MYTH MENU

Joseph Campbell

His theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was born in White Plains, New York. He traveled in Europe with his family, where he met and befriended the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, before studying at Columbia University. In 1927 he received an M.A. in English and comparative literature. After that, he went to the universities of Paris and Munich to study Arthurian romances.

Archetypes of Mythology by Stefan Stenudd This book examines Jungian theories on myth and religion, from Carl G. Jung to Jordan B. Peterson. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link). Psychoanalysis of Mythology by Stefan Stenudd This book examines Freudian theories on myth and religion, from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

       That was when he got familiar with the work and ideas of Carl G. Jung, but they did not meet until the 1940s, when both were editing texts by the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer after his death in 1943. It seems they met only once, having tea in the Bollingen tower Jung had built for himself.[1]

       In 1934, Campbell started teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and remained there until the early 1970s. In 1987 he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died the same year, which was one year after Mircea Eliade.

       He reached wide popularity with the television seriesThe Power of Myth, which was made in 1985 and 1986 but aired in 1988, after his death.

       In writing, he started as a literary critic, co-authoring a study of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in 1944. In 1949 he publishedThe Hero With a Thousand Faces, comparing hero myths from around the world and finding a Jungian process through rites of passage in the hero archetype. The book became an international bestseller. In 1959 to 1968 he published the four volumes work The Masks of God.

       Campbell’s appreciation of Jung and use of his theories is evident in his work, and in his comments on the matter. Late in life, Campbell explained in an interview, “I think the longer you live, the more Jung can say to you.”[2] But he also pointed out that Jung is not the final word, and he firmly denied being a Jungian:

I’m not a Jungian! As far as interpreting myths, Jung gives me the best clues I’ve got. But I’m much more interested in diffusion and relationships historically than Jung was, so that the Jungians think of me as a kind of questionable person. I don’t use those formula words very often in my interpretation of myths, but Jung gives me the background from which to let the myth talk to me.

       If I do have a guru of that sort, it would be Zimmer — the one who really gave me the courage to interpret myths out of what I knew of their common symbols.[3]

       Another indicator of Heinrich Zimmer’s influence on Campbell is that he edited four books with texts by Zimmer translated into English, as mentioned above. He also edited one book with texts by Jung,The Portable Jung from 1971, where he in the introduction expresses profound respect for Jung, also in the fields relevant to this book:

Jung was not only a medical man but a scholar in the grand style, whose researches, particularly in comparative mythology, alchemy, and the psychology of religion, have inspired and augmented the findings of an astonishing number of the leading creative scholars of our time.[4]

Monomyth Hero

Campbell’s first book on the subject of myth and how to interpret it,The Hero With a Thousand Faces from 1949, made an impression on Jungians as well as Freudians, scholars of mythology, and the general public. To this day, it remains his most recognized and popular book.

       The Jungian delight in his text is no surprise, since his way of understanding myth is largely based on the theories of Carl G. Jung, but that makes its impression on several Freudians all the more surprising. They were generally impatient with any thinking approaching that of Jung.

       The explanation might be that Campbell starts his book with a long quote from Freud’s The Future of an Illusion in the preface, showing his respect for the father of psychoanalysis, adding that for understanding the symbols in mythology “I know of no better modern tool than psychoanalysis.”[5] And he returns to Freud repeatedly through the book. Not as much as he leans on Jung, but clearly with similar respect.

       Campbell’s aim with the book is to compare a number of myths and folk tales from around the world in order to show their similar patterns, assuring the reader that “the parallels will be immediately apparent.”[6] He is far from the first to have this approach to myths, and he is aware of the inherent risk to underestimate the diversity. But it doesn’t discourage him in the least:

There are of course differences between the numerous mythologies and religions of mankind, but this is a book about the similarities; and once these are understood the differences will be found to be much less great than is popularly (and politically) supposed.

       That is an odd defense of his method. Since he sets out to find similarities, it is no wonder that he finds them, especially considering the vast material at his disposal. There are so many myths. If he had instead went on a search for differences, he would easily find at least as many examples of those, too. Nothing can be proven by either method.

       This mistake has been made by so many others searching for patterns in mythology — psychologists as well as anthropologists, folklorists, and historians of religion alike. They have failed by ignoring anomalies to their theories, in the eagerness to have them confirmed. It has also often led them to interpret the material quite elaborately, in order to find similarities where they are not apparent. Other chapters of this book describe many such instances, as does my book about Freudian theories on mythology.[7]

       Joseph Campbell is as bold about what his exploration has found as he is about what myth entails:

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.[8]

       That doesn’t leave very much out.

James Joyce Once

As for Campbell’s dissection of myths, he claims that it reveals a structure almost all of them share — at the very least all those that can be described as hero myths — as if they are basically one and the same myth. He calls this shared structure the monomyth, a term taken from the novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.[9]

       Indeed, the word is there — just once in the well over 600 pages long novel Joyce spent 17 years writing, and in a context no less cryptic than famously the whole text:

Ah, dearo! Dearo, dear! And her illian! And his willyum! When they were all there now, matinmarked for lookin on. At the carryfour with awlus plawshus, their happyass cloudious! And then and too the trivials! And their bivouac! And his monomyth! Ah ho! Say no more about it! I’m sorry! I saw. I’m sorry! I’m sorry to say I saw![10]

       What Joyce might have meant with the term, which seems to be an invention of his, is far from clear. I have not found him using it in his other books. Nor is it explained in the book about the novel written by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake , which was published in 1944 — right between the release of Joyce’s book and that of The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

       Since the release of the latter, it is Campbell’s application of the term monomyth that has spread and become widely adopted. Joyce is merely referred to as the source to the word, but not to its meaning and definitely not Campbell’s use of it.

       As for Joyce´s own idea about it, we can only speculate. It is significant that he writes “his” monomyth, indicating just one person’s myth, whereas Joseph Campbell speaks of “the monomyth,” suggesting one basic myth behind them all.

       The context where the word appears in Finnegans Wake is one of intercourse. In the sentence right before the above quote, Joyce writes “mens conscia recti, then hemale man all unbracing to omniwomen.” The Latin expression means a mind conscious of rectitude, which is a not-so-subtle way of indicating an erection, and together with the following words coitus is obviously intended. So, the quote above describes the excited state of it. Then, it may be simply so that monomyth is a wordplay on monolith, implying an erection of mythical proportion — at least in the eyes of the one confessing to have seen it. Joyce’s twisting of words and their meaning are evident all through his book.

       Still, about this one can only guess. Joyce was as prone to confuse as he was reluctant to explain.

The Acts and Scenes of a Myth

Contrary to James Joyce, what Joseph Campbell means with monomyth is quite clear. It is sort of a one-size-fits-all formula describing the structure and content of a myth — presumably just about every hero myth, and those exist in abundance. To Campbell, they alone are proper myths, and convey a message, a meaning, which is their function.

       In essence, the hero myth is “a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation—return.”[11] And he continues with a comprised synopsis of the hero story structure:

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.

       Campbell gives a number of examples myths where this pattern can be found, such as that of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it to the humans, Jason getting the Golden Fleece and thereby the throne, Aeneas descending to the underworld to meet his deceased father, and Prince Gautama struggling on his path to become the Buddha, which he compares to the stories of both Moses and Jesus.

       The structure of the hero myth, summarized in the above quote, Campbell expands by specifying a number of components, as chapters of the story or rather acts and scenes in a play.

       Like in many traditional plays, there are three acts. In the first act the adventure begins by departure from the present situation, in the second act the hero has struggles leading to revelations and growth, and in the third act the hero returns to accomplish an important change, which is the solution.

       That is indeed a very common plot in myths as well as plays. Campbell makes additional divisions of the story, very much like the scenes of a play, to form this synopsis:[12]

       Separation or departure

       (1) The Call to Adventure, or the signs of the vocation of the hero;

       (2) Refusal of the Call, or the folly of the flight from the god;

       (3) Supernatural Aid, the unsuspected assistance that comes to one who has undertaken his proper adventure;

       (4) The Crossing of the First Threshold;

       (5) The Belly of the Whale, or the passage into the realm of night.

       Trials and victories of initiation

       (1) The Road of Trials, or the dangerous aspect of the gods;

       (2) The Meeting with the Goddess (Magna Mater), or the bliss of infancy regained;

       (3) Woman as the Temptress, the realization and agony of Oedipus;

       (4) Atonement with the Father;

       (5) Apotheosis;

       (6) The Ultimate Boon.

       Return and reintegration with society

       (1) Refusal of the Return, or the world denied;

       (2) The Magic Flight, or the escape of Prometheus;

       (3) Rescue from Without;

       (4) The Crossing of the Return Threshold, or the return to the world of common day;

       (5) Master of the Two Worlds;

       (6) Freedom to Live, the nature and function of the ultimate boon.

       As components of a monomyth, the acts are more convincing than the scenes. Myths may have things in common, but not necessarily when going into elaborate specifics. There are so many myths and so many different kinds of heroes. It seems that with the scenes, Campbell has slipped from a straightforward reading of the myths into the psychological cosmologies of Freud and Jung.

       But he persists, claiming every ingredient to be essential and even in a way present also where it is absent:

If one or another of the basic elements of the archetypal pattern is omitted from a given fairy tale, legend, ritual, or myth, it is bound to be somehow or other implied — and the omission itself can speak volumes for the history and pathology of the example.[13]

       That is like claiming his theory is proven whether a story conforms to it or not. I beg to differ. Several of the scenes specified above are absent from many hero myths, and there is nothing significant about them missing in those stories. They are still complete adventures.

       Many heroes never refused the call to adventure nor the return from it, or had any encounter with either a great mother goddess or a female temptress, never went through an atonement with the father, and so on. Certainly, there are many hero myths that contain all the stages Campbell suggests, but at least as many that definitely do not, if they are allowed to speak for themselves and not be twisted by far-fetched assumptions about what might be implied.

       He even warns against such distortions of myths, himself:

The outlines of myths and tales are subject to damage and obscuration. Archaic traits are generally eliminated or subdued. Imported materials are revised to fit local landscape, custom, or belief, and always suffer in the process.[14]

       Such and other changes of the original myths lead him to conclude that “secondary interpretations are invented, often with considerable skill.”[15] It does not strike him that he contributes with yet another example of just that.

       The instances of Campbell’s own far-fetched interpretations of the myths fill his book. They mostly consist of elaborate symbolic explanations that go way beyond what meets the eye. Just to give one typical example, this is how he explains the phenomenon rather common in myths and fairy tales with food endlessly replenished:

The motif (derived from an infantile fantasy) of the inexhaustible dish, symbolizing the perpetual life-giving, formbuilding powers of the universal source, is a fairy-tale counterpart of the mythological image of the cornucopian banquet of the gods.[16]

       Or it could just be the pleasant fantasy of never going hungry. It would make mouths water in any audience. The constant and vital struggle for food has always been known to all people everywhere. No universal force or god is necessary to explain it.

Dramaturgy Suffices

Another major issue with Campbell’s monomyth theory is that the many specifics about its plot are insufficiently argued for, i.e., the why of each of them. He may have found a pattern applicable to many myths, though far from all, but that in itself is mere statistical correlation. The causation of it all needs to be demonstrated. Why do all these ingredients of the story need to be there?

       He makes some general references to Freudian and Jungian theories, more of the latter than the former, but he neglects to present plausible reasons for each of the acts and scenes of his scheme. He claims that they have to be in the monomyth, albeit with some variations, but doesn’t state why they do.

       Why a refusal of the call, why a supernatural aid, and so on? Campbell is remarkably vague about it. For comparison, a purely dramaturgical analysis of those scenes would easily present plausible reasons for their functions and necessity in the story, without the need of Freudian or Jungian psychology.

       Then, this type of myth is simply an adventure story with a main character becoming heroic through the process of the adventure. The three acts are essentially the beginning of the adventure, followed by the ordeal of it, and finally the return from it. That is simply the progression of the story Aristotle in his Poetics described as the beginning, the middle, and the end. Without these three parts, there would be no story.

       So much for the acts. The scenes in Campbell’s list can also be explained by dramaturgy. Far from all of them are needed, but if they are present there are easily found dramaturgical reasons for them.

       The Call to Adventure is the start without which there would be no adventure and no story to tell. Refusal of the Call emphasizes how big of an adventure is ahead, or our hero would not hesitate. Supernatural Aid, if there is one, makes the adventure rise in wonder and dignity, way above everyday matters. The Crossing of the First Threshold and The Belly of the Whale are challenges met along the way. So is The Road of Trials. Without them, the adventure would not be very adventurous.

       Then come a few scenes with which Campbell points clearly at Freudian and Jungian psychology, but they are definitely not present in every hero story: The Meeting with the Goddess (Magna Mater), Woman as the Temptress, and Atonement with the Father. If they are described simply as the mother, the lover, and the father, they are easier to find in myths, since relations familiar and important to us all engage the audience more than random strangers.

       Their roles in the story can vary considerably, but their basic function is to make the adventure more emotionally charged for the hero and thereby also for the audience. Any story needs to evoke the audience’s empathy, or it will be quickly forgotten.

       Next in Campbell’s scheme comes Apotheosis, the deification, which is when the hero transforms into a heroic being, becoming able to complete the demanded feat. The protagonist overcomes previous weaknesses and saves the day. It is the climax of the drama, when catastrophe is avoided and peace restored. The Ultimate Boon is the ability the hero has gained and the blessing it can bring to all the others. The hero has become a savior. It may be, as the word suggests, a gift from the powers that be, but not until the hero is worthy of it. Otherwise, it would be a phony hero.

       In modern adventure stories, especially in the movies, this climax is very close to the end — for the very reason that afterwards, the audience doesn’t have much excitement to expect. Mere minutes remain to “The End.” But Campbell suggests several additional scenes, having them form the third and final act, which is that of the return.

       There are indeed many hero tales that have this extended ending, where new problems are faced and need to be solved before the adventure is over. This often happens on the hero’s return after a glorious victory, which everybody thought would have solved it all. What it implies dramaturgically is that a great adversary remains, the real antagonist of the story is not yet defeated. It is commonly used as a surprising turn of the story in action movies, but also in many tales of old.

       Still, it cannot be prolonged. A new battle, coming as a surprise after the victory that seemed to solve all, may be spectacular but is quickly over. It has to be, since it strains the audience’s patience. They rightly feel somewhat deceived.

       Nonetheless, there is a good reason for the hero’s return meeting complications. Through the previous adventure, the protagonist has changed considerably, so a return to what things were beforehand is really impossible. The difference is that now, the hero is capable of dealing with it. That makes all the difference in the world — for protagonist and antagonist alike.

       Campbell divides this last act into six scenes, through which the hero struggles to bring the boon back to where it was needed from the beginning. In his understanding, they represent the last stages of the hero’s transformation. But that would just mean he has not yet transformed and remains in the middle of the adventure. His previous victory was incomplete or even illusionary, and the major threat remains.

       As for Campbell’s Refusal of the Return, it happens that some heroes, after their great feat, wish to remain to savor the victory and the transformation making it possible. A battle between their complacency and their conscience ensues, ending with duty calling them to return. That call of duty may well be uttered by another character in the story.

       A version mentioned also by Campbell is where mighty powers oppose and hinder the hero’s departure. The Magic Flight is the escape, which doesn’t necessarily involve any magic but often enough trickery of some sort. In some stories, the hero gets help to escape by others arriving, which is what Campbell calls Rescue from Without.

       Both the refusal and the flight are minor and swiftly passing events in the story, which is why many stories do without them. Their main dramaturgical function is to create a pause between the recent victory and what adventure comes next. After a very intense event, the hero as well as the audience need a moment of relief and calm before getting excited anew.

       If there is no more grand feat ahead, this is where the story ends, with a final pensive scene in tranquility. No audience is at peace with a story that ends immediately after great calamity. We need some time to settle our emotions and reflect.

       In a story where the hero has more to do upon returning, there may well be additional adventures on the way. But the bigger the hero’s first victory was, the less time there is for the rest of the story. And if events that follow overshadow that first victory, then it was neither the climax of the story nor the major transformation of the hero. If there are several crescendos in a symphony, the last one has to be the loudest.

       It is a question of emphasis, which has several functions in a story. Any story moves towards a climax, the major emphasis. But elements of the plot must participate to raise that emphasis and thereby intensify the climax. So, the hero has to start off weak and insecure, to make the transition into heroism all the more impressive. The challenges the hero has to face must be overwhelming, even seemingly insurmountable.

       But these measures are relative. In everyday realism, the challenges can be rather ordinary as long as the situation makes them intense to the protagonist. In myths, the hero is up against gods and battles to save the world. The emotional value is equivalent. Campbell deals with the latter, but dramaturgically there is no difference.

       For example, the scene he calls The Crossing of the Return Threshold is the leap from the fantastic world of gods and magic, which was where the hero victoriously transformed, back to the much less splendid human reality from where the adventure started. This return to normality doesn’t have to be such a leap for the transition to be demanding, but in myths the monumental is preferred. It makes the audience gasp. Still, the dramaturgy is the same in every kind of story, big or small, as is the effect on the audience.

       And heroes don’t need to be gigantic to be heroic.

       Campbell’s Master of the Two Worlds is the one who has reached the ability to handle both the divine world, in which the hero transformed, and the human world from which the hero came. Having gained a divine quality, the hero can still remain human. If the hero’s divinity had been lost, the whole quest would have been for a fleeting moment, and the story would have lost its relevance as soon as it ended. On the other hand, if the hero had by the transformation ceased to be and feel like a human, the story would have lost relevance to us all. It would be a monster.

       Actually, that is almost unthinkable since gods, too, have human traits and emotions or we would be unable to relate to them. That is as true for myths as it is for religions.

       This is so self-evident that most stories don’t dwell on it. Campbell implies the same: “The myths do not often display in a single image the mystery of the ready transit.”[17] Any compassionate hero would manage it, and it would be very difficult to find a myth where the hero is not compassionate at heart. Nobody would like it.

       The final scene in Campbell’s synopsis is Freedom to Live It is the end of the story and therefore its conclusion. He calls it “the result of the miraculous passage and return” and calls the goal of the myth “a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will.”[18] He continues:

And this is effected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all.

       Campbell’s wording has a religious inclination, which would not be required by dramaturgy. The protagonist needs to arrive at some kind of revelation, accomplish something previously out of reach to solve the problem at hand, before the story can end. Only then can the hero live happily ever after — or die tragically, which is not that rare. The conclusion of the story is within it. A mighty foe is defeated, a war is won, a kingdom is saved, and so on. Involving gods or not, the obstacle is concrete and so is the solution.

       It is for the audience to contemplate further implications and applications of the story. That goes for myths as well, or they would be sermons.

       I speak repeatedly about the audience, although Joseph Campbell treats the myths without much consideration of that. Still, also to him the audience is implied or the tale would lack any meaning. But he seems to take it for granted, in spite of the strange content and the cryptic meaning he claims that myths carry. No one would get it or even care, if they could not relate to the story.

       In dramaturgy, though, the audience is everything. Aristotle made that very clear in his Poetics. What makes a drama work or not is how the audience relates to it. And the myths show evident traces of applied dramaturgy, though many of them are older than this concept. The dramaturgical considerations come naturally as a story develops, much like a stand-up comedian learns to skip the jokes that get no laughs and enhance the ones that do, so that the audience laughs even more.

       Only stories that attract will prevail, no matter how laden with profound meaning they might be. Campbell should have started with what have made myths remain through time, before trying to extract some hidden meaning in them.

       Joseph Campbell states one thing, though, on which I am prepared to agree, when comparing myths to fairy tales:

Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historical, macrocosmic triumph.[19]

       Indeed, fairy tales may involve some magic but still deal with rather down to earth matters, where failure or fortune befalls just the human beings directly involved. Not so in most myths, where the main characters are superhuman and the outcome affects the whole world.

       I discuss the particulars of fairy tales elsewhere, especially in the chapter about Marie-Louise von Franz.

Adolescent Adventure

It may seem that one role is missing in Campbell’s monomyth. The mother, the lover, and the father are there, but what about the child?

       That is the hero.

       Tales of heroic quests have every sign of dealing with adolescence. The essential process described is akin to that of a child becoming an adult. The adolescent leaves the security of childhood behind to face the challenges of adulthood. The hero myth is a coming-of-age story.

       It is easy to see in Campbell’s scheme of the monomyth. The young protagonist is both excited and hesitant when the call to adventure arrives. It means leaving the comfort and security of the childhood home, which is scary but also a longing that keeps on growing until it is irresistible. Then out into the world, yet mostly unknown, and a future that is completely unpredictable. The voyage is one from childhood to adulthood, and the quest is to find one’s role in the adult world.

       It is an adventure, indeed, with ups and downs, problems and solutions, struggles and rewards, dreams and disappointments. Mistakes are made, of course, but by learning from them they tend to get sparser and less costly. The process is one of adapting to adult life, which was what childhood partly prepared for — but here is the real thing.

       When that is accomplished, the protagonist settles in a home much like the one of childhood, but now as an adult. So, it is a return, albeit to a new setting.

       What this also implies is that the hero myth would be particularly popular among children, because they see it in their future, and even more so among adolescents, because they live it. Adults, on the other hand, would not feel as touched by those stories. They have already lived them. I have the impression that this is indeed the case, but must admit that it is mere speculation.

       A parallel to the hero myth as a coming-of-age story is the rite of passage at puberty. Joseph Campbell mentions it in his book.[20] This rite exists in most cultures, but takes on different forms. In hunter-gatherer cultures it can be quite severe. When the children reach their teens, or thereabout, they are taken away from parental care and have to go through some ritualized ordeals, often painful, after which they return and are regarded as adults. And by suffering through the rite, they have proven themselves heroic.

       Myth and ritual are connected. Just as many rites are explained by myths, many myths have ritualistic ways of performing them. Those going through the passage rite to adulthood thereby enact the hero myth, as many others have done before them for countless generations. In that way, the hero does indeed have a thousand faces.

Primeval Mythology

The above discussed book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces from 1949, continues to be Joseph Campbell’s best known and most recognized written work. But it is not the most voluminous one. Ten years later, in 1959, he published the first book in a series of four with the common title The Masks of God, the last of which was released in 1968. Their titles are rather self-explanatory: Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Occidental Mythology, and Creative Mythology. The last of the four concerns individual experiences and expressions of the mythical.

       Campbell’s perspective on mythology is recognizable from what he wrote in The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Already the title of this book series indicates it. The hero has a multitude of faces and God has a number of masks. What this suggests is that all hero myths are basically the same, just as all gods of different forms fundamentally express the same phenomenon.

       In the prologue to the first book in the series, Campbell concludes from his comparative study of the mythologies around the world, “an honest comparison immediately reveals that all have been built from one fund of mythological motifs.”[21]

The Evolution of Mythology

Although Joseph Campbell sees sort of the same divine principle behind all the masks, he recognizes that there are huge variations to the theme. He compares it to the division of the human psyche into the personal and the collective unconscious, so that mythology has a local character although the foundation is shared by all.

       Carl G. Jung would agree and maybe also Sigmund Freud, whom he refers to as much or even more.

       Campbell spends a substantial part of the first book in the series,Primitive Mythology, describing the development of religious ideas through time as akin to human growth from childhood to old age. He sees three distinct periods of growth, each making its own impression on us:

(1) childhood and youth, with its uncouth charm; (2) maturity, with its competence and authority; and (3) wise old age, nursing its own death and gazing back, either with love or with rancor, at the fading world.[22]

       The very first imprint on our psyche comes at the moment of birth and the “sense of suffocation experienced by the infant before its lungs commence to operate,” causing a birth trauma and an unconscious longing back to the security of the womb.

       Otto Rank had written a book about the subject in 1924, The Trauma of Birth,[23] where he claimed it to be the first and foremost influence on the human psyche — dethroning the Oedipus complex from that position. It quickly led to his expulsion from the Freudian community. Joseph Campbell must have known about both him and his book, but mentions neither.

       Campbell also compares the development of mythology and religion to the evolution of all of nature. That is what he proposes to demonstrate in his book. He explains:

For, as in the visible world of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, so also in the visionary world of the gods: there has been a history, an evolution, a series of mutations, governed by laws; and to show forth such laws is the proper aim of science.[24]

       As he sets out to explain the psychology of myth, he uses quite a lot of biology. That is refreshing to find in a writer connected to psychoanalytical theories. Things like the prolonged infancy and childhood of the human species, the experience of puberty as well as the deterioration at old age, are all closely considered when he sketches an evolution of mythology.

Make-Believe

Campbell begins his account on the psychology of myth by considering the mask in the title of his book series, referring to primitive festivals where it was worn to signify a deity. Even though everyone knew that a man had made the mask and a man was wearing it, during the ritual the one with the mask was identified as the deity: “He does not merely represent the god; he is the god.”[25]

       It is a make-believe like that of a theatrical play, an “as if.” Campbell associates it with childhood, where fantasy can become quite real. That is very much what happens with myth, which concerns “the phenomenon of self-induced belief.”[26] He connects it to the Homo Ludens (human playing) theory of Johan Huizinga.[27] First of all, it is the fun of play, just like how children create their imaginary adventures. The participants do not necessarily believe it, but pretend to do so while they are playing the game.

       Indeed, that is a major ingredient in myth as well as ritual. Whether it is fictional nor not, it brings excitement and engagement. So much in mythology and religion is dependent on this factor, though most historians of religion as well as Freudians and Jungians have tended to underestimate or even ignore it. We need to be entertained, and a prerequisite of that is our pretending to believe, or we would be indifferent. In film and theatre, it means that we accept the premise in order for the story to stir our emotions.

       Religious rites also demand that we accept the premise for us to care about the rite at all. It is the mystery of faith, making us pretend, for example, that with the bread and wine in the Communion we are actually served the body and blood of Christ.[28] This pretense is far from meaningless. The experience of it is real and Campbell insists that it brings a reward to the participants:

The opaque weight of the world — both of life on earth and of death, heaven, and hell — is dissolved, and the spirit freed, not from anything, for there was nothing from which to be freed except a myth too solidly believed, but for something, something fresh and new, a spontaneous act.[29]

       This is equally true about mythology. However grim its content may be, “the paramount theme of mythology is not the agony of quest but the rapture of a revelation, not death but the resurrection: Hallelujah!”[30] All is well that ends well, at least in the emotions of the audience. Aristotle said something quite similar about tragedy in his Poetics. The drama and bitter end of the play causes an emotional release, a cleansing of sorts, catharsis, in the spectators. Campbell also points out this parallel.[31]

A Biological Archetype

Joseph Campbell presents an interesting way to explain the Jungian concept of archetypes from a biological perspective. He compares them to innate releasing mechanisms (IRM), which are instinctual behaviors linked to certain events or forms. It is what makes sea turtles hurry towards the sea as soon as they are hatched, and chicks at the same early stage of their lives dart for cover when a hawk flies overhead, but not when non-predator birds do. They are programmed to behave this way, already before birth.[32]

       Discussing this phenomenon, Campbell refers primarily to the Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, otherwise most famous for his bookOn Aggression, originally published in German 1963.

       Carl G. Jung’s theory about archetypes contained within the collective unconscious of us all is intriguing, but difficult to prove. There is really no room in biology for complex symbols to be genetically inherited, and no other way for complex information to be transmitted between generations without a cognitive process after birth. Either it is inherited as instinct or learned by experience.

       But with IRM, Campbell finds a biological explanation for human response to certain stimuli, which does indeed suggest something similar to the archetypes and the effect they are supposed to have on us. That would, of course, make the unconscious similar or identical to the instincts.

       On the other hand, it is implausible bordering on the absurd that we should have the multitude and intricacies of the Jungian archetypes and our responses to them instinctually innate in us. That is just too much for our genes to amass and carry along between generations.

       Campbell adds another phenomenon from ethology, applying what he calls “biological psychology” to it, and using it to shed light on his take on the archetypes: supernormal sign stimulus. It is when instinctual reactions are led astray by enhanced signals, making the response behavior meaningless or even detrimental.[33]

       He gives the example of the male grayling butterfly, which prefers to mate with females of a darker hue, and therefore cannot help but pursue something even darker, whether it is a female of the same species or not. When the signal is strong enough, it is irresistible.

       Campbell sees this supernormal sign stimulus at work among humans, too. He mentions women’s age-old use of cosmetics, as well as men dressed in gladiator vestments or kingly robes, and “every other humanly conceived and realized improvement of nature.” He even regards the gods as such stimuli, which is something he claims to present evidence for in his “natural history of the gods.”

       Certainly, the gods of most mythologies are vastly enhanced versions of humans. They are what we dream to be, and we are strongly attracted to those who show some signs of such grandeur. They are idols, worshipped by many. So, it is fathomable that we have imagined characters with extremely exaggerated features of the kind we admire the most, and become so attached to those images that we made them gods — even though they were nowhere to be found. Their existence was enforced by our longing for them.

       That would be a process possible to describe as the interaction between the ethological principles of innate releasing mechanisms and supernormal sign stimulus. Still, Campbell willingly admits that none of it is yet proven scientifically:

However, the human psyche has not yet been, to any great extent, satisfactorily tested for such stereotypes, and so, I am afraid, pending further study, we must simply admit that we do not know how far the principle of the inherited image can be carried when interpreting mythological universals. It is no less premature to deny its possibility than to announce it as anything more than a considered opinion.[34]

       That is the trap of exploring psychology biologically. The science of the latter demands hard evidence of clearly defined hypotheses. None of that can be said for the theory of archetypes in a collective unconscious. The archetypes are vaguely defined, and so are their effects on the psyche.

       That would be fine for something transmitted by culture, which is a continuously changing entity, but not if it is to be innate. Biology demands a sharply and narrowly formulated hypothesis of what to find in an explicitly given situation, for the result to serve as evidence. What was expected, and did that occur?

       The ethological examples mentioned above have that distinct clarity. The sea turtles hurrying to the sea right after hatching, the chick hiding from the hawk, and the grayling pursuing the darkest hue — they leave little room for speculation. It is just a question of if they do or don’t, and they do. Equally strict experiments are hardly possible with the archetypes or other claims specific to Freudian and Jungian psychology.

       Already Freud’s fundamental principle of the Oedipus complex would fail, since it is definitely not so that every son kills his father and copulates with his mother, or even longs to do so. Finding and proving an archetype common to all humans is just as hopeless. They come in all kinds of shapes and mean all kinds of different things, which is also what Jung and his followers have stated about them.

       Even the basic archetypes anima and animus, the female entity in men and the male one in women, are experienced and expressed in very different ways from person to person. That is true also for the hero archetype treated by Campbell in his previously discussed book on the subject. It is a character with so many different faces and fates. How to formulate what to expect, and how to determine if it occurs?

Not That Primitive

Campbell’s idea of an evolution of mythology analogous to human mental development from infancy to old age is also difficult to assess, mainly because he doesn’t present a developed model of what kind of mythology each stage would produce. He mentions some ingredients typical for each age, but they are not applied to a complete whole. It is not clear what mythological structure is to be expected at each stage of development.

       In his first book in the Masks of God series, Primitive Mythology, where he presents this theory of evolution, one would expect a sketch of the most primitive form, the infancy of it. What would the very oldest mythology be like, according to his theory? It is hard to confirm, since we have little or no evidence to support it, but with his theory he should at least be able to propose some general characteristics, the basic content of mythology at the infancy of the human species.

       Instead, he begins his closer examination of myths with those of the primitive planters, the beginning of agriculture, although that just gets us something like 10,000 years back or less. The first elaborate myth he quotes, about a tradition of regicide, was recorded in 1912 by the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, on whose writing he leans heavily in this book.[35] The myth may, of course, have had a long history — but not far enough back to be regarded as primitive, not even in the time scope of agriculture. That is also true for the next legend examined, that of Scheherazade, famous from Arabian Nights.[36] There is nothing primitive about it.

       The following part of the book deals with the primitive hunters, which takes us substantially farther back. Humans were hunters and gatherers already at the emergence of our species. That is millions of years ago. In search for the dawn of mythology, this is the place to go.

       This part of the book starts by comparing North American Indian planter and hunter tribes, both existing at the same time. This means it cannot be assumed that the mythologies of the former are more recent than those of the latter. If mythologies evolve, which is indeed likely, they must be expected to do so regardless of what form of culture they exist in.

       So, a hunter society mythology can change just as a planter mythology can, albeit probably in different directions. What counts is when their mythologies were recorded. The principle of evolution is not exclusive to some cultures, just as it doesn’t happen only to some species. It applies to all.

       Eventually, Campbell does approach truly primitive mythology, when speculating about its content in the Paleolithic Age, which began more than three million years ago and ended around the time when agriculture was introduced, roughly 10,000 years ago. Very little is known about human culture for most of that era, but by the end of it, let’s say from around 100,000 years ago, there are archeological findings giving significant clues to cultural phenomena. They show the advancement of human thought and creativity, but are not easy to interpret with any certainty.

       Campbell starts off with comparing a Blackfoot legend about bull hunting to a cave drawing at Trois-Frères in France of a man dressed in bull gear as he is hunting the animals. It is estimated to have been drawn around 13,000 BC. To Campbell, this is “a very strong suggestion” to the legend being at least as old.[37] Not really. It just implies the use of buffalo disguise when hunting them. That is not myth, but method.

       He uses another paleolithic art work as argument for his interpretation — Venus of Laussel, a bas-relief of a naked woman with what is probably a bison horn in her hand, approximately 25,000 years old. Again, he is jumping to conclusions, even describing it as part of a hunting shrine.

       It has been a habit of archaeologists and others to interpret such objects of Stone Age art as religious and ritualistic expressions, but other explanations are closer at hand. They may simply be artistic representations of life at that time, no magic or mythology intended. Trying to find evidence of a mythology cannot be done by elaborately interpreting objects as mythological, without also trying other explanations for them.

       It is the same problem when paleolithic graves are taken as proof of belief in an afterlife. We still bury our dead, even though our belief in an afterlife has withered, to say the least. For starters, we can’t just let the corpses lie where they fell, and we do mourn our deceased without needing a mythology to justify it.

       An amusing example of Campbell’s jump to conclusions is when he mentions the handprints on the walls of paleolithic caves, stating that they were made by “participants in the rites,” without mentioning what circumstance made him draw this conclusion.[38] No, they were much likelier just cavemen having fun and making their marks, as a sort of paleolithic graffiti.

       Campbell continues by presenting bits and pieces of myths from various recent or present cultures, much like laying a big jigsaw-puzzle, but that is no way to ascertain a primeval mythology. Such a puzzle could end up with any image, depending on the choices made along the way. Since he presents a distinct idea about mythology evolving from a kind of childhood, he should have started with a sketch of what mythology that would be, and then compared it to the clues we have — however minute — about paleolithic beliefs.

       There is yet another problem with his theory about a childhood mythology. Since he bases it on childhood emotions and perceptions of reality, it would mean that children formed this mythology. But surely, adults did it. The sentiments of childhood cannot have been decisive in the process. There is no reason to assume that adults of primeval times were seeing the world as the children of their time. They had grown out of that, and so must their conceptions have done.

       A primeval childhood of mythology was not formed by children, but by adults of that time.

Reason Before Religion

Campbell shares a basic misconception with most of those who have interpreted ancient myths and rites. They tended to regard our distant forefathers as superstitious and religious by nature, seeking supernatural explanations to explain phenomena around them and trying to control them by magic.

       But the ideas of deities and invisible forces ruling everything cannot have been the first ones to emerge in the minds of paleolithic humans. They would have started with the most near-at-hand concepts, based on sight, sound, smell, and touch. Their world would have been one of what was actually there, long before they started to speculate about what was not. Like all animals, they were practical creatures.

       Religious beliefs and rituals must have taken quite some time to appear, and it should not be taken for granted that their emergence replaced practical and rational thinking. Both moods of relating to life and the world coexisted, as they still do to a large extent. The balance between them may have fluctuated, but not enough for one of them to completely take over.

       So, when Campbell takes for granted that cave art must have had ritualistic, magical, and even religious meanings, he forgets what Johan Huizinga said about Homo ludens, the playing human, although he mentions it earlier in his book. People play, and have most certainly done so for about as long as our species has existed. Other animals surely do.

       Art is primarily playing, where both the artist and the audience participate in the game. That can also be said about myths. Fundamentally, they have been meant to entertain. The religious and ritualistic functions of them were later developments, but their basic entertaining values were never abandoned. Again, that is still true today.

       Instead of searching for what could be interpreted as signs of religious beliefs in paleolithic culture, which is completely in the eyes of the beholder, what should be pursued at first is how the practical and rational minds of primeval humans developed ideas of the immaterial, with invisible powers in control. It must have been a process of rational thinking to have begun at all, although it eventually led to what often seem to be very irrational conclusions.

       Considering that we have had this big brain of ours for very long, we should not assume that our forefathers didn’t know how to use it. In other words: Even in the very distant past, people’s worldviews must have made sense to them, or they would have been dismissed.

East Versus West

The second volume of the Masks of God series is Oriental Mythology, published in 1962. As the title states, it deals with mythologies of Asia, but Campbell treats the subject with frequent references to Occidental mythologies, which is the theme of the third book. He introduces Oriental Mythology by comparing the two mythological traditions, where he shows an affection for the Oriental ones shared by Carl G. Jung, basing it on a similarly rather romantic understanding of them.

       Jung’s perception of Asian mythology and spirituality has been discussed previously. He was an express admirer of the Chinese classic Tao Te Ching and the Japanese tradition of Zen Buddhism. Campbell discusses the two, but adds the Indian mythology predating Buddhism, with its ancient literary sources of the Vedas and other texts.

       To explain the difference between Western and Eastern religion, Campbell uses the two trees in the Garden of Eden — one with fruits giving eternal life and the fruits of the other bringing knowledge of good and evil. The former is the path of Oriental religion, whereas the latter is characteristic of the Occidental.[39]

       It is a clever analogy, and not that far-fetched. Looking at the Abrahamic religions, they definitely have a leniency towards a moral worldview, as Genesis shows. Adam and Eve ate of the fruit giving knowledge of good and evil, but were thrown out of Eden before having a bite of the fruit of life. Our path, then, is one of moral obligations until our dying days, after which we will be judged.

       On the other hand, whether we pass or fail the test, there is eternal life awaiting us, as if we finally get a bite of that fruit. Granted, this eternity is a blessing for some and a curse for others. But eternal it still is.

       As for the Oriental religions, it would be a gross oversimplification to state that they put no emphasis on moral demands. They certainly do, all of them. Buddhism has plenty of rules to live by, and so does Hinduism. Even Taoism, which deviates the most from what is usually meant by religion, is full of dictates about how we should and should not live. Its major text, the Tao Te Ching, makes it clear already in the title. The word Te can be translated as virtue, which is explained as living in accordance with the principle of Tao, the Way.

       Shinto, too, as presented in its two major texts from the 8th century, Kojiki and Nihongi, points out moral standards that even the gods have to obey.

       It is simply so that morality is a prominent ingredient in every religion, which is to no surprise considering the role religion plays in societies. It establishes and enforces behavioral norms by giving them supernatural origins. That is not the only function of religion, but certainly a very important one — in several religions clearly the most important one.

       Still, it is doubtful that the level of morality can be decided by geographical longitude. The religions originating in the Bible certainly emphasize morality, but it can hardly be said that they have established only in the West. In particular, the missionary religions Christianity and Islam have millions of devoted followers also in the East. That would not be the case if they were particularly alien to the Eastern mindset.

       Also, there have been plenty of Western religions in the West with little focus on morality, such as Greek and Roman mythology, where the gods often behaved in deplorable ways. The Norse gods were quite violent and the myths about them were scarcely concerned with moral aspects. The fact that these and many other religions were replaced by Christianity had much less to do with the morality of their content than with the military and economic power of the latter.

       Those old religions were not deserted due to their moral inferiority. They were conquered by the invading superior force of Christian societies. Although the intent of the invaders was often described as missionary, it had little to do with religion. That was just part of the appropriation.

       So, Campbell’s distinction between Oriental and Occidental religion based on moral content is questionable. It is not that simple.

A Cyclic World

Campbell presents another model, which might be more fruitful. He describes it as the myth of the eternal return, “which is still basic to Oriental life.”[40]

       It is the belief in the cyclic nature of the world and everything in it, with no absolute beginning or end, just an eternity of returns. Much of what we have always been able to observe conforms to it. The sun’s daily disappearance and return, the phases of the moon, the rhythm of the seasons, the succession of generations of people as well as animals and plants, and so on, are all evidently cyclic. It must have seemed obvious to our ancestors that if this much is cyclic, then maybe everything is — forever: “There never was a time when time was not.”

       Campbell points out the existential consequence of this worldview:

There is therefore nothing to be gained, either for the universe or for man, through individual originality and effort.

       Nothing can change the course of history, since everything is forever on repeat. Because of this, individual strife to stand out and make a difference is pointless. Instead, the only meaningful attitude is one of adaption:

The first duty of the individual, consequently, is simply to play his given role — as do the sun and moon, the various animal and plant species, the waters, the rocks, and the stars — without resistance, without fault.

       This ideal is clearly promoted in Taoism, with its principle ofwu-wei, non-action. The natural order is disturbed by human interference, which should therefore be minimal. Striving for greatness leads to failure, whereas the sage succeeds without action and without receiving praise, as if having nothing to do with the accomplishment. Similar ideals can be found in Hinduism and Buddhism.

       Western ideals are different. Individual accomplishments are energetically pursued and cherished. We yearn for standing out and living a life that makes for a spectacular biography, our personal hero myth. Our religions promote it, too.

       In Christianity and Islam, the ultimate success story is a virtuous life leading to Paradise, whereas the unworthy end in Hell. In Norse mythology it was a courageous life as a warrior that led to eternal festivities in Valhalla. The Greek and Roman mythologies were more ambiguous. An end in success was not guaranteed any hero, nor was it always clear what behavior would be rewarded. But their stories were spectacular and so were their endings.

       Certainly, in Western religion and culture the individual’s fate is valued far above that of the collective. We are not celebrated for conforming to others, but for deviating. In several Eastern cultures this is seen as improper and shameful.

       In Western cultures, even when an ideology is forthright collectivistic it points out the role of the individual. That is indicated already by the names they are given, such as Marxism and Leninism. Also the dominating Western religion, Christianity, is named after a person, although it preaches piety and humility. The three religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are called Abrahamic, and a name commonly given by the West to Islam is Mohammedanism, though never used by Muslims.

       It is a generalization, but a fairly plausible one, to regard the Western ideals as individualistic, praising those who stand out, while the Eastern ideal is not to stick out from the group, but humbly conform to it. Of course, these are ideals, not necessarily followed by all. The individual strife to gain recognition is not unheard of in the East, nor is modest adjustment to the group in the West. But they are exceptions rather than norms in those cultures.

       Still, it is not only in Western mythology that a timeline from beginning to end is found. Creation accounts exist in practically every mythology, also those in the East. Tao Te Ching describes a primordial chaos from which Tao emerges and introduces order.[41] In Indian mythology there are several creation myths, whereof the most intriguing one is Rig Veda 10:129. The short text describes how The One awakens in the nothingness and starts creation out of desire, but it ends with the following reservation:

Whence this creation has arisen — perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not — the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows — or perhaps he does not know.[42]

       The uncertainty admitted by the author is understandable, but there is no doubt about the world having once begun. The Japanese mythology also contains a beginning of the world. Both Kojiki and Nihongi, the two classics, describe a primordial state where neither heaven nor earth existed as separate entities, which implies a chaos of the same kind as in Tao Te Ching, to no surprise. There was, at the time of their writing, a substantial influence of Chinese thought on Japanese culture, including ideas about cosmogony.

       While mythical ideas about the emergence of the world are common around the world, ideas about its end, eschatology, are much rarer.

       Tao Te Ching mentions nothing about it, nor do the two Japanese classics. Hinduism states that the world has ended countless times and will continue to do so, always with a new beginning. In classical Buddhism, neither a beginning nor an end of the world is mentioned, but there are later Mahayana ideas about it. Judaism speaks of a coming Messianic age, but not an end of all. Similarly, Christianity speaks of a second coming of Christ and the Last Judgment, leading to a new world. Islam has a comparable concept. Norse mythology has Ragnarök, the final war where even the mightiest of gods perish, but it is followed by a resurrection of the god Balder and a splendid new world. Greek mythology contains no end of the world.

       It is worth pondering why ideas of a beginning have been so common, but those of an end have not. What is born will also one day die. That is true for humans, animals, and plants alike, and this has been known since primeval times. So, the thought of an end for the whole world — if it was once born — would seem to be apparent.

       There is, of course, the reluctance to consider death, as opposed to the joy of birth, but that is hardly the whole explanation. Humanity has been accustomed to the grim realities of life since we got the brain capacity to contemplate them. What is more difficult to comprehend, though, is how something can become nothing, how a world once born can cease to exist. This paradox is additionally implied by the fact that creation myths very rarely begin with nothing turning into something. There is always something present beforehand, be it a god, a primordial sea, an abyss, or a combination thereof. The world was created out of something. So, it may change but not turn into nothing.

       The cyclic nature of which Campbell speaks is one that may have had a beginning, but once it began there is no apparent reason for it to ever stop. The sun clocks the days and the moon the months, seemingly without end. People and animals continue to procreate since it is in their nature, and they even multiply. To our ancient predecessors it was as difficult to imagine the end of it as it is to us. Individuals perish but life goes on.

       Nevertheless, Campbell’s observation about Eastern mythology pointing to the collective and the Western one to the individual makes sense. As far as these kinds of generalizations go, the one he proposes is valid.

       There are certainly deviations and variations to be found, in the East as well as the West, and they may upon closer examination be found in abundance. Still, these two main perspectives can be meaningfully applied as categories of mythology from whatever part of the world. The myth of the hero, divine or human, certainly shows an individualistic emphasis. What myths would belong to the other category, though, is not as obvious. In its purest form it may not take the shape of a story at all.

       Comparing the texts of the Eastern and Western religions, the former tend to be more abstract and philosophical, whereas the latter come closer to fables ending with a moral conclusion. Campbell shows this difference as seen in Indian and biblical texts: “The Indian point of view is metaphysical, poetical; the biblical, ethical and historical.”[43] Although both have exceptions to this rule, they follow it more than they deviate from it.

       The reason for this may to a large extent lie in the fact that the Western world has a long tradition of separating religion and philosophy, which is not equally true for Eastern texts — at least not in Western eyes. For example, the presumed author of Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, would be more adequately described as a philosopher than a prophet, and ancient Taoism is far more of a philosophy than a religion. This could also be said about Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, as well as many of the unknown contributors to the Veda texts of India.

       Many of these were not religious but philosophical writings, which have in spite of that been categorized as the former by Western minds. To compare, Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers speculated about gods, the cosmos, and spiritual subjects, without us ever thinking of them as prophets of a religion.

Four Ages of Western Mythology

The third book in Campbell’s Masks of God series, Occidental Mythology published in 1964, presents Western mythology as a development through four “ages” — the age of the goddess, the heroes, the great classics, and the great beliefs. The first age was the primeval one, before 1500 BC, when a mother goddess of fruition was worshipped, the second between 1500 and 500 BC, which included the oldest biblical and Greek myths, the third between 500 BC and 500 CE, with Persian, Greek, and Roman mythologies, and the fourth after 500 CE until the present, with Byzantium, the emergence of Islam, and the changes within Christianity in Europe.

       This chronology can be questioned, as could any strict division of mythological development through time. The main problem would be the difficulty of ascertaining how old certain myths and mythological ingredients might be. About this we can do little more than speculate.

       It is not enough to sort them by the age of textual sources, since these are probably based on traditions dating much farther back. Mythologies certainly did not begin to take shape with the introduction of writing, but somewhere along the way of the development of speech, which was long before 1500 BC.

       Furthermore, the Occident in not homogenous enough to serve as a base for a chronology of mythology. It contains areas and cultures with quite disparate histories of religion. A geographical and cultural area where a timeline is significantly easier to apply is Europe, at least for the last 3000 years or so. Then the first period, until the 4th century CE would be one of diverse polytheistic mythologies, such as those of the Greek, Roman, and Germanic people. That was followed by the spread of Christianity and its monotheism, still to a large extent dominant on the continent.

       The era of Christianity can also be divided into rather distinct periods, starting with its emergence and slow growth in the 1st to 4th centuries CE, until in the year 380 it became the Roman state religion by the Edict of Thessalonica. The next major event was the split between the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches, becoming definite with the Schism of 1054. Almost 500 years later, in 1517, Martin Luther published his Ninety-five Theses that became the start of the Reformation and Protestantism.

       Still, these changes of Christianity were in practice and organization, not so much in its mythology. The major source remained the Bible with the New Testament, and the core principle was that of the trinity established in the 4th century. What made a profound change to Christianity was not within its mythology, but outside of it.

       The scientific revolution from the Renaissance and onward put Christian dogma into question, until scientific discoveries had all but dismissed it. The most important challenge was astronomical — the change from a geocentric to a heliocentric worldview in the 16th to 17th centuries. When earth was pushed from the center of the universe, so was God. Next came Newton’s celestial mechanics, showing the movements of the celestial bodies having no need of a divine force. And when Darwin’s theory of evolution made God redundant even in the creation of man, there was very little left for which to praise the Almighty.

       Campbell sees this development as a return to reason:

Within Christianized Europe itself, furthermore, the absolute authority of the One Church was dissolved through the irresistible return to force of the native European principles of individual judgment and the worth of rational man.[44]

       Reluctantly at first, Christian doctrine had to adapt, not by changing its sources but how they were interpreted. Also, the tremendous power of the church waned, since it could no longer make believable claims about the high power they represented. As God lost control of the world, so did his church.

       Accordingly, the Christian mythology has not changed substantially through its 2000 years, not even during the last centuries of scientific progress — but it has increasingly moved towards being interpreted symbolically. This idea was not new. Already in the 4th century, Augustine pointed out that much of what the Bible says must be understood as symbolic, and not strictly factual, so that the six days of creation were no ordinary days and so on. Other Christian commentators through the centuries have had similar approaches, especially regarding the creation as described in Genesis 1 and 2.

       Returning to Campbell’s four ages, additional questions arise regarding the first age in particular. The mother goddess of that age is little more than speculation, since it goes back to a time before the introduction of writing. That does not stop him from making bold claims about that primeval goddess:

Now in the neolithic village stage of this development and dispersal, the focal figure of all mythology and worship was the bountiful goddess Earth, as the mother and nourisher of life and receiver of the dead for rebirth.[45]

       Campbell mainly uses elements of biblical and Greek mythology to suggest what previous beliefs might have been and how ancient artifacts should be interpreted. Many other interpretations are just as possible or even more so. We simply can’t say for sure, and there is no evidence of a past when goddesses were regarded as superior to gods, though that has been claimed among Freudians as well as Jungians.

       In the chapters on the age of heroes, he deals mainly with the Pentateuch of the Bible, especially Genesis and the story of Moses. As for the latter, he refers frequently to Sigmund Freud and his book Moses and Monotheism, but points out, “I am not going either to defend or to attack the views of Freud.”[46] Still, in the same paragraph he calls Freud “one of the bravest creative spirits of our day.”

       To the same age he connects early Hellenic mythology and its traces in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

       As for the age of the great classics, Campbell begins with Zoroaster andAvesta, followed by Hellenism from the 4th century BC and on, ending with the Roman era in which he includes the development of Christianity.

       The age of the great beliefs introduces Islam and explores the Irish and Germanic mythologies, as well as the continued development of Christianity.

Four Functions of Mythology

In the concluding chapter of the book, Campbell presents what he calls “four essential functions of mythology.”[47] Indeed, those four aspects cover most, if not all, of what mythologies have meant to the societies committed to them.

       The first function is the “sense of awe before the mystery of being,” with which he refers to Rudolf Otto’s idea of the numinous, also emphasized by Mircea Eliade. Without it the other functions would not be reached, simply because the mythology would lack attraction and bewilderment. Nobody would care about myths that did not amaze and intrigue, nor could any religion assemble followers if it lacked wonders.

       The second function is a cosmology that also brings a sense of awe. Still, it has to make some kind of sense and be believable:

The cosmology has to correspond, however, to the actual experience, knowledge, and mentality of the culture folk involved.

       This is compatible with what was discussed above regarding science dethroning religion. When the cosmology in question can no longer be supported by reason, it collapses. Ideas of how the world works must fit how the world is perceived, at least not oppose it, since this is an element of mythology which can be tested against reality. What is stated about the observable world needs to match what is observed. To Campbell, this is where religion today fails the most:

And here we touch upon a crucial problem of the religions of our time; for the clergies, generally, still are preaching themes from the first to fourth millenniums B.C.[48]

       As an example, he mentions that no one of “adult mind” would today turn to Genesis for explanations about the origins of the earth and its living creatures, including mankind. Since his book was published in 1964, though, it has become increasingly clear that numerous adults persist with the biblical cosmology and reject scientific discoveries to the contrary. The minds of the so-called creationists must still be regarded as adult, at least in the biological sense.

       But for them, too, the need of a cosmology fitting the perceivable world is evident, or they would not bother to make elaborate alternative theories about the world to make it conform to the description in Genesis. At the failure of that, they grasp what they regard as anomalies in scientific claims, in an effort to make all conflicting theories equally a matter of belief, only. Their persistence demonstrates that they have other priorities than that of reason, but of course, that makes sense to them — as long as they are able to convince themselves.

       The third function, according to Campbell, is social. The mythology serves to “support the current social order, to integrate the individual organically with his group.” This has been emphasized by many anthropologists. Certainly, there are countless examples of it in how mythologies are treated in societies and the rites connected to them. A mythology can hardly exist without a community keeping it in place and committing to it as a common understanding. Campbell explains:

The social function of a mythology and of the rites by which it is rendered is to establish in every member of the group concerned a "system of sentiments" that can be depended upon to link him spontaneously to its ends.[49]

       In other words, mythology is used as an instrument to make the members of a society conform to its demands and to accept its doctrine. That is not necessarily a case of oppression, since it may very well be supported by almost all in that society, and in order for it to last it needs at least a clear majority willingly committed to it. But it has been known to happen in history as well as the present, that when willingness faded it was replaced by force. The authoritarian component in religion, with its invisible deities ruling from above, lends itself easily to an authoritarian regime.

       Campbell’s fourth function is the least obvious one. While the previous three are easy to confirm and have so been done in abundance by ethnologists, anthropologists, historians of religion, and others, this last function raises several questions. Campbell describes it, “to initiate the individual into the order of realities of his own psyche, guiding him toward his own spiritual enrichment and realization.”[50]

       That has a Jungian ring to it, approaching his idea of individuation, the self-discovery connecting the conscious with the hidden unconscious mind. What it actually means, though, is less clear outside of the depth psychology paradigm. Campbell’s wording raises a bundle of questions. What initiation, what realities, what spiritual enrichment, and what realization?

       It seems that he points to some kind of personal satori, a revelation of a mystical kind, reforming the individual psyche into an enlightened one. But what he speaks about is instead the victory of the rational mindset, “the informed, rational faculty of responsible judgment.”[51]

       He describes it as a humanistic individualism, and states that it is of European origin:

For it was in Europe alone that the principle of individual judgment and responsibility was developed in relation not to a fixed order of supposed divine laws, but to a changing context of human actualities, rationally governed.

       This opening of the eye of the European man led to “the vanishment thereby of all the earlier masks of God, which now are known to have been of developing man himself.” This is what he sets out to demonstrate in the last book of the series, Creative Mythology.

Individual Mythology

Joseph Campbell’s fourth and last book in the Masks of God series, Creative Mythology, was published in 1968. Here he focuses on the mythology of sorts created by great individual minds, especially in the last couple of centuries, as opposed to the traditional mythologies upheld by societies where all their members were expected or even forced to commit to them.

       He sees it as a release of mankind, mostly but not solely accomplished by the advances of science and its methods of research. Those were accomplishments by “the minds of already self-reliant individuals,”[52] with the courage to think freely. This affected society way beyond the confines of science:

Moreover, not only in the sciences but in every department of life the will and courage to credit one’s own senses and to honor one’s own decisions, to name one’s own virtues and to claim one’s own vision of truth, have been the generative forces of the new age, the enzymes of the fermentation of the wine of this great modern harvest — which is a wine, however, that can be safely drunk only by those with a courage oftheir own.

       Obviously, in Campbell’s mind these are the heroes, much more so than the mythical figures he discussed in The Hero With a Thousand Faces from 1949, discussed earlier. He praises those outstanding persons — scientists, philosophers, authors, and artists — to the point where it is as if he is writing a Gospel of Individuality: “The masters of these works, then, are the prophets of the present dawn of the new age of our species.”[53] He calls them a pantheon of actual individuals, and their works are the mythology of our time:

The arts of Shakespeare and Cervantes are revelations, texts and chapters, in this way, of the actual living mythology of our present developing humanity.[54]

       Among the other great minds that he mentions are James Joyce, his lifelong favorite author, Spinoza, Giordano Bruno, Einstein, Newton, Schopenhauer, Thomas Mann, and to no surprise Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he quotes: “The goal of mankind is not to be seen in the realization of some terminal state of perfection, but is present in its noblest exemplars.”[55]

       Campbell’s praise is certainly not without cause, but it is strange that he would separate these great minds and their accomplishments from the social setting in which they lived and worked. They were hardly alone and their contributions were not only products of their own minds. There was always a context, always a fellowship, without which they would not have been able to perform so splendidly.

       For example, William Shakespeare worked in a theater among other actors who surely inspired and cooperated with him, and his plays were founded on those of Ancient Greece as well as on Aristotle’s Poetics, among many other influences of his time and the tradition transmitted to it. Not that it takes away any of the brilliance of his plays, but it connects them to his surroundings.

       Accordingly, the radically original prose of James Joyce had grown out of the literary tradition with which he was very familiar, Einstein stood on the shoulders of Newton who stood on those of Copernicus and Kepler, and so on. Geniuses, like everyone else, wither without company and their thoughts don’t ascend if not carried by the thoughts and contributions of others.

       Furthermore, outstanding individual accomplishments are nothing new, nor the lasting respect for them. The Greek philosophers are well known to us and have been cherished since their own time. The same is true for many artists and authors through the ages. Several religions have remarkable individuals worshipped for their deeds, such as Zarathustra, Jesus, and Mohammed. Nor is it anything exclusive to the Occidental or European cultures. For example, there is Buddha of India, Lao Tzu and Confucius of China, and so on.

       Remarkable individuals have always existed and been recognized as such. Equally true is that some of them have been persecuted for deviating from the social norm more than the powers of their society tolerated. This, too, has not changed in our present days. Nor was it different for the Western world in the politically charged year of 1968, when Campbell’s book was published.

Again, the Functions of Mythology

Campbell returns to his idea of four functions of mythology, which he presented in the previous book, Occidental Mythology, but this time with slightly altered definitions of those functions.

       The first function, previously described as the sense of awe induced by mythology, is now “to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et jascinans of this universe as it is.”[56] Although the words differ, what is implied is surely the same numinous of which Rudolf Otto spoke.

       The second function, though, deviates considerably from the cosmology he previously assigned to it. Now it relates directly to the previous function of perceiving the universe, in order to “render an interpretive total image of the same, as known to contemporary consciousness.” That is quite cryptic and not cleared up much by his explanation:

It is the revelation to waking consciousness of the powers of its own sustaining source.

       Actually, it seems to be little more than a repetition of the first function. Where he previously spoke of two separate functions — the sense of awe and the structure of a cosmology — he now blends them into one. By that, both are obscured. The experience of the numinous loses its emotional significance and the cosmology loses its rational clarity. Campbell should have stayed with his earlier definitions, which made more sense.

       The third function, that of supporting the social order and conforming the individual to it, is in its new wording the same, but sharpened: “the enforcement of a moral order.” That is indeed how a social order is usually established and defended. It is proclaimed a necessity of a higher dignity, not to be questioned by individuals. Society and its norms are declared to be as they must. A social order is open to alteration, but a moral order is not.

       Before turning to Campbell’s fourth function of mythology, the first three call for additional consideration. They form a complete whole, regarding not only the functions but also perspectives of mythology.

       Most if not all mythologies contain a mixture of three separate perspectives, which can be described as modes of thought: artistic, scientific and moral. They correspond quite precisely to the first three functions in Campbell’s model.

       The scientific perspective is the intention to explain — the origin of the world and its inhabitants, the forces of nature, the fate of men, and so on. The moral perspective is the intention to discipline the members of the community by establishing higher causes for the rules of that society and thereby imprinting them in people’s minds. The artistic perspective is what creates the sense of awe mentioned by Campbell. It is the intention to entertain, without which the other two perspectives would fall flat. A boring mythology gets no devotee.

       Creation myths are usually very clear examples of this triangle of perspectives and how they appear with shifting emphasis within myths as well as between them. For example, Genesis 1 with its six days of creation has a clear emphasis on the scientific side of the triangle, whereas Genesis 2 with the story of Adam, Eve, and the forbidden fruit leans heavily to the moral side. Both are artistically enhanced for effect — Genesis 1 with the grand cosmic spectacle and Genesis 2 with the drama striking its main characters, who are portrayed as all too human, so that we feel their desperation and pain.

       There is nothing mysterious about the three sides of this triangle, neither with the intentions behind them nor with how they are expressed in mythology. Together, they cover just about all significant ingredients in mythology, which is also implied in Campbell’s treatment. It is with the fourth function he complicates matters unnecessarily. Still, he calls it the “most vital, most critical” of them, and explains that its aim is “to foster the centering and unfolding of the individual in integrity.”[57]

       This centering and unfolding are done in accord with a foursome relating to the four functions, and therefore with letters signifying their order:

d) himself (the microcosm), c) his culture (the mesocosm), b) the universe (the macrocosm), and a) that awesome ultimate mystery which is both beyond and within himself and all things.

       This creates kind of a loop, where the fourth function contains all of them, including itself. That is rather close to mumbo jumbo. Campbell is carried away by his urge to make depth psychology of it all, and doing so implies a purpose that is hard to imagine being incorporated in the formation of mythologies. The ancient sages, or individual geniuses if you will, who developed the mythologies were hardly aiming at a psychoanalytical strategy by which to lead each person to some kind of self-realization.

       Campbell is simply projecting his own conviction onto the ancient material. So, of course he can show no substantial evidence for it.

       Mythologies are socially adapted and upheld. They are not concerned with the personal psyche, other than that they need to be at least partially convincing to the minds towards which they are directed. Certainly, they can still induce sensations of self-discovery in those who adhere to them, but that is more of a side effect than an intended function of them. Persons with that experience are much likelier to have made their own interpretations.

       Of course, there are exceptions. Some mythologies explicitly include elements of self-realization, such as shamanistic paths to discover and express personal characteristics and powers, and the alchemist method of using the transmutation of lead into gold as a metaphor for personal refinement. Still, the main object of mythology has always been social, and not personal, however some individuals may have found to use it.

       Campbell’s excuse, in this last volume of Masks of God, is that here he deals with the creations of individual and independent minds. He asserts, “the mythology of which we are treating in this volume springs from individual experience, not dogma, learning, political interests, or programs for the renovation of society.”[58] But that is not a valid argument, for two reasons.

       Firstly, there is no contrariety between individual experience and dogma, learning, et cetera. They are not mutually exclusive. Quite the contrary. Most literary works contain what must be described as dogmatic or political messages, aimed at improving society. Otherwise, they would be pointless — only words, words, words. No author of any dignity just tells a story. There is a point to it, something of importance that the writer wants to address.

       Secondly, it cannot be stated that mythologies of old were not the results of individual experience. The author’s identity may be lost to us, but there surely was one — or several, which makes no difference. Mythologies were born out of minds with their individual experiences. Just as mythologies do not appear without people forming them, minds do not operate without experiences influencing them.

       The difference Campbell claims is not one of content, but of use. That use is likely to have reshaped mythologies over time, though more in how they were interpreted than how they were altered to fit this or that purpose.

       This is evident in how the words of the Bible have been treated through the centuries. The writing remains unedited, but the explanations of it have differed considerably through time and in various cultural settings. That can also be said for the Greek mythology, which was once in Ancient Greece regarded as a reality, but later became no more than fairy tales.

       So, when Campbell condemns mythologies of old, he does so because of their use, but mistakenly claims it is due to their content.

       The Gospels should have enlightened him, if he were not so opposed to how Christian churches have misused them by twisting their meanings. The many atrocities of the authoritarian and intolerant churches have no support in the teachings of Jesus, as the words of the Gospels transmit them.

       Considering this, the truly baffling thing is that those words have remained unaltered throughout, although they exposed the hypocrisy of those churches. Still, the clergy evidently did not dare to change the texts, since they had founded those churches on declaring the scriptures sacred, of divine origin. They were trapped by the very thing that gave them their power.

       Campbell, too, is not altering the texts he discusses, but he picks the ones that fit his theory and interprets them accordingly. It is his right, of course, but he does it with such bias that his conclusions are neither surprising nor convincing.

Jungians on Myth and Religion

1. Introduction

2. Erich Neumann

3. Károly Kerényi

4. Joseph L. Henderson

5. Joseph Campbell

6. Mircea Eliade

7. Marie-Louise von Franz

8. Charles H. Long

9. James Hillman

10. Anthony Stevens

11. David Adams Leeming

12. Jordan B. Peterson

13. Literature

This text is an excerpt from my book Archetypes of Mythology: Jungian Theories on Myth and Religion Examined from 2022. The excerpt was published on this website in January, 2023.

© Stefan Stenudd 2022, 2023

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About me
I'm a Swedish author of fiction and non-fiction books in both English and Swedish. I'm also an artist, a historian of ideas, and a 7 dan Aikikai Shihan aikido instructor. Click the header to read my full bio.