Myths to Live By

by Joseph Campbell

  First Zeus sent upon him a tempest that tore the sails of his ships to shreds and blew them for nine days, out of control, to the land of the Lotus Eaters—land of the hallucinogenic drug “forgetfulness,” where, like Watkins in his madhouse, Odysseus and his freaked-out men were set floating on a sea of dream. Then follows the sequence of their mythological adventures, altogether different in kind from anything they had ever known.

  Fig. 10.8 — Circe

  There was, first, their encounter with the Cyclops and, after a costly release from his terrible cave, a period of elation, as they sailed on the winds of the god Aeolus; next, however, a dead calm and the toilsome ordeal of the twelve great ships reduced to rowing. They made it to land at the island of the cannibal Laestrygons, who sent eleven ships to the bottom, and the mighty Odysseus, up against forces now greater far than he could master, made away with a terrified crew in the one last hull remaining. Rowing wearily, still on a dead-calm sea, they advanced to what was to prove to be the crux of the entire night-sea adventure, the island of Circe of the Braided Locks, the nymph who turns men into swine.

  This would be such a female as our already seriously humbled hero could not manhandle as mere booty. Her power surpassed his own. Fortunately for his fame, however, the protector and guide of souls beyond death to rebirth, the mystery-god Hermes, arrived just in time to protect him with both advice and a charm; so that, instead of being metamorphosed, the great mariner, so protected, was taken to Circe’s bed, after which she directed him to the underworld and the shades down there of his ancestors. There he also met Tiresias, the blind prophetic sage in whom male and female knowledges are united. And when he had learned there all he could, he returned, much improved, to the formerly very dangerous nymph, who was now his teacher and guide.

  Circe next directed him to the Island of the Sun, her own father, where, however—in the source-region of all light—his only remaining ship with its crew was shattered, and Odysseus, tossed alone into the sea, was carried by its irresistible tides right back to his daytime earthly wife (and life), Penelope... after an eight-year stop-off on the way with the middle-aged wifely nymph Calypso, and a brief pause, also, on the isle of pretty Nausicaa and her father, in whose night-sea craft he was finally carried in deep sleep home to his own sweet shore—now fully prepared for his life-to-come as a considerate spouse and father.

  A significant feature of this great epic of the inward night-sea adventure is its representation of the voyager as never wishing to remain at any of its stations. In the land of the Lotus Eaters, those of his men who ate the flowery food had no desire ever to return home; but Odysseus dragged them weeping to his ships, bound them in the hulls, and rowed away. And even during his idyllic stay of eight years on the isle of Calypso, he would often be found on the beach alone, gazing homeward, out to sea.

  Jesse Watkins too was able ultimately to distinguish himself in his worldly role from the madman in the asylum; and, like the turning point at the farthest reach of his classical prototype’s course, where the last ship went to pieces at the Island of the Sun, so in this modern mariner’s voyage, the turning point was reached at the brink of an experience of blasting light. Jesse Watkins, at that juncture, recognizing that he was not only a terrified madman about to experience annihilation, but also the sane man he once had been at home, from whose sphere of life he had become psychologically dissociated, sat (as we have heard) on his bed, clenched together his two hands, pronounced his daylight body’s name, and returned to it, like a diver to the surface of the sea.

  The usual and most appropriate mythological figure to symbolize such a return to life is “rebirth,” rebirth to a new world; and that, exactly, was the figure that occurred to the mind of this self-rescued patient on experiencing spontaneous remission. “When I came out,” he is reported to have told, “I suddenly felt that everything was so much more real than it had been before. The grass was greener, the sun was shining brighter, and people were more alive, I could see them clearer. I could see the bad things and the good things and all that. I was much more aware.”

  “Can we not see,” remarks Dr. Laing in his commentary on the whole experience, “that this voyage is not what we need to be cured of, but that it is itself a natural way of healing our own appalling state of alienation called normality?”

  Something much the same was the view, also, of both Dr. Perry and Dr. Silverman in the papers earlier mentioned; and, as I have most lately learned, the earliest documented proposal of this view was in a study published by C. G. Jung already in 1902, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena.”13

  In sum, then: The inward journeys of the mythological hero, the shaman, the mystic, and the schizophrenic are in principle the same; and when the return or remission occurs, it is experienced as a rebirth: the birth, that is to say, of a “twice-born” ego, no longer bound in by its daylight-world horizon. It is now known to be but the reflex of a larger self, its proper function being to carry the energies of an archetypal instinct system into fruitful play in a contemporary space-time daylight situation. One is now no longer afraid of nature; nor of nature’s child, society—which is monstrous too, and in fact cannot be otherwise; it would otherwise not survive. The new ego is in accord with all this, in harmony, at peace; and, as those who have returned from the journey tell, life is then richer, stronger, and more joyous.

  The whole problem, it would seem, is somehow to go through it, even time and again, without shipwreck: the answer being not that one should not be permitted to go crazy; but that one should have been taught something already of the scenery to be entered and powers likely to be met, given a formula of some kind by which to recognize, subdue them, and incorporate their energies. Siegfried, when he had slain Fafnir, took a taste of the dragon blood and immediately found, to his own surprise, that he understood the language of nature, both his own nature and nature without. He did not himself become a dragon, though he had derived from the dragon its powers—of which, however, he lost control when he returned to the world of general mankind.

  There is always in the adventure great danger of what is known to psychology as “inflation,” which is what overtakes the psychotic. He identifies himself either with the visionary object or with its witness, the visionary subject. The trick must be to become aware of it without becoming lost in it: to understand that we may all be saviors when functioning in relation to our friends or enemies: savior figures, but never The Savior. We may all be mothers and fathers, but are never The Mother, The Father. When a growing girl becomes aware of the pleasing effect that her blossoming womanhood is beginning to have upon others and takes the credit for this to her own ego, she has already gone a little crazy. She has misplaced her identification. What is causing all the excitement is not her own astonished little ego, but the wonderful new body that is growing up all around it.

  There is a Japanese saying I recall once having heard, of the five stages of man’s growth. “At ten, an animal; at twenty, a lunatic; at thirty, a failure; at forty, a fraud; at fifty, a criminal.” And at sixty, I would add (since by that time one will have gone through all this), one begins advising one’s friends; and at seventy (realizing that everything said has been misunderstood) one keeps quiet and is taken for a sage. “At eighty,” then said Confucius, “I knew my ground and stood firm.”

  Fig. 10.9 — New Jerusalem

  In the spirit of all of which, let me now underscore the lesson of these purgatorial thoughts with the concluding words of that mad vision of Saint John which he beheld from his exile on the island of Patmos:

  Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a great voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe
away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”...

  Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.14

  [Discuss]

  XI—Moon Walk: the Outward Journey

  Figure 11.1 — Moon Walk

  XI

  The Moon Walk—the Outward Journey

  [1970]1

  Are we today turning mythology into fact? Let me introduce with a passage from Dante’s Divine Comedy the truly wondrous topic of this chapter. It is of that moment of the poet’s visionary journey where he takes off from the Earthly Paradise, to ascend to the moon, the first celestial stop of his spiritual flight to God’s throne. He is addressing himself to the reader:

  O You who in a little boat, desirous to listen, have been following behind my craft which singing passes on, turn to see again your shores; put not out upon the deep; for haply, losing me, you would remain astray. The water which I take was never crossed. Minerva breathes, Apollo guides me, and the Muses nine point out to me the Bears.

  That will set the mood. The breath of a goddess, Minerva, is to fill our sails, patroness of heroes; the naming of Apollo is a pleasant surprise; and we are to be guided by the Muses, teachers of all arts, pointing out to us the navigational stars. For although our voyage is to be outward, it is also to be inward, to the sources of all great acts, which are not out there, but in here, in us all, where the Muses dwell.2

  I remember when I was a very small boy my uncle one evening brought me down to Riverside Drive to see “a man,” as he told me, “flying in an aeroplane [as they called them in those days] from Albany to New York.” That was Glenn Curtis, 1910, in a sort of motorized box-kite he had built. There were people lined along the low wall at the westward margin of the city, watching, waiting, facing into the sunset. All the nearby rooftops, too, were crowded. Twilight fell. And then suddenly everybody was pointing, shouting, “There he comes!” And what I saw was like the shadow of a dark bird, soaring in the fading light some hundred feet above the river. Seventeen years later, the year I left Columbia, Lindbergh flew the Atlantic. And this year, on our television sets, we have seen two landings on the moon.

  I want this chapter to be a celebration of the fabulous age in which we are living; also, of this country in which we are living; and of our incredible human race, which in the years just past broke free of its earth, to fly forth to the opening of the greatest adventure of the ages.

  When I listen to some of my academic colleagues talk of their indifference to this epochal adventure, I am reminded of the anecdote of the little old lady who, when offered an opportunity to look at the moon through a telescope, commented, when she had done so, “Give me the moon as God made it!” The only really adequate public comment on the occasion of the first moon walk that I have found reported in the world press was the exclamation of an Italian poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti, published in the picture magazine Epoca. In its vivid issue of July 27, 1969, we see a photo of this white-haired old gentleman pointing in rapture to his television screen, and in the caption beneath are his thrilling words: Questa è una notte diversa da ogni ultra notte del mondo.

  For indeed that was “a different night from all other nights of the world”! Who will ever in his days forget the spell of the incredible hour, July 20, 1969, when our television sets brought directly into our living rooms the image of that strange craft up there and Neil Armstrong’s booted foot coming down, feeling cautiously its way—to leave on the soil of that soaring satellite of earth the first impress ever of life? And then, as though immediately at home there, two astronauts in their space suits were to be seen moving about in a dream-landscape, performing their assigned tasks, setting up the American flag, assembling pieces of equipment, loping strangely but easily back and forth: their pictures brought to us, by the way, through two hundred and thirty-eight thousand miles of empty space by that other modern miracle (also now being taken for granted), the television set in our living room. “All humanity,” Buckminster Fuller once said, in prophecy of these transforming forces working now upon our senses, “is about to be born in an entirely new relationship to the universe.”

  From the point of view of a student of mythology, the most important consequences of what Copernicus wrote of the universe in 1543 followed from his presentation there of an image controverting and refuting the obvious “facts” that everybody everywhere could see. All mankind’s theological as well as cosmological thinking, up to that time, had been based on concepts of the universe visually confirmed from the point of view of earth. Also, man’s notion of himself and of nature, his poetry and his whole feeling system, were derived from the sight of his earthbound eyes. The sun rose eastward, passed above, leaning southward, and set blazing in the west. The Polynesian hero Maui had snared that sun to slow it down, so that his mother could have time to finish her cooking. Joshua stopped both the sun and the moon, to have time to finish off a slaughter, while God, to assist, flung down from heaven a hail of prodigious stones: “and there was no day like that before it or after it, when Jehovah hearkened to the voice of a man.”

  The moon was in ancient times regarded, and in parts of the world still is regarded, as the Mansion of the Fathers, the residence of the souls of those who have passed away and are there waiting to return for rebirth. For the moon itself, as we see it, dies and is resurrected. Shedding its shadow, it is renewed, as life sheds generations to be renewed in those to come. Whereas against all this, which had been confirmed and reconfirmed in the scriptures, poetry, feelings, and visions of all ages, what Copernicus proposed was a universe no eye could see but only the mind imagine: a mathematical, totally invisible construction, of interest only to astronomers, unbeheld, unfelt by any others of this human race, whose sight and feelings were locked still to earth.

  However, now, in our own day, four and one-quarter centuries later, with those pictures coming down to us from the point of view of the moon, we have all seen—and not only seen, but felt—that our visible world and the abstract construction of Copernicus correspond. That fabulous color photograph of our good earth rising as a glorious planet above a silent lunar landscape is something not to forget. Giuseppe Ungaretri published in that issue of Epoca the first verse of a new-world poetry in celebration of this moon-born revelation:

  Che fai tu, Terra, in ciel?

  Dimmi, che fai, Silenziosa Terra?

  What are you doing, Earth, in heaven?

  Tell me, what are you doing, Silent Earth?

  All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are any- and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry now is archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view.

  In contrast, I recall the sense of embarrassment that I felt two Christmas Eves ago, the night of the first manned flight around the moon, when those three magnificent young men up there began reading to us, and sending down as their message to the world, the first chapter of the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void,” and so on; all of which had nothing whatsoever to do with the world that they were themselves then actually viewing and exploring. I later asked a number of my friends what they had felt when they heard that coming down to them from the moon, and all, without exception, replied that they had found it wonderfully moving. How very strange! And how sad, I thought, that we should have had nothing in our own poetry to match the sense of that prodigious occasion! Nothing to match, or even to suggest, the marvel and the magnitude of this universe into which we then were moving! There was that same old childhood dream of some Babylonian-born Hebrew of the fourth century B.C., telling of t
he dawn of a world which those three men up there, even as they read, had refuted! How very disappointing! Better by far, it seemed to me, would have been those beautiful half-dozen lines from the opening of Dante’s Paradiso:

  To the glory of Him that moves all things, penetrates through the universe, and is resplendent in one part more, and in another less.

  In the heaven that most of his light receives have I been, and I have seen things, to recount which, descending, I neither know how nor have the power.

  To predict what the imagery of the poetry of man’s future is to be, is today, of course, impossible. However, those same three astronauts, when coming down, gave voice to a couple of suggestions. Having soared beyond thought into boundless space, circled many times the arid moon, and begun their long return: how welcome a sight, they said, was the beauty of their goal, this planet Earth, “like an oasis in the desert of infinite space!” Now there is a telling image: this earth, the one oasis in all space, an extraordinary kind of sacred grove, as it were, set apart for the rituals of life; and not simply one part or section of this earth, but the entire globe now a sanctuary, a set-apart Blessed Place. Moreover, we have all now seen for ourselves how very small is our heaven-born earth, and how perilous our position on the surface of its whirling, luminously beautiful orb.

  A second thought that the astronauts, coming down, expressed was in reply to a question from Ground Control asking who was then doing the navigating. Their immediate answer was, “Newton!” Think of that! They were riding back securely on the mathematics of the miracle of Isaac Newton’s brain.