Myths to Live By

by Joseph Campbell

  This calamity, in Wolfram’s meaning, was symbolic of the dissociation within Christendom of spirit from nature: the denial of nature as corrupt, the imposition of what was supposed to be an authority super-naturally endowed, and the actual demolishment of both nature and truth in consequence. The healing of the maimed king, therefore, could be accomplished only by an uncorrupted youth naturally endowed, who would merit the supreme crown through his own authentic life work and experience, motivated by a spirit of unflinching noble love, enduring loyalty, and spontaneous compassion. Such a one was Parzival. And though we cannot in these few pages review the whole course of his symbolic career, enough can be said of four of the main episodes to suggest the burden of the poet’s healing message.

  The noble youth had been reared by his widowed mother in a forest aloof from the courtly world, and it was only when he chanced to see a small company of questing knights go riding past his farm that he learned of knighthood and, abandoning his mother, set forth for King Arthur’s court. His training in courtesy and in the skills of knightly combat he received from Gurnemanz, an old nobleman who admired his obvious qualities and offered him his daughter in marriage. But Parzival, thinking, “I must not simply accept, I must earn my wife!” courteously, gently refused the gift and, alone again, rode away.

  He let the reins lie slack on his charger’s neck, and was thus carried by the will of nature (his mount) to the besieged castle of an orphaned queen his own age, Condwiramurs (conduire amour—“to lead love” ), whom he next day heroically rescued from the undesired assaults of a king who had hoped to add her feudal estates through capture and marriage to his own. And it was she, then, that lovely young queen, who became the wife he had earned; and there was no priest to solemnize the marriage—the poet Wolfram’s healing message here being that noble love alone is the sanctification of marriage, and loyalty in marriage, the confirmation of love.

  Fig. 8.5 — Parzival and Condwiramurs

  Proposition two, to which the poet then addressed himself, was of human nature fulfilled—not overcome or transcended—in the achievement of that supreme spiritual goal of which the Grail was the medieval symbol. For it was only after Parzival had met the normal secular challenges of his day—both in knightly deeds and in marriage—that he became involved without either forewarning or intent in the unpredicted, unpredictable, context of the higher spiritual adventure symbolized in the Grail Castle and wondrous healing of its king. The mystical law governing the adventure required that the hero to achieve it should have no knowledge of its task or rules, but accomplish all spontaneously on the impulse of his nature. The castle would appear like a vision before him. Its drawbridge lowering, he would ride across it to a joyous welcome. And the task then expected of him, when the maimed king on his litter would be carried into the stately hall, would be simply to ask what ailed him. The wound would immediately heal, the waste land become green, and the saving hero himself be installed as king. However, on the occasion of his first arrival and reception, Parzival, though moved to compassion, politely held his peace; for he had been taught by Gurnemanz that a knight does not ask questions. Thus he allowed concern for his social image to inhibit the impulse of his nature—which, of course, was exactly what everyone else in the world was doing in that period and was the cause of all that was wrong.

  Well, to cut a long and wonderful story very short, the result of this suppression of the dictate of his heart was that the young, misguided knight—scorned, humiliated, cursed, derided, and exiled from the precincts of the Grail—was so shamed and baffled by what had happened that he bitterly cursed God for what he took to have been a mean deception practiced upon him, and for years he rode in desperate, solitary quest, to achieve again that castle of the Grail and release its suffering king. Indeed, even after learning from a forest hermit that it was God’s law of that enchantment that none seeking the castle would find it and none who had once failed should ever have a second chance, the resolute youth persisted, moved by compassion for its terribly maimed king, whom his failure had left in such pain.

  But his ultimate victory followed, ironically, rather from his loyalty to Condwiramurs and fearlessness in combat than from his obdurate determination to rediscover the castle. The immediate occasion was a great and gallant wedding feast—with many a fair lady thereabout and much fashionable dalliance among colorful pavilions—from which he rode away, not in moral dudgeon but because, with the image of Condwiramurs in his heart (whom he had not seen through all these cruel years of unrelenting quest), he could not bring himself to engage in any of the pleasures of that marvelously fair occasion. He rode away alone. And he had not ridden far when there came charging at him from a nearby wood a brilliant knight of Islam.

  Now Parzival had known for some time that he had an elder half-brother, a Moslem; and it happened that this was he. They clashed and gave battle fiercely. “And I mourn for this,” wrote Wolfram; “for they were the two sons of one man. One could say that ‘they’ were fighting, if one wished to speak of two. Those two, however, were one: ‘My Brother and I’ is one body, like good man and good wife. Contending here from loyalty of heart, one flesh, one blood, was doing itself much harm.”24 The battle scene is a recapitulation transformed of the encounter of Anfortas with the pagan. Parzival’s sword, however, here broke on the other’s helmet. The Moslem flung his own blade away, scorning to murder a defenseless knight, and the two sat down to what proved to be a recognition scene.

  Clearly implicit in this critical meeting is an allegorical reference to the two opposed religions of the time, Christianity and Islam: “two noble sons,” so to say, “of one father.” And marvelously, when the two brothers have found their accord, a messenger of the Grail appears to invite both to the castle—which in a Christian work of the time of the Crusades is a detail surely remarkable! The maimed king is healed, Parzival is installed in his stead, and the Moslem, taking the Grail Maiden to wife (in whose virgin hands alone the symbolic vessel had been carried), departs with her to his Orient, there to reign in truth and love—seeing to it (as the text declares) “that his people should gain their rights.”

  But this wonderful Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach simply has to be read.25 Humorous, joyous, altogether different both in spirit and in meaning from the ponderous opus of Richard Wagner, it is one of the richest, greatest, most civilized works of the European Middle Ages; and as a monument, moreover, to the world-saving power of love in all its forms, perhaps the very greatest love story of all time.

  So let me now, in conclusion, turn to the writings of an author of our own day, Thomas Mann, who already in his earliest novelette, Tonio Kröger, named love the controlling principle of his art.

  The young North German hero of this story, whose mother was a woman of Latin race, found himself set apart from his blue-eyed blond companions, not only physically, but also temperamentally. It was with a curiously melancholy strain of intellectual contempt that he regarded them; yet with envy also, mixed of admiration and love. Indeed, in his secret heart, he pledged himself to them all eternally—and particularly a certain charming blue-eyed Hans and beautiful blonde Ingeborg, who represented to him irresistibly the appeal of fresh human beauty and youthful life.

  On coming of age, Tonio left the North to seek his destiny as a writer, and, moving to a city of the South, met there a young Russian, Lisaveta by name, and her circle of heavy thinkers. He there found himself no more at home, however, among those critics and despisers of the commonalty of the human race, than he had formerly felt among the objects of their scorn. He was thus between two worlds, “a lost burgher,” as he termed himself; and departing from this second scene mailed back, one day, to the critical Lisaveta an epistolary manifesto, setting forth his credo as an artist.

  The right word— le mot juste—he had recognized, can wound; can even kill. Yet the duty of the writer must be to observe and to name exactly: wounding, even possibly killing. For what the writer must name in describing are inevitab
ly imperfections. Perfection in life does not exist; and if it did, it would be—not lovable but admirable, possibly even a bore. Perfection lacks personality. (All the Buddhas, they say, are perfect: perfect and therefore alike. Having gained release from the imperfections of this world, they have left it, never to return. But the Bodhisattvas, remaining, regard the lives and deeds of this imperfect world with eyes and tears of compassion.) For let us note well (and here is the high point of Mann’s thinking on this subject): what is lovable about any human being is precisely his imperfections. The writer is to find the right words for these and to send them like arrows to their mark—but with a balm, the balm of love, on every point. For the mark, the imperfection, is exactly what is personal, human, natural, in the object, and the umbilical point of its life.

  “I admire,” wrote Tonio Kröger to his intellectual friend, “those proud and cold beings who adventure on paths of great daemonic beauty and despise ‘mankind’; but I do not envy them. Because [and here he lets fly his own dart] if there is anything capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is this burgherlike love that I feel for the human, the commonplace. All warmth, goodness, and humor derives from this; and it even seems to me that it must be itself that love of which it is written that one may speak with the tongues of men and of angels and yet, having it not, be as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals...”

  “Erotic” or “plastic irony,” is the name that Thomas Mann bestowed on this principle; and through the greater part of his creative career it was the guiding principle of his art. The unflinching eye detects, the intellect names, the heart goes out in compassion; and the life-force of every life-loving heart will be finally tested, challenged, and measured by its capacity to regard with such compassion whatever has been by the eye perceived and by the intellect named. “For God,” as we read in Paul to the Romans, “has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all.”

  Moreover, life itself, we can be sure, will provide every one of us ultimately with a test of our capacity for such love—as it in time tested Thomas Mann, with its transformation of his blue-eyed Hans and blonde Ingeborg, under Hitler, into what he could only name and describe as depraved monsters....

  What does one do under such a test?

  Saint Paul has said, “Love bears all things.”26 We have the words, also, of Jesus: “Judge not that you may not be judged.”27 And there is the saying, too, of Heraclitus: “To God all things are fair and good and right; but men hold some things wrong and some right. Good and evil are one.”28

  There is a deep and terrible mystery here, which we perhaps cannot, or possibly simply will not, comprehend; yet which will have to be assimilated if we are to meet such a test. For love is exactly as strong as life. And when life produces what the intellect names evil, we may enter into righteous battle, contending “from loyalty of heart”: however, if the principle of love (Christ’s “Love your enemies!”) is lost thereby, our humanity too will be lost.

  “Man,” in the words of the American novelist Hawthorne, “must not disclaim his brotherhood even with the guiltiest.”29

  [Discuss]

  IX—Mythologies of War and Peace

  Fig. 9.1 — Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa Ride to Battle

  IX

  Mythologies of War and Peace

  [1967]1

  It is for an obvious reason far easier to name examples of mythologies of war than mythologies of peace; for not only has conflict between groups been normal to human experience, but there is also the cruel fact to be recognized that killing is the precondition of all living whatsoever: life lives on life, eats life, and would otherwise not exist. To some this terrible necessity is fundamentally unacceptable, and such people have, at times, brought forth mythologies of a way to perpetual peace. However, those have not been the people generally who have survived in what Darwin termed the universal struggle for existence. Rather, it has been those who have been reconciled to the nature of life on this earth. Plainly and simply: it has been the nations, tribes, and peoples bred to mythologies of war that have survived to communicate their life-supporting mythic lore to descendants.

  In the long, long view of the most recent paleological researches and discoveries, it now appears that in primeval East Africa, where the earliest evidences of human evolution have come to light, there were already in the beginning, some eighteen hundred thousand years ago at least, two distinct kinds of hominid, or manlike creature, on this earth. One, which Professor L. S. B. Leakey, his discoverer, named Zinjanthropus, appears to have been a vegetarian. His line is now extinct. The other, Homo habilis—“able or capable man,” as Leakey named him—was a meat-eater, a killer, a maker of tools and weapons. And it is from his line, apparently, that we of the present human species are descended.

  “Man,” wrote Oswald Spengler, “is a beast of prey.”2 That is simply a fact of nature. And another such fact is this: that throughout the animal kingdom beasts of prey, when compared with their vegetarian victims, are in general not only the more powerful but also the more intelligent. Heraclitus declared war to be the creator of all great things; and in the words again of Spengler, “The one who lacks courage to be a hammer comes off in the role of the anvil.”3 Many a sensitive mind, reacting to this unwelcome truth, has found nature intolerable, and has cried down all those best fit to live as “wicked,” “evil,” or “monstrous,” setting up instead, as a counter-ideal, the model of him who turns the other cheek and whose kingdom is not of this world. And so it is that finally two radically opposed basic mythologies can be identified in the broad panorama of history: one in which this monstrous precondition of all temporal life is affirmed with a will, and the other, in which it is denied.

  Now when we turn to the primitive mythologies of the non-literate peoples of this earth, what we immediately find is that, without exception, they are of the first, or affirmative kind. I know of no primitive people anywhere that either rejects and despises conflict or represents warfare as an absolute evil. The great hunting tribesmen are killing animals all the time, and since the meat supplies are limited, there are inevitably collisions between the members of contending groups coming in to slaughter the same herds. By and large, hunting people are warrior people; and not only that, but many are exhilarated by battle and turn warfare into exercises in bravura. The rites and mythologies of such tribesmen are based generally on the idea that there is actually no such thing as death. If the blood of an animal slain is returned to the soil, it will carry the life principle back to Mother Earth for rebirth, and the same beast will return next season to yield its temporal body again. The animals of the hunt are regarded in this way as willing victims who give their bodies to mankind with the understanding that adequate rites are to be performed to return the life principle to its source. Likewise, after episodes of battle special rituals are enacted to assuage and release to the land of spirits the ghosts of those that have been slain.

  Such ceremonies may also include rites for toning down the war mania and battle heat of those who have done the killing. For this whole business of killing, whether killing beasts or killing men, is supposed to be fraught with danger. On one hand, there is the danger of revenge from the person or animal killed; and on the other hand, there is an equal danger of the killer himself becoming infected by a killing mania and running berserk. Along with the rites to honor and appease ghosts, accordingly, there may be also special rites enacted to re-attune returning warriors to the manners of life at home.

  One of the first books that I had the privilege of editing was of a Navaho war ceremonial, accompanied by its series of sand paintings (or rather, in this case, “pollen” paintings, made of the pulverized petals of flowers).4 The legend illustrated was of the Navaho twin war gods, whose rites were revived on the reservation during the years of the Second World War to initiate into the spirit of war the young Navahos being drafted into the United States Army.

  Fig. 9.2 — Code Talkers

  The name of the ceremony w
as Where the Two Came to Their Father. It told of the journey of the Navaho twin heroes to the home of the sun, their father, to procure from him the magic and weapons with which to eliminate the monsters that were at that time at large in the world. For it is a basic idea of practically every war mythology that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable order of human life on earth, which is that, of course, of one’s own people. In the sense of this Navaho rite, the young brave being initiated is identified with the young hero gods of the mythological age, who at that time protected mankind by clearing the wilderness of poisonous serpents, giants, and other monsters. One of the great problems, I would say, of our own variously troubled society is just this, that youths brought up to function in the protected fields of peacefully domestic life, when suddenly tapped to play the warrior role, are provided with little or no psychological induction. They are therefore spiritually unprepared to play their required parts in this immemorial game of life and cannot bring their inappropriate moral feelings to support it.

  But not all primitive peoples are fighters, and when we turn from the hunting and warring nomads of the ranging animal plains to the more substantially settled village peoples of the tropics—inhabiting a largely vegetable environment, where plant, not animal food has been forever the basic diet—we might expect to find a relatively peaceable world, with little or no requirement for either a psychology or a mythology of warcraft. However, as already remarked in earlier chapters, there is a very strange prevailing belief throughout those tropical zones, based on the observation that in the vegetable world new life arises from decay, life springs from death, and that from the rotting of last year’s growths new plants arise. Accordingly, the dominant mythological theme of many of the peoples of those regions supports the notion that through killing one increases life, and it is, in fact, exactly in those parts of the world that the most horrible and grotesque rituals of human sacrifice obtain even to this day, their inspiration being the notion that to activate life one kills. It is in those areas that the headhunt flourishes, the basic idea there being that before a young man who is to marry can beget a life, he must take a life and bring back as trophy a head—which will be honored at the wedding, not regarded with disdain, but respectfully entertained, so to say, as the giver of the power of life to the children of this marriage, now to be conceived and born.