87. Notes - a personal spiritual mythology

87.  7 April 2019

       This is Amorella. You have skimmed over the Emerson and Over-Soul above and assume Miss Havisham will comment on it but that is not going to happen. What you really are asking is what her circumstances are in relationship to your human consciousness in this blog. - Amorella

       1307 hours. I understand what you are saying. I wanted to talk about something far too broad where all matter of opinions on the soul are debatable whereas focusing on my soul only I have the right dig in with plausibility and imagination. Interesting. I had not thought that. You are right. 

       I hold all events and memories that are worthy of your self-existence beyond the physical realms. From these you can debate down into which better show who you are after further self-study. However, all events and memories originally set forth, stay. You create your own interpretations just as in life, only with the greater maturity of having passed through the physical universe as you understood and interpreted it. Events and memories of those events take on an added importance when there are no more 'real' events related to the physical world. The spirit is the light, the ghost, as it were in the physical world, is but a shade of reality. The sun as to a lit match stick at most, and the sun as to a mere ember at least. This is who I am. Through your heart and mind I make constant judgments on events and memories because when you are physically dead, the events and memories close.  - mh

       1333 hours. This helps my understanding. In a sense (and I am thinking of Joseph Campbell here) this work is the inventing of a personal spiritual mythology.

       This blog is a personal spiritual mythology in the Campbell sense. Post. - Amorella

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"Myth is an organization of symbolic forms, images, and narratives that are metaphoric of the possibilities of human experience and fulfillment of a given society at a given time." 

- Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. Campbell's most well-known work is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero shared by world mythologies, termed the monomyth.

Since the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell's theory has been applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. His philosophy has been summarized by his own often repeated phrase: "Follow your bliss." He gained recognition in Hollywood when George Lucas credited Campbell's work as influencing his Star Wars saga.

Life

Background

Joseph Campbell was born in White Plains, New York, on March 26, 1904, the son of Josephine (née Lynch) and Charles William Campbell. He was from an upper-middle-class Irish Catholic family. During his childhood, he moved with his family to nearby New Rochelle, New York. In 1919, a fire destroyed the family home in New Rochelle, killing his grandmother.

In 1921, Campbell graduated from the Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut. While at Dartmouth College he studied biology and mathematics, but decided that he preferred the humanities. He transferred to Columbia University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature in 1925 and a Master of Arts degree in medieval literature in 1927. At Dartmouth he had joined Delta Tau Delta. An accomplished athlete, he received awards in track and field events, and, for a time, was among the fastest half-mile runners in the world. 

In 1924, Campbell traveled to Europe with his family. On the ship during his return trip he encountered the messiah elect of the Theosophical Society, Jiddu Krishnamurti; they discussed Indian philosophy, sparking in Campbell an interest in Hindu and Indian thought. In 1927, he received a fellowship from Columbia University to study in Europe. Campbell studied Old French, Provençal, and Sanskrit at the University of Paris and the University of Munich. He learned to read and speak French and German. 

On his return to Columbia University in 1929, Campbell expressed a desire to pursue the study of Sanskrit and modern art in addition to Medieval literature. Lacking faculty approval, Campbell withdrew from graduate studies. Later in life he jested that it is a sign of incompetence to have a PhD in the liberal arts, the discipline covering his work. 

The Great Depression

With the arrival of the Great Depression, Campbell spent the next five years (1929–1934) living in a rented shack in Woodstock, New York.^[16] There, he contemplated the next course of his life^[17] while engaged in intensive and rigorous independent study. He later said that he "would divide the day into four four-hour periods, of which I would be reading in three of the four-hour periods, and free one of them ... I would get nine hours of sheer reading done a day. And this went on for five years straight." 

Campbell traveled to California for a year (1931–1932), continuing his independent studies and becoming close friends with the budding writer John Steinbeck and his wife Carol. Campbell was introduced to the Steinbecks by author and early nutritionist Adelle Davis whom he met and developed a close relationship with on a cruise to the Caribbean with his father in December 1929. On the Monterey Peninsula, Campbell, like John Steinbeck, fell under the spell of the marine biologist Ed Ricketts(the model for "Doc" in Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row as well as central characters in several other novels). Campbell lived for a while next door to Ricketts, participated in professional and social activities at his neighbor's, and accompanied him, along with Xenia and Sasha Kashevaroff, on a 1932 journey to Juneau, Alaska on the Grampus. Campbell began writing a novel centered on Ricketts as a hero but, unlike Steinbeck, did not complete his book. 

Bruce Robison writes that Campbell would refer to those days as a time when everything in his life was taking shape. ... Campbell, the great chronicler of the "hero's journey" in mythology, recognized patterns that paralleled his own thinking in one of Ricketts's unpublished philosophical essays. Echoes of Carl Jung, Robinson Jeffers and James Joyce can be found in the work of Steinbeck and Ricketts as well as Campbell. 

Campbell continued his independent reading while teaching for a year in 1933 at the Canterbury School, during which time he also attempted to publish works of fiction. While teaching at the Canterbury School, Campbell sold his first short story Strictly Platonic to Liberty magazine. 

Sarah Lawrence College

Campbell had the position as Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1938, he married one of his former students, the dancer-choreographer Jean Erdman. For most of their 49 years of marriage they shared a two-room apartment in Greenwich Village in New York City. In the 1980s they also purchased an apartment in Honolulu and divided their time between the two cities. They did not have any children.

Early in World War II, Campbell attended a lecture by the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer; the two men became good friends. After Zimmer's death, Campbell was given the task of editing and posthumously publishing Zimmer's papers, which he would do over the following decade.

In 1955–1956, as the last volume of Zimmer's posthumous (The Art of Indian Asia, Its Mythology and Transformations) was finally about to be published, Campbell took a sabbatical from Sarah Lawrence College and traveled, for the first time, to Asia. He spent six months in southern Asia (mostly India) and another six in East Asia (mostly Japan). This year had a profound influence on his thinking about Asian religion and myth, and also on the necessity for teaching comparative mythology to a larger, non-academic audience. 

In 1972, Campbell retired from Sarah Lawrence College, after having taught there for 38 years.

Later life and death

Campbell attended a Grateful Dead concert in 1986, and marveled that "Everyone has just lost themselves in everybody else here!" With the Dead, Campbell put on a conference called "Ritual and Rapture from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead".

Campbell died at his home in Honolulu, Hawaii, on October 30, 1987, from complications of esophageal cancer. Before his death he had completed filming the series of interviews with Bill Moyers that aired the following spring as The Power of Myth. He is buried in O'ahu Cemetery, Honolulu.

Influences

Art, literature, philosophy

Campbell often referred to the work of modern writers James Joyce and Thomas Mann in his lectures and writings, as well as to the art of Pablo Picasso. He was introduced to their work during his stay as a graduate student.

The works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche had a profound effect on Campbell's thinking; he quoted their writing frequently.

The "follow your bliss" philosophy attributed to Campbell following the original broadcast of The Power of Myth (see below) derives from the Hindu Upanishads; however, Campbell was possibly also influenced by the 1922 Sinclair Lewis novel Babbitt. In The Power of Myth, Campbell quotes from the novel:

Campbell: Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt?
Moyers:Not in a long time.
Campbell:Remember the last line? "I have never done a thing that I wanted to do in all my life." That is a man who never followed his bliss. 

Psychology and anthropology

The anthropologist Leo Frobenius and his disciple Adolf Ellegard Jensen were important to Campbell's view of cultural history. Campbell was also influenced by the psychological work of Abraham Maslow and Stanislav Grof.

Campbell's ideas regarding myth and its relation to the human psyche are dependent in part on the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud, but in particular on the work of Jung, whose studies of human psychology greatly influenced Campbell. 

Campbell's conception of myth is closely related to the Jungian method of dream interpretation, which is heavily reliant on symbolic interpretation. 

Jung's insights into archetypes were heavily influenced by the Bardo Thodol (also known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead). In his book The Mythic Image,Campbell quotes Jung's statement about the Bardo Thodol, that it belongs to that class of writings which not only are of interest to specialists in Mahayana Buddhism, but also, because of their deep humanity and still deeper insight into the secrets of the human psyche, make an especial appeal to the layman seeking to broaden his knowledge of life ... For years, ever since it was first published, the Bardo Thodol has been my constant companion, and to it I owe not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights. 

Comparative mythology and Campbell's theories

Monomyth

Campbell's concept of monomyth (one myth) refers to the theory that sees all mythic narratives as variations of a single great story. The theory is based on the observation that a common pattern exists beneath the narrative elements of most great myths, regardless of their origin or time of creation. Campbell often referred to the ideas of Adolf Bastian and his distinction between what he called "folk" and "elementary" ideas, the latter referring to the prime matter of monomyth while the former to the multitude of local forms the myth takes in order to remain an up-to-date carrier of sacred meanings. The central pattern most studied by Campbell is often referred to as the hero's journey and was first described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces(1949). An enthusiast of novelist James Joyce, Campbell borrowed the term monomyth from Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Campbell also made heavy use of Carl Jung's theories on the structure of the human psyche, and he often used terms such as anima/animus and ego consciousness.

As a strong believer in the psychic unity of mankind and its poetic expression through mythology, Campbell made use of the concept to express the idea that the whole of the human race can be seen as engaged in the effort of making the world "transparent to transcendence" by showing that underneath the world of phenomena lies an eternal source which is constantly pouring its energies into this world of time, suffering, and ultimately death.To achieve this task one needs to speak about things that existed before and beyond words, a seemingly impossible task, the solution to which lies in the metaphors found in myths. These metaphors are statements that point beyond themselves into the transcendent.The Hero's Journey was the story of the man or woman who, through great suffering, reached an experience of the eternal source and returned with gifts powerful enough to set their society free.

As this story spread through space and evolved through time, it was broken down into various local forms (masks), depending on the social structures and environmental pressures that existed for the culture that interpreted it. The basic structure, however, has remained relatively unchanged and can be classified using the various stages of a hero's adventure through the story, stages such as the Call to Adventure, Receiving Supernatural Aid, Meeting with the Goddess/Atonement with the Father and Return. These stages, as well as the symbols one encounters throughout the story, provide the necessary metaphors to express the spiritual truths the story is trying to convey. Metaphor for Campbell, in contrast with comparisons which make use of the word like, pretend to a literal interpretation of what they are referring to, as in the sentence "Jesus is the Son of God" rather than "the relationship of man to God is like that of a son to a father".

In the 2000 documentary Joseph Campbell: A Hero's Journey, he explains God in terms of a metaphor:

God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought, even the categories of being and non-being. Those are categories of thought. I mean it's as simple as that. So,it depends on how much you want to think about it. Whether it's doing you any good. Whether it is putting you in touch with the mystery that's the ground of your own being. If it isn't, well, it's a lie.

So, half the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts. Those are what we call theists. The other half are people who know that the metaphors are not facts. And so, they're lies. Those are the atheists. 

Some scholars have disagreed with the concept of the "monomyth" because of its oversimplification of different cultures. According to Robert Ellwood, "A tendency to think in generic terms of people, races ... is undoubtedly the profoundest flaw in mythological thinking." 

Functions of myth

Campbell often described mythology as having a fourfold function within human society. These appear at the end of his work The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, as well as various lectures.

The Metaphysical Function

Awakening a sense of awe before the mystery of being

According to Campbell, the absolute mystery of life, what he called transcendent reality, cannot be captured directly in words or images. Symbols and mythic metaphors on the other hand point outside themselves and into that reality.They are what Campbell called "being statements" and their enactment through ritual can give to the participant a sense of that ultimate mystery as an experience. "Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of reason and coercion.... The first function of mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is." 

The Cosmological Function

Explaining the shape of the universe

For pre-modern societies, myth also functioned as a proto-science, offering explanations for the physical phenomena that surrounded and affected their lives, such as the change of seasons and the life cycles of animals and plants.

The Sociological Function

Validate and support the existing social order

Ancient societies had to conform to an existing social order if they were to survive at all. This is because they evolved under "pressure" from necessities much more intense than the ones encountered in our modern world. Mythology confirmed that order and enforced it by reflecting it into the stories themselves, often describing how the order arrived from divine intervention. Campbell often referred to these "conformity" myths as the "Right Hand Path" to reflect the brain's left hemisphere's abilities for logic, order and linearity. Together with these myths however, he observed the existence of the "Left Hand Path", mythic patterns like the "Hero's Journey" which are revolutionary in character in that they demand from the individual a surpassing of social norms and sometimes even of morality. 

The Pedagogical Function

Guide the individual through the stages of life

As a person goes through life, many psychological challenges will be encountered. Myth may serve as a guide for successful passage through the stages of one's life.

Evolution of myth

Campbell's view of mythology was by no means static and his books describe in detail how mythologies evolved through time, reflecting the realities in which each society had to adjust. Various stages of cultural development have different yet identifiable mythological systems. In brief these are:

The Way of the Animal Powers

Hunting and gathering societies

At this stage of evolution religion was animistic, as all of nature was seen as being infused with a spirit or divine presence. At center stage was the main hunting animal of that culture, whether the buffalo for Native Americans or the eland for South African tribes, and a large part of religion focused on dealing with the psychological tension that came from the reality of the necessity to kill versus the divinity of the animal. This was done by presenting the animals as springing from an eternal archetypal source and coming to this world as willing victims, with the understanding that their lives would be returned to the soil or to the Mother through a ritual of restoration. The act of slaughter then becomes a ritual where both parties, animal and mankind, are equal participants. In Mythos and The Power of Myth, Campbell recounts the story he calls "The Buffalo's Wife" as told by the Blackfoot tribe of North America. The story tells of a time when the buffalos stopped coming to the hunting plains, leaving the tribe to starve. The chief's daughter promises to marry the buffalo chief in return for their reappearance, but is eventually spared and taught the buffalo dance by the animals themselves, through which the spirits of their dead will return to their eternal life source. Indeed, Campbell taught that throughout history mankind has held a belief that all life comes from and returns to another dimension which transcends temporality, but which can be reached through ritual.

The Way of the Seeded Earth

Early agrarian societies

Beginning in the fertile grasslands of the Levant and the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age and moving to Europe, the practice of agriculture spread along with a new way of understanding mankind's relationship to the world. At this time the earth was seen as the Mother, and the myths focused around Her life-giving powers. The plant and cultivation cycle was mirrored in religious rituals which often included human sacrifice, symbolic or literal. The main figures of this system were a female Great Goddess, Mother Earth, and her ever-dying and ever-resurrected son/consort, a male God. At this time the focus was to participate in the repetitive rhythm the world moved in expressed as the four seasons, the birth and death of crops and the phases of the moon. At the center of this motion was the Mother Goddess from whom all life springs and to whom all life returns. This often gave Her a dual aspect as both mother and destroyer.

The Way of the Celestial Lights

The first high civilizations

As the first agricultural societies evolved into the high civilisations of Mesopotamia and Babylonia, the observation of the stars inspired them with the idea that life on earth must also follow a similar mathematically predetermined pattern in which individual beings are but mere participants in an eternal cosmic play. The king was symbolised by the Sun with the golden crown as its main metaphor, while his court were the orbiting planets. The Mother Goddess remained, but her powers were now fixed within the rigid framework of a clockwork universe.

However, two barbarian incursions changed that. As the Indo-European (Aryan) people descended from the north and the Semites swept up from the Arabian desert, they carried with them a male dominated mythology with a warrior god whose symbol was the thunder.

As they conquered, mainly due to the superior technology of iron smithing, their mythology blended with and subjugated the previous system of the Earth Goddess. Many mythologies of the ancient world, such as those of Greece, India, and Persia, are a result of that fusion with gods retaining some of their original traits and character but now belonging to a single system. Figures such as Zeus and Indra are thunder gods who now interact with Demeter and Dionysus, whose ritual sacrifice and rebirth, bearing testament to his pre-Indo-European roots, were still enacted in classical Greece. But for the most part, the focus heavily shifted toward the masculine, with Zeus ascending the throne of the gods and Dionysus demoted to a mere demi-god.

This demotion was very profound in the case of the biblical imagery where the female elements were marginalized to an extreme. Campbell believed that Eve and the snake that tempted her were once fertility gods worshipped in their own right, with the tree of knowledge being the Tree of Life. He also found significance in the biblical story of Cain and Abel, with Cain being a farmer whose agrarian offering is not accepted by God, while herder Abel's animal sacrifice is. In the lecture series of Mythos, Campbell speaks of the Mysteries of Eleusis in Ancient Greece, where Demeter's journey in the underworld was enacted for young men and women of the time. There he observed that wheat was presented as the ultimate mystery with wine being a symbol of Dionysus, much like in the Christian mysteries where bread and wine are considered to incarnate the body and blood of Jesus.Both religions carry the same "seeded earth" cosmology in different forms while retaining an image of the ever-dying, ever-resurrected God.

The Way of Man

Medieval mythology, romantic love, and the birth of the modern spirit

Campbell recognized that the poetic form of courtly love, carried through medieval Europe by the traveling troubadours, contained a complete mythology in its own right. In The Power of Myth as well as the "Occidental Mythology" volume of The Masks of God, Campbell describes the emergence of a new kind of erotic experience as a "person to person" affair, in contrast with the purely physical definition given to Eros in the ancient world and the communal agape found in the Christian religion. An archetypal story of this kind is the legend of Tristan and Isolde which, apart from its mystical function, shows the transition from an arranged-marriage society as practiced in the Middle Ages and sanctified by the church, into the form of marriage by "falling in love" with another person that we recognize today. 

So what essentially started from a mythological theme, has since become a social reality, mainly due to a change in perception brought about by a new mythology—and represents a central foundational manifestation of Campbell's overriding interpretive message, "Follow your bliss."

Campbell believed that in the modern world the function served by formal, traditional mythological systems has been taken on by individual creators such as artists and philosophers. In the works of some of his favorites, such as Thomas Mann, Pablo Picasso and James Joyce, he saw mythological themes that could serve the same life-giving purpose that mythology had once played. 

Accordingly, Campbell believed the religions of the world to be the various culturally influenced "masks" of the same fundamental, transcendent truths. 

All religions can bring one to an elevated awareness above and beyond a dualistic conception of reality, or idea of "pairs of opposites" such as being and non-being, or right and wrong. 

Indeed, he quotes from the Rigveda in the preface to The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

 "Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names."

Selected and edited from Wikipedia

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       1617 hours. "I have my doubts but I am not an atheist." - rho 

       So, you disagree with Campbell about theists and atheists. - Amorella

       1619 hours. I do. I wanted this on the record after completing the selected reading from Wikipedia. I am an agnostic who is also an existential transcendentalist. 

       That's fair and true. mh

       1624 hours. I am surprised by Miss Havisham’s comment, but I feel comfortable with her assessment even though my reflection is always open to scrutiny. 

       Yes, your reflection is always open as long as you are living. - Amorella

`

       1632 hours. I don't know where to go from here. Should I begin a new blog beginning today?

       No, transparency is more important. At least for now let's call Notes 1 - 86: An Introduction to a Personal Spiritual Mythology. Post when possible. - Amorella

       1642 hours. My iPhone is not connecting to my MacBook at the moment. I am at a loss for words. I need to think and evaluate.