A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)

by Joseph Campbell

  Satan is the epitome of infractible ego.

  The Persian poets have asked, “By what power is Satan sustained?” And the answer that they have found is this: “By his memory of the sound of God’s voice when he said, ‘Be gone!’” What an image of that exquisite spiritual agony which is at once the rapture and the anguish of love!89

  “The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider or some lothsome Insect over the Fire, ab-hors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as Worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the Fire; he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in his Sight; you are Ten Thousand Times so abominable in his Eyes as the most hateful venomous Serpent is in ours.…you are thus in the Hands of an angry god; ‘tis nothing but his mere Pleasure that keeps you from being at this Moment swallowed up in everlasting Destruction.” —Pastor Jonathan Edwards90

  ”God’s mere pleasure,” which defends the sinner from the arrow, the flood, and the flames, is termed in the traditional vocabulary of Christianity God’s ”mercy”; and ”the mighty power of the spirit of God,” by which the heart is changed, that is God’s “grace.” In most mythologies, the images of mercy and grace are rendered as vividly as those of justice and wrath, so that a balance is maintained, and the heart is buoyed rather than scourged along its way. “Fear not!” says the hand gesture of the god Śiva, as he dances before his devotee the dance of the universal destruction.

  “Fear not, for all rests well in God. The forms that come

  and go—and of which your body is but one—are the flashes of my dancing limbs. Know Me in all, and of what shall you be afraid?”91

  Hell is the concretization of your life experiences, a place where you’re stuck, the wasteland. In hell, you are so bound to yourself that grace cannot enter.

  The problem with hell

  is that the fire doesn’t consume you.

  The fires of transformation do.

  Fire is symbolic of the night sea journey, the upcoming of shadow—repressed biography, history, and traumas—and the burning out of the imps of malice. Purgatory is a place where that fire is turned into a purging fire that burns out the fear system, burns out the blockage so that it will open.

  If hell is the wasteland, then purgatory would be the journey where you leave the place of pain. You are still in pain, but you’re in quest with a sense of possible realization. There is no longer despair. You really do not have a sacred place, a rescue land, until you can find some little field of action, or place to be, where it’s not a wasteland, where there is a little spring of ambrosia. It’s a joy that comes from inside. It is not something that puts the joy in you, but a place that lets you so experience your own will, your own intention, and your own wish that, in small, the joy is there. The sin against the Holy Ghost, I think, is despair. The Holy Ghost is that which inspires you to realization., and despair is the feeling that nothing can come. That is absolute hell.

  Find a place where there’s joy,

  and the joy will burn out the pain.

  I had an interesting experience when I was lecturing at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington D.C. to groups of officers about to go on assignment to the Orient or Southeast Asia. In one group there was this very smart black man, who’d just come from three years in Vienna and was going to India. The gentlemen in these groups would always invite me to have lunch at a very nice restaurant at the Watergate Hotel, and this time they asked this chap to drive me over there.

  He had a zoom-zoom sports car, and he was quite the guy. When he and I were at the table, the first thing he started talking to me about was being black and the things that were against him. I thought, “Well, I’m going to let him have it. I’m sick of this kind of stuff.” I said, “In terms of the people I know, you are way up there. You’ve got a good life. Everybody has something against him. Some people are unattractive, and that’s against them. Some people are Protestants in a Catholic country; some are Catholic in a Protestant environment. If you go on blaming everything that is negative in your life on the fact that you’re black, you deny yourself the privilege of becoming human. You’re just a black man. You are not a man yet.” Then the crowd came in, and he sat quietly the rest of the time.

  When I arrived the next month for my session, I went up to report in, and the officer on duty said, “Say, Joe, what did you tell that guy last time?” I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Why?” He said, “Well, he’s bought all your books, and he’s downstairs and wants you to sign them. When I asked him why he was doing that, he said, ‘Professor Campbell has made a man out of me.’”

  Now that was a big lesson to me, and it runs against all this bleeding-heart stuff. I was proud of that. So, he’d been stuck in his hell: he hadn’t been able to see past his own notion of what his limitation was. Anyway, I went downstairs, and he had all the books, and as I was signing them, I said, “Well, this’ll help you remember me.” He said, “Oh, I’ll never forget you.”

  Everytime you do something like that you find it was the right thing to do, provided that you furnish the person with something to jump to. If you’re really not interested in the person, you can just agree with them, “Ah, you poor chap, I understand. It’s real tough.”

  Don’t think of what’s being said,

  but of what’s talking.

  Malice? Ignorance? Pride? Love?

  The goal of the hero’s journey

  is yourself, finding yourself.

  When we are one place in our lives and want to be in another place, there’s an obstacle to be overcome, a threshold to be passed. The six-pointed star, which in Judaism is the Star of David, is a symbol that appears in India as the sign of Cakra IV.

  In the double triangle, the upward-pointed triangle—you might use the word “aspiration” for that—is symbolic of the movement principle. The downward-pointed triangle is inertia, and it represents what the obstacle would be. The downward-pointing triangle can be experienced either as an impediment or as the door that is opened. When you recognize its psychological significance and effect a mental transformation, then you see the obstacle as an opening.

  So you can experience the downward-pointed triangle two ways: one, as an obstacle; and the other, as the means by which you are going to make the ascent. So, everything in your life that seems to be obstructive can be transformed by your recognizing that it is the means for your transition.

  That’s the whole sense of the Tantra philosophy in India. Tantric exercises, which are occult and hidden, go so far as to propose precisely the most destructive, or seductive practices, as the rung of a ladder of ascent. So, for example, sexual union, which is usually one of the chief distractions from the way, is taken to be the way. Also you have—and this is extreme—necrophagia, the eating of dead bodies.

  In certain American Indian cultures of the Southwest, one of the initiations to the clown category—and their black and white costume motif is a good symbol of the clown—involves actually eating dog shit. The most repulsive has to be accepted as also brahman. People like that are beyond all pairs of opposites. You can go to quite an extreme in eliminating your resistance to some of the things that life proposes. But you don’t have to go that far.

  In the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas, Jesus says, “Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift up the stone and you will find me there.”92 The historical Jesus has identified himself with the Christ. That is Buddha consciousness. He is living in terms, not of his ego, but of the Christ: the ubiquity in everything of the radiance of that which is the deepest center within you.

  So, when this downward-pointed triangle becomes the means, instead of the obstruction, to your break-through, you’ve achieved the passage of the threshold.

  There is always danger

  at the threshold.

  Leave the temporal body,

  and let the spirit enter.

  What is the obstruction in your life, and how do you transform it into the radia
nce? Ask yourself, “What is the main obstruction to my path?” In India, demons are really obstructions to the expansion of conscious-ness. A demon or devil is a power in you to which you have not given expression, an unrecognized or suppressed god. Anyone who is unable to understand a god sees it as a devil.

  “Devil” is a word we use

  for another peoples’ god.

  All anyone is really trying to do is have an expansion of consciousness, so that the knowing and loving are on greater and greater horizons. That’s what happens when the kuṇḍalinī comes up: more and more of the body is informed with radiance and consciousness.

  The goal of the journey

  is to discover yourself

  as consciousness.

  Joyce says in Ulysses, “If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door.”93 The difficulties one encounters may be looked at as having the possibility of transformation into opening gates rather than closed doors.

  When you find yourself blocked by a concretized symbol from your childhood, meditation is a systematic discipline that will solve your problem. The function of meditation, ideally, would be to transcend the concretized response and deliver the message.

  The first thing I’d do would be to think, “What are, specifically, the symbols that are still active, still touching me this way?” What are the symbols? There’s a great context of symbols in the world. Not all of them are the ones that afflict you. When you do find the symbol that is blocking you, find some mode of thinking and experience that matches in its importance for you what the symbol meant. You cannot get rid of a sym-bol if you haven’t found that to which it refers.

  If you find in your own heart a center of experience for which the symbol has been substituted, the symbol will dissolve. Think, “Of what is it the metaphor?” When you find that, the symbol will lose its blocking force, or it will become a guide.

  This is the “knowing” part of “to know, to love, to serve.” If you’re in trouble with this part because you do not really know what this thing refers to, then it will push you around. I’m very, very sure of that.

  To dissolve such a concretization as an adult, you need to find what the reference of the symbol is. When that is found, you will have the elucidation. The symbol will move into place, and you can regard it with pleasure: as something that guides you to the realization of what its message is, instead of as a roadblock. This is an important point.

  That is the downward-pointed triangle. It is either an obstruction or the field through which the realization is to come.

  Heaven and hell are psychological definitions. The Catholic definition of mortal sin should relieve you of the thought that you have committed one. As a Catholic, you learn that for a sin to be mortal, the kind that condemns you to hell, it has to be a grievous matter, over which there has been sufficient reflection, done with full consent of the will. So, a mortal sin is a deliberate exclusion of the gift of grace, and that is what the devil symbolizes. You cannot open to supernatural grace, to the voice of God.

  Deliberately breaking the ritual law can be a mortal sin. But here’s the bizarre thing about such a religion of ritual laws: kill your mother in a passion, and that is not a mortal sin. That’s a venial sin, and you will have your two-thousand years in purgatory on that one. But one little mortal sin, and you’re bound for hell. Let’s all go in a big chariot. When the Church said that eating meat on Friday was no longer a mortal sin, there was a crisis in the entire Catholic community. In New York City, where there are a lot of Catholics, there was a great crisis, part of which had to do with the fish merchants.

  When the symbols are interpreted

  spiritually rather than concretely,

  then they yield the revelation.

  I want to tell about my relationship to confession. As a kid, you go to confession, and you say, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I disobeyed Mother three times, didn’t say morning prayers two mornings, and told a lie.” He says, “You mustn’t do these things. Say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys, and you’re clear.”

  I never got old enough to confess any significant sin. I don’t know what the hell would have happened. I did commit one little sin one summer, at Shelter Island out on Long Island. I was about nine years old. There was a wonderful hardware store named Ferguson’s. I remember it well. I’d go there with my mother and see her buy things. She’d say, “Charge it,” and then go out with them. One such trip, I saw a wonderful penknife with all these things on it. So a few days later I went in alone and said, “I want that knife.” the owner said, “Here, Joe.” I said, “Charge it.” He said, “Okay.”

  I went home and said to Mother, “Look at the wonderful penknife I found.” She said, “Are you sure you found that?” I said, “Yes, yes, I found it.” Well, at the end of the month a bill came for the penknife, and Mother said, “Joe, come here. When you go to confession on Saturday, take that penknife to Father Isadore. Confess the sin, and then take the knife around to the sacristy and give it to him.

  This was not easy. It was the most severe indication of what I’d done. Five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys were nothing like giving up that knife. So, I went to confession and tried to tell the priest what I had done. I was an altar boy at the time: you know, “mea culpa, mea culpa” stuff. Afterward, I went around to the sacristy and gave him the penknife. And he said, “Oh, Joe, I didn’t know it was that serious.”

  I knew something then that I didn’t know before I stole that penknife: charging it without any idea of what the hell was going to happen was wonderful.

  * * *

  The forgiveness in Roman Catholic confession is conditional. The absolution the priest gives is conditional on a resolution on your part.

  First, you need contrition, meaning you are really, really sorry for having committed that sin. Second, you make a resolution never to commit it again. That does not mean that you are not going to commit it again. It means that you sincerely resolve not to.

  In that wonderful Arthurian Romance of La Questa del St. Graal, where all the knights go out to discover the Grail, Lancelot could not behold the Grail. Why? Because of his adulterous affair with Guinevere. But the real reason was that he could not honestly feel contrition for that love. How could Lancelot possibly have contrition for having experienced through Guinevere an illumination beyond what even the church had given him? And it is represented as such. He could not feel sorry, and he could not resolve to cancel it, so he was unworthy to behold the Grail.

  The Grail is being in perfect accord

  with the abundance of nature,

  the highest spiritual realization,

  the inexhaustible vessel from which

  you get everything you want.

  In a religion of duality,

  the sin and eternal punishment

  comes from the outside,

  from the ruling concrete god.

  There’s a knight in mortal sin. And yet, the monk who wrote that Romance had a sense of the charm of Lancelot’s life: he’s the most human, the most touching character in the whole context. These are ironical things, which is why, finally, the priest says, “God’s will? We don’t know God’s will. There may be forgiveness that we don’t know anything about.”

  I will hold this love against God,

  eternal damnation, anything.

  That is true love.

  When I was about sixteen years old, in prep school, and knew I was losing my childhood faith, I resolved that I would not quit the Catholic church until I knew why I was quitting, that is to say, until I had dissolved the symbols and knew what they referred to and meant. The whole thing wasn’t over until I was twenty-five years old and in Germany. I spent nine years working everything out, and then it just dropped off like a worn-out shirt. That’s the knowing thing. If you don’t know what the hell that symbol is saying to you, then it’s just there as a command, and there is going to be more and more of this hanging on. If you can’t use your mind in this
rather complex field, I don’t know how you are going to work it out.

  You become mature

  when you become

  the authority for your own life.

  COULD God exist if nobody else did? No. That’s why gods are very avid for worshipers. If there is nobody to worship them, there are no gods. There are as many gods as there are people thinking about God. When Mrs. Mulligan and the Pope are thinking about God, it is not the same God.

  In choosing your god, you choose

  your way of looking at the universe.

  There are plenty of Gods.

  Choose yours.

  The god you worship

  is the god you deserve.

  When you say that God needs man and man needs God, that “God” that’s being talked about is the image of God, the concept of God, the name of God, the ethnic God. You bet he needs man. He wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for man.