Joseph Campbell was a remarkable man. Ostensibly a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence, his true achievement in life was his work as a comparative mythologist. Campbell studied the mythologies of all cultures and the religions of the world and found the common threads running through all the fables. His writings on the subject are voluminous, a lifetime of work. His 1949 work The Hero With A Thousand Faces has been a standard college text for many decades and rightly so.

Outside of my family and my closest friends, the writings of Joseph Campbell have had the greatest influence on my life. His writings set me on a path (but of my own making, as Campbell would tell you is necessary) which I tread still today. His books fill my shelves.

From time to time, I post the following stories from Campbell. They are deceptively simple tales regarding his personal experiences. The first of them is significant and it is far more timely now than when I've posted it in the past; the second, I post merely as a bonus, but it's something with which I think we can all relate.

The stories are taken from Diane K. Osbon's book Reflections on the Art of Living- a Joseph Campbell Companion. The informality of the language in both these brief tales is due to the fact that they are taken from Campbell's series of lectures at the Esalen Institute, in 1984. Campbell is speaking to an audience:

I had an interesting experience when I was lecturing at the Foreign Services Institute in Washington D.C. to a group of officers about to go on assignment to the Orient or Southeast Asia. In one group there was this very smart black man, who had 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 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 people 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."
Every time you do something like that you find it was the right thing to do, provided 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."

______


I want to tell you about my relationship to confession. As a kid, you go to confession, and you say "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I disobeyed Mother three times, didn't say morning prayers two mornings, and told a lie." He says, "You mustn't do these things. Say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys, and you're clear."
I never got old enough to confess any significant sin. I don't know what the hell would have happened. I did commit one little sin one summer, at Shelter Island, out on Long Island. I was about nine years old. There was a wonderful hardware store named Ferguson's. I remember it well. I'd go there with my mother and see her buy things. She'd say "Charge it", and then go out with them. One such trip, I saw a wonderful penknife with all these things on it. So a few days later I went in alone and said, "I want that knife." The owner said "Here, Joe." I said "Charge it." He said, "Okay."
I went home and said to my mother, "Look at the wonderful penknife I found." She said, "Are you sure you found that?" I said, "Yes, yes, I found it." Well, at the end of the month a bill came for the penknife, and Mother said, "Joe, come here. When you go to confession on Saturday, take that penknife to Father Isadore, confess the sin, and then take the knife around to the sacristy and give it to him."
This was not easy. It was the most severe indication of what I'd done. Five Our Fathers and Five Hail Marys were nothing like giving up that knife. So, I went to confession and tried to tell the priest what I had done. I was an altar boy at the time: you know, "mea culpa, mea culpa" stuff. Afterward, I went around to the sacristy and gave him the penknife. And he said "Oh, Joe, I didn't know it was that serious."
I knew something then that I didn't know before I stole that penknife: charging it without any idea of what was going to happen was wonderful.

I haven't read Osbon's book so that first paragraph was a treat. There was a fair amount to think about in there. thanks.

Added a book to my cart. Sounds interesting.

I don't think I read or studied from The Hero With A Thousand Faces in college, but selections of Joseph Campbell's works did come up a few times. Mostly in anthropology classes. Brilliant man. I need to actually sit down and read the books in the OP.

I have read several of his books. He really works all sides of the issue, heavily researched & footnoted.

One really needs to go slow in some areas, stopping to think about the theme discussed. With some it may shake long held beliefs. In a lot of ways I think he lets those be, more part of the ‘human condition’.

If one wanted to start, I think ‘The Masks of God’ seems a logical place. It’s been a few decades, don’t have any order memorized.

The first paragraph revealed something so rare, a person willing to listen and take stock of himself. Just one such person offers hope.

A bit more Campbell from Osbon's book (she edited the book, but every word of it is Campbell's).

Stories like this, I find delightful, and his comment about vegetarianism is something I have posted many times over the years in this forum. But, that's not what this story is really about; it's much deeper and far more useful than a funny quip. The emphasis is mine:

My wonderful friend, Heinrich Zimmer, my final guru, often said, “The best things cannot be told.” That is to say, you can’t talk about that which lies beyond the reach of words.

The second best are misunderstood, because they are your statements about that which cannot be told. They are misunderstood because the vocabulary of symbols that you have to use are thought to be references to historical events.

The third best is conversation, political life, economics, and all that. And that’s what we are usually dealing with: the first three chakras.

Zimmer loved to recount an amusing animal-fable from India. It tells of a tigress, pregnant and starving, who comes upon a little flock of goats and pounces on them with such energy that she brings about the birth of her little one and her own death.

The goats scatter, and when they come back to their grazing place, they find this just-born tiger and its dead mother. Having strong parental instincts, they adopt the tiger, and it grows up thinking it’s a goat. It learns to bleat. It learns to eat grass. And since grass doesn’t nourish it very well, it grows up to become a pretty miserable specimen of its species.

When the young tiger reaches adolescence, a large male tiger pounces on the flock, and the goats scatter. But this little fellow is a tiger, so he stands there. The big one looks at him in amazement and says, “Are you living here with these goats?” “Maaaaaa,” says the little tiger. Well, the old tiger is mortified, something like a father who comes home and finds his son with long hair. He swats him back and forth a couple of times, and the little thing just responds with these silly bleats and begins nibbling grass in embarrassment. So the big tiger brings him to a still pond.

Now, still water is a favorite Indian image to symbolize the idea of yoga. The first aphorism of yoga is: “Yoga is the intentional stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind-stuff.” Our minds, which are in continual flux, are likened to the surface of a pond that’s blown by a wind. So the forms that we see, those of our own lives and the world around us, are simply flashing images that come and go in the field of time, but beneath all of them is the substantial form of forms. Bring the pond to a standstill, have the wind withdraw and the waters clear, and you’ll see, in stasis, the perfect image beneath all of these changing forms.

So this little fellow looks into the pond and sees his own face for the first time. The big tiger puts his face over and says, “You see, you’ve got a face like mine. You’re not a goat. You’re a tiger like me. Be like me.”

Now that’s guru stuff: I’ll give you my picture to wear, be like me. It’s the opposite to the individual way.

So the little one is getting that message; he’s picked up and taken to the tiger’s den, where there are the remains of a recently slaughtered gazelle. Taking a chunk of this bloody stuff, the big tiger says, “Open your face.” The little one backs away, “I’m a vegetarian.” “None of that nonsense,” says the big fellow, and he shoves a piece of meat down the little one’s throat. He gags on it. The text says, “As all do on true doctrine.”

But gagging on the true doctrine, he’s nevertheless getting it into his blood, into his nerves; it’s his proper food. It touches his proper nature. Spontaneously, he gives a tiger stretch, the first one. A little tiger roar comes out—Tiger Roar 101. The big one says, “There. Now you’ve got it. Now we go into the forest and eat tiger food.”

 

Vegetarianism
is the first turning away from life,
because life lives on lives.
Vegetarians are just eating
something that can’t run away.

 

Now, of course, the moral is that we are all tigers living here as goats. The right hand path, the sociological department, is interested in cultivating our goat-nature. Mythology, properly understood as metaphor, will guide you to the recognition of your tiger face. But then how are you going to live with these goats?

Well, Jesus had something to say about this problem. In Matthew 7 he said, “Do not cast your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet and turn and tear you.”

 

The function
of the orthodox community
is to torture the mystic to death:
his goal.

 

You wear the outer garment of the law, behave as everyone else and wear the inner garment of the mystic way. Jesus also said that when you pray, you should go into your own room and close the door. When you go out, brush your hair. Don’t let them know. Otherwise, you’ll be a kook, something phony.

So that has to do with not letting people know where you are. But then comes the second problem: how do you live with these people? Do you know the answer? You know that they are all tigers. And you live with that aspect of their nature, and perhaps in your art you can let them know that they are tigers.

And that’s the revelation then. And so this brings us to the final formula of the Bodhisattava way, the way of the one who is grounded in eternity and moving in the field of time. The field of time is the field of sorrow. “All life is sorrowful.” And it is. If you try to correct the sorrows, all you do is shift them somewhere else. Life is sorrowful. How do you live with that? You realize the eternal within yourself. You disengage, and yet, reengage. You—and here’s the beautiful formula—“participate with joy in the sorrows of the world.” You play the game. It hurts, but you know that you have found the place that is transcendent of injury and fulfillments. You are there, and that’s it.

quote:

Originally posted by sourdough44:
If one wanted to start, I think ‘The Masks of God’ seems a logical place. It’s been a few decades, don’t have any order memorized.

That's the one.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
And that’s the revelation then. And so this brings us to the final formula of the Bodhisattava way, the way of the one who is grounded in eternity and moving in the field of time. The field of time is the field of sorrow. “All life is sorrowful.” And it is. If you try to correct the sorrows, all you do is shift them somewhere else. Life is sorrowful. How do you live with that? You realize the eternal within yourself. You disengage, and yet, reengage. You—and here’s the beautiful formula—“participate with joy in the sorrows of the world.” You play the game. It hurts, but you know that you have found the place that is transcendent of injury and fulfillments. You are there, and that’s it.[/i]

Thank you for posting this. This is the lesson life has been trying to teach me for quite some time now, which I've only recently awaken to.

The “Reflections ...” book arrived. I have no idea who the author is or what the subject matter is. But the first few pages were interesting. I’ll need to find some alone time this weekend to read.

The book doesn't so much have an author as it has an editor. Diane Osbon edited the book. She assembled portions of Campbell's series of lectures which were given at the Esalen Institute in 1984, along with excerpts from some of Campbell's books- Myths To Live By; The Hero With A Thousand Faces; Primitive Mythology; The Mythic Image; The Inner Reaches of Outer Space and others. All of the text is either Campbell's words or Campbell quoting or paraphrasing other authors or philosophers.

The subject matter is Campbell's philosophy on how a person may understand and navigate our complex existence.

Thanks for the background and context. Looking forward to reading it.

Seems like what’s written is interesting but less important than what one thinks after pondering what was written.

quote:

Originally posted by sourdough44:
If one wanted to start, I think ‘The Masks of God’ seems a logical place. It’s been a few decades, don’t have any order memorized.

I'll have to disagree with you on that. The Masks of God is a four volume set totaling 2360 pages. It is heavy, heavy reading and I would recommend it only to those people who are very serious about the subject and who have some familiarity of the writings of Campbell.

My recommendation of a starting point would be The Hero With a Thousand Faces. It's 430 pages and it gives the reader a clear understanding of what Campbell refers to as "the hero's journey" which is an archetype found throughout the mythologies of all cultures who left a written record, and includes our modern society.

I think the one book that seemed to summarize much for me was ‘Primitive Mythology’ which is in the ‘Masks of God’ series.

I did read beyond that one book, but not all he wrote. Another thing of note is the amount of research, references & footnotes with what he wrote.

I don’t even feel he was a anti-religion, as some may think, he seemed more interested in explaining where religion comes from. Even that idea, may be a little much, depending on one’s mindset.

quote:

Originally posted by sourdough44:
I don’t even feel he was a anti-religion, as some may think, he seemed more interested in explaining where religion comes from. Even that idea, may be a little much, depending on one’s mindset.

Campbell was not anti-religion.

This passage from Reflections on the Art of Living mirrors my own experience with religion. I, too, was raised as a Catholic:

When I was about sixteen years old, in prep school, and knew I was losing my childhood faith, I resolved that I would not quit the Catholic church until I knew why I was quitting, that is to say, until I had dissolved the symbols and knew what they referred to and meant. The whole thing wasn’t over until I was twenty-five years old and in Germany. I spent nine years working everything out, and then it just dropped off like a worn-out shirt. That’s the knowing thing. If you don’t know what the hell that symbol is saying to you, then it’s just there as a command, and there is going to be more and more of this hanging on. If you can’t use your mind in this rather complex field, I don’t know how you are going to work it out.

And, this- a passage from the same book:

There is a darling little woman who comes to my lectures in New York, who was a nun. She left the convent after hearing a couple of my talks. She did. That’s one of my great credits, you old bastard up there. The last time I was lecturing and she was in the group, she came up to me afterward and asked, “Mr. Campbell, do you think that Jesus was God, was God’s son?” I said, “Not unless we all are.” “Ahh!” she said, and off she went.

And that’s what Jung is saying in his Answer to Job : it is actually the work of man that is projected in the image of an imagined being called God. And so, historically, the God image is really a mirror image of the condition of man at a given time.

These types of comments lead casual readers of Campbell's work to believe he was anti-religion, but the truth is very far from this. Campbell's objection to religion was the misinterpretation of religious texts. He said that all religions are true in the metaphorical sense, and the problem arises when people get "stuck to the metaphor." A prime example of this would be the snake handlers in the Appalachians; literally handling poisonous snakes during church services and sometimes getting bit by the vipers and killed because they have taken metaphor and thought it to be literal.

In this excerpt from The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, Campbell clarifies his views:



So, there you have it. Those two minutes should tell you a great deal about Campbell's relationship with religion: don't get "stuck to the metaphor." I've said it many times in this forum over the years- I am one of the best non-Christian friends that a Christian might have, because even though I don't believe Jesus was the Son of God (unless we all are, as Campbell says) and I don't believe that Jesus ascended bodily to Heaven (which is an absolutely essential belief for Christians), I still recognize the value of the metaphor of the scripture and, in the case of Christianity, the beauty of that scripture.

One last clue. Here is another passage from Reflections in which Campbell is referring to Man's relationship to his death and the death of others. I've highlighted the portion I wish to point out:

I think the idea of life after death is a bad idea. It distracts you from appreciating the uniqueness of the here and now, the moment you are living. For example, if you think that when you die your parents will be there and you’ll live with them forever, you may no longer appreciate the significant moments that you share with them on earth.

Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now. I think that’s washed out a bit by the notion that everyone will be happy in heaven. You had better be happy here, now. You’d better experience the eternal here and now.. Being “happy with Him forever in heaven” means that while you are here on earth you should be happy: that is to say, your life should be identified with the divine power, the eternal power in all life. If you concretize the symbol of heaven, the whole situation disintegrates. You think, for example, that eternity is there, and your life is here. You believe that God, the source of energy, is there, and you are here, and He may come into your life or He may not. No, no— that source of eternal energy is here, in you, now.

That is the essence of Gnosticism, Buddha consciousness, and so forth. St. Paul got close to the idea when he said, “I live now, not I, but Christ in me.” I once made this observation in a lecture, and a priest in attendance said, “That’s blasphemy.”—an example of the church not conceding the very sense of the symbol.

On the other hand, since the function of the heaven image is to help you to die, to yield to where nature’s taking you rather than resist, I think you would tell a Christian child who is going to die that he is going to go to heaven.

The resistance to death
has to do with not knowing
where you’re going when you die.

 In one of the sūtras, the Buddha is asked how one person helps another face death. He responds: “Suppose a house caught fire, and in the house was a father with three little children, and the children were afraid of the flames, but they wouldn’t go outside. The father says, ‘Now, look, outside we have a darling little goat cart. The goats are all waiting for you, so let’s go out and get in the cart.’” That is to say, you put something out past the flames for the person who is not able to experience anything else. This approach is a convenient means of bringing about a desirable and necessary act that the person would otherwise be incapable of performing.

When you support someone who is dying, you are helping that person to identify with the consciousness that is going to disengage from the body. We disengage from various things all of our lives. Finally, we identify with consciousness and disengage from our bodies.

In Buddhism,
the central thought is
compassion without attachment

And so, the death of one for whom you feel com-passion shouldn’t be an affliction. Your attachment is the temporal aspect of the relationship; your compassion is the eternal aspect. Hence, you can reconcile yourself to feelings of loss by identifying with that which is not lost when all is lost: namely, the consciousness that informs the body and all things. This yielding back into undifferentiated consciousness is the return, and that is as far as you can think, as much as you can know. The rest is transcendent of all conscious knowledge.


Helping the children get past the flames, by giving them a goal on the other side of the fire- this is metaphorical of a key function of religious faith. Such statements are not those of a man who is anti-religion.


.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: parabellum,

This is the only clip of this particular segment of Jordan Peterson's latest appearance on JRE.

I wouldn't presume to try to define Peterson's belief in God and in Christianity. I've seen a couple of recently published videos on youtube which say that Peterson is no longer an atheist. Well, first of all, I'm not so sure Peterson could have been defined as an atheist. Perhaps he could be classified as an agnostic. You can find dozens of excerpts on youtube of Peterson speaking about religion and his answers are complex and I have not invested enough time in watching these vids and trying to place them in proper context to understand exactly what he is saying or trying to say, and the recent videos which say that Peterson is no longer an atheist are soundbites of him speaking, and they're all re-edited and, well, there's the context problem again, so I have to ignore these vids.

This clip, however, is not re-edited, and I think from watching it that Peterson is the intellectual heir to Joseph Campbell on this subject. If you watched the clip I posted above, you can get the idea of Campbell's relationship with and interpretation of the Bible, and I see much of Campbell in Peterson's thoughts in this clip.

My spiritual quest is never-ending and when I run across something like this, something which resonates with truth, it's quite moving for me.

Very powerful and unlike much of religious dogma, a person can come away from something like this with another useful tool in their life kit.

The JRE excerpt begins at the 2:25 mark

I would agree Peterson seems to carry the same torch Campbell was.

I heard that the other day and knew I needed to listen to this part again. He's very insightful.

When I first heard JP I was introduced to myth. And I tried to figure out how it mates up with my faith, mainly in the Bible, but also in my life. There was some shock as to, one more thing I've been lied to my whole life about, the Bible is all myth? But I saw the parallels he drew in Disney stuff, and other stories and it surely hit home for me.

The Bible is the same but has added value IMO. It seems to me to be working on every level. I do believe there is more to it, divinely speaking. I believe Jesus was real, I do pray and consider myself a Christian. (even though I drink Miller Lite and do plenty of stuff that's not kosher.) I try to live based on teachings of Jesus.

I'm not close minded enough to think my ways are the right ways but I try not to get lost in the details. I also have a hard time believing someone will fry for eternity over a technicality. I've never bought that. So I'm not exactly sure where the overlap is. I'm happy to not know too. This is one place faith comes in. I get to exercise my faith based on everything I've learned and experienced mixed with my intuition and internal guidance. And that puts me at peace.

I'm kind of working these thoughts out here, so this may be half baked.

I guess the things I learned from JP and myths, have only served to strengthen my faith. And I like that.

This video just popped up on my radar this morning. JP references Joseph Campbell at about the 10:00 mark.

Says you can think of Christ from a psychological perspective, and what separates this from a whole a sequence of dying and resurrecting Gods in the past, as CS Lewis pointed out according to JP, is that there is a historical record of him. And that's the union of those two things, per JP.

He says, many times in his own life he's seen the objective and narrative world touch.

That's me just trying to give some cliff notes though.