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Campbell, in his work “Occidental Mythology”(London, Souvenir Press 2001) noted that the Age of Heros and Gods extended from 1520-500 BC, and this Era was succeeded by the Age of the Great Classics which, in turn, extended from 539 BC to 500 AD. Campbell also notes in this work the fundamental differences that exist in Oriental Mythology when compared to Occidental Mythology. In the former, Campbell notes that:
“Prayers, chants, images, temples, gods, sages, divinities and cosmologies, are but ferries to a shore of experience beyond the categories of thought, to be abandoned on arrival.” (Page 3)
Man and God, in this system, are not opposites but transcendentally identical entities. Occidental Mythology maintains that man has not the power for such an experience but can only experience the” divine within himself”. There is, Campbell argues, a movement between The Book of Job in which man abandons his human judgement in favour of that of God, and the competing mythology of the Greeks, who dare to stand independent and free with their knowledge of themselves and their world, and who also dare to judge the characters of their Gods: thus initiating a humanistic tradition that was continued in European Mythology(Greek, Roman, Celtic and German.) In these systems, Logos as the Word of God, and the rationality of human psuché, are contrasted, and give rise to very different views of God and Man, and their relation. In his account of the Cultural development of Man Campbell notes that in ca 7500BC in the Near East Region of Asia Minor, Syria, Northern Iraq and Iran:
“The arts of agriculture and stockbreeding were developed…..men now became substantial tillers of the earth. Self sustaining villages appeared and their number steadily increasing, spread in a broad band eastward and westward, arriving simultaneously at both oceans about 2500 BC. Meanwhile, in the developed Zone of origin, the nuclear Near East, a second epochal mutation occurred ca 3500BC when in the river land of Mesopotamia the fundamental arts of all high civilisation were invented:writing, mathematics, monumental architecture, systematic scentific observation (of the heavens), temple worship and the kingly art of government.” (Pages 6-7)
Aristotle’s political view of man, the rational social animal, is in accord with the above quote. His idea of the self-sufficiency of the village provided a social framework for the family to meet more complex needs which would then, in turn, develop into the need for the village to unite with other villages and form a polis which demanded that the art of government become more organised and more complex, and perhaps demanded the invention of the other arts and sciences as well. Thousands of years of the practice of these arts and sciences take us up to the date of 1200BC, the date Julian Jaynes, the Princeton Psychologist, claims the power of Consciousness emerged as a broad social phenomenon.
Language, up until this point in time was, Jaynes maintains, bilaterally located in the brain. Jaynes further controversially maintained that the voices of gods and Kings were transmitted between the hemispheres in te form of commands: these gods and Kings themselves may, or may not, have possessed the power of consciousness, which according to the Delphic oracle demanded of man that he know himself if ruin and destruction was to be avoided. Jaynes’ hypothesis builds upon brain research and the discovery that the right hemisphere also possesses a capacity to recognise language.
Campbell notes that around the date 1250BC in the Occident:
“The old cosmologies and mythologies of the goddess other were radically transformed, reinterpreted, and in large measure even suppressed by those suddenly intrusive patriarchial warrior tribesmen whose traditions have come down to us dually in the Old and New Testaments and the myths of Greece.” (Page 7)
We have pointed out previously, in the context of the above debate, that Greek mythology had possessed in turns the female figures/furies of the Erinyes, the Oracles, who tended to be female, and the Goddesses of the Zeus Pantheon. This suggests a significant appreciation of the role of the female in what Ricoeur called “the realm of the sacred”.
Campbell, in his work “The Hero with a thousand faces” develops the theme of the goddess via the thought of Melanie Klein contained in her work, “The Psychoanalysis of Children” Klein, for example, notes that if the infant is deprived, for some reason of the breast, its fury can become quite alarming for bystanders:
“These appear as reactions to, and spontaneous defences against the body-destructive fantasies that assail the child when it is deprived of the mothers breast.The infant reacts with a temper tantrum and the fantasy that goes with the temper tantrum is to tear everything out of the mothers body……The child then fears retaliation for these impulses, i.e. that everything will be scooped out of its inside. Anxieties for the integrity of its body, fantasies of restitution, a silent, deep requirement for indestructibility and protection against the “bad” forces from within and without, begin to direct the shaping of the psyche, and these remain as determining factors in the later neurotic, and even normal life activities, spiritual efforts, religious beliefs, and ritual practices of the adult.” (Page 149)
Campbell points to the medicine men of primitive tribes as emerging from such body-destructive fantasies. The medicine man attempts to restore the integrity of the body for the imagination. Childhood fantasies do not manifest themeselves merely in the rituals of primitive peoples, but also in their myths. These manifestations occur in many forms including that of immortality and the separation of the soul and the body.
The Hero, Campbell argues, seeks intercourse with the gods and goddesses and the Imperishable Being that transcends them both. In the Eastern Mythologies this experience of immortality is not tied to the separation of the soul and the body but rsther to an experience of the immortal as a presence in the moment.
Having found what he was searching for, the hero is then destined to return to the kingdom of humanity with his message which even Buddha doubted could be communicated. What is the message which is so difficult to understand? Campbell suggests the following:
“The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the explanation of that dimension, either willingly or unwillngly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness.” (Page 188)
Both Plato and Buddha ask whether the hero, having experienced the world of forms, can return to humanity, without either danger to themselves, or the frustration of trying to communicate a message that transcends common sense. Hinduism speaks, for example, of the battlefield:
“The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life where every creature lives on the death of another…The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will. And this is effected through a realisation of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all. ..Man in the world of action loses his centering in the principle of eternity if he is anxious about the outcome of his deeds but resting them and their fruits on the knees of the living God he is released by them, as by a sacrifice, from the bondages of the sea of death.”(Pages 205-206)
This reminds us of the the message fro the Bhagavad Gita:
“I am death the destroyer of worlds”
uttered in the name of the life principle (eros) which the Ancient Greeks struggled so valiantly to comprehend. The search of Philosophy for the Eternal Forms or Metaphysics (Aristotle’s first principles) is neither mythological, biographical, historical or scientific. Campbell laments:
“Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. The living imges become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science or history, mythology is absurd. When a civilisation begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the links between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian Cult. To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.”(Page 213)
Both Mythology and Philosophy, in their different ways concern themselves with the wisdom, forms and principles from the past. Each religion in its different way also contains the transcendental experiences typical of the “realm of the sacred”. Campbell, like TS Eliot is a Catholic. He describes the Christian experience of “Holy Saturday”(The day between the death and resurrection of Christ):
“… the priest puts on a purple cope and, preceded by the processional cross, the candelabra and the lighted blessed candle, goes to the baptismal font with his ministers and the clergy, while the following tract is sung: “As the hart panteth after the fountains of water, so my soul panteth after thee, O God! When shall I come and appear before the face of God? My tears have been my bread day and night, whie they say to me daily:Where is thy God?”(Page 214)
This melancholic lament recalls the message Jaynes refers to in his explorations of the existence of God during the period of the dawn of Consciousness: the message, namely, of a Deus Absconditis which has been crassly and popularly translated by Nietzsche into the crass message of God being dead. It is, Jaynes argues, we who bear the responsibility for both the historically experienced presence of God and his/her absence. The task of mythology, more than Philosophy, is to restore this archaic experience of transcendence in our lives. Modern Catholicism, of course, is imbued with the spirit of Romanticism as the above experience of Holy Saturday clearly manifests. The Priest-King or Grail-King is the Romantic hero that symbolises the tragedy of the life of Christ. In this Holy Saturday ceremony, the familiar waters of transformation is blessed in the hope that the Holy Ghost will “cleanse” the water of all traces of “Satan”. Water is the sacred substance of baptism which John used to baptise Jesus and provide us all with the experience of being born again, washing away original sin in the human form of psuché.
In a section entitled “From Psychology to Metaphysics”, Campbell notes that the symbols of mythology resemble the elements of dreams and he also notes that the psuchoanalysts( Freud, Jung, Stekel, Rank, Abraham, Klein, Roheim, etc) have provided us “with a store of common principles” (Page 219) by which to interpret both types of phenomena. Of course, the scientific view of the world as “the totality of facts”, stands in the way of such interpretations, construing them as “false”, because subjective, as if the individual element of our experience needed to be cancelled if the scientific form of “The Truth” was to prevail.
There is no doubt, however, that the Transcendental form of reasoning in the analogies found in Kant’s Prolegomena (used by Campbell in his work “The Outer Reaches of Inner Space”) are in a sense “relational truths”. Campbell argues that transcendental analogy provides us with some access to the “realm of the sacred”, or what Campbell refers to as “the morphogenetic field”.
Campbell sees a close resemblance between the phenomena of dreams and the experiences related in myths. One crucial difference is that in the case of myths the elements are consciously chosen for the purposes of communicating what is transcendent. In that respect myths are a more structured form of experience designed to manifest the “vital energies of the whole human psyche”. These elements:
“Link the unconscious to the fields of practical action, not irrationally, in the manner of a neurotic projection, but in such a fashion as to permit a mature and sobering, practical comprhension of the fact-world, to play back, as a stern control, into the realms of infantile wish and fear.” (Page 220)
Myth, that is, are:
“controlled and intended statements of certain spiritual principles which have remained constant throughout the course of human history as the form and nervous structure of the human physique itself.” (Page 221)
One of the keys to understanding the divine power within is given to us by Aristotle’s power of “noos”, the divine part of the human form of psuche which can be accessed by the so-called great-souled-beings (Phronimos), who are able to use pracitcal rationality to both know themselves and avoid the ruin and destruction predicted by the Oracles. Campbell finds this idea well expressed in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas:
“The Kingdom of God is within You”