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Joseph
Campbell and the Right
Reading of Myth
This observation brings us
to the unifying work of Joseph Campbell.
Campbell, like Jung and
Eliade, was a prolific writer. His first major work was The
Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he described a single
pattern underlying the myriad hero stories in the world. His
magnum opus, The Masks of God, gave a similar treatment
to the world's mythologies.
David Miller has made
contradictory statements about Campbell's emphasis on unity
versus plurality: "the phrase did not read the thousand
heroes with one face" and "Campbell's major work was
about masks (plural differences), not mask (singular
meaning)." However, I see the titles as reflecting, again,
the balance between That and This: one hero, many faces; one
god, many masks. As with Jung's collective unconscious and
Eliade's Sacred, the pattern underlying the hero stories and the
God behind the masks represent the undifferentiated That, the
"divine reality" of Huxley's Perennial Philosophy.
Likewise, the personal unconscious and conscious of Jung,
Eliade's manifold Profanes, and Campbell's faces and masks
represent "the phenomenal world of matter and of
individualized consciousness" described by Huxley. E
pluribus unum, as both the dollar and Professor Marvel (no
longer the Wizard of Oz) proclaim: Out of many, one. But this is
the Aristotelian view of universals; had we not better say,
"E unus pluribum"--out of one, many? This reflects our
Platonic way of seeing This descending from That, rather than
That arising from This.
Building on Bastian
In any case, in the first
and last volumes of Masks Campbell cites an
otherwise-obscure (in the English-speaking world) ethnologist
named Adolf Bastian. As described in Volume IV, "Adolf
Bastian (1826-1905) coined the term 'ethnic ideas' (Volkergedanke)
for the local, historic transformations of the archetypes, and
the term 'elementary ideas' (Elementargedanke) for the
archetypes themselves" (653). Note his use of the term
"archetype"; Campbell elsewhere asserts that
"Jung's idea of the 'archetypes'…is a development of the
earlier theory of Adolf Bastian" (I:32). To my knowledge,
however, Bastian never used the term per se; Jung
borrowed it from earlier theorists.
The Hero with a
Thousand Faces
So Campbell, like Jung,
builds a system on the work of Bastian. But in his case, it is a
look into mythology and story--and their accompanying
art, rituals, etc.--rather than the strictly psychological
function. The hero story can serve as a paradigm. The oft-quoted
statement of the "monomyth" goes like this: "A
hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region
of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered
and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this
mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his
fellow man" (Hero 30). This is a going forth and a
return; implicit in it are five episodes: (1) Home ("the
world of common day"); (2) the First Threshold; (3) the
Other World ("a region of supernatural wonder"); (4)
the Second Threshold; and (5) the Return ("the hero comes
back from this mysterious adventure").
From This to That to This.
From Personality No. 1 to
Personality No. 2 to Personality No. 1.
From Profane to Sacred to
Profane.
From Ethnic to Elementary
to Ethnic.
Each crossing is dangerous.
So why run the risk? Campbell mentions multiple benefits for the
Hero who completes the Quest. He may become a Warrior; a Lover;
an Emperor or Tyrant; a World Redeemer; or a Saint (315ff). But
the most evocative title given to the returned hero, at least in
a study of That and This, is: Master of the Two Worlds (229ff).
The one who successfully negotiates the passage develops the
"Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division,
from the perspective of the apparitions of time to that of the
causal deep and back -- not contaminating the principles of the
one with those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the
one by virtue of the other…" (229).
This last is a crucially
important idea. There is an either/or quality to That and This.
How can the individual Self be the divine reality? How
can one act from both Personalities, No. 1 and No. 2? If the
Profane becomes Sacred, how can it still be Profane? How can a
Hero dwell in Two Worlds, when one must not contaminate the
other?
Yet Huxley says, "You
are That." Jung says, "I was actually two
different persons." Eliade says that a Sacred Tree is still
a tree. And Campbell says of the Hero, "The individual,
through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely
all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies,
hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is
prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so
becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment" (237).
A final point. In
describing Bastian's work, Campbell makes the point several
times that "Nowhere, [Bastian] noted, are the 'elementary
ideas' to be found in a pure state, abstracted from the locally
conditioned 'ethnic ideas' through which they are
substantialized; but rather, like the image of man himself, they
are to be known only by way of the rich variety of their
extremely interesting, frequently startling, yet always finally
recognizable inflections in the panorama of human life" (Masks
I:32).
Neo-Perennialism
For this reason, I propose
a slight adjustment in the Perennial Philosophy, something I
call "Neo-Perennialism." As Jung only discovered the
collective unconscious through examining many patients; as
Eliade could only discuss the Sacred through examples from
manifold cultures; as Campbell needed to see the Hero through
the Faces, and God through the Masks: So we can only come to
That through examination of This. Every person of spirit can
look closely at her or his own belief system to find in its
metaphors "that which is grave and constant," to quote
Joyce, and then make the bridge through that elementary idea
into another person's belief system. If I can see that my heaven
and another person's nirvana represent the same goal through
different metaphors, if I can see that my prayer and your
meditation, my priest and your shaman, my precepts and your
commandments are all fulfilling the same spiritual end--even if
in radically different ways--then I can begin to appreciate the
depth and beauty of the life you live, and learn to live it with
you.
What's more, Jung's Number
1 is Number 2; Eliade's Sacred is Profane.
There is nothing at all otherworldly about a Sacred Tree, except
for its actual otherworldliness. I mean, it can still be
cut up and used for firewood. So that in fact the
Perennial path leads directly through the ordinary, everyday
reality.
For what we are talking
about is not just a future life in That, but our current life in
This as well; not just an otherworldly existence in That, but a
this-worldly existence in This. In his ground-breaking The
World's Religions, Huston Smith wrote in the mid-twentieth
century: "We hear that East and West are meeting, but it is
an understatement. They are being flung at one another, hurled
with the force of atoms, the speed of jets, the restlessness of
minds impatient to learn the ways of others. When historians
look back on our century, they may remember it most, not for
space travel or the release of nuclear energy, but as the time
when the peoples of the world first came to take one another
seriously" (6-7). It is in this very life that we
will face the challenges that will ultimately lead to our
transcendence.
Contents
(C) 2006 James Baquet.
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