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

by Joseph Campbell

  A little girl has a golden ball. Now gold is the in-corruptible metal, the sphere is the perfect sphere, and the circle is her soul. She likes to go out to the edge of the forest, the abyss, and sit beside a little pool, a little spring, the entrance to the underworld, and there she likes to toss her soul around: toss the little ball and catch it, toss the ball and catch it, toss the ball and—bing!—she misses it, and it goes down into the pond.

  She starts to weep. She has lost her soul. This is depression. This is loss of energy and joy in life. Some-thing has slipped out. It is the counterpart of Helen of Troy being stolen in the classic story of the Iliad: Helen of Troy was stolen, so they want to get her back.

  So, the little golden ball has dropped, her soul has been swallowed by the wolf of the underworld. Now, when the energy goes down like that, the power that’s at the bottom of the pool, the inhabitant of the under-world, comes up—a dragon, or in this case, a little frog. He says “What’s the matter, Little Girl?” And she tells him, “I’ve lost my golden ball.” And he says, “I’ll get it for you.” And she says, “That would be very nice.” And he says, “What will you give me?”

  Now, she has to give up something, there has to be some kind of exchange, so she says, “I will give you my golden crown.” He says, “I do not want your golden crown.” “I’ll give you my pretty silk dress.” “I don’t want your pretty silk dress.” “Well,” she demands, “what do you want?” “I want to eat with you at the table, be with you as your playmate, sleep with you in your bed.” So, underestimating the frog, she says, “Okay, I’ll do that.”

  The frog dives down and brings up the ball. Now he is the hero who is on the adventure. She, without so much as a thank you, takes the ball and goes trotting home, and he comes flopping after her, saying, “Wait for me.” He’s very slow.

  She gets home, and that evening, when the little princess and King Daddy and Queen Mother are having dinner, doing very nicely with their meal, this green creature comes flopping up the front steps: plomp, plomp, plomp. The girl goes a bit pale, and her father asks, “So, what’s the matter? What’s that?” And she says, “Oh, just a little frog I met.” And he says, “Did you make any promises?”

  Now there’s the moral principle coming in; you have to correlate all these things. So, when she answers, “Yes,” the king says, “Well, then, open the door and let him in.” So, in comes the frog, and he’s down on the floor, and then he says, “I want to be on the table. I want to eat off of your golden plate.” Well, that spoils dinner. The dinner is finished, and she goes up to bed. He comes flopping up the stairs after her and bangs against the door, saying, “I want to come in.” So she opens the door and lets him in. “I want to sleep in your bed with you.” Well, that is more than she can take.

  There are several ways of ending this part of the story, but the one I like best is where she just picks up the frog and throws him against the wall. The frog cracks open, and out steps this beautiful prince, with eyelashes like a camel. It seems he had also been in trouble: he had been cursed by a hag into the condition of a frog. Now that’s the little boy who hasn’t dared to move on into adulthood. She is the little girl who is at the brink of adulthood. Both of them are refusing it, but each now helps the other out of this dilemma, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful experience.

  Then, the story says, the next morning, after they had been married, a coach comes to the front door. It was his coach. He was a prince, after all, whose kingdom had been in desolation since his transformation into a frog. So he and his bride get into the coach, and as they are driving away, they hear a loud sound: Bang! He says to the coachman, “What’s the matter, Henry? What’s happened?” And Henry says, “Well, ever since you have been gone, my Prince, there have been four bands of iron around my heart. One of them has now broken.” As they ride further, there are three more “Bangs,” and then the heart of the coachman beats properly once again.

  The coachman is symbolic of the land that requires the prince as its generating and governing power. He’d failed in his duty and gone down into the underworld, but down in the underworld, he found his little bride.

  I like that story particularly, because both of them are in trouble, both are at the bottom of the pond, and each rescues the other in this funny way. Meanwhile, the world up there has been waiting for its prince to return. So that is one example of the hero journey.

  THE question that comes—always, always, always—is: “What about the woman’s journey?” The woman’s life, if she is following the biologically grounded norm, is that of life in the world, in one relationship or another to a family. Then when the retirement time comes, the normal passage is into the stage which can be pictured as the Grandmother, of giving advice to the new life coming along. One can be in a position of being a grandmother to the grandchildren of the world. One is in a role, then, of mature, life-fostering advice. The woman brings forth life in one way or another, either biologically or socially, and then, in the latter stage, is life-fostering and life-guiding. The man is more inward than the woman in that last stage.

  The relationship of age to childhood, it seems to me, is a very sweet thing. There is a sweet, amusing picture of Ida Rolf and a little child looking at each other, west to east, across the distance of life: the whole, historically conditioned stage between is missing, and there’s just one eternity looking at the other. If you can be in some kind of social relationship that enables that principle of the eternal experience to look at the eternal innocence and foster it, that is really archetypal.

  In cases throughout history, however, where there have been inadequate responses to what the woman is doing—that is to say, she is doing what nature and society expect, but it’s an arid and bad situation—this is what I would term a “call to adventure.” And if a woman engages in the man’s task of entering the field of achievement, then her mythology will be essentially the same as that of the male hero.

  The heroine will, of course, encounter difficulties and advantages which are not those that the male meets, but whether one is male or female, the stages of the inner journey, the visionary quest, are the same, even though the imagery is going to be a little different. For instance, the central image in a man’s mandala is often some radiant jewel, or gem, or something like that, but the central image for a woman might be of her holding a child in her arms, the child of her spiritual birth, since the imagery of biological commitment is translated even to the spiritual forms.

  My wife, who is anything but the housewife, has no trouble in seeing the male hero as the counterpart of the female hero, if the woman is engaged in the kind of task that has traditionally been seen as a male task; that is to say, if she is engaged in achieving something, rather than waiting in solitude to be achieved, which is the woman’s normal role. Jean is an artist, richly fulfilled in an active role, and her crises are essentially the same as a male’s crises. The women we know with whom she has worked are also not typical housewives. They have achieved fulfillment in the realm of the arts, which is the only place I know of—except, perhaps, for academe—where women can have this unconventional way of life. In my own work, I have known a lot of women in the world of “the head trip,” but they never seemed to me to be as richly fulfilled as the ones that went into the arts. Their fulfillment was more in the way of achievement, whereas the artists’ fulfillment was in doing what the artist does, and that is a different thing.

  In all of literature there is very little of the woman’s adventure because she is already “It,” and her problem is the realization of that. There are quite a few adventures of little girls in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and most of them have to do with the hesitation before moving into the threshold of accepting womanhood—the sleeping princess, and all that sort of thing, and then the waking. When women dream, often their active aspect appears in male form.

  What the male represents is the agent of the femi-nine power directed to a specific kind of functioning. In the male body, however, there’s not t
he recall to female nature that there is automatically in the female body. Consequently, a male going forth and finding the place of, the instrument of, his full power would not have the problem of discovering the feminine factor in himself, for it is quite slight compared with the feminine factor in the female body. It is a greater distance from what the body has given you. It’s a matter of proportion.

  A man must do.

  He must disengage from the mother

  and find his way of “doing,”

  which is a way of pain.

  A woman has only to be.

  In my twenties, I lived with artists, many of them women. I noticed that when they approached the age of thirty, the marriage problem came up with each one. “I have to get married now and have a child.” When the female within calls the sculptress who has found her instruments of power, the mallet and chisel, her art falls apart, because she can’t carry a serious art career unless she is at it, and nothing else, all day long.

  This wreckage doesn’t happen with men. When the female calls the male, all he does is go and get married, because the female is out there, where she naturally is. I would say that this is one of the points in the female journey: there is a heavier load of given nature to deal with. It starts with the girl being overtaken by the menstrual moment, and then she’s a woman.

  That much of a summons to life is the problem that you ladies have that we men don’t. Your whole body tells you that you have disowned it. A man does not have that problem. A woman can follow the hero’s journey, but there will be other calls and another relationship that’s asked of her, namely, to the nature field of which she is the manifestation.

  It took me a long time to get around to marriage, principally because I felt that women always wanted to have fun, and that was not my interest at all. It would interfere with my reading. That’s really the truth. But another reason was that every time I would get really involved with a woman, I’d have the feeling of weight: life was heavy. And pretty soon I’d just get fed up with that heaviness, with that feeling of everything being so goddamn important and all these little bits of things becoming mountainous problems, and—Jesus!: “I’m out.” And then, a little while later, here it is again.

  I have taught hundreds of young women, many of whom have gone into the arts, as did Jean, who went into classic dance. But many of the others had husbands who would not stand for that. Each of these women had to make a choice, and if she chose to knuckle down to what her husband wanted, that ended her adventure. It really did. Everything else then became a substitute. But the objective is to have your own adventure, not a substitute, and it is not by any means an easy thing to do.

  When I was teaching these young women, I wasn’t thinking of turning them into philologists or historians. So what was I giving them this stuff for? Most were going to get married, have children, and give them-selves to daily chores—comparable to my daily chore of teaching them, which, after the first excitement, was no fun either. But there are many ways of using the material, and my thought was this: they will have their families, and then, when they are fifty and their families have been launched, there they’ll be. And it was my intention to give them this spiritual message of how to read the world in the second half of life’s journey. That was a long time ago. I still know many of these women—twenty, thirty, or forty years later—and I hear unanimously, that my approach worked, that I gave them something that is now feeding this aspect of their lives.

  It’s interesting that in traditions like the Japanese or the old Oriental, and this goes all the way back to Greece in Plato’s time, the housewife was one kind of woman, and the courtesan was another. The courtesan was the woman proficient in the arts, in literature, and in talk. It was a different type of human life from that of the housewife, and in those traditions, the woman was fulfilled in that role.

  Then there’s another woman’s role in literature, but one I have never seen, that of the woman who appears as an Amazon. There is one such story about the daughter of the King of France, who’s been kidnapped by the Muslims. After she and a Muslim fall infinitely in love, she is rescued by her family and brought back from Islam. Her Muslim lover follows, recaptures her, and now, as they are running to escape from this military group of brothers who are trying to take her back, she says to him, “How good are you with your sword?” He says, “No good. I’m just good in bed.” “Well,” she replies, “you go on then, and I will take care of this bunch.” It is a wonderful story, one of the best in the world, and it’s worth looking for in the Arabian Nights.

  Joyce speaks of the woman as the one who is the link between: between nations, between people. The ability women have to marry men of totally alien cultures and find themselves at home with them is more than what happens when men marry women of alien cultures. Woman is the link between. Another thing that Joyce brings out in Finnegans Wake: a woman has three or four sons: one is a great son, another is a poor son. She loves them all. She is not evaluating in terms of achievements or anything of the kind. She represents a human-to-human relationship.

  Where male power dominates,

  you have separation.

  Where female power dominates,

  there’s a non-dual, embracing quality.

  Having taught young women, I’ve been amazed to see how competent they are in understanding their hus-band’s job, if they are in a marriage that’s really going. She never studied that stuff, but she’s right in there with him, because any failure on the part of either member ruins the duad. In my own case, everything that I write I read to Jean, who gives me the criticism and support that my work requires. The man might feel sometimes as though he does not need cooperation, but he does. There is a big difference between a man operating with a woman behind him and one out there alone.

  When we were first married, and I was driving the car, it didn’t matter what the hell I did, Jean went along with it. Then there came a time when I realized there would been a psychological transformation, that some-times she was critical of the way my driving was done. There then came a stage where she was directing, And all of that was acceptable: it had to do with changes in her thinking. First, she thought, “Anything he does is great.” Then, when she had learned a little more about me, her uncritical acceptance went away. Finally, after she had learned still more about me—and it always goes like this—now, she is the boss. I know the feeling of turning a car over to someone and just having to say, “If we run into something, that’s okay. Here we go, Dear.” And you find that she manages very well. It’s different, that’s all. It is the Perilous Bed.

  A knight, in full armor,

  approaches the Perilous Bed.

  Whenever he tries to settle into it,

  the bed jumps and bucks and moves.

  The Perilous Bed represents

  the female temperament.

  If the male can just hold on,

  if he can endure,

  the bed will settle down,

  and he’ll get the reward.

  Some time ago, I had a sabbatical and spent the whole year traveling, mostly in India and Japan, but I was also in Thailand, Ceylon, Burma, and Taiwan. My impression was that, in anything, the women in these cultures were more competent than the men. Perhaps I had to go abroad to see something that is also a fact back here, but I was tremendously impressed by the vigor and authority of Oriental women.

  I was a long time in India, and since I had already published the Zimmer books, I saw every department of India that one could ask to see, including the house of Nehru. His younger sister took me as her person-to-go-to-parties-with, so I met the whole bunch. Indian women look so darned humble with their saris and all, but they are nothing of the kind. They are potent. In Japan, however, it is a different situation, because those men are really strong men. But when you see a Japanese couple in a restaurant, who pays the check? The woman. She has the money.

  The principle characterization of Athene is as the guardian of heroes, as a patroness, like L
akṣmī, the Indian goddess who isthe supporter of the king or of anybody who then becomes her hero. We find Athene depicted in art as the protector of heroes: she is there when Perseus takes the head of Medusa, and she is the one who initiates the young man into his heroic career. In the Odyssey, she tells Telemachus to go find his father. She is present when Odysseus lands on the island of Scherie and meets the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, and she is again present at the meeting of father and son. So, we can think of her as the guardian of heroes.

  Athene is also the protectress of the Acropolis, the fortress of the city. Athene relates to the father, not to the mother. Her mother was Metis, but when Metis was pregnant, Zeus swallowed her, so she gave birth to her child in Zeus’ belly, and Athene emerged from his head. That’s what Freud calls a transfer to above—the birthplace of the male creation—and she comes forth from there. In societies with such traditions, as I see it, the mother is the mother of our nature. The child is born of the mother and is the little nature object. The father is the parent of one’s social maturity. Hence, in the boy’s initiation, he goes from the mother to the men’s camp, and they initiate him.