The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

  I once saw a marvelous scientific movie about protoplasm. It was a revelation to me. It is in movement all the time, flowing. Sometimes it seems to be flowing this way and that, and then it shapes things. It has a potentiality for bringing things into shape. I saw this movie in northern California, and as I drove down the coast to Big Sur, all the way, all I could see was protoplasm in the form of grass being eaten by protoplasm in the form of cows; protoplasm in the form of birds diving for protoplasm in the form of fish. You just got this wonderful sense of the abyss from which all has come. But each form has its own intentions, its own possibilities, and that’s where meaning comes. Not in the protoplasm itself.

  MOYERS: We are right back, then, to the Indians, who believe that the informing life and energy of all things is the earth. You quote those lines from the Upanishads: “Thou art the dark blue bird, and the green parrot with red eyes. Thou hast the lightning as thy child. Thou art the season and the seas. Having no beginning, thou dost abide with immanence, whereof all things are born.” That is this idea, isn’t it—that we and the earth are the same?

  But wasn’t it inevitable that this idea would die under the weight of scientific discoveries? We know now that plants don’t grow out of the bodies of dead people, they grow according to the laws of seed, and soil, and sun. Didn’t Newton kill myth?

  CAMPBELL: Oh, I think myth is coming back. There’s a young scientist today who’s using the term “morphogenetic field,” the field that produces forms. That’s who the Goddess is, the field that produces forms.

  MOYERS: What’s the significance for us?

  CAMPBELL: Well, it means to find what is the source of your own life, and what is the relationship of your body, your physical form, to this energy that animates it. The body without the energy isn’t alive, is it? So you distinguish in your own life that which is of the body and that which is of energy and consciousness.

  In India, the most common ultimate symbol is of the phallus, or lingam, as they call it, of the generating god penetrating the vagina, or the yoni, as they call it, of the Goddess. In contemplating this symbol, you are contemplating the generating moment itself of all life. The entire mystery of the generation of life is symbolically contemplated in that sign.

  You see, the sexual mystery in India, and in most of the world, is a holy mystery. It is the mystery of the generation of life. The act of generating a child is a cosmic act and is to be understood as holy. And so the symbol that most immediately represents this mystery of the pouring of the energy of life into the field of time is the lingam and the yoni, the male and female powers in creative conjunction.

  MOYERS: What would it have meant to us if somewhere along the way we had begun to pray to “Our Mother” instead of “Our Father”? What psychological difference would it have made?

  CAMPBELL: It certainly has made a psychological difference in the character of our culture. For example, the basic birth of Western civilization occurred in the great river valleys—the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, and later the Ganges. That was the world of the Goddess. The name of the river Ganges (Ganga) is the name of a goddess, for example.

  And then there came the invasions. Now, these started seriously in the fourth millennium B.C. and became more and more devastating. They came in from the north and from the south and wiped out cities overnight. Just read the story in the Book of Genesis of the part played by Jacob’s tribe in the fall of the city of Shechem. Overnight, the city is wiped out by these herding people who have suddenly appeared. The Semite invaders were herders of goats and sheep, the Indo-Europeans of cattle. Both were formerly hunters, and so the cultures are essentially animal-oriented. When you have hunters, you have killers. And when you have herders, you have killers, because they’re always in movement, nomadic, coming into conflict with other people and conquering the areas into which they move. And these invasions bring in warrior gods, thunderbolt hurlers, like Zeus, or Yahweh.

  MOYERS: The sword and death instead of the phallus and fertility?

  CAMPBELL: That’s right, and they are equated.

  MOYERS: There’s a story you tell about the overthrow of the mother goddess Tiamat.

  CAMPBELL: I guess that could be taken as the key archetypal event here.

  MOYERS: You called it a critical moment in history.

  CAMPBELL: Yes. The Semitic people were invading the world of the Mother Goddess systems, and so the male-oriented mythologies became dominant, and the Mother Goddess becomes, well—sort of Grandmother Goddess, way, way back.

  It was in the time of the rise of the city of Babylon. And each of these early cities had its own protective god or goddess. The characteristic of an imperialistic people is to try to have its own local god dubbed big boy of the whole universe, you see. No other divinity counts. And the way to bring this about is by annihilating the god or goddess who was there before. Well, the one that was here before the Babylonian god Marduk was the All-Mother Goddess. So the story begins with a great council of the male gods up in the sky, each god a star, and they have heard that the Grandma is coming, old Tiamat, the Abyss, the inexhaustible Source. She arrives in the form of a great fish or dragon—and what god will have the courage to go against Grandma and do her in? And the one who has the courage is, of course, the god of our present great city. He’s the big one.

  So when Tiamat opens her mouth, the young god Marduk of Babylon sends winds into her throat and belly that blow her to pieces, and he then dismembers her and fashions the earth and heavens out of the parts of her body. This motif of dismembering a primordial being and turning its body into the universe appears in many mythologies in many forms. In India it comes up with the figure of Purusha, the reflection of whose body is the universe.

  Now, the mother goddess in old mother-goddess mythologies was herself already the universe, so the great creative deed of Marduk was a supererogatory act. There was no need for him to cut her up and make the universe out of her, because she was already the universe. But the male-oriented myth takes over, and he becomes—apparently—the creator.

  MOYERS: And the interest turned from the Goddess to her son, this young political upstart who—

  CAMPBELL: Well, the interest turned to the interest specifically of the male governors of the city of Babylon.

  MOYERS: So the matriarchal society began to give way to a—

  CAMPBELL: Oh, by that time—1750 B.C. or so—it was finished.

  MOYERS: There are women today who say that the spirit of the Goddess has been in exile for five thousand years, since the—

  CAMPBELL: You can’t put it that far back, five thousand years. She was a very potent figure in Hellenistic times in the Mediterranean, and she came back with the Virgin in the Roman Catholic tradition. You don’t have a tradition with the Goddess celebrated any more beautifully and marvelously than in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century French cathedrals, every one of which is called Notre Dame.

  MOYERS: Yes, but all of those motifs and themes were controlled by males—priests, bishops—who excluded women, so whatever the form might have meant to the believer, for the purpose of power the image was in the hands of the dominant male figure.

  CAMPBELL: You can put an accent on it that way, but I think it’s a little too strong because there were the great female saints. Hildegarde of Bingen—she was a match for Innocent III. And Eleanor of Aquitaine—I don’t think there is anybody in the Middle Ages who has the stature to match hers. One now can look back and quarrel with the whole situation, but the situation of women was not that bad by any means.

  MOYERS: No, but none of those saints would ever become pope.

  CAMPBELL: Becoming pope, that’s not much of a job, really. That’s a business position. None of the popes could ever have become the mother of Christ. There are different roles to play. It was the male’s job to protect the women.

  MOYERS: That’s where the paternalistic idea grew.

  CAMPBELL: Women are booty, they are goods. With the fall of a city, every
woman in the city would be raped.

  MOYERS: There’s this ethical contradiction mentioned in your book, quoting Exodus: “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife—except abroad. Then you should put all males to the sword, and the women you shall take as booty to yourself.” That’s right out of the Old Testament.

  CAMPBELL: Deuteronomy. Those are fierce passages.

  MOYERS: And what do they say to you about women?

  CAMPBELL: They say more about Deuteronomy than about women. The Hebrews were absolutely ruthless with respect to their neighbors. But this passage is an extreme statement of something that is inherent in most sociologically oriented mythologies. That is to say, love and compassion are reserved for the in-group, and aggression and abuse are projected outward on others. Compassion is to be reserved for members of your own group. The out-group is to be treated in a way described there in Deuteronomy.

  Now, today there is no out-group anymore on the planet. And the problem of a modern religion is to have such compassion work for the whole of humanity. But then what happens to the aggression? This is a problem that the world is going to, have to face—because aggression is a natural instinct just as much as, and more immediate than, compassion, and it is always going to be there. It’s a biological fact. Of course, in biblical times, when the Hebrews came in, they really wiped out the Goddess. The term for the Canaanite goddess that’s used in the Old Testament is “the Abomination.” Apparently, throughout the period represented in the Book of Kings, for example, there was a back and forth between the two cults. Many of the Hebrew kings were condemned in the Old Testament for having worshiped on the mountaintops. Those mountains were symbols of the Goddess. And there was a very strong accent against the Goddess in the Hebrew, which you do not find in the Indo-European mythologies. Here you have Zeus marrying the Goddess, and then the two play together. So it’s an extreme case that we have in the Bible, and our own Western subjugation of the female is a function of biblical thinking.

  MOYERS: Because when you substitute the male for the female, you get a different psychology, a different cultural bias. And it’s permissible in your culture to do what your gods do, so you just—

  CAMPBELL: That’s exactly it. I would see three situations here. First, the early one of the Goddess, when the male is hardly a significant divinity. Then the reverse, when the male takes over her role. And finally, then, the classical stage, where the two are in interaction—as they are also, for example, in India.

  MOYERS: Where does that arise?

  CAMPBELL: It comes from the attitude of the Indo-Europeans, who did not completely devaluate the female principle.

  MOYERS: What about the virgin birth? Suddenly, the Goddess reappears in the form of the chaste and pure vessel chosen for God’s action.

  CAMPBELL: In the history of Western religions, this is an extremely interesting development. In the Old Testament, you have a God who creates a world without a goddess. Then when you come to Proverbs, there she is, Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom, who says, “When He created the world, I was there, and I was His greatest joy.” But in the Hebrew tradition the idea of a son of God is repulsive, it is not considered at all. The Messiah as the son of God is not actually God’s son. He is one who in his character and dignity is worthy to be likened to the son of God. I’m sure there’s no idea of a virgin birth in that tradition. The virgin birth comes into Christianity by way of the Greek tradition. When you read the four gospels, for example, the only one in which the virgin birth appears is the Gospel According to Luke, and Luke was a Greek.

  MOYERS: And in the Greek tradition there were images, legends, myths of virgin births?

  CAMPBELL: Oh, yes—Leda and the swan, Persephone and the serpent, and this one and that one and the other one. The virgin birth is represented throughout.

  MOYERS: This was not a new idea, then, in Bethlehem. But what is the meaning of the virgin birth?

  CAMPBELL: I think the best way to answer that is to talk about a system they have in India that describes stages of spiritual development. In India, there is a system of seven psychological centers up the spine. They represent psychological planes of concern and consciousness and action. The first is at the rectum, representing alimentation, the basic, life-sustaining function. The serpent well represents this compulsion—as a kind of traveling esophagus going along just eating, eating, eating. None of us would be here if we weren’t forever eating. What you eat is always something that just a moment before was alive. This is the sacramental mystery of food and eating, which doesn’t often come to our minds when we sit ourselves down to eat. If we say grace before meals, we thank this figure out of the Bible for our food. But in earlier mythologies, when people would sit down to eat, they would thank the animal they were about to consume for having given of itself as a willing sacrifice.

  There’s a wonderful saying in one of the Upanishads: “Oh wonderful, oh wonderful, oh wonderful, I am food, I am food, I am food! I am an eater of food, I am an eater of food, I am an eater of food.” We don’t think that way today about ourselves. But holding on to yourself and not letting yourself become food is the primary life-denying negative act. You’re stopping the flow! And a yielding to the flow is the great mystery experience that goes with thanking an animal that is about to be eaten for having given of itself. You, too, will be given in time.

  MOYERS: I’m nature, nature is me.

  CAMPBELL: Yes. Now, the second psychological center is symbolized in the Indian order of spiritual development by the sex organs, which is to say the urge to procreation. A third center is at the level of the navel, and here is the center of the will to power, to mastery and achievement, or, in its negative aspect, to the conquering, mastering, smashing, and trashing of others. This is the third, or aggressive, function. And as we are given to recognize in the symbolism of the Indian psychological system, the first function, alimentation, is of an animal instinct; the second, procreation, is of an animal instinct; and the third, mastery and conquest, is also of an animal instinct—and these three centers are located symbolically in the pelvic basin.

  The next, or fourth, center is at the level of the heart; and this is of the opening to compassion. Here you move out of the field of animal action into a field that is properly human and spiritual.

  And for each of these four centers there is envisioned a symbolic form. At the base, for example, the first one, the symbol is the lingam and yoni, the male and female organs in conjunction. And at the heart center, there is again the lingam and yoni, that is to say, male and female organs in conjunction, but here they are represented in gold as symbolic of the virgin birth, that is to say, it is the birth of spiritual man out of the animal man.

  MOYERS: And it happens—

  CAMPBELL: It happens when you awaken at the level of the heart to compassion, com-passion, shared suffering: experienced participation in the suffering of another person. That’s the beginning of humanity. And the meditations of religion properly are on that level, the heart level.

  MOYERS: You say that’s the beginning of humanity. But in these stories, that’s the moment when gods are born. The virgin birth—it’s a god who emerges.

  CAMPBELL: And do you know who that god is? It’s you. All of these symbols in mythology refer to you. You can get stuck out there, and think it’s all out there. So you’re thinking about Jesus with all the sentiments relevant to how he suffered—out there. But that suffering is what ought to be going on in you. Have you been spiritually reborn? Have you died to your animal nature and come to life as a human incarnation of compassion?

  MOYERS: Why is it significant that this is of a virgin?

  CAMPBELL: The begetter is of the spirit. This is a spiritual birth. The virgin conceived of the word through the ear.

  MOYERS: The word came like a shaft of light.

  CAMPBELL: Yes. And the Buddha, with the same meaning, is said to have been born from his mother’s side from the level of the heart chakra.

  M
OYERS: Heart Chakra meaning …?

  CAMPBELL: Oh, the heart chakra is the symbolic center associated with the heart. The chakra means “circle” or “sphere.”

  MOYERS: So the Buddha comes out—

  CAMPBELL: —the Buddha is born from his mother’s side. That’s a symbolic birth. He wasn’t physically born from his mother’s side, but symbolically.

  MOYERS: But the Christ came the way you and I did.

  CAMPBELL: Yes, but of a virgin. And then, according to Roman Catholic doctrine, her virginity was restored. So nothing happened physically, you might say. What is symbolically referred to is not Jesus’ physical birth but his spiritual significance. That’s what the virgin birth represents. Heroes and demigods are born that way as beings motivated by compassion and not mastery, sexuality, or self-preservation.

  This is the sense of the second birth, when you begin to live out of the heart center. The lower three centers are not to be refuted but transcended, when they become subject to and servant to the heart.

  MOYERS: If we go back into antiquity, do we find images of the Madonna as the mother of the savior child?

  CAMPBELL: The antique model for the Madonna, actually, is Isis with Horus at her breast.

  MOYERS: Isis?

  CAMPBELL: It’s a complicated story. Indeed all of these get to be pretty complicated. But Isis and her husband Osiris were twins, born of the Goddess Nut. And their younger relatives were Seth and Nephthys, who were also twins born from Nut. One night, Osiris slept with Nephthys, thinking she was Isis—a kind of inattention to details, you might say. From that night’s event, Anubis was born, Osiris’ oldest son, but by the wrong wife. Seth, her husband, took this badly and planned to kill his older brother, Osiris. Secretly he took Osiris’ measurements and had a beautiful sarcophagus made that would exactly fit him. And then, one evening, when there was a lively party in progress among the gods, Seth came in with his sarcophagus and declared that anyone whom it perfectly fitted could have it as a gift for his tomb. Everyone at the party tried, and of course when Osiris got in, the sarcophagus fitted him perfectly. Immediately seventy-two accomplices came rushing out, and they clapped the lid on, strapped it together, and threw it into the Nile. So what we have here is the death of a god. And whenever you have the death of such a god as this, you may next expect a resurrection.