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Campbell claims that human physiology has not changed over the last 40000 years, but there is a theory proposed by Julian Jaynes that with the advent of writing( ca 3000 BC), a major reorganisation of the function of the organ of the brain occurred: two areas of the left-side of the brain became firmly associated with two language functions (language comprehension and motor-language function. This reorganisation is assumed to be the result of the complex uses of language that for example culminated in highly literate civilisations such as that of Ancient Greece, where during the period from 400-300 BC, Plato and Aristotle were producing highly complex philosophical dialogues and records of lectures in areas such as metaphysics, logic, biology, politics rhetoric and the arts.
Homer too must be mentioned in this context with, for example, his Iliad , an account of the Trojan War which modern archaeology has now firmly established as a historical event. This period of Ancient Greece stands out in mythological contexts because although Homer wrote about the warrior Achilles who undoubtedly was a great hero of the times for the Ancient Greeks, it was Plato with his dialogue about the last days of Socrates that was arguing for a new kind of spiritual hero in the name of Philosophy. This establishment of a spiritual hero was obviously also related to the theoretical turning of attention to the way in which the polis was ruled. Plato named no corrupt individual Kings or rulers in his criticism of Athenian government, but merely pointed abstractly to the importance of enlightened rule and the rule according to Laws. Achilles, on Plato’s and Aristotles account of the virtuous man, did not live up to their criteria of areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) when it came to his behaviour of desecrating the bodies of his enemies on the battlefield amongst other things. Socrates was named the wisest man in Athens for his intellectual pursuits, but he too had a history of bravery in battle. Socrates we should recall was also sceptical about the invention of writing on the grounds that he believed it would lead mankind to place less reliance on his memory. At this stage of its evolution, writing had not yet achieved its full potential and the phenomenon Socrates may have been referring to was those readers who were using texts blindly for source material rather than for the purposes of learning the content. Current knowledge of the way in which the brain has been organised by written texts, includes the fact that the language function of the brain may serve to enhance memory via multiple association pathways associated for example with the verbal heard image of the words and the visual written image of the words.
Modern research requires of course reference to multiple written sources representing the history of the knowledge in a particular area of research, and this practice may have been initiated by Aristotle who saw it as his scholarly duty to criticise and synthesise multiple historical sources in his reasonings about a particular topic of research.Most of Aristotles dialogues and theoretical published writings have been lost so we do not have a complete record of his evolving theoretical commitments. This was not the case with Plato’s works.
When Campbell states at the beginning of his work “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space” that both myths and dreams come from a single psychological source, namely the imagination, he connects this source to “the conflict of the organs of the body” which must include the brain. This is a hylomorphic position which we ought to recall claims that the first actuality of the body is the soul (psuché). Campbells position is also similar to that of Spinoza in which it is claimed that an adequate idea of the soul will entail realising that its first idea is the idea of its body. For Aristotle, however, it is not just the human constellation of organs that constitutes human psuché, but also the configuration of the human limb system, its extensions, and human posture that are important factors to take into consideration.
Campbell also refers to the will, a concept which in fact is a later elaboration upon hylomorphic theory best characterised by Kant in his critical writings. The will can, of course, be associated with an impulsive desire or wish to do something and in such circumstances the imagination plays a central role, but it can also be an instrument of reason. The rituals and images of myth would appear to be driven more by the imagination than reason, although as we deal with the myths of more advanced civilisations, there is an increasing presence of rational content. Insofar as primitive mythology is concerned, however, it would appear that the Psychology of Jung is a more appropriate theory than that of the Kantian Psychologist Freud. Indeed Jung’s concept of the “collective unconscious” containing as it does reference to universal human desires and fears, is more useful in this context than that of the more technical Freudian idea of the unconscious which may well contain the elementary ideas and archetypes Campbell refers to.
Freud however, may also have regarded behaviour that is directed and regulated by certain elementary ideas and archetypes as psychotic. In an account of the behaviour of the Yogi from early Indian Mythology Campbell himself claims that the yogi is swimming in the same waters the psychotic is drowning in. To record and communicate the imaginative adventures of so many peoples and civilisations, however, would certainly have seemed for Freud to be part of the “talking cure” mankind was in need of if he was to fully understand his animal origins and early mental evolution. For Freud, as was the case with Kant, the actualisation of the power of rationality in the species of homo sapiens lay in the far distant future, and perhaps we should add that whether this process would reach its telos or end was more of a question for Freud than it was for Kant. The weapons of mass destruction had not yet been created or used by the time Freud died in 1939, but we can already note in his work from 1929, Civilisation and its Discontents, that he thought the future for mankind looked problematic. Indeed it must have seemed to Freud as his books were being burned by the Nazis that in the battle between the giants of Eros and Thanatos, the latter was faring better than expected. Freud was a man of science and must have seen its civilisation building potential especially in the field of medicine. Had he lived until 1945 he might well have seen in the creation of the weapons of mass destruction by the scientists of the day, the presence of Thanatos.
Einstein who cooperated with Freud on a project designed to explain the psychological mechanisms involved, in warfare, refused to participate on the infamous Manhattan Project. The success of this project in the production of a weapon of mass destruction and the decision by Truman to use the weapon on civilian populations at the end of the second world war must have seemed by many humanists to be a low point in the history of civilisation. Shortly after this catastrophic event for the Japanese however, the influence of Eros was felt when the Kantian project of the United Nations was actualised, thus providing us with renewed hope for a humanistic future, however far away that future may be.
The concept of consciousness for Freud was loaded with Cartesian implications which Freud did not accept completely given his commitment to the role of the instincts and the preconscious mind in the human form of life (psuché). The Preconscious, for him was a function related to both the meanings of words, and our knowledge, and these functions could easily be activated by questions such as “What is the meaning of the word x?” and “What is x?”. This preconscious function obviously became more complex with the advent of writing which supplemented our verbal images of words with visual images, thus providing language with a gravitas it had not possessed before, whatever the effect it might have had on our memories. That one text like Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” can be a synthesis of a large number of preceding historical texts has obvious advantages when it comes to the advancement of thought on a particular subject or in a specific area of study. Aristotles collected works are also a testament to the diversification of intellectual interests one could find in the Ancient Greece of his lifetime.
You can find a number of references to mythology in Aristotles works but his interpretations were never literal , urging us rather to search for and find the “symbolic or metaphorical meanings of the myths he referenced. Ideas such as life after death or the characterisations of malevolent or protective spirits were still subject, in his Philosophy, to regulation by the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. For example, the emotions of fear and desire in his work were sublimated and subjected to the search for first principles. Indeed such is the range of Aristotles thought it is doubtful whether a thinker of such a kind could have been possible before the invention of writing.
We know the importance of principles and a methodology to Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. The distinction between what is true (Aletheia) and what is not true, required both principles and a methodology, as did the distinction between what is empirical and what is transcendent. Neither the elementary ideas or the archetypes were as such direct concerns of Philosophy. Philosophy’s concern with psuché, to take one example, was not connected to ideas relating to the question of whether there was a personal life after death. Taking such a position literally would have seemed to many Aristotelian inspired philosophers to be violating the principle of noncontradiction. An imagined personal life after death for them was just a figment of the imagination.
For Freud there was, in our unconscious minds, a sense that nothing can happen to us–the absence of a sense of our own mortality–which can be interpreted as meaning that we believe ourselves to be immortal but does not necessarily have to be interpreted in this way.
Indeed, if Aristotles dictum that the first actuality of the human body is the soul is correct, then this would also suggest that the death of the body entails the death of the soul, and insofar as the body is also the bearer of consciousness this suggests that the death of the body also entails the disappearance of consciousness. Since Socrates claimed in the dialogue, the Phaedo, that death was one long dreamless sleep this too speaks for the absence of even unconsciously motivated psychic activity. Paradoxically it was Freud, the anti-religious Philosopher that took us back to the work of Plato and the cultural battle between Eros and Thanatos. In this battle on the individual plane ,a wish or will not to die originates in the unconscious and can be used by the power of the imagination to motivate acts of heroism or even foolish acts of bravado.
Thanatos for Freud was subject to regulation by Eros and its institutions but, Freud maintained that a narcissistically inclined ego can engage in compulsive aggressive behaviour of various kinds for various reasons. Freud referred to a case history of a one and a half year old boy who engaged in repetitive compulsive behaviour in response to anxiety over the absence of his mother. Freud’s analysis of this behaviour attributed a motivating influence to Thanatos, the death drive or death instinct.
Freud was of course theorising in a very different cultural climate to that of either Aristotle or Kant. Kant, is the philosopher of freedom par excellence, but he was not living in Freudian times when a whole-scale inversion of moral values and laws was taking place. Plato we know feared the abuse of freedom that resulted in lack of respect for ones parents and teachers which was not the case during Freudian times but is becoming prevalent in our so-called “Modern times”: this extreme idea of freedom in some quarters appears to be nihilistically detaching the idea from our individual and collective responsibilities. Hannah Arendt pointed to the collapse of respect for authority that has been occurring over the centuries since Henry 8th’s dissolution of the monastries, so perhaps we can presume that Freud would not have been surprised by these phenomena and by our modern secularism and atheism. We believe we fought two world wars for the idea of freedom, but if these reflections are credible then the only conclusion we can draw is the gloomy one that we did not have an adequate idea of what we were fighting for while we were fighting against what we perceived to be evil. The Kantian idea of the good will was certainly eclipsed at the end of the second world war when the USA dropped two atomic bombs on civilian populations as part of the “final solution” to the “Japanese problem”.Indeed it is to Freud’s credit that he identified the United States as a problem in his work “Civilisation and its Discontents”, having visited the country earlier in the century. Russia was also identified as a problem for the evolution of civilisation, a prophecy that is becoming increasingly relevant as we move through the 21st century. Both of these countries, Freud claimed, are threats to the hope for the progress of Western Civilisation.
Freud, we should also recall, co-authored a book on Woodrow Wilson, the American President behind the Treaty of Versaille. With the help of a co-author who knew the President and had access to Presidential correspondence, Freud psychoanalysed Woodrow Wilson who as we now know suffered a series of mental breakdowns during his life. We can see therefore how important historical writings are, and perhaps also how important it is that they are cleansed of the material of imaginative fears and desires, cleansed of ideas of malevolent and protective spirits.
History does, however, seems to have shown us that a very materialistic view of the world has prevailed over the kind of spiritual view manifested in the work of Kant. This secularistic and atheistic spirit has however produced a backlash in the form of the art of those who wish to regress to an Ancient Indian view of civilisation which, as we know involves detaching ourselves from the external world in favour of an inner space which remains at rest amidst all the commotion and noise of the universe. This kind of retreat from the world would have been highly problematic from both the Kantian and Freudian points of view.
Freud’s Reality Principle is a very pragmatic principle requiring much knowledge of the world and oneself which is Kantian to its core. Freuds pragmatism is not however materialistic and acknowledges the need for a spiritual dimension involving a respect for both knowledge and the moral values of the society. The Ego is an important Freudian agency whose first concern is the protection of the body, but whose concerns continue in the spirit of areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time–the civilisation building power). These demands from our external world can only be achieved if one has knowledge of the world and of ones own powers. Knowledge of the world is defined in such contexts in terms of knowledge of relevant facts and reasons for these facts. Aristotle’s remarkable discovery of logic pointed out that if you know the principle or reason for a state of affairs you can then deduce another state of affairs, e.g.:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore Socrates is mortal
“All men are mortal” is a universal conceptual truth that is connected to both the facts that all men are born, live, and then die as well as the reasons for these facts such as “All life forms are mortal”, “All men are life-forms”. Reality, for Freud then, is definitely connected to rationality and the principles of thought and judgement. For Aristotle and Kant and perhaps for Freud too, the above “logical truths”and their experiential consequences belong in the realm of the study of Metaphysics which also discusses the theoretical idea of God in relation to both the principles of Nature and Morality. Amongst these principles are the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, which belong to the Kantian faculty of reason that has the telos or purpose of exploring the totality of conditions for a state of affairs to be the way it is or for human psuché to be the form of life that it is.
The Oracular proclamation, that:
“Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction”
was of course very much on the minds of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and perhaps was also on the minds of Kant and Freud, as was the challenge that we human beings need to know ourselves if we are to avoid ruin and destruction. That we are all destined for this inevitable loss of the gift of life is clear, given the facts we know and can justify, and the reasons for them. For Aristotle and perhaps for Kant too, all human activities aim at the good in spite of the fate that awaits us all. It is human psuché with its potential to be both the best of animals and the worst of animals which most clearly manifests the presence of protective ad malevolent spirits.
Socrates suggests that we seek for justice in its magnified form in the polis because it is here that it is easy to see if and how the city encourages its citizens to lead a good-spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia). Such a life entails that its citizens possess the virtues of wisdom, courage and temperance in the face of the temptations to lead lives dedicated to bodily pleasures, or the acquisition of wealth and power. Socrates in Plato’s Republic proposes a principle of specialisation for the citizens of this ideal polis: a principle that the polis should be organised in such a way that the essential work of the polis ought to be done by those that are most suited for that work, i.e. amongst other aspects, important tasks ought to be done by those that have the powers or capacities required for the tasks. To take just one key example, those that are tasked with the activity of passing laws must pass laws that are just. Plato with his class division between workers, warriors and philosopher-rulers, elaborates upon this idea with a strangely uncharacteristic materialistic idea of souls that are composed of bronze, silver and gold which are manipulated by the rulers who institute controversial “breeding programs” to maintain the integrity of the classes. There is no trace of either this programme or the rigid division Plato recommended in the Republic in Aristotle’s work but he did propose that an ideal enlightened middle class should emerge in the future to rule according to the principle of the Golden Mean : a principle which navigates a middle course between the demands for the freedom of the poor and the demands for unbridled power by the rich. Such an ideal middle class, Aristotle argued, would rule in the name of justice and rationality embodied in the Ancient Greek understanding of epistemé, areté, diké, arché, aletheia, logos, eros, and eudaimonia. The larger the middle class, he argued, the more stable will the polis be. This, by the way, is the aim of many contemporary centrist Politicians in Europe. The Ancient Greek idea of human psuché was well captured by Aristotle’s essence specifying definition: “rational animal capable of discourse”. The discourse at issue here manifested a concern for the above Greek ideas as a means of bringing about a good spirited flourishing polis that will remain stable and not fall into the abyss of ruin and destruction.
The institution of written texts and documents is also an essential aspect of the governing of the polis which requires possession of the knowledge necessary for prudent, just and wise rule: the great-souled man, (phronimos) possesses such knowledge. One important aspect of running the polis is care for those citizens who are disadvantaged in various ways, e.g. suffering from mental health issues. Without statistical data it is difficult to know just how prevalent such issues were. One assumes it was the medical profession of the time that helped these patients for obvious reasons given the Greek view of psuché where body and soul were so intimately related. Many but not all mental health issues begin with traumatic experience which of course affects the normal functioning of the body in various ways. There were of course no institutions for mental health care as was the case during Freud’s times. There is a suggestion in Plato that it was the family that took the major responsibility for patients suffering from serious mental health issues. We ought, however, to remember in the context of this discussion that institutionalisation of mentally ill patients during Freud’s lifetime could not be called either prudent or wise. We recall that whilst Freud was initiating his “talking cure” literally thousands of women were being forcibly incarcerated in European mental institutions for “hysteria”, a condition that Freud, together with Josef Breuer would investigate using the so-called “talking cure”. Their treatment was dubbed the “moral treatment” because it respected the patients wishes.
The trauma hysterical patients experienced was not always remembered or even acknowledged by them and Freud and Breuer therefore resorted to hypnosis to gain access to the traces of the traumatic experience. Hypnosis however proved not to be a viable technique because not everybody could be hypnotised, but also because the only treatment available was through post hypnotic suggestion in which the symptom would often disappear once the patient returned to consciousness. This was not a cure though because another symptom would just take its place. What was needed for a complete treatment was a state of mind in which the patient was conscious but relaxed enough to gain access to unconscious memories with the help of appropriate techniques such as free association and dream interpretation. The number one rule of the psychoanalytical discourse was that the patient honestly communicate all the thoughts they are having during the treatment period. The techniques used in these sessions also needed to identify the defensive “resistances ” that prevented the unconscious material from emerging during these sessions.
Consciousness, we know, is merely a vicissitude of the instincts and it is used by the ego in relation to the pleasure-pain and reality principles with a preference for the latter, especially when it comes to subjecting emotional gratifications and anxiety to the discipline of rationality. In this regulation process it appears as if the mind is layered and the lower layers do not easily manifest in consciousness requiring special techniques if they are to be accessed (free association, dream interpretation , and managing resistances).
For Freud it was clear from the beginning of his theorising that the unconscious was not a location in the mind which was in many other theories regarded as a special kind of substance. Rather the unconscious was part of a functional mental process regulated by the energy regulation and pleasure-pain principles. Freud, claimed he was a Kantian Psychologist and it is against the background of this claim that we should seek to understand why he wished to use the term “Mythology” in relation to his theory about the role of the instincts in psychoanalysis. Kant, we know, was engaged in a much larger metaphysical project charting the totality of conditions for mental functioning. What Freud is engaged upon could well be described as theorising about the outer reaches of inner space. Interior trauma eventually expresses itself in outer symptoms, which are both bodily and behavioural. It is important in psychoanalytical treatment that the traumatic memory become part of a cathartic process which brings it into some kind of relation both to consciousness and to language.
O Shaughnessy in his work “The Will: a Dual Aspect Theory” provides us with an account of the role of the body image in the context of normal action. The Will, he argues, in its active physical projects involving the body uses what he calls a projected “body image”(consisting of all of the parts of the body that are under the control of the will) to initiate the action desired. In seeing an apple and desiring to eat it, my arm and hand are energised in order for the reaching and picking activity to provide the necessary conditions for the activity of eating the apple. O Shaughnessy is influenced by the writings of Freud. We are, O Shaughnessy argues, mentally aware of the act of moving our arm and this awareness is non-observational: it is an immediate awareness. These explorations are obviously relevant to explaining what it is that is happening when a patient suffering from hysteria suddenly cannot use their legs or their eyes: i.e. cases of hysterical paralysis and hysterical blindness. Physical investigations of such paralysis and blindness reveal no real cause but there must be a cause nevertheless, and this must be similar to the causes that produce our imagined dream images, imagined actions and imagined sensations. The dreaming mind is to some extent a deranged mind operating in extremely unnatural circumstances, and this is also true of the hysterical patients mind. The relation of the body-image to the hysterical mind is, of course, not a normal one and perhaps what is creating hysterical phenomena is more closely connected to dream mechanisms and phenomena than to normal mechanisms and phenomena. O Shaughnessy is also critical of some of Freud’s positions, e.g. He claims that instinctive drives are not for Freud connected to representations. This criticism may have been true of Freuds very early materialistic theories but it is not true of the later theorising where Freud is insistence that he is dealing only with the psychical representatives of the instincts which otherwise for him, as is the case for Kant, are an unknown X.
Schopenhauer’s account of the will maintains that the will is independent of representation. Perhaps the best way of conceiving of Freuds position philosophically is through the lens of Aristotles hylomorphic theory. Instincts for hylomorphic theory would be matter that is organised by certain principles that typically operate in the realm of psuché, but they can also in their turn be regulated by other principles and become vicissitudes of instincts, e.g. consciousness. Now my awareness of the movement of my arm may be instinctive but it is a form of knowledge of myself, and some form of knowledge of myself is also going to be operating in my consciousness of myself as thinking. Campbell argues that the images of mythology come from a conflict among the organs of the human psuché, and the most dramatic examples of this phenomena come in the form of dream images when we are seemingly woken suddenly and seem to remember walking down some steps and missing a step after perhaps falling asleep in a very tired state. This phenomenon may have been produced by the life instinct in an emergency response to the organs of the body (including the breathing responses of our lungs) shutting down too fast and too completely. This image, like all dream images has the function of trying to keep us asleep–here the conflict is seen clearly.
Now dreams do not normally connect to the transcendent dimensions of our existence in the way in which Myth does, although Carl Jung maintains that the dreams of individuals in the later stages of the self-individuation process may relate to the transcendent and the infinite more directly. Campbell believes that many narratives of Mythology connect more directly to the metaphysics of nature and the metaphysics of moral than our Christian narratives. The growing trend of secularisation and atheism indicates however that our Christian religion is not providing us with meaningful symbols. Campbell argues that now that we have the knowledge of the universe that we do, and have walked on the surface of the moon looking at our planet from outer space, we have to develop a mythology that relates to our planet and its place in the universe. This is not an easy task given the facts that our planetary system is merely a series of specks in the galaxy which in its turn is but one galaxy in an almost inconceivable number of other galaxies. Narratives normally posses the telos or purpose of celebrating our lives on this planet, celebrating the power of being human in response to the powers of nature and space. The Greek and Shakespearean genre of tragedy, when performed on a stage as a visible spectacle may, however, be the best we can do in the form of acknowledgement of the power of nature versus the power of man, who, as the Greek oracles claimed is destined for ruin and destruction. The proclamation from the same oracles to “know thyself!” may also be the registration of an ancient pre-literate wisdom which respects that aspect of nature which is beyond human control, for example, a huge asteroid impacting the earth, a large volcano erupting and exploding, a large devastating earthquake, constant heavy rain for a long period of time, etc. Having watched men walk on the moon was significant in many respect but perhaps its primary significance is in the realisation that should something cataclysmic occur on our planet there is a t least the remote possibility of starting again somewhere else. So perhaps our modern mythology might create narratives related to the problems of moving a civilisation to an inhospitable environment. The heroes of such narratives would obviously be scientists and engineers as long as the cataclysmic event on earth was not of the scientists making. If, however, the weapons of mass destruction which they have invented produces a cataclysmic event, they will be held responsible for destroying what took tens of thousands of years to create and will in Jung’s terms be manifestations of the Shadow of the Psuché. The Shadow for Jung took many concrete forms of minsters and demons and was seemingly less abstractly conceived than the Freudian death instinct which was related to Thanatos of ancient Greek Mythology.
Campbell, in the context of this discussion, notes that contemporary popular themes of concern are health, progeny and prosperity and these seem not to acknowledge the possible tragic fate of mankind and also do not seem to acknowledge the second coming of the saviour as prophesied by our Christian religion.
In a chapter of this work entitled “Cosmology and the Mythic Imagination”, Campbell once again takes up the Apollo mission and its use of what he claims is Kantian a priori knowledge of the laws of space:
“The laws of space are known to the mind because they are of the mind…..Outer space is within inasmuch as the laws of space(known by NASA) are within us….Outer space and inner space are the same.”
We are, he claims, born out of the space containing our sun and our earth in a galaxy formed long before we were born. Our earth is on the galactic view merely a satellite of the sun. We are creations of this earth, our eyes are of this earth and our knowledge too belongs to this earth which is a creation of space. Campbell refers in the context of this discussion to the “Atlas of the Universe”. Out universe, he claims:
“Is a universe of unimaginable magnitude and inconceivable violence. In it billions of thermo-nuclear furnaces are scattering from each other…some stars are blowing themselves to pieces littering the universe with dust and gas from which new stars and their satellites are being born.”
Add to this the traces of micro-waves we have discovered and attribute to being remnants of a huge explosion ca 18 billion yers ago and we begin to understand why scientists wish to speak about a space-time continuum in which they claim we are seeing the traces of an event that occurred eons ago. Space, time, and matter, are for Aristotle and Kant in their constitution infinite, but it is difficult to believe that either Philosopher would have claimed as some scientists have that the universe came into existence with this huge explosion. They would undoubtedly have agreed that this explosion carried an important cosmological significance with it. Both Philosophers, in all likelihood would have been more inclined to side with Ovids account of the universe for which there might have been no beginning, merely a chaos of elements which Deus brought into order by sending all the elements to their places. For these philosophers anthropomorphizations of God or the gods would have been essentially contradictory since Deus for them was something abstract like the laws of space/time/matter/psuché.
Psuché, according to Plato, Jung and Campbell is the location of concrete elementary ideas or archeytpes which, if the circumstances are propitious, we can recollect. For Campbell, Mythology contains the images of Deities which are local forms of the elementary ideas and archetypes. He further claims that the mere contemplation of these elementary ideas and archetypes sends us into a state of ecstatic rapture. Kant felt aw and wonder at the mere perception of outer space and the thought of the moral law within and Aristotle probably felt the same in relation to the thought of the infinite and Prime Form.
Campbell also points out in this chapter that the book of Genesis in the OT is “merely the local and tribal mythology of one of the peoples on earth and does not therefore meet the criteria of universality and necessity sought by, for example, the philosophers. He does not specifically say so, but he probably means to level this accusation of perspectivalism at Greek Mythology. Concrete images such as the gods living on Mount Olympus would appear to support his position but we ought also recall that Zeus and the pantheon of the Greek Gods replace the earlier mythological figures of the demiurge, the erinyes/euminedes, eros and thanatos. The proclamations of the oracles seem indeed to predate the later mythology relating to the war between the gods and the titans.
Campbell claims that mythology is essentially trying to reveal what is transcendent and metaphysical in our existence and we should not therefore fixate upon the concrete manifestations of these symbols. In this context we ought to realise that Mythology is an art form and as such is presenting elementary ideas to audiences aesthetically. Now Kant has pointed out that both universality and necessity were involved in aesthetic judgements and activity, but in a subjective form. The particular province of Mythology appears however to incorporate knowledge of the transcendental ideas of nature and the transcendental ideas of the power of being human. The sublime is, then, an important focus for mythology and the communication of sublime truths may have been one of the tasks of the Ancient Greek oracles, e.g. “everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. Campbell, in this context, points to the destruction of the city of Jerusalem in 70 AD. God’s chosen people had their city, their temple and the ark of the covenant destroyed. Campbell wishes to point to such events as illustration of the fact that the laws of man and his cities do not elevate them above nature and that we should always bear in mind that different mythologies are there to curb the hubris of man by reminding us of the relativity of different deities and lifestyles.
The invention of writing was of course an important cultural event that allowed mythologies to be written down and preserved for the attention of future historians. Around the time that writing and mathematics was being invented priests were curious about the immensity of the heavens which could not be explored by earth bound beings such as us. This awe and wonder was then sublimated by the invention of mathematics which attempted to find a means to measure space and time and thus project human ideas and numerals upon space and temporal duration. Numbers were obviously related not just to space but also to time. As a result of this invention and its projection, the heavens began to become associated with almost inconceivable magnitudes and events occurring in the heavens over time also appeared to manifest regularities that also symbolised the transcendent and the metaphysical. Numbers became thus associated with sacred properties especially when particular numbers began to appear in cultures as distant as Iceland and India.
Darkness is the prevalent property of the universe and light is a secondary phenomenon generated by thermo-nuclear reactors (stars) but in spite of this fact it is light that is associated with the good and darkness with evil, especially for those forms of psuché possessing the power of vision. These visual properties of darkness and light have no particular meaning for plant life which does not possess a visual system. The light and darkness for plant life are stimuli that produce not pictures of reality but a chemical reaction.
Campbell claims that the Nietzschean proclamation that God is dead was only directed at the jealous angry Gods of different tribes and he also claims that we moderns have left these gods behind for experiences of transcendence. Now Kant certainly experienced and theorised about transcendence and found space in his life-world for the sublime and the sacred. We moderns of the 21st century, however appear too preoccupied with our technological gadgets to search for the mysteries of life in our secularised societies. Campbell claims the following:
“God is the infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhee.”
This is a fine characterisation of the infinite universe and also accounts for the fact that:
“Every local image of God is one among millions possible”
Mythological places may be symbolic but they may also be actual. Heaven and hell are obviously symbolic, sublime and dreaded places located in the inner space of mans psuché which may then be projected upon real geographical places such as the heavens or the bowels of the earth. We need to understand, Campbell argues, that when the Bible claims that Jesus ascended up to heaven that this event really did not take place as described, and we are dealing with something metaphysical and transcendent. In this event what we are witnessing is the retreat of Jesus as an real figure in outer space to our inner space.
Hinduism has its pantheon of deities which include Brahman, Atman, Indira, Vishnu and Shiva. In one of the Hindu narratives Indira believes he is the only god of the universe until Brahman informs Indira that is rather he, Brahman who will foresee the dissolution of the universe and that he, indira is but one of a very large number of Indiras. The hubris of Indira is thereby neutralised. We are also introduced to Atman that part of the individual psuché that is a part of Brahman and therefore eternal and unchangeable. The Buddhists deny this because for them there is no constant essence of the soul. Both religions believe in resurrections of the soul which compromises any notion of life that maintains that it is of the essence of life to come to an end in death.