A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

by Joseph Campbell

  It’s a shame we have only one word for the two concepts. In India, there are several—jīva, ātman, brahman—and they are all different. “God,” our one word, is a really inadequate word. It always implies a personification, and unless one says “Goddess,” it implies a male personification. Our limited vocabulary is what binds us, what ties us up.

  In relation to the first books and chapters of the Bible, it used to be the custom of both Jews and Christians to take the narratives literally, as though they were dependable accounts of the origin of the universe and of actual prehistoric events. It was supposed and taught that there had been, quite concretely, a creation of the world in seven days by a god known only to the Jews; that somewhere on this broad new earth there had been a Garden of Eden containing a serpent that could talk; that the first woman, Eve, was formed from the first man’s rib, and that the wicked serpent told her of the marvelous properties of the fruits of a certain tree of which God had forbidden the couple to eat; and that, as a consequence of their having eaten of that fruit, there followed a “Fall” of all mankind, death came into the world, and the couple was driven forth from the garden. For there was in the center of that garden a second tree, the fruit of which would have given them eternal life; and their creator, fearing lest they should now take and eat of that too, and so become as knowing and immortal as himself, cursed them, and having driven them out, placed at his garden gate “cherubim and a flaming sword which turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”77

  Those cherubim are an important symbol. The Garden of innocence and spontaneous life, of unity before the knowledge of pairs of opposites, exits into the world of time and historical duality, symbolized by the cherubim at the gate with the flaming sword between: you can’t go through. How are we to interpret those cherubim and the Garden?

  Well, you go to Japan to see the Great Buddha at Nara. He is seated in the garden at the foot of the Tree of Immortal Life. As you approach the temple, you come to a preliminary building where two terrific figures stand as door guardians. They are the cherubim. One of them has his mouth open, the other’s mouth is closed: a pair of opposites. One represents the fear of death, and the other the desire for life—the temptations that didn’t touch the Buddha.

  No earthly paradise has been found.…for it is the garden of man’s soul. As pictured in the Bible tale with its four mysterious rivers flowing in the four directions from a common source at the center, it is exactly what C. G. Jung has called an “archetypal image”: a psychological symbol, spontaneously produced, which appears universally, both in dreams and in myths and rites.…Like the image of a deity, the quadrated garden with the life source at its center is a figment of the psyche, not a product of gross elements, and the one who seeks without for it, gets lost.78

  So what is keeping you out of the Garden? Your fear and desire: that which the Buddha transcended. And when the Buddha did not respond to temptations of fear and desire, he passed through the gate to the tree, where he now sits with his hand pointing to the earth. That’s redemption. The Buddha and the Christ are equivalent. Jesus has gone through and become, himself, the fruit of the tree.

  When threatened

  by fear and desire,

  let ego go.

  So the idea of redemption in both Christianity and Buddhism has to do with one’s having come through. Whether one does or not, in either tradition, is some-thing else. You can walk between those figures at Nara and enter the temple, bringing fear and desire with you, and you’ve not really gone through. You may think you’ve achieved illumination, but you’re still in exile.

  The Buddhist interpretation of this whole thing is one of psychological transformation. The Christian interpretation is one of debt and payment. Paul was preaching to a group of merchants, who understood

  the whole mystery in terms of economics: there is a debt, and you get an equivalent payment. The debt is enormous, so the payment has to be enormous This is all bankers’ thinking. Christianity is caught up in that.

  I see Buddhism and Christianity as two vocabularies for speaking about the same thing. In Buddhism we are lost in the world of fear and desire, the field of māyā, illusion. This is, in Christian iconography, the Fall. Redemption is losing those fears and having the experience of eternal life. You experience that through the act of Jesus in affirming the world, in participating in the world with joy.

  The Buddha is saying, “Don’t be afraid of those gate guardians. Come in and eat the fruit of the tree.” The act of communion is eating the fruit of the second tree in the Garden. The fruit is symbolic of the spiritual nourishment that comes when you have reached the knowledge of your eternal life. There are various ways of interpreting these mysteries. I am not telling you something I invented.

  “Since in the world of time every man lives but one life, it is in himself that he must search for the secret of the Garden.”—Loren Eisely79

  …in the Levant, the accent is on obedience, the obedience of man to the will of God, whimsical though it might be; the leading idea being that the god has rendered a revelation, which is registered in a book that men are to read and to revere, never to presume to criticize, but to accept and to obey. Those who do not know, or who would reject, this holy book are in exile from their maker. 80

  So, then, what is it that our religions actually teach? Not the way to an experience of identity with the Godhead, since that, as we have said, is the prime heresy; but the way and the means to establish and maintain a relationship to a named God. And how is such a relationship to be achieved? Only through membership in a certain supernaturally endowed, uniquely favored social group.81

  A religion of relationships

  is a religion of exile.

  The Old Testament God has a covenant with a certain historic people, the only holy race—the only holy thing, in fact—on earth. And how does one gain membership? The traditional answer was most recently (March 10, 1970) reaffirmed in Israel as defining the first prerequisite to full citizenship in that mythologically inspired nation: by being born of a Jewish mother.82

  Our actual ultimate root

  is in our humanity,

  not in our personal genealogy.83

  And in the Christian view, by what means? By virtue of the incarnation of Christ Jesus, who is to be known as true God and true man (which, in the Christian view, is a miracle, whereas in the Orient, on the other hand, everyone is to be known as true God and true man, though few may have yet awakened to the force of that wonder in themselves).84

  We are all Christs

  and don’t realize it.

  Among tribesmen depending on the hunting skills of individuals for their existence, the individual is fostered: even the concept of immortality is individual, not collective. Spiritual leadership is exercised primarily by shamans, who are individuals endowed with spiritual power through personal experience, not socially installed priests, made members of an organization through appointment and anointment.85

  The central demand is to surrender our exclusivity: everything that defines us as against each other. For years people have used religious affiliations to do this. Martin Buber speaks of “I-Thou” and “I-It” relationships. An ego talking to a Thou is different from an ego talking to an It. Wherever we emphasize otherness or outgroups, we are making persons into Its: the gentile, the Jew, the enemy—they all become the same.

  Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love: they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of the protection of his god. And there takes place, then, that dramatic divorce of the two principles of love and hate which the pages of history so bountifully illustra
te. Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.86

  If you fix

  on yourself and your tradition,

  believing you alone have got “It,”

  you’ve removed yourself

  from the rest of mankind.

  Some say Communism is a social system without a religion; but you can’t say that Communism is not religious, for the laws of a Communist society have all the qualities of a religion because Communism has become the religion.

  In terms of the ritual side of it, Communism has all the character of a religion, and it has the characteristics of one that is a biblical descendent. There is a good and there is a bad, and we’re fighting for the good, and there will be a day, come the Revolution, when all will be Communist and right. Part of the argument between Russia and China is about who is interpreting Marx properly, which is sheer scholasticism.

  So, actually, most of the world’s societies are being ruled by post-biblical traditions, in which anybody who is anything else is out. Besides the Communist brother-hood, there is the Jewish community, the Christian community, and the Islamic, the Muslim community. Judaism doesn’t have a missionizing impulse, but the other three—Islam, Christianity, and Communism—are murderous traditions. The aim of each is total world conquest. That’s a beautiful show. Makes a mess of the world though.

  The goal of life

  is to make your heartbeat

  match the beat of the universe,

  to match your nature with Nature.

  In Buddhism the goal of life is the repose of the nirvāṇic experience of life: “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world,” and soon. In a credo religion, the goal of life tends to get formulated. In Islam, it’s in the very name of the religion: islām means “submission,” to bow in acquiescence and reverence to the will of God. This credo gives warriors enormous courage and power: whether they’re going to get killed or not get killed, they move in with submission to the fate. In fact, that’s what a warrior has to do anyhow.

  The warrior’s approach

  is to say “yes” to life:

  “yea” to it all.

  In terms of historical action, Christianity and Islam have the same character. They’re going to remake the world for their God. I find this repulsive, but it’s what makes history, so you have to say “yes” to it. If you say “no” to one little detail of your life, you’ve unraveled the whole thing. You have to say “yes” to the whole thing, including its extinction. That’s what’s known as “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.” It’s my little theme song.

  Love informs the whole universe

  right down into the abyss of hell.

  Dante in his Divine Comedy unfolded a vision of the universe that perfectly satisfied both the approved religious and the accepted scientific notions of his time. When Satan had been flung out of heaven for his pride and disobedience, he was supposed to have fallen like a flaming comet and, when he struck the earth, to have plowed right through to its center. The prodigious crater that he opened thereupon became the fiery pit of Hell; and the great mass of displaced earth pushed forth at the opposite pole became the Mountain of Purgatory, which is represented by Dante as lifting heavenward exactly at the South Pole.87

  Dante saw even the fires of hell

  as a manifestation of God’s love.

  You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created the angels, he commanded them to pay worship to no one but himself; but then, creating man, he commanded them to bow in reverence to this most noble of his works, and Lucifer refused—because, we are told, of his pride. However, according to the Moslem reading of his case, it was rather because he loved and adored god so deeply and intensely that he could not bring himself to bow before anything else. And it was for that that he was flung into Hell, condemned to exist there forever, apart form his love.88

  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.