Joseph Campbell - Mythic Reflections - The Diigo Meta page

• 09 Apr 09
  

  WickedBuddhi

  History

• 09 Sep 08
  

  Clay Burell

  Joseph Campbell interview discussing why Western religions - Judaism, Christianity, and (I would add) Islam - are catastrophic "problems" for the world.

  christianity religion literature culture

  • Tom: Heinrich Zimmer said "The best truths cannot be spoken.
    . . "

    
    
    

    Joseph: "And the second best are misunderstood."

    
    
    

    Tom: Then you added something to that.

    
    
    

    Joseph: The third best is the usual conversation - science, history,
    sociology.

    
    
    

    Tom: Why do people confuse these?

    
    
    

    Joseph: Because the imagery that has to be used in order to tell
    what can't be told, symbolic imagery, is then understood or interpreted
    not symbolically but factually, empirically. It's a natural thing, but that's
    the whole problem with Western religion. All of the symbols are interpreted
    as if they were historical references. They're not. And if they are, then
    so what?

  • If a deity
    blocks off transcendency, cuts you short of it by stopping at himself, he
    turns you into a worshipper and a devotee, and he hasn't opened the mystery
    of your own being.

    
    
    

    Tom: You once called that the pathology of theology.

    
    
    

    Joseph: That's what I would call it.

    
    
    

    Tom: Walter Huston Clark says the church is like a vaccination
    against the real thing.

    
    
    

    Joseph: Jung says religion is a defense against the experience
    of god. I say our religions are.

  • 9 more annotations...

  • • Tom: What do you do, then, if the experience is not to be found
      in religion?

      
      
      

      Joseph: You find it in mysticism and get in touch with mystics
      who read these symbolic forms symbolically. Mystics are people who are not
      theologians; theologians are people who interpret the vocabulary of scripture
      as if it were referring to supernatural facts.

      
      
      

      There are plenty of mystics in the Christian tradition, only we don't
      hear much about them. But now and again you run into it. Meister Eckhart
      is such a person. Thomas Merton had it. Dante had it. Dionysus the Areopagyte
      had it. John of the Cross breaks through every now and again and then comes
      slopping back again. He flashes back and forth.

      
      
      

      I think Joyce is full of it. And Thomas Mann had it in his writing, though
      it isn't as far out as Joyce. It's strange how after Mann's death it disappears
      and you don't get it any more.

    • Tom: I gather you're not terribly fond of the Bible.

      
      
      

      Joseph: Not at all! It's the most over-advertised book
      in the world. It's very pretentious to claim it to be the word of God, or
      accept it as such and perpetuate this tribal mythology, justifying all kinds
      of violence to people who are not members of the tribe.

      
      
      

      The thing I see about the Bible that's unfortunate is that it's a tribally
      circumscribed mythology. It deals with a certain people at a certain time.
      The Christians magnified it to include them. It then turns this society
      against all others, whereas the condition of the world today is that this
      particular society that's presented in the Bible isn't even the most important.
      This thing is like a dead weight. It's pulling us back because it belongs
      to an earlier period. We can't break loose and move into a modern theology.

      
      
      

      One of the great promises of mythology is, with what social group do
      you identify? How about the planet? To say that the members of this particular
      social group are the elite of God's world is a good way to keep that group
      together, but look at the consequences! I think that what might be called
      the sanctified chauvinism of the Bible is one of the curses of the planet
      today.

    • Tom: There's a lot of interesting material in the Old Testament,
      isn't there? For instance, it says that God created everything except the
      water.

      
      
      

      Joseph: You've put your finger on it. The water I is the
      goddess. You see, what happens in the Old Testament is that the masculine
      principle remains personified and the female principle is reduced to an
      element. The first verse says when God created, the breath of God brooded
      over the waters. And the water is the goddess.

    • Tom: I assume you don't believe in an actual, literal seven
      days of creation.

      
      
      

      Joseph: Of course not. That has nothing to do with the actual
      evolutionary story as we now get it.

      
      
      

      Tom: How do you reconcile these two accounts?

      
      
      

      Joseph: Why should one bother to, any more than you would try
      to reconcile the Navajo story?

      
      
      

      Tom: I remember hearing a wonderful lecture by the late Louis
      Leakey in which he insisted that there was no conflict between the Genesis
      account of creation and what he had discovered.

      
      
      

      Joseph: Well, it is in conflict because he didn't read it carefully
      enough. There are two Biblical accounts, one in the first chapter and one
      in the second, and they're quite contrary to each other.

      
      
      

      It's about time we stopped feeling that we have to believe in the Bible.
      I'd just as soon try to work out the Navajo thing, where they come up through
      four worlds. One is red, one yellow . . .

    • Tom: But if you throw out the Bible as history, don't you also
      throw it out as a moral imperative?

      
      
      

      Joseph: Yes. I don't think the Bible is anybody's moral imperative,
      unless you want to be a traditional Jew. That's what the Bible tells you.

      
      
      

      Tom: Doesn't it tell you how to be a good person?

      
      
      

      Joseph: No.

      
      
      

      Tom: Lots of people think so.

      
      
      

      Joseph: Just read the thing. Maybe it gives you a few hints, but
      the Bible also tells you to kill everyone in Canaan, right down to the mice.

      
      
      

      Tom: What was the passage you quoted to justify their exclusivity
      ideas?

      
      
      

      Joseph: "There is no God in all the world but in Israel."
      That leaves everybody out except the Jews. This is one of the most chauvinistic
      views of morality.

      
      
      

      One of the great texts is in Exodus, when the Jews are told to kill the
      lambs and put the blood on their doorsteps so the angel of death won't kill
      any of their children, but will kill the first children of the Egyptians.
      And the night before they leave, they're to invite their Egyptian friends
      to lend them their jewels and so on. Then the next night, they run off with
      the jewels, and the text says, so they fleeced the Egyptians. No, so they
      despoiled the Egyptians. You call this good ethics?

    • Tom: What's the background of something like Cain and Abel?

      
      
      

      Joseph: There's a very amusing Sumerian dialogue that appeared
      about 1500 years earlier than the Cain and Abel story. It's about a herder
      and an agriculturalist competing for the favor of the goddess. The goddess
      chooses to prefer the agriculturalist and his offering. Well, the Jews come
      into this area, and they're not agriculturalists, they're herders. And they
      don't have a goddess, they have a god. So they turn the whole thing upside
      down, and make God favor the herder against the agriculturalist.

      
      
      

      The interesting thing is that throughout the Old Testament, it's the
      younger brother who overturns the older brother in God's favor. It happens
      time and time again. This is simply a function of the fact that the Jews
      come in as younger brothers. They come in as barbaric Bedouins from the
      desert, into highly sophisticated agricultural areas, and they're declaring
      that although the others are the elders - as Cain was, the founder of cities
      and all that - they are God's favorite. It's just another form of sanctified
      chauvinism. You understand the view of exclusive religion, don't you - "You
      worship God in your way, I'll worship God in his."

    • Tom: I gather there were a number of East-West conflicts in
      the early church. I find Pellagius a fascinating figure, for example.

      
      
      

      Joseph: Pellagius in the fourth century was either a Welshman
      or an Irishman, I think. He upheld the individualistic Western tradition
      against what I would call the tribalism of the East, and was considered
      a heretic. He stated the main points against the doctrines of which St.
      Augustine, his contemporary, was the champion. One was the doctrine of original
      sin. Pellagius said, you cannot inherit another's sin. Therefore, Adam's
      sin is not inherited by anybody.

      
      
      

      Tom: The sins of the father are not visited upon the
      son?

      
      
      

      Joseph: That is all Eastern philosophy, not European. Another
      thing Pellagius said is that you cannot be saved by another's act. That
      takes care of Jesus on the cross and knocks the whole thing out. Of course
      that was rejected. Pellagius was defending a doctrine of individual responsibility.
      I don't know where it comes from, but certainly it was typical, I would
      say, of European as opposed to Eastern points of view. You were an individual,
      not merely the member of a group.

      
      
      

      Tom: That sounds like the line in the King Arthur legend .
      . .

      
      
      

      Joseph: "Each knight entered the forest at a point he had
      chosen, where it was darkest and there was no way or path." That's
      from The Quest of the Sangral, 1215 or so in France.

      
      
      

      Tom: How do they expect to find their way then?

      
      
      

      Joseph: By questing.

      
      
      

      Tom: And that's what we all do in life?

      
      
      

      Joseph: Yes. Otherwise, you'd follow someone else's path, follow
      the well-tried ways. No one in the world was ever you before, with your
      particular gifts and abilities and possibilities. It's a shame to waste
      those by doing what someone else has done.

    • "When we get ready to hang the capitalists, they'll compete
      to sell us the rope."
    • And look at what people are reading in the papers. You get into the subways
      and people are all reading the same thing - this murder, that murder. This
      rape, this divorce. What topics to be mentating on! This journalistic accent
      in our lives is murder. Murder.
• 26 Oct 06
  

  arete ksuanth618 spirituality

• 16 Sep 06
  

  Kevin Champion

  arete ksuanth618 spirituality

  • Joseph: Because the imagery that has to be used in order to tell
    what can't be told, symbolic imagery, is then understood or interpreted
    not symbolically but factually, empirically. It's a natural thing, but that's
    the whole problem with Western religion. All of the symbols are interpreted
    as if they were historical references. They're not. And if they are, then
    so what?

  • Tom: What does myth do for us? Why is it so important?

    
    
    

    Joseph: It puts you in touch with a plane of reference that goes
    past your mind and into your very being, into your very gut. The ultimate
    mystery of being and nonbeing transcends all categories of knowledge and
    thought.

  • 17 more annotations...
  • • And whatever
      you do can be discussed in relationship to this ground of truth. Though
      to talk about it as truth is a little bit deceptive because when we think
      of truth we think of something that can be conceptualized. It goes past
      that.
    • What you're learning in myth is about yourself as part of the
      being of the world. If it talks not about you, finally, but about something
      out there, then it's short.
    • If a deity
      blocks off transcendency, cuts you short of it by stopping at himself, he
      turns you into a worshipper and a devotee, and he hasn't opened the mystery
      of your own being.

    • Joseph: You find it in mysticism and get in touch with mystics
      who read these symbolic forms symbolically. Mystics are people who are not
      theologians; theologians are people who interpret the vocabulary of scripture
      as if it were referring to supernatural facts.

      
      
      

      There are plenty of mystics in the Christian tradition

    • This means not being tied to this, that, or
      another tradition, but letting the general comparison . . . See, I'm very
      much for comparative studies of mythology. I think one of the problems today
      is that society has moved into a multicultural relationship that renders
      archaic these culture-bounded mythological systems - like the Christian,
      the Jewish, the Hindu.

    • Tom: What are the purposes of myth?

      
      
      

      Joseph: There are four of them. One's mystical. One's cosmological:
      the whole universe as we now understand it becomes, as it were, a revelation
      of the mystery dimension. The third is sociological, taking care of the
      society that exists. But we don't know what this society is, it's changed
      so fast. Good God! In the past 40 years there have been such transformations
      in mores that it's impossible to talk about them. Finally, there's the pedagogical
      one of guiding an individual through the inevitables of a lifetime. But
      even that's become impossible because we don't know what the inevitables
      of a lifetime are any more. They change from moment to moment.

    • Now, the panorama of possibilities and possible lives and how they
      change from decade to decade has made it impossible to mythologize. The
      individual is just going in raw. It's like open field running in football
      - there are no rules. You have to watch everything all the way down the
      line. All you can learn is what your own inward life is and try to stay
      loyal to that.

    • What role does ritual play in mythology?

      
      
      

      Joseph: A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And through the enactment
      it brings to mind the implications of the life act that you are engaged
      in.

    • When you're eating something, this is something quite special to do.
      And you ought to have that thought when you eat a carrot as well as when
      you eat an animal, it seems to me. But you don't know what you're doing
      unless you think about it. That's what a ritual does. It give you an occasion
      to realize what you're doing so that you're participating in the inevitable
      energy of life in its exchanges. That's what rituals are for; you do things
      with intention, and not just in the animal way, ravenously, without knowing
      what you're doing.
    • Joseph: But that doesn't work any more. Christianity isn't moving
      people's lives today. What's moving people's lives is the stock market and
      the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It's a totally materialistic
      level that has taken over the world. There isn't even an ideal that anybody's
      fighting for.

    • Tom: But if you throw out the Bible as history, don't you also
      throw it out as a moral imperative?

      
      
      

      Joseph: Yes. I don't think the Bible is anybody's moral imperative,
      unless you want to be a traditional Jew. That's what the Bible tells you.

    • The thing I see about the Bible that's unfortunate is that it's a tribally
      circumscribed mythology. It deals with a certain people at a certain time.
      The Christians magnified it to include them. It then turns this society
      against all others, whereas the condition of the world today is that this
      particular society that's presented in the Bible isn't even the most important.
      This thing is like a dead weight. It's pulling us back because it belongs
      to an earlier period. We can't break loose and move into a modern theology.

      
      
      

      One of the great promises of mythology is, with what social group do
      you identify? How about the planet? To say that the members of this particular
      social group are the elite of God's world is a good way to keep that group
      together, but look at the consequences! I think that what might be called
      the sanctified chauvinism of the Bible is one of the curses of the planet
      today.

    • Tom: Do you mean that if the infinite reveals itself to you,
      your little mind responds by saying "God spoke to me" because
      it can only grasp what happened in its limited terms?

      
      
      

      Joseph: That's right.

    • This is true also of sex. People who just engage in sex as a fun game,
      as something exciting like that, don't realize what they're doing. Then
      you don't have the sacramentalization. And the whole reason marriage is
      a sacrament is that it lets you know what the hell is correct and what isn't,
      and what's going on here. A male and female coming together with the possibility
      of another life coming out of it - that's a big act.

    • Tom: Where does this experience come from?

      
      
      

      Joseph: Your life is your experience of transcendent energies
      because you don't know where your life comes from, but you can experience
      them. We're experiencing them right here, just by sitting on them and having
      them bubble up.

      
      
      

      Tom: Are you using "transcendent" as another term
      for God?

      
      
      

      Joseph: If you want to personify it. Brahman is the Sanskrit way
      of talking about it. Manitou is the Algonquin way, Orinda is the Iroquois,
      Owacan is the Sioux.

    • Tom: What does the term "transcendent" mean, in von
      Durckheim's phrase, "transparent to the transcendent"?

      
      
      

      Joseph: The simple meaning of the term is that which goes beyond
      all concepts and conceptualization, or that which lies beyond all
      conceptualization.

    • The basic mythological
      concept is transcendent of personification. Personification is a concession
      to human consciousness so that you can talk about these things.

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