The Power of Myth

This is what Campbell did. It was impossible to listen to him—truly to hear him—without realizing in one’s own consciousness a stirring of fresh life, the rising of one’s own imagination. He agreed that the “guiding idea” of his work was to find “the commonality of themes in world myths, pointing to a constant requirement in the human psyche for a centering in terms of deep principles.” “You’re talking about a search for the meaning of life?” I asked. “No, no, no,” he said. “For the experience of being alive.” I have said that mythology is an interior road map of experience, drawn by people who have traveled it. He would, I suspect, not settle for the journalist’s prosaic definition. To him mythology was “the song of the universe,” “the music of the spheres”—music we dance to even when we cannot name the tune. We are hearing its refrains “whether we listen with aloof amusement to the mumbo jumbo of some witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture translations from sonnets of Lao-tsu, or now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimoan fairy tale.” He imagined that this grand and cacophonous chorus began when our primal ancestors told stories to themselves about the animals that they killed for food and about the supernatural world to which the animals seemed to go when they died. “Out there somewhere,” beyond the visible plain of existence, was the “animal master,” who held over human beings the power of life and death: if he failed to send the beasts back to be sacrificed again, the hunters and their kin would starve. Thus early societies learned that “the essence of life is that it lives by killing and eating; that’s the great mystery that the myths have to deal with.” The hunt became a ritual of sacrifice, and the hunters in turn performed acts of atonement to the departed spirits of the animals, hoping to coax them into returning to be sacrificed again. The beasts were seen as envoys from that other world, and Campbell surmised “a magical, wonderful accord” growing between the hunter and the hunted, as if they were locked in a “mystical, timeless” cycle of death, burial, and resurrection. Their art—the paintings on cave walls—and oral literature gave form to the impulse we now call religion. As these primal folk turned from hunting to planting, the stories they told to interpret the mysteries of life changed, too. Now the seed became the magic symbol of the endless cycle. The plant died, and was buried, and its seed was born again.

This is what Campbell did. It was impossible to listen to him—truly to hear him—without realizing in one’s own consciousness a stirring of fresh life, the risin…