Symbols are only the vehicles of communication; they must not be mistaken for the final term, the tenor, of their reference. No matter how attractive or impressive they may seem, they remain but convenient means, accommodated to the understanding. Hence the personality or personalities of God -- whether represented in trinitarian, dualistic, or unitarian terms, in polytheistic, monotheistic, or henotheistic terms, pictorially or verbally, as documented fact or as apocalyptic vision -- no one should attempt to read or interpret as the final thing. The problem of the theologian is to keep the symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey.
He’s speaking here in another context, but it can still serve as a guidestar in interpreting his own work. Be a sensitive and discerning reader. Campbell is going to throw a lot of symbols at you, but don’t let their light blind you to the substance that they are meant to represent.
Many are the figures, particularly in the social and mythological contexts of the Orient, who represent this ultimate state of the anonymous presence. The sages of the hermit groves and the wandering mendicants who play a conspicuous role in the life and legends of the East; in myth such figures as the Wandering Jew (despised, unknown, yet with the pearl of great price in his pocket); the tatterdemalion beggar, set upon by dogs; the miraculous mendicant bard whose music stills the heart; or the masquerading god, Wotan, Viracocha, Edshu: these are examples. “Sometimes a fool, sometimes a sage, sometimes possessed of regal splendor; sometimes wandering, sometimes as motionless as a python, sometimes wearing a benignant expression; sometimes honored, sometimes insulted, sometimes unknown -- thus lives the man of realisation, ever happy with supreme bliss. Just as an actor is always a man, whether he puts on the costume of his role or lays it aside, so is the perfect knower of the Imperishable always the Imperishable, and nothing else.
The symbols will come in many shapes and sizes, but they will all represent the same thing, and it will take a person of exceptional wisdom and discernment to see the true Imperishable that all these perishable symbols reflect, if not directly illuminate.
In The Hero With A Thousand Faces Campbell is talking primarily about something he calls the Monomyth -- elsewhere referred to as the Hero’s Journey -- a template for stories that seem to transcend cultures and time, and which involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.
Here’s a diagram Campbell provides:
And here’s Campbell’s description of it.
The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give him magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again -- if the powers have remained unfriendly to him -- his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).
Surely you recognize this template, and can see in it a story you are familiar with -- even one that might have shaped your understanding of yourself and your world. The Hero, after all, is Prometheus, is Jesus Christ, is Luke Skywalker -- and is hundreds of others from human cultures throughout time and location. Campbell spends most of this work dissecting it, chasing down its different branches, and providing examples upon examples of this Monomyth in action.
But the most interesting part of this work are the glimpses it offers (even written in 1949) to modern man’s difficulty with and distance from this mythology of his own past.
It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may well be that the very incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid. We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood. In the United States there is even a pathos of inverted emphasis: the goal is not to grow old, but to remain young; not to mature away from Mother, but to cleave to her. And so, while husbands are worshiping at their boyhood shrines, being the lawyers, merchants, or masterminds their parents wanted them to be, their wives, even after fourteen years of marriage and two fine children produced and raised, are still on the search for love -- which can come to them only from the centaurs, sileni, satyrs, and other concupiscent incubi of the rout of Pan, either as in the second of the above-recited dreams, or as in our popular, vanilla-frosted temples of the venereal goddess, under the make-up of the latest heroes of the screen.
What a sentence! Men worshiping at their boyhood shrines, women searching for love in our popular, vanilla-frosted temples of the venereal goddess -- and both of them uncoupled from the myths and rituals that their ancestors used to cross the boundary into adulthood and, therefore, uncoupled from each other. Into this all-too-pervasive reality…
The psycho-analyst has to come along, at last, to assert again the tried wisdom of the older, forward-looking teachings of the masked medicine dancers and the witch-doctor-circumcisers; whereupon we find, as in the dream of the serpent bite, that the ageless initiation symbolism is produced spontaneously by the patient himself at the moment of release. Apparently, there is something in these initiatory images so necessary to the psyche that if they are not supplied from without, through myth and ritual, they will have to be announced again, through dream, from within -- lest our energies should remain locked in a banal, long-outmoded toy-room, at the bottom of the sea.
It is the Monomyth, evidently so essential to our psyche, and so absent from our culture, that it manifests itself unstudied and unrealized in our dreams -- and there it was, in the 1930s, waiting for Freud and the psycho-analysts to discover it and return it to its place of predominance and influence.
And modern man evidently needed this help, because he had by then lost a coherent understanding of what this mythology even was -- able to approach it now only with the help of different sages who use different lenses to sharpen it into focus for different purposes.
Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Müller); as a repository of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual and his group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung); as the traditional vehicle of man’s profoundest metaphysical insights (Coomaraswamy); and as God’s Revelation to His children (the Church). Mythology is all of these. The various judgments are determined by the viewpoints of the judges. For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, of how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race, the age.
And all of this begs Campbell’s ultimate question -- who is today’s Hero? For this view of mythology, of the very function of the Monomyth and the Hero’s Journey itself -- presupposes an identity for modern man that he and his institutions no longer recognize.
All of which is far indeed from the contemporary view; for the democratic ideal of the self-determining individual, the invention of the power-driven machine, and the development of the scientific method of research, have so transformed human life that the long-inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed. In the fateful, epoch-announcing words of Nietsche’s Zarathustra: “Dead are all the gods.” One knows the tale; it has been told a thousand ways. It is the nero-cycle of the modern age, the wonder-story of mankind’s coming to maturity. The spell of the past, the bondage of tradition, was shattered with sure and mighty strokes. The dream-web of myth fell away; the mind opened to full waking consciousness; and modern man emerged from ancient ignorance, like a butterfly from its cocoon, or like the sun at dawn from the womb of mother night.
It gives me an idea -- maybe for my next book? A modern man is plunged back into his mythic past and is forced to live the Monomyth in that context. How will he cope? How would he interpret the experience?
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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