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Epilogue: Myth and Society

Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2011 3:10 am
by Chris OConnor
Epilogue: Myth and Society
The Hero with a Thousand Faces - by Joseph Campbell

Re: Epilogue: Myth and Society

Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2011 9:40 am
by Clayburn
This is one of my favorite reads. Joseph Campbell was a true genius. I'll have to reread this one soon.

Re: Epilogue: Myth and Society

Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 11:19 am
by DWill
Uh-oh, why am I posting on the final, short chapter, having said nothing about the book since early on? I admit it, I skipped to the "significance" chapter. The reason is not Campbell's fault, by any means, but has more to do with my not being enough a student of myth to hang with him. The body of the book is a compendium of myth, consisting of hundreds of examples from myths from all over the world, all too much for me currently. Maybe that will change at some point, though I'm running out of time for changes. I can't conceive how anyone can know this much about a subject.


He says, first, that "there is no final system for the interpretation of myths, and there will never be any such thing" (329). Would that were a view that religions had taken about the texts that they have (mis)appropriated. But that being the case, that interpretations are going to be very individual, I have less motivation to read so much about Campbell's own interpretations.

He also talks about the modern world's inability to join with myth, and this observation also partly explains why I couldn't get into the book. Campbell is right about modernity's image of itself as breaking free of the superstitions embodied in myth, adopting a scientific worldview, and exalting the individual over the group. "Those great co-ordinating mythologies," he says, functioned to concentrate meaning in the group, "in the great anonymous forms, none in the self-expressive individual; today no meaning is in the group--none in the world: all is in the individual" (334). What we exalt, usually, is just what Campbell identifies: scientific thinking and the liberty of the individual. I know I often do, at least, and this makes the endless permutations of fantastic myths less attractive to me.

There is an advantage to our way, but also a big drawback. "Where then there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there is now darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul" (334). Campbell doesn't claim that we can turn back "from what has been accomplished by the modern revolution," but we can still "render the modern world spiritually significant" by "making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the conditions of contemporary life." (334). He reminds me here of Stuart Kauffman in Reinventing the Sacred. I have only a vague idea of what he means, though.

This world-altering shift can come about only through the workings of the unconscious, not as a result of conscious intent. He says that through a "long and very frightening process...new symbols [will] become visible" (335). He makes an attractive religious pitch for universalism: "The way to become human is to learn to recognize the lineaments of God in all the wonderful modulations of the face of man" (336). But he emphasizes that the "old mysteries have all lost their force; their symbols no longer interest our psyches." Again, this points to my difficulty in believing in the significance of the myths he has told us about.

In his last two paragraphs he pulls out the stops, leaving me behind in a religious flight that clearly reveals his earlier Catholicism.

Re: Epilogue: Myth and Society

Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 1:15 pm
by lady of shallot
Dwill I found the same thing about this book. I realize that I am very uncomfortable with myths that are "required" belief. I know that Campbell did not expect his readers to believe them but the cultures to which they were sacred did.

Things like Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Camelot, Robin Hood etc are o.k. as they are meant to be fun. Otherwise it kind of makes my skin crawl.

Re: Epilogue: Myth and Society

Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 1:31 pm
by geo
DWill wrote:
In his last two paragraphs he pulls out the stops, leaving me behind in a religious flight that clearly reveals his earlier Catholicism.
Is this book merely Campbell's personal religious philosophy cloaked as a pseudo scholarly study of mythology? I keep expecting him to say God and eternity are just symbols, but he's not going to say that, is he?

Re: Epilogue: Myth and Society

Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 2:33 pm
by lady of shallot
I don't believe he was religious as he had no religious ceremony at his funeral. This was his Tschict (?) I guess I do not like the veneration of Joseph Campbell and in fact could not even bring myself to read the biography of him my husband brought home. However I do very much like his "find your bliss and follow it" quote.

Re: Epilogue: Myth and Society

Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 9:45 pm
by geo
The universal symbolism in mythology is certainly fascinating, but so often he veers off into mystical territory and loses me. Even with some of the psychology stuff, he's on thin ice. I'd like to bring him down the earth a bit. My biggest question right now is why are snakes so predominant in so many of the world's myths. What is the deal with snakes?

Re: Epilogue: Myth and Society

Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 6:06 pm
by DWill
I don't know what it is exactly about snakes, either. Maybe somebody does. With snakes and all animals in myth, we probably can't understand because we don't have anything like the close experience earlier people had with animals. We say that humans are part of nature, but I don't believe this is actually true of us once we developed civilizations. We're not close to nature but have set ourselves more and more apart from it, and this has been the whole idea of our progress.

I read a very interesting book on saffron's recommendation called The Old Way, about the hunter-gatherers of the Kalihari in the 1950s, just before the surrounding white culture moved in and that way of life disappeared. It was obvious that living as part of nature, as they did, is something foreign to me. They were subject to all the immediate dangers and the unforgiving contingencies of nature. Just think of actually needing to protect yourself from being eaten by lions, jackals, and leopards, and having to succeed in your foraging and hunting or else face starvation. Their relationship to animals, especially to lions, was elemental, and the "Old Way" was in fact not far removed from the ways of the animals themselves.

I thought of Robert Wright, too, while reading it, and the discussion we had earlier about whether earlier people saw myth and religion as metaphorical or literal. I think I oversimplified or was just wrong when I said that the gods and spirits were real or literal to the people who invented them. Again, I can never know how myth functioned for those people, being so far removed from their way of life. But the Ju/Wasi bushmen weren't ruled by either their myths or their gods (of which there were only two, making them less polytheistic than Christians!). How could they be? They had to survive and reserve their ultimate respect for the facts of life in the bush. Then what were the gods for? It wasn't necessarily to explain natural phenomena, as in many cases the Ju/wasi would just say they didn't know why something was the way it was; the Old People hadn't told them. It simply seems to be natural for humans to make up stories, as unsatisfactory as that seems as an explanation. The stories had an overriding social purpose, promoting solidarity of the group, making whether they were 'true' or believed almost irrelevant.

A correspondence with Wright is that the gods had nothing to do with commanding human behavior or rewarding and punishing. The Ju/wasi took care of that extremely well themselves.

Re: Epilogue: Myth and Society

Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 8:41 pm
by Saffron
DWill has made two very interesting posts. It has been awhile since I read J. Campbell's book and have not had energy to dig it out (my books are still in piles from when I moved last year). I have been trying to remember what I liked and didn't about the book. Reading DWill's posts reminded me. I think Campbell was on to something in his investigation of Mythology. Before I explain my statement, let me take one step back to something DWill said in post #2.
I thought of Robert Wright, too, while reading it, and the discussion we had earlier about whether earlier people saw myth and religion as metaphorical or literal. I think I oversimplified or was just wrong when I said that the gods and spirits were real or literal to the people who invented them. . . But the Ju/Wasi bushmen weren't ruled by either their myths or their gods. . . They had to survive and reserve their ultimate respect for the facts of life in the bush. Then what were the gods for? It wasn't necessarily to explain natural phenomena, as in many cases the Ju/wasi would just say they didn't know why something was the way it was; the Old People hadn't told them.
While reading The Old Way I was also struck by the pragmatic way the Ju/wasi explained their myths, gods and understanding or lack of understanding about the world. It was clear in the book that they did not take a literalist approach to their mythology. They acted in the world based on what made sense, on empirical evidence and not on dogma. The myths seem to serve more as a means of promoting group coherence and as a tool of enculturation.

Something DWill did not mention in his post is that the Ju/Wasi had a botanist's knowledge of the Kalahari Desert. According to Elizabeth Marshall, the author of The Old Way, the Ju/Wasi were as adept at plant identification in all seasons and stages of growth as any PhD botanist could ever hope to be. Western scholars have generally under estimated the scientific knowledge and abilities of people not of the first world (I was trying not to use the word "primitive"). On the surface it seems incompatible that a society that believe in superstitions and uses myth to explain the world would be lacking in scientific skills. This is an erroneous assumption.

I came across a similar underestimation in the book Collapse by Jarred Diamond. Diamond is describing the disappearance of the Easter Island society of the big heads (moai). One of the big mysteries is how those massive statues called moai were erected without the help of machinery. All kinds of theories have been put forth to explain; even aliens. It turns out all this time no one thought to ask the current inhabitants, the descendants of the folks who did the job. Finally a few years ago an anthropologist thought to ask and apparently the people were somewhat insulted that no one had asked previously. Not only did the people know, but they were able to demonstrate.

All this was really to make the point that we modern people assume that science (logic and rational thought) and the stuff of the unconscious mind (story telling, mythology, the arts) are incompatible, at odds, in competition. I believe they are part of the same process. More and more research on the workings of the human brain back this idea up (have a look at David Brooks' The Social Animal).

Now I am finally to what I want to say about Joseph Campbell. I think that he made many mistakes in how he thought about mythology, not to mention a bit sexist. He tried too hard to explain the symbols and what it all means. I don't actually think there are any specific meanings that are inherent in the symbols. I think the importance of myth is the story and the lessons to be learned by the hearer of the tale. Those lessons can be as simple as learning to feel like you belong to the group, or profound as a prescription on how to be the hero of your own life.

And this last quote from DWill's post seem just right at the end of my post.
It simply seems to be natural for humans to make up stories, as unsatisfactory as that seems as an explanation. The stories had an overriding social purpose, promoting solidarity of the group, making whether they were 'true' or believed almost irrelevant.

Re: Epilogue: Myth and Society

Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 10:13 pm
by Seraphim
I'm just getting active again on this site, but I was curious about this book, so I decided to poke my nose in this thread to get an idea of how the book was received. I know I'm a bit backwards starting at the epilogue, but oh well. This discussion has caught my attention, so I've found a copy and have just begun, as I'm curious to see more of exactly what Campbell has to say about mythology.

Whatever his opinion, I do agree with Saffron's following comment:
Saffron wrote:I think the importance of myth is the story and the lessons to be learned by the hearer of the tale. Those lessons can be as simple as learning to feel like you belong to the group, or profound as a prescription on how to be the hero of your own life.
People can create many different interpretations of symbols, but in the end, the lessons are what we take from these stories.

I look forward to reading this book and hopefully participating some more in the discussion.