature is first. You're a human being before you're a social being, and in the depth of nature is the mystery that I've been talking about, and that mystery's voice came pouring forth out of the earth. The Goddess Earth herself with a voice of thunder said, “This is that one who through many lifetimes has so given of himself that there's nobody here.” And with that the elephant on which Lord [unsure of name 48:02] rode bowed in worship. The army was dispersed, and that night the Buddha achieved illumination. That is the crucifixion. He crucified in himself all those passions and interests and relationship systems that bind us to the world. This doesn't mean that ultimately he was gone, because he came back and taught for fifty years. [48:29]TRACK 12:  Through the Gate: Western Atonement, Eastern Illumination Now, whoever got into the gate, and what is that gate? In the Christian tradition we speak of Sin and Atonement. Adam and Eve offended a pedagogue, their Father. They criticised him, they stepped away from him, and the only way man could be brought back into proper relationship as atonement. You have a kind of penal system here of fault and adjustment. This is one way of saying the same thing that is said in the Oriental interpretation of that god. Look again at the cherubim at the gate. Not the gate of paradise in the Bible, but the gate of Nara. One of them, as I've said, is standing with mouth open, the other with mouth closed. These symbolise desire, aggression,

fear. These symbolise those passions of fear and desire which keep us out of the gate. It is by transcending, walking between these, leaving ourselves outside, “I” is massacred at the gate, that we come to the illumination at the centre of the garden, what is called Maya, the veil of illusion that obscures us from the truth of our own being which is no being, is exactly a function of fears and desires. Freud tells us this exact same thing, except that he doesn't push through all the way to the Buddha illumination, all he does is get you back to society again so that you can work the standard oil pump or whatever job you have. These, uh, he feels that what we are alienated from is society in this, uh, system that I'm, uh, talking about which we're alienated from is simply the knowledge of yourself as that from which nothing can be alienated.[50:40]So here I've given two myths now, shared by two traditions. Uh, the myth of the one that became two whether as, uh, aham or as Adam who became Eve, or as, uh, the Greek, and three orders of paradise: the Oriental one where it is simply the recognition of your own identity with that which cannot be identified, uh, or the Biblical one of exile, or the later Christian one of exile and return through the Saviour, which whom one is in a sense to feel identified but cannot dare to feel actually identical.

TRACK 13:  Mythic Dissociation: the West’s “Alienation Problem”Um, now let me just speak very briefly of this alienation problem which is our own today. When you think of the, uh, a r x system, a is related to x, we are related to the divine through our society. I called the

first system that I spoke of, the Oriental one, that of mythic identification where you are to learn through myth to identify yourself for the ultimate being. I would call the second mythic dissociation. The divine is dissociated from nature. Nature in that sense is not divine. When you turn inward in meditation you do not come in touch with the ultimate dimension of divinity, you come in touch with a human soul, which may or may not be in proper relationship to its god, and to get in a relationship to its god it has to relate itself properly to god's society, so you are dissociated, you are alienated from the experience of your own divinity, and you are asked to come into relationship to the ultimate good by way of society which presents you with certain claims. This I would call social identification. Now what has happened today is that as a result of our sciences, natural sciences and historical sciences, the claims of every one of these social traditions have been disqualified. They are not as they pretend to be, and we know it. And so having had ourselves, uh, disqualified as manifestations of the divine by the tradition, the tradition itself is now disqualified as a vehicle of relationship to the divine by science, and so again we have that experience of alienation, and it is because of this that we are having the strong movements now all over the place. On one level simply meditation, this way, that way, or another way. It started with the pouring in of Indian lore in the nineteenth century, the reaction in European scien- scholarly circles to the transations of the Upanishads when they came in, of the Oriental texts, was absolutely enormous. The fact that we had here a humanism of a certain sense, namely the highest thing in the

universe is illuminated man, which is the only marvel of being that knows that it's a marvel of being, and all the gods are inferior to the illuminated Buddha consciousness. This seemed to unite our humanistic tradition as it had been, uh, academically received from the Greeks, to unite the religious dimension, and at, at that same time the Bible was being disqualified by the archaeological discoveries in the near East, so that we have one of these scholars after another simply finding, “Ah, this is it.” Think of Schopenhauer: “The Upanishads have been the, uh, delight of my life, and they will be the consolation of my death.” And that was a pretty inferior third-rate, uh, translation of the Upanishads that, uh, had, uh, given him this great, great inspiration, which was the underlying thought of his whole philosophy. Nietzsche also, one after the other. Then after the Second World War we have the Japanese, the Zen, the Buddhist thing coming in. Now I notice all over the place the movement of Christian consciousness, where Western young men actually turn themselves, or try to [unclear 55:28] Caucasoid Westerner looks a little bit absurd in the paraphernalia of Oriental, uh, what we say social manifestation of your, uh, religion, wearing your heart on your sleeve, uh, with their heads shaved and the, uh, Brahmanical tuft on the, and not being Brahmans, and the, uh, saffron robe and all, chanting, “Krishna, Krishna, Krishna.” Uh, that point I, that always strikes me as what we are seeking when we turn to the Orient is not to become Orientals, there's no point in making believe you're Japanese, making believe you're, you're Hindu. It is

through that that you are defined, through your own nature, your own being, the, uh, the, uh, identity system, and I'm told that the [unclear 56:20] one of his first lessons is, “You're an American, be an American. Don't pretend [unclear 56:28].” Um, there's always a temptation to lose yourself in an act, playing the role of being this, that or the other thing. Alright, if through that act you can bring about the deepening of yourself as you were born and not as you wish you were born with another complexion and all, uh, it will work, but if it distracts you it only alienates you the further from, uh, uh, the true sense. TRACK 14:  Completing the Round, Returning to the World So we have these two traditions now, and you can think of it all ways. Uh, am I working by way of a relationship, or am I working, I mean with relationship as the final term, or am I working toward identity? An identity was something that is not this limited tag to here. [Unsure of this sentence, it doesn't seem to make sense but I'm hearing it completely wrong!] And then we come to the final point: having found that identity, what's going to happen? Are you going to slip out, as the Indians say “let the body drop off”, first let society drop off then let the body drop off? Or in this quest are you looking for the root but you've got also the top of the system, the tree or whatever? You've gotta, if you're going to be total, have the two and find a way back. So it's this total round that I'm going to be talking about later, uh, that the Buddhists and Oriental traditions offer to us. In the Chinese Secret of the Golden

Flower there is that little paragraph that says, “First one seeks the center and when finds it all is illusion. Next one recognises that all is illusion, next one moves in the world of illusion in recollection of the center.” So those are the East/West comparisons that I propose as basic and that I'll be returning to in, in later talks.

 

 

Lecture I.1.1 - The Celebration of LifeBy Joseph Campbell

THE CELEBRATION OF LIFE 

TRACK 1:  The Awesome Mystery of Being

Many of you, I'm sure, have heard the saying that mythology is other people's religions. Now I am going to ask you in these talks to put yourself in other people's shoes, and have a look at your own as mythology. Nietzsche has said, “This is the age of comparisons”—it works on all levels.[i] And in the realm of what I'm calling mythology, which many people call religions, there are cross-influences operating today that would have been thought impossible a hundred years ago.

Furthermore, it is good to recall, to remember, that our cultures, and our races—the Mongoloid, the Negroid and the Caucasoid races—are very, very late arrivals in the history of the human species. And we already have very interesting evidence of religious or mythological practices in races long antedating ours.

For instance, in the high Alps there were discovered in the 1920's, in very small caves, right on the level, right below the ice level of the glaciers, little shrines containing the skulls of cave bears.[ii] Now during the course of the last glaciation, the Riss-Würm glacier period,[iii] those caves were covered with ice. No one could have gone there. And after the time of that glaciation, there were no cave bears in the world. So these little shrines—with these cave bear skulls, and little fires, and little instruments showing that there had been worship practice there—date from 200,000 years ago.

What is this mystery that makes the human species bow before some sign of mystery? Each of us has been brought up in some tradition that has its imagery of that mystery. But the point I want to start out with is that, in the human heart and in the human mind, no matter what the race, the culture, the language, the tradition, there is this sense—or at least the possibility—of experiencing the sense of a mystery, and an awesome mystery, and a very terrifying mystery, inhabiting the whole universe, the very mystery of being itself.

And here in these very early little signs, these very early shrines, we have the evidence of man 200,000 years ago bowing, and asking for something, and devoting themselves to something in this way of religion which we continue to know in this aspect, that inflection, and that other, throughout the world today.

TRACK 2:  Universal Motifs, Particular DifferentiationNow, there have been in the past 200 years a great, great many investigations and researches—some of them very pious, some of them very cynical—of the religions of the world. And certain quite constant motifs—basic themes—have come out throughout the whole field: these universals, these continually recurring themes. Also, in each of the

various areas there are quite special, particular inflections quite different from those in other areas. That is to say, we have this spectacle of continuity and consistency, and, at the same time, differentiation.

Now, I want to speak tonight in a very general way to the main problems that these situations and these observations bring up.

What are the functions, the human functions, served by mythologies, by symbolic forms which have been served, we can now say, for 200,000 years, and have sustained the race, even on the simplest level, and even on the levels of the highest cultures? We all know the greatest monuments, the greatest architectural and art monuments are in celebration of these mysteries—I don't care where you turn. These are the things we now go by jet to see.

Let us consider this problem. 

TRACK 3:  Life Kills Other Life to Live

The human eye opens at a rather late stage in the development of the individual. He has already done the most marvelous work he will ever do. In a mysterious way, in his mother's womb, he has built a human body. And this body has organs that are directed to certain ends and intentions. And these were not the organs designed by reason, designed by consciousness. Reason and consciousness comes to itself and asks later, “What is it I am all about? What is it I am here for? Why is it I do this and that?”

Furthermore, the coming of the eyes into the human—not the human, but general biological picture—is very late. Life had already originated hundreds of millions of years before eyes opened and saw what was going on, saw what life was doing. Now if you'll see and think what it is that life does, that

life has to do in order to be life—it has to kill and eat other life. That is the basic thing. This is a rather monstrous thing. And when the eyes see what the situation is, on which its own life depends, its own existence depends—when conscience and consciousness become aware of the pre-conditions of their own existence, there is often the sense of shock, the sense of horror. You know, the basic word of Buddhism: “All life is sorrowful.” That's one way of recognizing this. There is also the feeling many have of guilt simply for being alive. This is in a way symbolized in the image of the Fall in the Garden. Life is monstrous. Consciousness has other notions of how things ought to be, what virtue is, and so on.

TRACK 4:  The First Function of MythologyOne of the problems that man has to face is reconciling himself to the foundations of his own existence. And this is the first function of mythology: that reconciliation of consciousness with the mystery of being, not criticizing it.

Shakespeare, in his definition of art in Hamlet, where he says “Art”—or the art of acting—“holds as it were the mirror up to nature,”[iv] is a perfect definition, I would say, of the first function of mythology. When you hold the mirror up to your self, your consciousness becomes aware of its support, what it is that is supporting it. You may be shocked at what you see; you may be greatly pleased. But one way or another, you become aware of yourself. Your consciousness becomes aware of that darkness—that being which came into being out of darkness—and which is its own support.

The first function then of a mythology is the reconciliation of consciousness to the foundations of being—and the realization of that mystery as something that consciousness is not going to be able to criticize, not even going to be able to elucidate, not even going to be able to name. It is

something beyond naming, beyond all definitions. That is the first point. And when that is lost, one loses this sense of awe—which Goethe calls “the best thing in man”[v]—one loses the sense of gratitude for one's privilege of having this center of consciousness, aware of these things.

TRACK 5:  The Second Function of MythologyThe second function of a mythology is to present an image—a total image—of the universe as consciousness is aware of it. We have to encompass the whole of what we know and see—in terms of this mystery. Now as you immediately realize, in the course of the ages, in the course of time, man's understanding and man's image of the universe, has greatly, greatly changed.

The view of the world roundabout—that the Pawnee Indian would have had on the plains of Nebraska 200 years ago—is very, very different from what is now propounded in the University of Nebraska. A totally new cosmos has come into being—has come into our consciousness. Likewise, when we read in the Book of Genesis, the story of the creation of the world, that's not the world that our scientists are telling us about. Read an account of the coming into being of the cosmos from the spiral nebulae, hundreds and hundreds of millions of years ago, and try to bring that into accord with the biblical story—or try to bring it into accord with any of the inherited stories.

The image of the cosmos must change with the development of the mind and the knowledge; otherwise the mythic statement is lost, and man becomes disassociated from the very basis of his own religious experience. Doubt comes in and so forth.

You must remember: all of the great traditions, and little traditions in their own time were scientifically correct. That is

to say, they were correct in terms of the scientific image of that age. So there must be a scientifically validated image.

Now, you know what has happened. Our scientific field has separated itself from the religious field, or vice versa. It was actually the religious community that rejected the scientific community in the seventeenth century. And this divorce is a fatal thing—and a very unfortunate, and a totally unnecessary thing. There is no reason whatsoever for clinging to the literal—the literal reading of a scientific statement that is four thousand years old. It must be read another way.

And there is something else being said there, which is lost if you either hang on to the old science, or reject it.

TRACK 6:  The Third Function of MythologyNow the third function of a mythological tradition is to validate and maintain a certain moral order.

Now, these moral orders greatly differ from one society to another. For example, the requirements of a primitive hunting community are very, very different from those of a primitive planting community. What is required of the young men and women when they mature is in each case quite different.

Likewise, in a complex society of differentiated tasks—with professional doctors, medicines, medical men, professional astronomers or scientists, professional governing people, professional trading people, all of these coordinated in one society—we have a quite different social problem, quite different moral problem from that of a simple primitive community. And so there is this variation from society to society in terms of the social orders.

Now, some of these social orders are extremely ruthless and fierce in their requirements and extremely narrow in their demands. Individuals may be thus divorced—separated, so to say—from their own nature. Read some of the descriptions in the anthropological works of the primitive initiation rites what is done to the young people in some primitive societies in order to test their courage, in order to integrate them in the social group.

Now, most societies are extremely dogmatic and fierce in their integration of the individual. The individual is born as a separate entity. He is carved up, so to say, and made to fit into a pattern that the society requires. It doesn't require a total man; it requires a part man—not an individual, but a dividuum: someone who has been divided up and put into a notch.

This happens in the most primitive societies already. Nature produces this wonderfully rich being full of possibilities. The society (and you cannot blame society, it is in circumstance of its own) requires a certain specific limited type. It's got to have that, otherwise it can't exist, particularly on the primitive levels where the margin for existence is very, very slight. And so the individual is, so to say, carved into shape, scarified, with teeth knocked out. His body is changed so that he will know, “I'm a member of this group, not that group.”

One of the very important essential ideas in mythology, and in the rites of a mythologically based culture is that the individual must be shaped—he must be made to react in the way that that culture wants. And in so shaping the person, the person is removed, so to say, from his own nature.

TRACK 7:  Heresy is the Life of a MythologySo we have two levels here: the nature level, which all men potentially share; and the local social level. Now always, as

we all know about societies, there is a group that finally gets hold of it, and has certain vested interests in keeping things as they are. And when there is a change—when the social structure changes—this group continues to hang on, and it enforces its rights, so to say. And here—right within the social order itself—a destructive, dissolving principle begins to operate.

We can see this in the history of religions. One of the great crises, for instance, is the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the pattern of early medieval Christianity began to disintegrate because new ideas were coming in: new possibilities were opening up, a much more highly educated and multitudinous elite class was developing, and the old, comparatively simple ideas no longer held. There was a terrific fermentation[vi] at that time—heresy all over the place. Heresy is the life of a mythology, really, and orthodoxy is the death.

TRACK 8:  The Fourth Function of MythologyThe fourth function of a mythology, then, is to center and integrate the individual, in relation to himself—the microcosm—in relation to his society—we'll call that the mezzocosm, the in-between-cosm—in relation to the universe as he's able to know it, and finally, in relation to that ultimate mystery of which I spoke in the beginning.

Now, let me say a word about the problem of integrating the individual—what the problem is here, because this is the thing that has been the same. Societies have changed, but the problem of the individual in his life course has not greatly changed.

The human being is a very strange animal. He matures when he is about twenty years old. He has been growing for twenty years. For most animals, that is the length of a

lifetime. So here is a creature who has grown for twenty years in an attitude and in a position largely of dependency: uncertain of himself, turning—particularly in the earlier years, the first twelve or so—to his parents for help, instruction, protection, approval and punishment.

This creates a psychological structure of dependency. The individual is in an attitude of dependence on parental figures. Then we ask him to become responsible, to assume responsibility, grow up. This is the crisis of the transit from infancy to adulthood, from dependency to responsibility. Something has to be done to make it happen; it won't happen automatically, as we now know from the problem of psychoanalysis.

A person who looks like an adult, but every time responsibility is thrown upon him turns around to see where Mother or Daddy is just hasn't passed that threshold. A neurotic is a person who is having responses of dependency when there ought to be responses of responsibility. That's all it is. So then he goes to a psychiatrist, who tells him, “Grow up.”

That's about all the problem is. But that is not so easy, because after you have, you know, the business of a reflex stimulus response, the response takes place—the response of dependence, dependence, dependence—and now suddenly it's got to be responsibility. And so, here it's going: you say, “Oh gee, look, I'm 30 now, I've got to be over here,” and the thing gets mixed up.

TRACK 9: An Australian Initiation RiteThe primitive and traditional initiation rites have to do with transforming the mode of reaction—sometimes, and usually terrifically frightening, and actually very painful rituals, so that the individual will no longer think he's a little boy.

Some rather amusing ones in relation to this are from Australia, for instance, where things are pretty fierce. When little boys begin to become kind of nasty and difficult for their mothers to handle, the women get together and give them a good beating around the legs with sticks and so forth, and then in a few weeks something very interesting happens. The men—all dressed in strange, god-like costumes such as the youngsters have always been taught were the figures of the divinities—they come in with bullroarers and yawls and all kinds of terrifying noises, and the children—the boys—run to their mothers for protection. And the mothers pretend to protect them. Then the men grab them and take them away; so Mother's no good anymore.

Now they have to face this thing. And then what they have to face is really no fun. One of the little crises—the boy is behind a screen of bushes, and a lot of very interesting things are going on outside at night: dances and so forth. The boys are told not to look. Well, any boy who does look, can you imagine what's done with him? He's killed and eaten. That is one way to handle juvenile delinquents. Any youngster who will not cooperate with the society that is supporting him is just eradicated.

Then he is given a chance to see what is going on out there. So he is sitting, a scared kid, I mean he is about twelve or thirteen years old. At the end of this dance field—and it's night—a strange man comes out performing the myth of the Cosmic Kangaroo… [laughter] I'm not kidding. Then the Cosmic Dog comes out and attacks the kangaroo. This is all part of the mythology of the totem ancestor. And after the youngster has seen this—here he is sitting on the edge, so you were watching a show, you know—and these two big fellows come rushing down the field and jump on the kid, and continue to jump on him! Well, now he is going to remember Kangaroo and Dog forever. This thing is built in. It

may not be bright, but they get the point, and there are not many points to be got.

There are other things that happen that I won't go through, but they are all pretty exciting, let's say. And when they are all over, the kid isn't the kid he was before he changed. A lot has happened. His body has been changed, and he's then sent back to the girls. And there is one of them already selected to be his wife, and he's now a guaranteed little man, and he's going to behave as a man of this crowd ought to behave.[vii]

Now, that's not quite the way we educate our youngsters. We have another idea for them.

TRACK 10: Adult Behavior and Changing Social OrdersThe traditional notion of a mature adult is a person who behaves as he ought to behave—who behaves as the society has always asked him to behave. Grandpa behaved this way; so did Great-grandpa. And every kid who didn't was eaten. So we all behaved this way; that is to say, the adult is the one who accepts and represents the order of the society without question. This you get in all traditional societies.

Now, you know what we call a person who behaves that way: this we call a stuffed shirt. He has never built anything particular out of himself. He has simply done as told. He's sure of what's right and what's wrong, and that's that. Now we can't have this anymore, and we don't want it. Our notion in our society today of an adult mind is a mind that accepts responsibility for its own actions, that judges in terms of values, not saying, “Oh, I want this because I like it,” but in terms of an ordered, considered value scale. The individual is to judge, the individual is to criticize, and the individual is to represent—with courage and loyalty—his judgments.

Now, this asks a lot of the society itself that wasn't asked before. This also tends to shatter the idea of authority. Now that idea was formally validated by—say it came from God; the Lord of the Universe ordered things this way for the society. A point I want to make is this: that all of these divine interpretations of local laws, of local social orders, are simply cooked up; they are not true. The society has changed with time. These are functions of conditions—of geography and history. One must realize that the moral order is in flux, is changing. There is no God-given right, wrong, true, false, moral, immoral. And with that kind of relativism, one is free to live as a human being, not simply as a robot, repeating patterns that have been enforced from the past. So we have a much more sophisticated idea toward the social order.

However when it comes to this other problem of the natural order, one's nature as man, the thing is not quite so relativistic.

TRACK 11:  Old Age and DeathNow, the next stage in the mystery of the human development is that of old age coming on. Just about when you learn how to do what they have been trying to teach you, you begin to fumble. And then you have to pull yourself together and—for another few years—act as though you still could do it. And then everybody else begins to see that he's not doing so well. They put another waiter in to take over the job for you, and that kind of thing, and you are gradually eased out. In other words, the first function of the local social mythology was to bring you from childhood—dependency—to responsibility in terms of the social demands. And then, just about when you are beginning to feel good about it all, the society that has said, “You've got to do what we want,” begins to say, “Well, it looks as though you can't do what we

want, so you are on your own.” Then you have what's called a nervous breakdown.

The next problem then in a mythological order that is going to take care of us is to tell us what to do with our psyches when that begins to happen. The economic problem isn't the main one—not that somebody should, you know, give you a fishing rod and send you out fishing, and then have dinner for you when you come home. It's, What are you going to do with that power inside you? You've become somewhat aware of the world—of the mystery of the world—and you just don't want to go doodling along with silly little children's tasks, and that's not what you're worth—it's not what you are ready for. There are problems to face.

The most challenging one is death. Man is the only animal that knows he's going to die. And as soon as you fumble that ball coming… Schopenhauer has a wonderful line somewhere. He says, “The first half of life, when there is a knock on the door, you think, [excited] Here it comes! And the last half of life, when there is a knock on the door, you think, [glum] Here it comes.”[viii] So we find this wonderful problem, and mythologies in general—the religions—have served it. They have provided images, tasks and disciplines that carry the child from childhood dependency to responsibility—rather simple responsibilities, those that society says you've got to accept. And then they've provided a way out. They tell you that Daddy will be over there, and you're going back home.

Now, this isn't quite enough any more either. Is it any wonder that our clergymen look a little bit anxious these days?

TRACK 12:  Myths Give Inspiration for AspirationNow, I just want to speak about the phases in the development of any mythology. How did it start, and what happens to it?

I think one could say this: that all of the high cultures and low cultures and primitive cultures, and charming simple cultures, and great big enormous ones have grown out of myths. They are founded on myths. And what these myths have given has been inspiration for aspiration.

The economic interpretation of history is for the birds. Economics is itself a function of aspiration. It's what people aspire to that creates the field in which economics works. And people who don't have any aspirations—you know, the problem of a businessman who can't get people to want anything. It's the want; it's the aspiration. And what is wanted is not simply one, two or three meals a day and a bed—that's not enough. It's got to be much more than that to make a life.

Now, where do these aspirations come from? They come from a very wonderful, childlike thing: fascination. You know, if you wanted to make money today… I think I know economists, but I'll bet the thing to do would be to invest your money in something like cameras—things that people play with, things that they are fascinated by. These fascinations are the creations of new activities.

And when we look at the old cultures we can see—and some of it is very strange to see indeed…

TRACK 13: The Animal World: Humankind’s First InspirationWhat is most fascinating to begin with is one's neighbor. Particularly if the neighbor is a very strange looking creature. Now think of man in the old days. He was a minority on the planet, and when he looked at his neighbors, they had four feet, they had horns, they had great woolly bodies—they were very strange playmates. Furthermore, he was eating

certain of them, and they were rather dangerous. He had to arrange some kind of arrangement with his neighbors, namely these animals.

And we know that the first religious rites—and the first religious address, so to say, was to animals, their neighbors. These were the images of God, as our neighbors are today. But they are not four-footed for the most part; some of them act that way, but they're not. [laughter]

The animal world was the first inspiration, and the divinities were animal divinities. And not only that, but—just as kids, when they identify with something, when they are fascinated by something, they act like it, they play it—so the original rituals, the hunting people, danced buffalo dances, deer dances, called themselves after their names. Their tribes were called weasels and buffaloes and all these things. They were in covenant, so to say, with the animal world. And the notion was—this is a very interesting thing—that through this covenant, the animals gave their bodies willingly to be eaten. Because only the body dies, the being comes back. If you return the blood of the animal to the earth, the life is in the blood. The earth is the mother of life, and the animal will be back next year. A fundamental hunting rite: if you want the animals to be back next year, you have to perform this.

TRACK 14: Out of Death Comes Life: the Plant World as InspirationPeople who lived, then, in the plant world—the world of the tropics, where nature was a plant world—they saw something else. They saw that out of rot, out of decay, there comes life. And this notion that out of death comes life becomes a very important thing in the tropical cultures. And it led to what to us is a very horrible pattern of rituals, rituals of human sacrifice—killing people, letting them rot, burying

them—with the notion that out of this death there would come life.

In Indonesia, Borneo—the old headhunters—the idea was that before a young man could marry and beget life, he had to kill life: he had to get a head. And if you've ever witnessed any movie—or by any other means—the representation of a Borneo marriage ceremony, the head is right there when the young couple are having their wedding dinner, and the head is being fed. And the youngster who's going to be born, is going to have the name of the man who had that head. That man's coming back.

This notion that out of death comes life becomes a very important theme in the later religions of the world. “He who loses his life shall find it,” is a spiritualization of this idea.[ix]

TRACK 15:  As Above, So Below: the Cosmic Order as InspirationThen when the first cities appeared in Mesopotamia, about 3000 b.c., large communities grew up based on agriculture. The planting has to take place at a certain time, reaping a certain time, and there are professional priests watching the heavens to know when those times were—when those times came. And those men became aware of the movement of the planets through the fixed stars. And they calculated and recognized that these planets were moving in mathematically inevitable courses. And the idea came into being at this time in Mesopotamia of a cosmic order of mathematical precision, on and on—eons: as the day comes and goes, the year comes and goes, the eons come and go, and the whole society must go into accord with that. This idea that the human society should reproduce the heavenly order comes in.

The neighbors now were the stars and the planets, and this still lives with us in our religions. All of our religions have inherited this motif from the old Babylonian world. It went out with the higher civilizations to India, to China, even across the Pacific to Mexico and Peru. And you see these great towers—these great temple towers that represent the mountain of the world—and it's the axis of the world around which the world turns, as it does around the pole star. The whole world and society and the individual in it are like the planets moving in a great course.

Now in the 1920's, Sir Leonard Woolley excavating in the old city of Ur—remember Abraham, the man from Ur? He left the Zigurats—Sir Leonard Woolley, excavating in the graveyards of Ur found graves in which there were thirty and forty people buried—all of them in court attire—who had been buried alive. When the King died—or was killed, at a certain time in the movement of the planets when the Moon goes down, and the planet Venus along with the Moon, that was the end of an eon—the King and his entire court walked into the grave. They were playing a game; just as the hunters were imitating animals, just as the planting people were imitating plants, so the high civilizations began with princely, aristocratic little groups imitating the stars to the deaths, going all the way. The whole court, at the end of an eon, went in the grave so that another court could come. And it's a very poetic thing really. The harpists, the little girls who played the harps—we have these harps, they have been excavated and restored—these little skeleton hands: the girl's hands were still on the harp strings. The women in one of the graves had golden hair ribbons; one girl didn't have her golden hair ribbon on, it was found in her pocket. She had been late for the party and hadn't had time to put her ribbon on.

Well now we don't do that anymore. That kind of action has fallen into disrepute. Nevertheless, the king still wears the golden crown of the sun. The kingly paraphernalia of the installation of Queen Elizabeth and so forth, or of the burial of Winston Churchill a couple of years ago, was an imitation of these heavenly movements.

And even in our own country, the burial of President Kennedy, those horses with their black feet, their feet blackened, the color of the horse, the canons and so forth, the number of the horses, the horse with his inverted stirrups and all—all of these are imitations of old rites in which the king is dead and his vehicle, his horse, is going with him. The sense has gone, yet the poetry somehow echoes. What happens is that the old fascination disappears, an echo remains and you have, as it were, the vestige of a mythology.

TRACK 16:  The Mythology for Today: the Other as InspirationThe problem of our present age is to recreate the mythology for today on which people will live, on which the society will grow. It is being done; it is being done well. People aren't always looking in the right place for it, but it is taking shape. Our great artists, our great poets, our great scientists—read for example Erwin Schrodinger little book, My View of the World. This is a vision of a poet and of a first-rate physical scientist. And it has the same song in it that one reads and hears in the old Upani¶ads, and in the sayings of the great prophets —out of today's experience.

Nature is still ours. It is enough. It is in the universe. And what it shows is that mysterium tremendum, that mystery that was shown in the first place. And that is the basic

problem of the poet, and of the myths, as I said in the first place, to reconcile consciousness to its own source—namely nature, or what one might conceive to be within or behind nature.

Secondary to that is the social situation. Now in our society, the social problem is turned over largely to the police and to Congress as a purely practical matter. However, the creatures that constitute the society—these are today the neighbor, they really are. The idea of a personal God living somehow somewhere else, out there… There is no out there anymore; there is no up there. It's awfully difficult to validate, but it seems to me—if one's looking for the personality of God—it's right here in the multitudinous personalities of those around us.

Everything I find in the poets—in the scientists who push through to this mystery—points not to the animals as our neighbors, not to the plant, not to the planet, but to that other one, that Thou whom you face, who's not the thou you would want him to be; he's Other. And it's that recognition of otherness that is absolutely basic and necessary.

Now, this doesn't mean that you have to give up your otherness in recognition of him; it may darn well be collision. But it has to be collision with reverence and respect.

TRACK 17:  Mythology’s Song: That’s LifeI've been reading, recently, a great many medieval works.[x] And these involve—particularly in the Arthurian romance and so forth—knights in combat with each other—fiercely in combat with complete respect for each other, even love for each other.

And there is one wonderful line in Parzival, by Wolfram von Eschenbach, when two brothers, who didn't know they were brothers, were in combat. In fact they were half-brothers.

One was a Christian, and the other was a Mohammedan. They were in combat, and Wolfram says, “If one wished to think of it that way, one could say that they were two battling. But they have the same father, and they are one, and they are one battling himself out of loyalty, out of honor, and doing himself much harm.”[xi]

But that is the tragic sense. As I say, life begins, and that's the thing, the first thing the eye sees: life eating itself, killing…. But that's life. And the reconciliation of consciousness, which revolts from this, to that and its affirmation—that is the song of mythology; it has been. It is the song of the religions.

And with that little affirmative theme—the affirmation of life as is—I would say, we have the key to the hopping up, the stepping up, the invigorating of life, which has been the function—actually, the first function of mythology, from the time the old cave men asked the bear to give its body for their life.

With that little theme, I’ll close with thanks to you all.

 

[i] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, section I, part 23.[ii] Emil Bächler excavated the Drachenloch caves in Switzerland between 1917 and 1923.[iii] This term actually refers to the interglacial age immediately preceding the last major glaciation, which is generally known as the Würm glaciation. That ice age lasted from approximately 110,000 b.c. to 10,000 b.c. Cave bears became extinct approximately 26,000 b.c.[iv] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, IIIii.

[v] Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, part II, l. 6273: Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil.[vi] Campbell may perhaps have meant fomentation.[vii] See Sir Baldwin Spencer, Native Tribes of Central Australia, (New York: Dover Publications, 1968).[viii] Arthur Schopenhauer, Aforismen, ch VI. This is Campbell’s own rather playful translation of the following: Ist sonach der Charakter der ersten Lebenshälfte unbefriedigte Sehnsucht nach Glück, so ist der der zweiten Besorgnis vor Unglück..[ix] The Gospel According to Luke, 9:24; the Gospel According to Matthew, 10:39; the Gospel According to John, 12:25.[x] At the time when this lecture was delivered, Campbell was deeply involved in writing Occidental Mythology, the third volume in his series The Masks of God.[xi] Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, Book XV, l. 740.

Lecture I.1.2 - The Individual in Oriental MythologyBy Joseph Campbell

Details: Date: February 20, 1961 Venue: The Cooper Union Location: New York, NY Archive Number: L43

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TRACK 1:  The Three Orients

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a particularly difficult subject this

evening since, as you know, there are at least three distinct

Orients.  There is the Orient of the Near East—the Levant, Arabian

world, and the world of the Christian and Jewish traditions, and

earlier perhaps the Persian Zoroastrian religion are the

distinguished representatives. There is the world of India, with

Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism as its typical religious

examples.  And there is the world of the Far East, which includes

those two quite different worlds of China and Japan.

Furthermore, the subject is somewhat difficult because, at least as I

see the problem, the idea of the individual as we understand it in

the European Western world does not exist in any of these.

TRACK 2: Individual Identity in the Occident and Orient

To make myself clear, let me pause for a minute to say a few

words about what seems to me to be the Western idea of the

individual. I will take a few rather well known examples to

illustrate the fact.

Carl Jung in his work speaks of the integration of the personality,

and uses the word “individuation” rather frequently.  And to make

clear what he means, he points out that each one of us is, by his

society, invited to play a certain role, a certain social role in order

to function. We play roles. These roles he calls personae, from the

Latin word for the mask worn by an actor.

We all have to put on a mask of some sort in order to function in

the society. And even those who choose not to function in the

society—to revolt from the society—put on masks too. They wear

certain insignia, you might say, that indicate, I am in revolt.

One can be impressed by a persona, by a mask. For example, if one

meets a person and is talking to him and thinks one is beginning to

establish some kind of rapport, and then learns, let us say, that this

is the distinguished ambassador from such and such a place, the

mask comes in front of that person and a certain awe in your

relationship to him, and this person becomes what Jung calls a

mana personality—a personality with magical powers—so that

you are not talking directly to him.

In order to be individuated, in order to be an individual, we must

distinguish between ourselves and the mask that we wear. Now

this mask goes very deep; it includes moral ideas, it includes

judgment systems. These archetypes for action have been

impressed upon us by our society.

Now I take Jung’s idea of the individuation as a rather clean-cut

example of an Occidental ideal: that one should put on the mask

and take it off. When you come home in the evening are you still

Mr. President, or do you leave that in the office? If you keep your

mask on, you know what we say of such a person: he is a stuffed

shirt. The personality gradually disappears, and this is a particular

disaster if one becomes impressed by one’s own mask. Here we

have a real mirage phenomenon: nobody there. 

Now let me say that the typical ideal in the Orient is that one

should become identified with the mask. The whole pattern of

education throughout the Orient is Believe what you’re told, do

what you’re told, do not ask questions. For an Occidental teaching

Oriental students, it is absolutely bewildering—the

submissiveness. For an Oriental teaching Occidental students, the

challenges are shocking. There is no respect for the professor qua

professor.

 TRACK 3:  Are You Your Body?

Now in the wonderful Inferno of Dante, as he wandered through

these hell pits, he recognized all of his friends there as we should

recognize ours if we went. And proceeding through Purgatory, and

even to Heaven, he knew who those people were. Their

personalities—their individual personalities—were preserved, even

in the afterworld. The personality here is a permanent part of a

permanent entity. You are born once, you live once—you are that.

There is an identification with the body. In the Greek world, when

the heroes go to the underworld, again they recognize their friends.

However, in the Oriental hells and heavens, whether of the

Buddhist or the Hindu or the Jain type, you do not recognize

anybody. They are not the same person they were on Earth.

Now, let me make a point. The hero in Europe—in the Greek

tragedy, in Dante’s Commedia, in Jung’s idea of the individual—is

this individual, this temporal being here now. In the Farther East of

India and China and Japan, the hero is—and I’ll use the crucial

word—the reincarnating monad: that entity which goes through

bodies, puts them on and puts them off as clothes.

This is a continuing theme in the Orient, in the farther Orient. You

are not this body, you are not this ego. You are to think of this as

merely something put on to be thrown away again. A fundamental

distinction here between our European concept of the individual,

and that of, let us say, India and the Far East—the reincarnating

principle makes quite unimportant this particular temporal

phenomenon that we now are. There is an expansion of the ego

concept, or an annihilation of it, so that it is not identified with this

temporal phenomenon here now, but with the reincarnating

principle. Now the differences from belief to belief, which I am

going to try to describe, have to do with the identification of the

monad. What is it that reincarnates?

 

TRACK 4:  Eons Come and Go: the Round of Existence

Now let me take the next point. One of the most impressive and

wondrous things about the Oriental religions is the concept of the

Round of Existence—these eons that come and go, so that worlds

come into being, and worlds go out of being. This is an idea that

originated very, very long ago in the Near East.

As you know, our civilizations, whether European or Oriental,

have all derived from a Near Eastern base. It was in the great zone

of Palestine, Syria, Iran, and Iraq that the earliest agricultural and

pastoral communities developed. From these, there spread forth

this strongly based agricultural-pastoral-agrarian society on which

the later civilizations are based.

Then about 3500 B.C., in that area, the mathematically calculable

movement of the five visible planets, and the sun and moon, were

recognized. And the idea developed of a mathematical order

underlying the whole universe. We have eons mathematically

calculated so that after a certain long passage of time, the whole

world dissolves, and then it comes into being again, and then it

dissolves.

You know the old story in Hesiod already of the four great ages of

gold, silver, bronze, iron, and then they come forth again, and then

they go again. In the Eddas of the medieval Germanic peoples, the

world comes into being and then goes out of being, and throughout

India and the Far East this is so. Now when the world does that,

when you have this pattern of eternal recurrence, there is nothing

you or I can do to change the situation. Individual initiative is of no

use whatsoever. It has no value whatsoever. It is an intrusion upon

the scene. Just as the sun rises on schedule, and sets on schedule,

as the moon waxes and wanes, as the plants grow and die, so must

you live.

 TRACK 5:  Living in Accord with the Cosmic Order

In India, this idea is the idea of dharma—the idea of that duty, that

virtue which is yours as a result of your birth.

Now in India, this dharma is understood in terms of caste; that is to

say, each order of society has its very strict rules, and you are born

into that, and you live according to this caste system. It is thought

that as a result of earlier births you are perfectly ready to be born

on that level, so to say. Consequently, the moral system—the

persona, the mask that is supplied you by your social group—is

perfectly appropriate to your character, otherwise you would not

have been born on that level.

Now, there is no need for a God to judge you and put you in your

spot. This happens automatically, as it were, by specific gravity.

The weight of your soul—the spiritual weight of it—determines

what level of the social order you will come in on, and your duty is

simply to do as told.

In the old texts—The Laws of Manu and The Institutes of Vishnu

and so forth—the detailed description of how you are to behave—

how long your sleeves are to me, how many times you are to

sneeze in the morning—every little detail of life is described to an

iota. And the opportunity to think, “What would I like to do now?

What would I like to be?” and all—that kind of thing—is not

allowed. The slightest infringement is rigorously punished. The

punishment system is extremely strict; the society is very serious

about this.

In the Farther East, in China and Japan, there is the idea of the Tao

—the Way, the cosmic order, which is described in terms different

from those of India, but nevertheless amounts to essentially the

same thing: namely that there is a cosmic rhythm, a cosmic order,

and that is our nature. And the real goal of life is to know how to

function in unison with the Tao so that our spontaneity is the

spontaneity of nature itself.

This is a noble wonderful ideal; it is an ideal of self-giving. The

idea of ego in these societies is regarded as the diabolical principle,

the negative principle. One follows from beginning to end this

story of Annihilate ego, cancel ego—and in fact the ego is given

no opportunity whatsoever to develop.

TRACK 6:  Ego and Id in the Orient and Occident

In the Indian philosophies, there is a very well known

classification of the goals for which men live. These are called The

Four Ends of Life. There are three for which people live in the

world, in society. And there is one for which people leave society

and go into the forest.

The three for which people live in society are the first virtue,

dharma—that you should perform the laws imposed upon you by

your caste. And the other two are the natural desires of any

organism. They are aggression, or achievement—called arthra—

and delight or pleasure. These are the natural drives of what Freud

calls the id, namely the simple biological energy of the psyche.

These id drives—desire for pleasure, desire for achievement—are

to be realized under the ceiling of the dharma. In other words I

want versus Thou shalt.

I want, Thou shalt —these are the motives, I would say, of the

nursery. There is no development here of an individual at all.

There is no provision made for what Freud calls ego development.

The ego principle—I principle—is contaminated by the id

principle, according to this system. They cohere. I means I want in

the Orient, whereas in Jung’s and Freud’s and our Western view in

general, there is a dissociation between id and ego. Ego is the

principle that links this individual here and now to this situation

here and now. You are not to think in terms of clichés. You are not

to think that this situation ever happened before. It didn’t. It is

absolutely unique. Its demands are absolutely unique. The decision

has to be made now.

Furthermore, as a result of assuming an ego, you assume

responsibility for what you do. And that is the next point in the

Western idea of the ego that is missing in the Orient. What you do

in the Orient is what you do as a soldier. A soldier is not personally

responsible for anything that he does under command. He does it

because that is the order, and he is simply a good soldier.

Similarly, if you are acting according to dharma, doing just what

you are told, there is no personal responsibility on you at all. You

do not assume responsibility for anything.

Now, I think in the West the Protestant idea of individual

conscience—deciding what God’s message is to you, through your

own conscience—this is a fundamental principle in the West. It has

to do with an idea of freedom of will, freedom of conscience,

freedom of decision, assumption of personal responsibility.  There

is none of this in the Orient at all.

TRACK 7:  God in the Levantine Orient

Now, let me make another point. I want to speak now briefly about

a distinction between this first Orient, the Orient of the Levant,

from which the Biblical tradition comes, and the other Orients of

India and the Far East. 

I’ve spoken of the great cycles, and I’ve said these come

mathematically. Now the image—the mythological image that is

used to describe the coming of the end and then the return—is the

image of the deluge, the flood. The world sinks in the primordial

waters again, in the primordial abyss, and then it comes out in

form, and then it goes back, and then it comes out. This happens

automatically, mathematically.

About 2500 B.C. a new version of the deluge appears in the

Sumerian texts—the idea is that God (in that case Enlil) sent the

deluge in punishment for man’s sins—is a totally different deluge.

In this case you do not have the automatic coming and going, you

have a punishment of someone who is guilty.

Now, there are enormous implications in this shift of scene. In the

first place, a certain sense of wonder and magnitude and glory is

lost; there is no question about it. The other is a great magnificent,

wondrous affair: this cosmic being of which we are but morsels.

On the other hand, this throws man into a personal relationship to a

deity who has free will. The deities—in both India and the Farther

East—are agents of the cycle. For the most part, they are, as it

were, executives: executing the necessary acts, bringing about the

inevitable processes of the cosmic cycle.

However, when you have the deity Himself sending the flood,

Himself making the laws, you have a quite different principle in

play. And it is at about this time that a very big shift takes place in

the whole consciousness of the world west of Iran. This includes

the Levant, and Europe.

It is this: no longer do we think of God and man as mere aspects of

a total being, which is the cosmos. God and man become separate

from each other, and in tension with each other, and God is judging

man and acting upon him.

Furthermore, God sits as it were behind the laws of the universe,

not in front of them. In the older system of the great mathematics

of the cosmos, God, as I say, is simply the executive, and you have

the great natural laws, which govern everything. But when you

have a God who determines what the laws are to be—who says,

“Let it be so and so,” and it is so and so—you have a stress on the

personality that doesn’t exist on the other side.

Now, this puts the Levantine Orient into a rather close relationship

to the individualism of the West that I have been talking about.

However, there is a big distinction to be made. In the Levant, the

stress is always on obeying. The idea is that this God has given a

revelation which is encompassed in a book—in a statement. This

goes for Zoroastrianism, goes for Judaism, goes for Islam, goes for

every one of the great religions out of the Near East. There is a

book, there is a revealed truth, and man does not quibble with that.

Man finds out what it says, and the one who does quibble with that

is by definition an evil person—a person who has lost touch with

the truth, and is an outcast. Whole races—whole worlds—can fall

away.

In fact, the usual pattern in the Near East is that there is one folk

that has received the word, or one tradition, and this is the true

tradition. In the Levant, the typical hero is not the individual, nor is

it the reincarnating monad. It is the folk or church that carries the

truth.

The individual is as it were, an organ of that organism. The

Christian is one with all Christians in the organism of Christ, of the

Church. And the Hebrew community, you have the seed of

Abraham and the Chosen People, who will be vindicated at the end

of time, and the individual’s relationship to the God is through the

community, not a personal one. There must be ten people present

in the idea of the minyan.

So there is this idea of the Fall, and a process of the whole

community, and with the community all that counts back to the

God, and the individual participates in that.

The interesting thing in Europe is that this idea has come to Europe

from the Orient. You can see it happening in the early Christian

communities—the attempt to fuse the two ideas of the individual

and the community.

And I would say that you can see the joint in the Christian notion

of two judgments: the personal judgment and the general

judgment. Each of us at death is judged—that is the individual

problem. And at the end of the world there is a second judgment

where everybody comes back for a grand second judgment when

the world ends and all of this. Here we have the two traditions

brought together.

 TRACK 8:  Europe and the Near East: a Summation

Now let me sum up briefly what I’ve tried to point out so far, and

then move on to the Farther East. In Europe I would say we have a

very strong individualistic tradition which goes back certainly to

the Greeks, and is to be identified also in the North European

Pagan traditions of the Celts and the Germans. This comes into

relationship in the Medieval period in particular, with the idea of

the community, the Chosen People, the group outside of which

there is no salvation.

The statement made by [David] Ben-Gurion, a couple of weeks

ago[i]—this is an old traditional idea of the Near East entirely:

those who do not reside in this sacred place are said to have no

God. There you have the idea of the community as hero, the people

of God. And in the further East I will bring us to this problem of

the reincarnating monad. And I want to begin to create this world

for you by telling a story from one of the late Indian Upanishads.

 TRACK 9:  The Humbling of Indra

This is a story known as the   Humbling of Indra .

Indra is King of the Gods—is the counterpart of Zeus. And in the

course of the great cycles, the monster—the great serpent power—

accumulated to himself all of the waters of the world so that the

world was dissolving, it was dying.

And Indra lets fly a thunderbolt and exploded this serpent monster

—who’s name, Ritra, means the enveloper—exploded him so that

the waters flowed back into the world.

Now he thought he had done that himself. He was a god, he

exploded the monster, the monster blew up, all the waters rushed

back.  Indra thought, What a great boy am I!

He went back to the cosmic mountain, Mt. Meru, the Olympus of

India, and he noticed all of the great palaces of the Gods had fallen

into decay. And he thought, I will build a city worthy of myself, the

hero who has saved the universe, and I will build a palace worthy

of myself.

So he called the master craftsman of the gods, Vishvakarman, the

maker of all things, and said, “I’d like palaces; I’d like lotus ponds;

I’d like pagodas; I’d like a great, great thing here, because a great,

great thing am I.”

And Visvakarman said, “Well, this is perfectly fine. I’ll be glad to

do this.”

Well, he starts to work and indeed the glorious palace was coming

to birth here, and every time Indra came and looked over the site,

he thought, Oh a little more of this there, and a little more of that

here” and this thing kept going and going.

So Visvakarman said, “My god! This is going to go on, and we’re

both immortal, so there is no end to it.” And becoming extremely

unhappy about this, he went to the higher up.

Now, the higher up—higher than Indra, who is simply King of the

Gods—was Brahma, who represents the creative force. He sits on a

lotus, and this lotus grows from the navel of Vishnu, who is

sleeping on a great serpent whose name is Endless, and that serpent

is on the immortal waters.

So we have this lovely picture of the immortal sea, the serpent

floating on it as a kind of seven-headed couch, Vishnu sleeping on

the serpent—all of them representing the same thing, namely the

immortal waters. His dream sends forth this world lotus which is

us. Sitting on that is this executive secretary who brings forth the

world named Brahma.

So Visvakarman comes to Brahma and he says, “I am in trouble.”

And he describes the situation.

And Brahma says, “Very well, you go back to work. I’ll see the big

boy downstairs.”

So he went to the edge of the cosmic ocean, kneeling by the waters

—great form floating out there dreaming the dream of the universe

—and he issued his prayer, and the great sleeping being simply

made a gesture indicating, I got it.

Next morning, Indra has come to see his palace, and the porter

comes running into him and says, “There’s a beautiful young

Brahmin boy outside, and the children are all around him, and he is

an auspicious sign. Invite him in and this will be a wonderful thing

for the palace.”

Well inviting a Brahmin in—Brahmins are greater than the gods—

is a grand thing. So Indra invites the Brahmin boy in, and after

giving him hospitality says, “Now what has brought you here.”

The boy speaks and his voice is like thunder rumbling on the

distant horizon, and he says, “I’ve heard that you are building the

greatest palace—a palace such as no Indra ever built before you.

I’ve come, I’ve seen, it is so. No Indra ever built such a palace

before you.” Indra is sitting there—this little pipsqueak? “Indras

before me? [tapping impatiently] What are you talking about?”

There’s something rather frightening about it all.

And the boy says, “I have seen Indras and Indras and Indras. Every

time Brahma opens his eyes, a world comes into being governed

by an Indra. When he closes them, the world goes, opens, another

world, closes, another world. Presently the lotus goes, that Brahma

goes… another lotus… eyes… Indras… Brahmas—from

beginning to end, endlessly in all directions.

“And then,” said the boy, “consider the galaxies of Brahmas, to the

infinitudes of infinity: each with its Vishnu, each with its Brahmas,

each with its Indras. There may be sages in your court who would

tell you they could count the sands of the sea. There are none who

would dare to count those Brahmas, let alone Indras.”

While he’s talking, there appears—coming in the palace floor—a

parade of ants about four yards wide in perfect ranks parading

across the floor. And the boy sees them, he laughs, and Indra’s

whiskers go out. “What is this?”

“Don’t ask,” said the boy, “unless you want to be hurt.”

“Well,” says Indra, “teach.” Now, the basic thought in the Orient

is, for higher teaching you must ask questions. The teacher answers

the questions. Since wisdom is of such magnitude, there is nothing

to say. What we have to do is simply talk to your point. So Indra

says, “Teach me about these ants.”

And the boy says, “Former Indras all. [laughter] Through eons of

reincarnation, they have worked their way up through the scales of

life, eighty-four billion incarnations or so, and they get to the status

of Indra, and then they slay the dragon, and then they say, “How

great am I!’ And I comes in, and I goes down—and we start

again.”

And while he’s talking, there comes into the palace an old yogi—

crotchety old fellow—with an umbrella of banana leaves,

something like the picture of Robinson Crusoe we’ve all seen. And

he’s wearing the leopard skin loincloth of a yogi, and on his chest

is a curious circle of hair. And all the hair in the center is gone.

So this old fellow comes in, and the boy says, “Who are you?

What’s your name? Where do you live? What’s the name of your

wife and family? Why do you have that umbrella? And what’s the

meaning of that curious design of hair on your chest?”

“Well,” says the old fellow, “Hairy is my name. I don’t have a

house. Life’s short. This umbrella; that’s plenty for me. It keeps

the sun off my head. I’m not married, I don’t have children. Why

have children, why produce things for this fleeting world? Nothing

lasts. And you know, about these hairs—it’s curious. And perhaps

there’s a lesson to be learned from them. Every time an Indra dies,

one hair drops out. They’re half gone now. Pretty soon they will all

be gone. Life’s short. Why build a house?”

Well at that, these two disappear. They are of course the two great

deities—Vishnu the Dreamer sent his hair down to become this

incarnation of the boy, and Shiva, the great yogi sent a

manifestation to appear as the yoga.

Well the stunned Indra, who represents Man in authority, Man in

dignity, man of the world, is terribly biffed. He thinks, I’m going to

quit, I’m going to leave it all. I’m going to become a yogi. I’m

going into the forest and I’m going to meditate, and I’m going to

come in touch with the transcendent bliss of eternity and let this

whole thing drop off.

Now this is the big collision in the Orient between the idea of

dharma—the idea of social duty, the idea of those three ends that

I’ve already mentioned, the ends of virtue, of pleasure, and

success; Indra had succeeded in all of these—and the fourth end

which is dropping it all. Throwing it off.

Now, this is not individuation in Jung’s terms at all. It is canceling

even ego. It is canceling desire for pleasure, it is canceling desire

for success, it is canceling virtue. It is what is called moksha:

release, dropping it.

Well, when Indra’s beautiful queen Indrani learns that her spouse

—she in her prime divinity, you might say—is about to go off to

the forest, she turns to the palace priest named Brihaspati, the Lord

of Divine Power, and says, “This is something! A yogi comes into

the palace, he sees the yogi, he now has got the idea he’s going out

and become a yogi. He’s going to leave the whole thing, here we

are going to be!”

“Well,” said Brihaspati, “come with me, dear.” He takes her by the

hand, sits before Indra and he gives him a little priestly sermon.

The sermon is [this]: Cosmos is a manifestation of the eternal

being. It comes like a flower, it goes like a flower. Coming, going,

coming going. We, in our being, participate in that. We think of

ourselves as egos, but actually we are in participation with this

cosmic process. You—as the Lord of all Creatures—are in a

particularly fine position to make manifest the glory of the cosmos.

The egolessness of all beings, to realize in the life of love, to

realize in the life of war craft and conquest, to realize in the life of

virtue the process and to make it manifest.

“There are those who have to go to the forest and cast off the world

in order to find eternity. There are those, on the other hand, who

are living in the world, can be as it were, yogis within”—what in

the Orient is called the mystic garment within, and the garment of

the law without. “This is the high ideal, oh Indra, and this is for

you.”

Now in this story, I think that all of the play of the Oriental

possibilities are indicated. You can see the force of the incarnation

idea, the force of the egolessness idea, the force of the vast

development of cosmic eons in which the individual plays simply

as a functioning entity. And you can see also that two ways are

indicated: the way of quitting, and the way of coming back.

 TRACK 10: Letting Go: the Fierce Yoga of Jainism

Now, in the last fifteen minutes, I want to speak about the various

ways of quitting and coming back, which I think will indicate

something about the Oriental ideas of the individual.

The first idea is that this reincarnating monad—this reincarnating

principle—is in essence absolutely pure. It is like a pure bubble; it

has no quality, it has no individuality, it has no character. But it is

contaminated by karmic matter—by the stuff of the world. And the

whole world in fact is nothing but a seething mass of these

monads, trapped in the substance of the world.

There are two principles here. This is a strict dualism. This is the

point of view of the Jains—Jainism. There is a strict dualism.

There is the pure self, and there is that self in play in the world. All

action contaminates that self, even what we call pure action. There

are said to be six colors that pour into the soul—into this monad—

through action. The grossest roughest color activity is the color

black to the soul. Next comes the color dark blue, then comes the

color of smoke, then comes the color of fire, then yellow color, and

then white. The soul itself is translucent; it isn’t even white.

Now, these colors weigh the soul down, and souls that are black

are born in the lower regions of the cosmic body. Souls that are

light are born further up. And souls that are white are born up in

the brain—this would be heaven.[ii]

So you have this cosmic being with the different stages of

development indicated in various parts of its body. In order to get

above that, and rise to a place that is called slightly tilted—it’s an

enormous umbrella up above this being—yet to go up there as a

pure bubble, you have to perform certain very strict yogic

exercises. And this yoga of the Jains is based on the idea that you

must stop acting, stop moving, stop eating, stop thinking, stop

feeling—finally, stop breathing. [laughter]

But it’s no good dying unless you have quelled absolutely all

interest in life. If there is one little spark of Oh, wouldn’t it be nice

left in you, you’ll be back. [laughter]

Furthermore, as you proceed down the line—it’s a fierce yoga—as

you proceed down the line, you build up more pressure for coming

back, so that in the last stages of this furious affair the slightest

little thing can dislodge you and you come right back.

Well, you can understand that this is a rigorous, fierce affair, and

by gradations, one takes vows. One vows not to eat anything that

has life in it—that is to say even an apple that has been picked

from a tree. You eat only dead things. You take vows not to walk

more than four or five steps a day, because in walking you hurt

things: you step on insects, also you apply pressure to the

molecules of the earth. You can see in Bombay to this day, people

walking with a little gauze over their mouths—these are the Jain

monks and nuns. And that is there not only so that you shouldn’t

breathe in an insect, but also when you breathe you shouldn’t hurt

the air, and you shouldn’t hurt the tissues of your throat—these are

all very tender things. Well if life is that delicate, let it go—you

know, get out. This doctrine… Well, there are two kinds of monks

here: the strict monks are called those clothed in space, digambara

—the absolutely naked monks. They take off all their clothes, they

pull out all their hair—they reject everything having to do with a

reference to society. And you can see the images of these great,

stark naked figures standing perfectly still in the posture known as

kayotsarga, which is dismissing the body—let it go.

The other variety of monk is much less strict. This is known as

svetambara,  dressed in white; they wear white garments and you

can see them in cities with these protections.

There is a very funny story connected with this order. You know,

pious people are strange everywhere. [laughter] In this particular

case, two chaps come along through the streets of Bombay with a

cart full of bed bugs. And they call, “Who will feed the bugs? Who

will feed the bugs?”

And some lady in the window tosses out a coin—that means she

will feed the bugs. So one of the chaps lies down in the bed for a

rupee, and the bugs have their dinner, and she has gained credit for

assisting this inferior type of life to have its little enjoyment and

move on, you know—it will be up in about eighty-four more

incarnations perhaps going around with the cart saying, “Who will

feed the bugs?”

 TRACK 11: Living in the World: the Psychological Shift of Buddhism

Well now, the great teacher of this doctrine, Mahavira, was a

contemporary of the Buddha, and the Buddha despised the doctrine.

He said that this idea of a purely physical detachment from the world

is altogether wrong in its thinking—the proper problem is

psychological.

This is a great moment in the world,—500 B.C.: a strictly

psychological approach to the problem. This was a moment of

immense importance. It does not matter whether you eat meat. It

does not matter whether you kill things as you walk around. What

matters is your psychological attitude. Do you act with desire for the

fruits of action, or with fear? Or do you act simply because it is your

duty to act?

This is known in Hinduism as Karma Yoga: acting without desire or

fear, but simply in terms of the process. Now with the Buddha, he

would not have you act in the world, at first. His doctrine was first

interpreted as a monastic doctrine, as a doctrine of quitting the world,

just as the Jains quit the world. And the first communities of

Buddhists did quit the world.

But we find in Buddhism a very strong movement of living in the

world, without desire or fear, but simply as it were, in action.

The fundamental notion is that once you have abandoned the world

of desire and the world of fear, you undergo a psychological shift.

Your ego attitude is dropped, and you act simply as the world acts in

what is called spontaneity. You become, as it were, a tree. You

become a plant. You live right out of yourself.

One can hear in this word of Christ about “consider the lilies of the

field: they labor not, neither do they spin.”[iii] They are not anxious.

This idea swept the whole Orient, and it matched notions that were

already present in China and Japan. In China the idea of Lao-tse of

wu wei—non effort, action without striving, letting it roll, letting

your life just roll—this idea is the basic Buddha idea, and it broke the

grip of this literal yoga of killing yourself.

Now, when you have detached yourself like this, you are, as it were,

just—well, one term that’s used is a burnt string. When a string has

been burnt, lying on the ground, it looks like a string still, but if you

go [a blowing sound] it isn’t there. And so it is with the person who

has quenched his commitment to ego, and has pulled back: he is as it

were in the center, and life moves through him just in a rolling

process.

This is the basic idea, I would say, for the individual living in the

world, whether it is in Hinduism, in Buddhism, in Taoism, or in the

world of Japan.

 TRACK 12:  Renounce the World or Roll With It

Now I will conclude by making a very brief distinction—this is

drawing lines a little too sharply, but in a brief discussion, it’s all

that’s possible. In India there is a mood of world renunciation.

Even though we can say that living in the world we are without

ego, there is nevertheless a pathos of world renunciation in India.

The Indian, as it were, wishes to identify himself with an eternal

principle, which remains still. And when you read the first

aphorism of Indian Yoga in the Yoga Sutras it says, “Yoga is the

intentional stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind”—

making it stop, making it stand still, so that there is no ripple of

life, and so that the glorious image of perfection shines through in

perfection.[iv]

Whereas in China and Japan, the attitude is rather “roll with the

world.” The saying there is, Let the thoughts come, let them move.

The geese fly over the pond. Their image is reflected in the pond.

The pond made no effort to grab the image; it made no effort to

hold them. It comes, it goes. Let us pass that way.

Then, in the Taoism of China, you have the attitude of finding [the]

Tao, but leaving society, going into the forest, going on to the

mountain, and participating in nature—union with the Tao of

nature.

In the world of Confucius, you have the idea of finding the Tao in

society, through a sincere enactment of traditional decorum in

which a sentiment of fellow feeling is communicated and

participated in. And it is through this that the human Tao is

experienced, but always according to the rules of the Chinese

family system: relationship of father to son, wife to husband, older

brother to younger brother, and so forth.

TRACK 13:  Zen: a Samurai Story

In Japan, something I think might be called the extreme of the

union of release and world experience in one moment is

experienced. Here you have the idea of freedom within the very

social pattern in which you live. The idea of doing the job that you

have to do, and at the same time having a spontaneity that amounts

to freedom, to choice, to say, “Yay.”

I want to give one story in conclusion to illustrate this Japanese

approach—the idea of zen in Japan, the idea of meditation. Zen is a

word from the Chinese ch’an, which comes from the Sanskrit

dyana, which means contemplation. You contemplate the divinity,

the power, the wonder of the world in all things, and in yourself

and in your own actions.

This idea in Japan in the twelfth century was taken up by the

knights, the samurai—the priestly warriors—and all the arts of

combat and war were associated with this Zen, so that nothing is

happening; it is simply the process that is taking place through this

strictly controlled legal activity of the warrior in his fencing

techniques and so forth.

Well, there is a story of a samurai whose overlord had been

murdered, and he assumed the duty and task of avenging the

murder—a vendetta. And he, after years, had finally got his man

against a wall, and his great samurai sword was ready to take off

his head. And this chap, who was now cornered like a rat, in fury

and distraction and not knowing what to do, spit at the other man

—spit in his face.

And this noble warrior put his sword back in the sheath and walked

away.

Why?

Because that man had made him angry.

[laughter and applause]

Back To Top

[i] Ben-Gurion made this statement at the 25th World Zionist Congress, in December, 1960. Time translated Ben-Gurion’s statement as follows: "Whoever dwells outside the land of Israel is considered to have no God." (“What is a Jew?” Time, May 19, 1961.)

[ii] Joseph Campbell, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal. Edited by David Kudler. New World Library, 2003, pp. 93-95.

[iii] The Gospel According to Luke, 12:28.

[iv] Patanjali, The Yoga Sutras, 1:2.

Lecture I.1.3 - Symbolism and the IndividualBy Joseph Campbell

Details: Date: November 16, 1961 Venue: The Cooper Union Location: New York, NY Archive Number: L44

Links: Download this Lecture Discuss this Lecture

TRACK 1: Oriental and Occidental Domains

The point I want to make tonight is a contrast between Oriental and Occidental concepts of the problem of the individual. My principle intention is to try to indicate, to all here, that the ideals of the West for the individual—and for individual freedom and so forth—have no meaning whatsoever in the Oriental world, and the traditional Oriental world, and had better be revised, had better have been reviewed in our thinking with reference to our ideals for the rest of the world. I want, on the other hand, to stress the fact that for the West this is the great ideal, and it is what we represent, and what we have to contribute to humanity in the way of a spiritual image.

I draw the main division between Orient and Occident in terms of mythological and traditional symbolism in Iran, in Persia—this is, I would say, the watershed. Eastward of Iran, we have two great domains: the domain of India and its world; and the domain of the Far East, essentially China and Japan. Westward of that domain we have two divisions also: the division of the Levant, of the Near East; and the division of Europe.

And these four domains in the history of their symbolic traditions are quite distinct in style, quite distinct in ideas. However they do group into two orders of two: India and China on the one hand; the Levant and Europe on the other. These two great fields represent,

in earlier days, dialogues between each of its divisions: India and the Far East in dialogue; Levant and Europe.

The great extraordinary thing that has happened in the contemporary world is that these two quite different spheres of humanity have been brought together, and now are trying to speak to each other intelligently so that they should understand each other, and be able to live, so to say, in symphony, or in counterpoint, need… not any one overpowering the other, since what we need really is this multiple discourse.

The extraordinary thing to consider is that all four have sprung finally from one single root. Every one of these civilizations is based ultimately on the art of agriculture and the domestication of cattle. And we know from archaeology now that this great transformation of humanity from the status of hunting and food collection to the status of food production and the building of big communities can be dated and must be dated about 6000 B.C. in the Near East, so that it is actually from the Levant that the branches of this great tree of the four domains of civilization stem.

TRACK 2: Social Organization in Agricultural Communities

In the earlier primitive societies, which are small, I think it can be said every individual controls the entire cultural inheritance. You have, in a small hunting community, a community of equivalent adults. Every adult is, in terms of that culture’s notion, a total human being. The only divisions are in terms of sex and age groups. But every man, every woman, even every youngster, controls what is necessary to control in order to be a total member of that society.

However, with the emergence of the larger communities based on the arts of agriculture, which begin to appear very distinctly in the archaeological remains around 5000 B.C.; the antecedents are shortly earlier than that. By 4500 B.C., there is a whole

constellation of substantial villages in the Near East. By 3500 B.C., they have begun to be rather large cities.

It is at this time that a differentiation in the society begins to build up. There are specialists. There are craftsmen with specializations. There are priest castes, there are governing castes, and there are serving castes. You get a differentiation of the society, and the adult now is no longer in total control of the entire culture good. He is a part man. And one can see, in the symbolism of this period, the interest in trying to conceive of the relationship of part to whole. It is in the pottery designs of 4500 B.C. that the first geometrical organizations of the field occur; there is no such thing in earlier art. About 4500 B.C., in the art of the Samara and Halaf styles, we see very beautifully organized fields with disparate elements gathered so that they relate to a whole.

And in the center of these designs there is always a symbolic form that indicates the integrating principle. And this form in later symbology is the form of a God—it is a symbol of a deity. The deity becomes the superordinated principle to which everyone is ordinated, is co-ordinated, and this deity is incarnate in the King. This is very prominent in the Pharaonic tradition of Egypt, but in early Mesopotamian it is present also. The King is the deity. Not only that, but everybody in his court is symbolically related to that King.

Now, it was at this time—let us take the date about 3500 B.C.—that the five visible planets were discovered in the heavens: these five little points of light moving in mathematically calculable courses through the fixed stars. And it is at this time that the priest caste, discovering this, conceived the idea that there was a heavenly cosmic order which should be duplicated in the social order. And we have a pantomime—a courtly pantomime of the order of the heavens. It is at this time that the symbology of the crown—the

solar crown, or the lunar crown with the horns of the moon—come along. The King and court represent this heavenly order.

TRACK 3: Royal Burials

Now in the middle 20’s there was an extraordinary discovery made, which I’m sure a number of you have read about by Sir Leonard Woolley, in the old Sumerian City of Ur from which Abraham is supposed to have come. He was digging within the temple compound of Ur, which is the old city of the Moon God. And he came upon multiple graves—graves in which as many as sixty-four human beings had been buried together, all in courtly array. And they were not people in disorderly fashion—thrown into the grave and covered over. They were in rows, without any signs of struggle.

They were mostly court people. One of the most important graves was that of a woman who was called Shubad,[i] who was buried beside a man who was thought to have been her husband Abari.[ii] It was originally thought they were King and Queen—they may have been. The Queen’s entire court was buried with her, and the King’s entire court was buried with him, under hers. She had a court of twenty-five people buried with her.[iii] She had been brought in on a sled that had been drawn by asses, and this entire court had been buried with her.

Beneath was the court of the man who was thought to have been her husband—you can’t tell from just the name. And with him there were buried some fifty or sixty-five people. He had been brought in on a wagon with oxen. All these were in the graves.

Now, these people were in court attire. The girl harpist who had been playing the harp: her skeleton hands were still on the harp strings, or where the strings had been. And the harp itself was in

the form of a bull’s body. And the bull’s head: a beautiful golden bull’s head had a lapis lazuli beard. This was the mythological bull. This is the bull whose lunar horns we see—the moon bull who dies and is resurrected, dies and is resurrected. This is the god Tammuz of the old mythological days.[iv]

Now, the thought that this entire court had gone into the grave as a ritual act. This is only one instance. In every one of the ancient cultures—the Egyptian cultures, the early Chinese—we have graves with as many as 800 people buried in them. And the—the Pharaohs of the first Egyptian dynasties had in fact two funereal estates: one in Abydos, and one in Memphis. And so you have a country place and a city place with as many as 400 people buried with the king in each one of these.

 TRACK 4: The Great Cosmic Law

Let us ask where is the individual in a situation of this sort—there is no such thing. There is only this great law which in Egypt was called ma’at, in Babylonian—Sumerian was called me, in Chinese is the Tao, in Sanskrit is dharma. This is a cosmic law that comes from all eternity—permeates the world. And anyone who wishes to be a thing, who wishes really to be something, must live in terms of this cosmic law.

And there is to be no individual choice whatsoever. There is no opportunity to think “What would I like to do? What would I like to be?” Your birth determines exactly what you are to do. This basic ideal of, what I shall now call dharma—of virtue, of a cosmic law to which the individual must submit if he is to be anything—is fundamental in the Orient to this day. And the individual who does not participate in that, is said to be a-sat—he is nothing, he is no thing. Whereas the one who does participate in that is something: sat—the Sanskrit word that has been pronounced suttee, where the wife follows her husband into the grave. This is simply the

feminine form of the participle sat. She is some thing. She is a wife because she has fulfilled the wifely role.

And when we look back at those graves in awe, there was a wife. This whole court went following the husband in death. Not only that, but those early kings were themselves killed ritually—every six years, every eight years, every twelve years in varying numbers according to various traditions. The king and his court went into the ground to be dissolved and born again in the next court. It is a fantastic, noble, wonderful ideal—this archaic ideal of the individual who is nobody, but simply the incarnation of a vast, glorious law.

Now, it is against that, that the Occidental ideal of the individual must be measured. And if we look for a date, when the first sign of the transformation comes along, we can take the date about 2500 B.C.—a little later than that—when the text in the Mesopotamian area begin to distinguish between the man and the god. The king is no longer a god-king. The king is the servant of the god; he is called the tenant-farmer of the god. The city is the god’s estate and the king is the god’s servant there.

It is at this point that myths begin to come along of man created by the gods to be God’s servant. Man is to be the servant of the god. He is not himself a manifestation of the divinity in any sense. God and creature are apart; he is the servant of the god, and the god’s slave.

 

TRACK 5: The Split Being: Two Contrasting Myths

Now, I want to take a very interesting myth and indicate its appearance in India and the west, and let you see from this how these two world views—the world view of the individual who is no individual, but participates in a divine essence, and the western

idea of the individual who is separated from the God—how they stand in contrast.

To begin with, let me take the Indian myth. In one of the great Indian sacred writings—the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad dates from about 700 B.C.—there is the story of the creation of the world, and it runs as follows:  In the beginning the world was only the Self. The world was only the Self. And the self said to Itself, “I am.” And as soon as it said, “I am,” it had the concept I—aham in Sanskrit; ego. As soon as it thought I, it became afraid.

Then it reasoned, and thought, Of whom should I be afraid since there is no one but myself? By this reasoning fear was eliminated. No sooner was fear eliminated than this being thought, I wish there were another. Now this being was as big as a man and woman embracing, and it split apart and became a man and woman. And the man embraced the woman and begot men.

And the woman thought, How can he embrace me when I am of his substance? And she turned into a cow, and he turned into a bull and begot cattle. And this thing went right down the line to the ants. And so all beings were created, poured forth—the Sanskrit word is srushti. Creation is a pouring forth of this original being who split in two, and became the world.

And he looked around and said, “I verily am this. It is all I that has become the world.”

Now, remember the counterpart in Genesis. Do you remember a certain gentleman who was split in half, his name Adam, to whit? And what Joyce—James Joyce—calls “the cutlet-sized consort” was drawn from his rib. Adam was split in half, and became Adam and Eve, and we are all their progeny. But please notice: in this case God split Adam apart. You have God and man. The god did not become creation; the god is apart from creation. Man and God

are not the same. Creature and created are different from each other.

These are two totally different interpretations of the same symbol of the split being that became two, and then became all things.

Now from this, I want to point to the main ideal for the individual in the great traditions of the Orient. The main ideal is that you should realize that you are a manifestation of that being. That is what you are. It is to be a discovery—a recognition of identity. In the west, the main ideal is that you should discover a relationship to that being, not an identity. This is a quite different religious notion. Now let me go on.[v]

 TRACK 6: The Story of the Buddha’s Realization

The great symbol for us of Oriental realization is the figure of the Buddha. The story of the Buddha’s realization is extremely illuminating in its psychological nature. The Buddha was thinking to know what the truth of truths is. And after discussions with many sages and so forth, he finally rejects all that he has heard, and goes himself to what is called the Tree of Illumination—the Bodhi Tree—which is in the Immovable Spot in the middle of the world.

There is a very nice story of his arrival at the Bodhi Tree, and I will tell it briefly to ornament this occasion.

The Buddha arrived at the great tree, and he stood at the south of it and faced south. And the southern part of the world tipped so that the edge touched hell, and the northern part tipped up so that it touched heaven, and the Buddha said, “This cannot be the Immovable Spot.”

And so he moved with his right arm to the tree around to the western side. Standing there, facing west, he noticed that the earth

tipped down so that the West touched hell, and the East tipped up. He said “This cannot be the Immovable Spot.”

He went to the North, same thing.

He went to the East—and it remained still. He therefore sat there; he said, “This is the immovable spot where all of the Buddhas have found enlightenment.” Please notice all of the Buddhas. He is simply doing what the predecessors of his enterprise had done.

Then he settled himself there and as he was seated, the very being who in the first story that I had told said, “Aham”—namely the Creator of the World—came against the Buddha: the one who had said “I,” the one who then had said, “I am afraid,” the one who then had said, “I desire.” I says two things: it says, “I fear and I desire.” This is the old Oriental concept.

So this being came against the Buddha, first in the form of I desire. And he paraded before the Buddha his three beautiful daughters. And if the Buddha had so much as thought I, he would then have thought they. He had no I; he saw no they. The temptation failed.

The great being then turned himself into a monster of terror, and hurled at the Buddha an army. And if the Buddha had thought I, he would have thought they, and he would have felt fear. But he had no I. The army failed, and as its weapons reached him, they turned into flowers and he was filled with bouquets of flowers.

Because he had neither I nor the desire and fear that go with that, he had, as it were, pushed himself back of creation—he had un-created the world. He had gone back of that desire system from which the world is created.[vi]

Now, it is this I that the Orient seeks to eliminate. It identifies the I with the—what Freud calls—pleasure principle: just the drive for desires.

 TRACK 7: The Freudian Ego: a Negative Power in the Orient

In the West we have a totally different notion of the I. Those of you who know Freud have read of the id. The id desires and fears. The id—this innocent dynamism of the uneducated, primitive psyche—is exactly what is depicted in the Indian myth.

But the Freudian ego is not id. The Freudian ego is a function in the psyche that is oriented to empirical reality. It is a function of the psyche that is to realize the unique occasion of I-who-was-not-here-before, meeting this situation which never existed before, performing with the sense of personal responsibility on this occasion in relation to what Freud calls the reality principle.

Now, this is what I wanted to stress. In our conception there is a function in the psyche that is to be dissociated from mere primitive pleasure drive, and related to reality here and now. In the Oriental system, there are only two great drives: one is I want, and the other is You must. You must obey the rules and balance your wish system against that until you are brave enough as the Buddha was to quench all of these wishes.

It is because the Orient has this fundamental concept of ego as being a negative power—as being something that ought to be eliminated—that all of our talk about freedom of the individual and so forth, sounds—east of Iran—as though it was simply sheer, materialistic desire talk, where that is not what it is. Our concept is the development of an individual.

Now let me move west. The Orient has its problems relating this—what I would call this comparatively primitive concept of the psyche—to the problems of a contemporary world. The problem there is primarily now to assimilate the machine without assimilating ego. To create, so to say, an Asian machine age, where there will be no egos, where everyone will be doing what he’s told to do from the great auditorium, not exactly of heaven,

but what Nietzsche called the new idol: the state. This is the new god that will tell the individual what his karma and his dharma are.

In the west, principally, we have another notion.

 TRACK 8: Job’s Submission and Prometheus’ Humanism

Now let me turn to the problem of the western problem of relationships between man and god, and the primary problem of the individual as we conceive it here. I like to take as the most vivid example of the problem of the individual in the Levantine tradition, the tradition of the Near East from which our religions come—the case of Job. Here is a man who has been unjustly assaulted by his god. The text itself says, “A just man unjustly assaulted by God.”

Justice is a human value. It is not a value of the universe; it is not a value of that id; it is not a value of a cosmic order. A cosmic order is an order of mathematical laws. Justice is a human value. Love is a human value. Mercy is a human value. These do not exist in the universe, and they did not exist in Job’s god. Job experienced the impact of that tremendous mystery of being, in full force, which had no regard whatsoever for his or his community’s concept of justice.

And imagining that human values should apply to God, he challenged—when his comforters (so-called) came and talked with him, and said, “You must have misbehaved, otherwise this would not have befallen you”—he said, “No, I have not misbehaved, and I will not say that this has befallen me because I have been untrue to my God. I have been true to Him and this has happened.”

Because of this challenge, God was forced to reveal himself. And what did God say? Did God say, “I’m sorry”? Did God say, “I shouldn’t have done it”? Did God say, “The devil made a bet with me, and I did the best I could to win”? God said, “Did you create

Leviathan? Could you catch him on a hook? Did you fill his head with harpoons? I did.” In other words, he said, “I am great.” And that was the answer. And Job was convinced. And Job, you might say, abandoned his loyalty to the human values. And Job said, “I have heard of you with my ears; I now behold you with my eyes. I cover my head with ashes. I’m ashamed.”

This, in the dialogue between the god principle and the man principle, shows the victory of God. And this, I would say, is the basic thesis of the Levant. “Who is man, Oh Lord, that thou shouldst think of him at all?”[vii]

Obey. The sacred book, revealed, tells you what to do. The relationship problem is solved in terms of acquiescence of the human to the divine—this is the great heroism of the religious man.

In contrast to him, I would take as my symbol of the European idea Aeschylus’ Prometheus, who was also tormented by a god unjustly. Zeus had him pinned with a stone, with an iron peg to a mountain, and sent a eagle to eat his liver. The liver grew back every night so it was always there to be eaten the next day. And this endless, hideous torment was imposed upon him by Zeus. Why? Because he had stolen the heavenly fire for man. He had done exactly what the people who had built the Tower of Babel were trying to do. He was trying to storm heaven and to get for man the values of a human civilization.

And there is that fabulous line of Aeschylus, which is in diametric contrast with the other fabulous line of Job (“Who is man? I submit.”) Remember, Prometheus’ words when an emissary from Zeus came and said, “Just say you’re sorry, and he will let you go.” Prometheus said, “I care less than nothing for Zeus, let him do what he likes.”[viii]—“I am not going to renege on the human system of values. These are what I stand for, these are what I represent.”

These I would say are what the Greeks represent, and these are what I would say are the inheritors of that great Greek world represent. And these are not the same values as those represented by Job.

 TRACK 9: Christ Crucified: a Synthesis of Job and Prometheus

And now we come to the agony of the Western psyche, with these two systems of ideals: one preaching the beauty and majesty of the religious submission before God; the other, the heroism of the humane or humanistic insistence on the values of man—these are in collision, and distinctly so in the Christian tradition, I would say, more than in any others.

The figure of Christ himself on the cross is precisely a Promethean figure; he’s precisely a Job figure, and he has got, for man from God, Redemption. The Christian thesis is that man sinned, disobeyed, was rejected from the Garden, and is by Christ’s death and suffering, Promethean deed, returned to God’s grace.

And just as Prometheus sees for man the fire of civilization, Christ sees the fire of Redemption and is crucified for it by God. Consider however what happens in the Christian reading of this story. Christ is God, who has come down to do this, and we are not God.

Now in the Indian story that I spoke of earlier in the hour, all of us are that being. We are all divine. That divine power is immanent in us all. And what the God incarnate represents is our own very being. In that sense, we are all Christ’s cruxifix—that being which is our own very life, and is, as it were, inhibited in its manifestation through our own limitations—that is the Christ crucified. And this is the standpoint of the so-called Gnostic tradition. You can read in the Thomas gospel, “Split the stick and there am I,” says Jesus.[ix] Christ sleeps in the stone. Thou art the crucifix of Christ, and he is what you are trying to discover in yourself. This is, as it were, the

Promethean view of man mixed with the Job view of God. And it is perhaps the best synthesizing symbol we have—that each individual in his own way, is so to say, the Incarnation, and at once the limitation and the possibility of this divine revelation, the highest manifestation of which is you, as the individual. Schopenhauer brought this out in his wonderful philosophy when he said, “Every individual is the entire divinity of the world in his own way.”[x] This is a kind of synthesizing symbol to point out the divinity of the individual, and at the same time to stress the human value system which he represents.

 TRACK 10: Nietzsche’s Superman

I would say that in most recent times, the strongest statement of the principle of the individual is that of Nietzsche philosophy and the idea of the Superman. This has been a greatly missed represented point of view. There has been a general tendency to confuse Nietzsche’s view of the Superman with his view of the Masterman—they are not the same.

Nietzsche speaks of the naive man-animal, powerful in his life, who lacks however, the sense of the spirit. And then there is the principle of what he calls the man of the decadence, who is questioning man’s problems and so forth—the intellectual, the Socratic man who is, as he says, a sick man: the Masterman and the man of the decadence.

The Superman is the one who embraces both principles, who both has the courage to live, and has the wit to question life—to query it. Thomas Mann in all of his writings used this as his ideal. The ideal of the man with the intellect and the words that kill, that name life, that know all its faults, and yet has the courage and sympathy to love life in its faults, and with its faults, and because of its faults. Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman is beautifully summarized in Mann’s writings when he speaks of the plastic irony of the writer’s craft.

TRACK 11: Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger

And I will end this little summary of a very, very big subject by bringing this as my final point. Perhaps you remember the wonderful little story of Tonio Kröger, the young boy who grew up in a perfectly normal, very successful burgher family in North Germany, and was more sensitive than his friends and neighbors and family, and noticed the faults—drew away as most of our young people do from their families: “Oh mother, won’t you ever learn.”

However, this particular boy had had the good fortune to find that these young, stupid people were quite charming, and he felt a warm and immediate love for them, even while criticizing them. He left home.  He went—we would say now, became, I suppose a beatnik. He went over to Bohemia, to all those bright young people who know all the words that can criticize their family out of the shock. Papa’s a  square, and I’m a beat. The vocabulary of any literary man can simply slay anyone who doesn’t know the answers. The word, the mind, the definition of a word criticizes—you name a thing by naming its faults. But then Tonio discovered this wonderful thing: a thing without a fault is not lovable. What you love is precisely the fault of the person. And if you can name the fault in such a way that you indicate it is a fault, and that is precisely that individual, that is the quality of that individual, that is what is lovable in that individual—if you can do that, you become not a mere literary man, but a creative poet.[xi]

You have recognized the peculiar thing about life. And it is namely this: that every single individual is imperfect. And that it is precisely in his imperfections that he is charming, that he is wonderful, that he is of value. All of the Buddhas on the other hand, are alike. When you see in a temple in India, and in particularly the Jain temples where the Illuminated Ones are shown

in a row,  they are all exactly identical. They are perfect human beings, they are absolutely cold—they aren’t human at all.

 TRACK 12: Individual Uniqueness: the Gift of the West

Now it is my little thesis that this wonderful discovery of our wonderful European Western world—of the charm and the power in charm of the individual’s fault—is the great, great gift that we have to give to the world.

We can have the perfection of the Buddhas to enjoy from this side of Iran, so to say. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to convince anyone who has spent his whole devotion addressing the perfections of the Buddhas—to convince any such person that the wonderful thing is precisely this individual uniqueness. The responsibility you take for your own peculiarity, for your own decisions, for your own boat, so to say.

My last word, then, in relationship to this enormous theme is, Mr. Fairchild had the courage to propose to me, is “I care less than nothing for Zeus. Let him do what he likes.”

Thank you.

[laughter and applause]

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[i] Shubad was a Sumerian nin—a title that has been translated alternately as priestess or queen. Though the city in which she was entombed was Sumerian, she was herself apparently a Semitic Akkadian; the name written on her funeral cylinder is Pu-abi, which translates as Word of my father.

[ii] The source for Campbell’s use of this name is uncertain; the spelling is, therefore, also uncertain. The tomb immediately below Shubad’s to which Campbell refers was that of Mes-Kalam-dug, whom some have assumed to have been Shubad’s husband or consort.

[iii] In fact, she was buried with a man in a coffin, five soldiers and thirteen ladies-in-waiting, as well as two oxen and four male servants. Depending on one’s count, this would add up to twenty-three—unless one wished to include the cattle.

[iv] Also spelled Dammuz and Damuzi; his death is the inciting action in The Descent of Innana. See Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 3rd edition. New World Library, 2008, pp. 87–89, 184–186. For more on the tombs of Ur, see Sir Leonard Woolley, The Sumerians. W. W. Norton and Company, 1965.

[v] For another comparison of these two stories (along with a similar tale from Plato’s Symposium), see Joseph Campbell, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, edited by David Kudler. New World Library, 2003, pp. 9–10.

[vi] For further explorations of the symbolism of this myth of the enlightenment of the Buddha, see The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 25; and Myths of Light, pp. 122–123.

[vii] The Book of Job, 42:1–6.

[viii] Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, ll. 937-9

[ix] The Gospel According to Thomas, 77.

[x] Campbell himself translated this and other of Schopenhauer’s aphorisms directly and idiomatically from the German; we have not yet identified the source of this statement.

[xi] For more of Campbell’s thoughts on Tonio Kröger, see Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, edited by David Kudler. New World Library, 2005, pp 77–78, and “Erotic Irony and Mythic Forms in the Art of Thomas Mann,” The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959–1987, edited by Antony van Couvering, 2nd edition. New World Library, 2007, pp. 274-276.