The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell; a review

“Myths formulate things for you. They say, for example, that you have to become an adult at a particular age. The age might be a good average for that to happen—but actually, in the individual life, it differs greatly. Some people are late bloomers, and come to particular stages at a relatively late age. You have to have a feeling for where you are. You’ve got only one life to live, and you don’t have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.”

--Joseph Campbell

Myths—the old great ones—are true. Not because they necessarily happened—though some have, in some form or fashion, even if distorted or exaggerated over centuries and millennia of retelling—but because they convey timeless truths about the human condition. We recognize something of ourselves in them. The wanderings of Odysseus. King Arthur and the quest for the Grail and the fall of Camelot. The Celtic myths and legends, of Cú Chulainn and the Tuatha Dé Danann. These stories endure because they tell us something profound about human nature, both how it is and how it might be different, how we might live better lives. 

I was reminded of everything I love about myth in a recent reading of The Power of Myth. Published in 1988, the book is an extended conversation between Joseph Campbell and television journalist Bill Moyers (who just passed away last month) that took place in 1985 and 1986 at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch and the Museum of Natural History in New York. Portions of the interview were aired in a six-hour PBS series, which proved wildly popular at the time and led to a Campbell revival. The interviews spanned more than 24 hours and The Power of Myth is the complete edited transcript. 

Campbell passed away just a year after the interview and The Power of Myth serves as a repository of his thinking late in life. I’m glad we have it. I cannot do justice to his unique intellect except to say he understood humanity at a level few have before or since. His great genius was in comparative mythology. Campbell spent a lifetime studying the great myths of all the world and came to find they shared much in common. People across cultures and ages are different, but also struggle with the same concerns and problems—the aimlessness of youth, the difficult transition from childhood to adult responsibility, aging and death. And these common stories become encoded into myth.

The Power of Myth is not Bulfinch’s Mythology. It is not a history of the myths, but instead addresses their metaphysical aspects: What are myths? Why do we need them? How have they come to endure?

The answers lie in the pages of this book, but also Dr. Robert Johnson, a contemporary of Campbell and like him a student of Carl Jung, who said of myth, “People have such a tendency to think that mythology is something that happened way back yonder, but mythology is a current, immediate, living thing. Everybody has his own myth, churning away inside himself.”

This speaks to me.

I spent much of my life walking around in a fog, consuming music, books, porn, social media, whatever. Never turning inward; never attempting to come to grips with my unconscious self that ruled my actions like an unseen hand on the tiller. Myths offer a way out, into a higher plane of existence, because they make you look within, where the answers lie, and where the dragon waits. This is the hero’s journey and one we all must undertake. I have personally experienced it, and see the same story and archetypes and patterns play out again and again in the broader culture. 

Jung and Campbell have somewhat fallen out of favor today. We have a blossoming field of neuroscience plumbing the depths of the human brain at a physical, biochemical level. I suspect the scientific community would consider the idea of a shadow self or the collective unconscious unscientific, speculative, lacking empirical support. But they continue to provide a working model of the human psyche and development that speaks to me, deeply. I have to come to believe in dualism. Mind and body are separate though related. Although concepts like love and honor and pride are not physical objects they exist, and so are of no less import than physical matter. We need abstract symbolic language to navigate the concrete world. Myths offer the roadmap.

The real quest is within, our foe to be conquered is the unexamined life, the un-individuated self. We believe our lives will be fixed if a certain politician gets into office or some bill is passed; we are mistaken.  The hard truth is that no calvary is coming over the hill; we must accept the burden of accountability, which is paradoxically liberating. Says Campbell: 

“Ultimately, the last deed has to be done by yourself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down … Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That’s the helpful thing about the Indian idea of karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing.”

As Jung said in The Undiscovered Self, “A million zeroes joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations.” Adds Johnson: “You have to have some sane people as individuals before you can talk about community. Otherwise you have a community of sickness.”

This is not a call for selfishness; it’s a call for living an authentic life and then sharing the bounty outwards. Being curious about other people’s lives; expressing true empathy. This is the truth at the heart of the Holy Grail myth, in which the knights set out each on their own path, entering the Forest Sauvage at their own entry points. Per Campbell:

“The theme of the Grail romance is that the land, the country, the whole territory of concern has been laid waste. It is called a wasteland. And what is the nature of the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. And that is what T.S. Eliot meant in his poem The Waste Land … the Grail becomes the—what can we call it?—that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. The Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness.”

Once we have found ourselves, we help others. That completes the circle. Perceval recovers the Grail only after he formulates the question to the wounded Fisher King: “What ails thee?” 

“The question is an expression, not of the rules of the society, but of compassion, the natural opening of the human heart to another human being,” Campbell explains. “That’s the Grail.”

It’s not easy, but life is hard, and has always been thus. But Campbell chose to play it. His lessons are worth reading. "I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera--except that it hurts".

On a bit of a lighter note, if you’re a Star Wars fan The Power of Myth contains some insightful analysis of the film. For example, Campbell describes Darth Vader as an unformed man, undeveloped as a human individual, but is instead a bureaucrat living for an imposed program (Lucas was a big Campbell devotee and Star Wars an homage to his teachings). Vader’s monstrous mask is a symbol; when taken away his “strange and sort of pitiful undifferentiated face” is laid bare. 

We need the myths; without the great stories we lack the models and language to become self-sufficient individuals, susceptible to propaganda and mass subjugation. Fortunately we have Campell’s teachings as a north star to guide us out of our own personal wasteland, if we brave the journey. We must.