The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

  You see, consciousness thinks it’s running the shop. But it’s a secondary organ of a total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body. When it does put itself in control, you get a man like Darth Vader in Star Wars, the man who goes over to the consciously intentional side.

  MOYERS: The dark figure.

  CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s the figure that in Goethe’s Faust is represented by Mephistopheles.

  MOYERS: But I can hear someone saying, “Well, that’s all well and good for the imagination of a George Lucas or for the scholarship of a Joseph Campbell, but that isn’t what happens in my life.”

  CAMPBELL: You bet it is—and if he doesn’t recognize it, it may turn him into Darth Vader. If the person insists on a certain program, and doesn’t listen to the demands of his own heart, he’s going to risk a schizophrenic crackup. Such a person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a program for life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for.

  MOYERS: Given what you know about human beings, is it conceivable that there is a port of wisdom beyond the conflicts of truth and illusion by which our lives can be put back together again? Can we develop new models?

  CAMPBELL: They’re already here, in the religions. All religions have been true for their time. If you can recognize the enduring aspect of their truth and separate it from the temporal applications, you’ve got it.

  We’ve spoken about it right here: the sacrifice of the physical desires and fears of the body to that which spiritually supports the body; is the body learning to know and express its own deepest life in the field of time? One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

  MOYERS: Not the first cause, but a higher cause?

  CAMPBELL: I would say, a more inward cause. “Higher” is just up there, and there is no “up there.” We know that. That old man up there has been blown away. You’ve got to find the Force inside you. This is why Oriental gurus are so convincing to young people today. They say, “It is in you. Go and find it.”

  MOYERS: But isn’t it only the very few who can face the challenge of a new truth and put their lives in accord with it?

  CAMPBELL: Not at all! A few may be the teachers and the leaders, but this is something that anybody can respond to, just as anybody has the potential to run out to save a child. It is within everybody to recognize values in his life that are not confined to maintenance of the body and economic concerns of the day.

  MOYERS: When I was a boy and read Knights of the Round Table, myth stirred me to think that I could be a hero. I wanted to go out and do battle with dragons, I wanted to go into the dark forest and slay evil. What does it say to you that myths can cause the son of an Oklahoma farmer to think of himself as a hero?

  CAMPBELL: Myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength, and the bringing of solar light into the world. Slaying monsters is slaying the dark things. Myths grab you somewhere down inside. As a boy, you go at it one way, as I did reading my Indian stories. Later on, myths tell you more, and more, and still more. I think that anyone who has ever dealt seriously with religious or mythic ideas will tell you that we learn them as a child on one level, but then many different levels are revealed. Myths are infinite in their revelation.

  MOYERS: How do I slay that dragon in me? What’s the journey each of us has to make, what you call “the soul’s high adventure”?

  CAMPBELL: My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.

  MOYERS: Is it my work or my life?

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

  MOYERS: In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we’re not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.

  CAMPBELL: But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way t? do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.

  MOYERS: When I take that journey and go down there and slay those dragons, do I have to go alone?

  CAMPBELL: If you have someone who can help you, that’s fine, too. But, ultimately, the last deed has to be done by oneself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.

  MOYERS: What’s my ego?

  CAMPBELL: What you think you want, what you will to believe, what you think you can afford, what you decide to love, what you regard yourself as bound to. It may be all much too small, in which case it will nail you down. And if you simply do what your neighbors tell you to do, you’re certainly going to be nailed down. Your neighbors are then your dragon as it reflects from within yourself.

  Our Western dragons represent greed. However, the Chinese dragon is different. It represents the vitality of the swamps and comes up beating its belly and bellowing, “Haw ha ha haww.” That’s a lovely kind of dragon, one that yields the bounty of the waters, a great, glorious gift. But the dragon of our Western tales tries to collect and keep everything to himself. In his secret cave he guards things: heaps of gold and perhaps a captured virgin. He doesn’t know what to do with either, so he just guards and keeps. There are people like that, and we call them creeps. There’s no life from them, no giving. They just glue themselves to you and hang around and try to suck out of you their life.

  Jung had a patient who came to him because she felt herself to be alone in the world, on the rocks, and when she drew a picture for him of how she felt, there she was on the shore of a dismal sea, caught in rocks from the waist down. The wind was blowing, and her hair was blowing, and all the gold, all the joy of life, was locked away from her in the rocks. The next picture that she drew, however, followed something that he had said to her. A flash of lightning strikes the rocks, and a golden disk is being lifted out. There is no more gold locked within the rocks. There are golden patches now on the surface. In the course of the conferences that followed, these patches of gold were identified. They were her friends. She wasn’t alone. She had locked herself in her own little room and life, yet she had friends. Her recognition of these followed only after the killing of her dragon.

  MOYERS: I like what you say about the old myth of Theseus and Ariande. Theseus says to Ariande, “I’ll love you forever if you can show me a way to come out of the labyrinth.” So she gives him a ball of string, which he unwinds as he goes into the labyrinth, and then follows to find the way out. You say, “All he had was the string. That’s all you need.”

  CAMPBELL: That’s all you need—an Ariande thread.

  MOYERS: Sometimes we look for great wealth to save us, a great power to save us, or great ideas to save us, when all we need is that piece of string.

  CAMPBELL: That’s not always easy to find. But it’s nice to have someone who can give you a clue. That’s the teacher’s job, to help you find your Ariande thread.

  MOYERS: Like all heroes, the Buddha doesn’t show you the truth itself, he show
s you the way to truth.

  CAMPBELL: But it’s got to be your way, not his. The Buddha can’t tell you exactly how to get rid of your particular fears, for example. Different teachers may suggest exercises, but they may not be the ones to work for you. All a teacher can do is suggest. He is like a lighthouse that says, “There are rocks over here, steer clear. There is a channel, however, out there.”

  The big problem of any young person’s life is to have models to suggest possibilities. Nietzsche says, “Man is the sick animal.”

  Man is the animal that doesn’t know what to do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life. What are we going to do with ourselves? A living myth presents contemporary models.

  MOYERS: Today, we have an endless variety of models. A lot of people end up choosing many and never knowing who they are.

  CAMPBELL: When you choose your vocation, you have actually chosen a model, and it will fit you in a little while. After middle life, for example, you can pretty well tell what a person’s profession is. Wherever I go, people know I’m a professor. I don’t know what it is that I do, or how I look, but I, too, can tell professors from engineers and merchants. You’re shaped by your life.

  MOYERS: There is a wonderful image in King Arthur where the knights of the Round Table are about to enter the search for the Grail in the Dark Forest, and the narrator says, “They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. So each entered the forest at a separate point of his choice.” You’ve interpreted that to express the Western emphasis upon the unique phenomenon of a single human life—the individual confronting darkness.

  CAMPBELL: What struck me when I read that in the thirteenth-century Queste del Saint Graal was that it epitomizes an especially Western spiritual aim and ideal, which is, of living the life that is potential in you and was never in anyone else as a possibility.

  This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s. In the traditional Orient, on the other hand, and generally in all traditionally grounded societies, the individual is cookie-molded. His duties are put upon him in exact and precise terms, and there’s no way of breaking out from them. When you go to a guru to be guided on the spiritual way, he knows just where you are on the traditional path, just where you have to go next, just what you must do to get there. He’ll give you his picture to wear, so you can be like him. That wouldn’t be a proper Western pedagogical way of guidance. We have to give our students guidance in developing their own pictures of themselves. What each must seek in his life never was, on land or sea. It is to be something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

  MOYERS: There’s the question Hamlet asked, “Are you up to your destiny?”

  CAMPBELL: Hamlet’s problem was that he wasn’t. He was given a destiny too big for him to handle, and it blew him to pieces. That can happen, too.

  MOYERS: Which stories from mythology help us understand death?

  CAMPBELL: You don’t understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death. I would say that the story of Christ assuming the form of a human servant, even to death on the cross, is the principal lesson for us of the acceptance of death. The story of Oedipus and the Sphinx has something to say of this, too. The Sphinx in the Oedipus story is not the Egyptian Sphinx, but a female form with the wings of a bird, the body of an animal, and the breast, neck, and face of a woman. What she represents is the destiny of all life. She has sent a plague over the land, and to lift the plague, the hero has to answer the riddle that she presents: “What is it that walks on four legs, then on two legs, and then on three?” The answer is “Man.” The child creeps about on four legs, the adult walks on two, and the aged walk with a cane.

  The riddle of the Sphinx is the image of life itself through time—childhood, maturity, age, and death. When without fear you have faced and accepted the riddle of the Sphinx, death has no further hold on you, and the curse of the Sphinx disappears. The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life hut as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure—fearlessness and achievement.

  I remember reading as a boy of the war cry of the Indian braves riding into battle against the rain of bullets of Custer’s men. “What a wonderful day to die!” There was no hanging on there to life. That is one of the great messages of mythology. I, as I now know myself, am not the final form of my being. We must constantly die one way or another to the selfhood already achieved.

  MOYERS: Do you have a story that illustrates this?

  CAMPBELL: Well, the old English tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a famous one. One day a green giant came riding on a great green horse into King Arthur’s dining hall. “I challenge anyone here,” he cried, “to take this great battle-ax that I carry and cut off my head, and then, one year from today, meet me at the Green Chapel, where I shall cut off his head.”

  The only knight in the hall who had the courage to accept this incongruous invitation was Gawain. He arose from the table, the Green Knight got off his horse, handed Gawain the ax, stuck out his neck, and Gawain with a single stroke chopped off his head. The Green Knight stood up, picked up his head, took back the ax, climbed onto his horse, and as he rode away called back to the astonished Gawain, “I’ll see you in a year.”

  That year everybody was very kind to Gawain. A fortnight or so before the term of the adventure, he rode off to search for the Green Chapel and keep faith with the giant Green Knight. As the date approached, with about three days to go, Gawain found himself before a hunter’s cabin, where he asked the way to the Green Chapel. The hunter, a pleasant, genial fellow, met him at the door and replied, “Well, the Chapel is just down the way, a few hundred yards. Why not spend your next three days here with us? We’d love to have you. And when your time comes, your green friend is just down the way.”

  So Gawain says okay. And the hunter that evening says to him, “Now, early tomorrow I’m going off hunting, but I’ll be back in the evening, when we shall exchange our winnings of the day. I’ll give you everything I get on the hunt, and you give me whatever will have come to you.” They laugh, and that was fine with Gawain. So they all retire to bed.

  In the morning, early, the hunter rides off while Gawain is still asleep. Presently, in comes the hunter’s extraordinarily beautiful wife, who tickles Gawain under the chin, and wakes him, and passionately invites him to a morning of love. Well, he is a knight of King Arthur’s court, and to betray his host is the last thing such a knight can stoop to, so Gawain sternly resists. However, she is insistent and makes more and more of an issue of this thing, until finally she says to him, “Well then, let me give you just one kiss!” So she gives him one large smack. And that was that.

  That evening, the hunter arrives with a great haul of all kinds of small game, throws it on the floor, and Gawain gives him one large kiss. They laugh, and that, too, was that.

  The second morning, the wife again comes into the room, more passionate than ever, and the fruit of that encounter is two kisses. The hunter in the evening returns with about half as much game as before and receives two kisses, and again they laugh.

  On the third morning, the wife is glorious, and Gawain, a young man about to meet his death, has all he can do to keep his head and retain his knightly honor, with this last gift before him of the luxury of life. This time, he accepts three kisses. And when she has delivered these, she begs him, as a token of her love, to accept her garter. “It is charmed,” she says, “and will protect you against every danger.” So Gawai
n accepts the garter. And when the hunter returns with just one silly, smelly fox, which he tosses onto the floor, he receives in exchange three kisses from Gawain—but no garter.

  Do we not see what the tests are of this young knight Gawain? They are the same as the first two of Buddha. One is of desire, lust. The other is of the fear of death. Gawain had proved courage enough in just keeping his faith with this adventure. However, the garter was just one temptation too many.

  So when Gawain is approaching the Green Chapel, he hears the Green Knight there, whetting the great ax—whiff, whiff, whiff, whiff. Gawain arrives, and the giant simply says to him, “Stretch your neck out here on this block.” Gawain does so, and the Green Knight lifts the ax, but then pauses. “No, stretch it out a little more,” he says. Gawain does so, and again the giant elevates the great ax. “A little more,” he says once again. Gawain does the best he can and then whiffff—only giving Gawain’s neck one little scratch. Then the Green Knight, who is in fact the hunter himself transfigured, explains, “That’s for the garter.”

  This, they say, is the origin legend of the order of the Knights of the Garter.

  MOYERS: And the moral of the story?

  CAMPBELL: The moral, I suppose, would be that the first requirements for a heroic career are the knightly virtues of loyalty, temperance, and courage. The loyalty in this case is of two degrees or commitments: first, to the chosen adventure, but then, also, to the ideals of the order of knighthood. Now, this second commitment seems to put Gawain’s way in opposition to the way of the Buddha, who when ordered by the Lord of Duty to perform the social duties proper to his caste, simply ignored the command, and that night achieved illumination as well as release from rebirth. Gawain is a European and, like Odysseus, who remained true to the earth and returned from the Island of the Sun to his marriage with Penelope, he has accepted, as the commitment of his life, not release from but loyalty to the values of life in this world. And yet, as we have just seen, whether following the middle way of the Buddha or the middle way of Gawain, the passage to fulfillment lies between the perils of desire and fear.