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There are miraculous events recounted in the New Testament. Events such as the ascension of Jesus up towards the heavens, Campbell claims, mark not an outward journey, but rather a journey inward into the reaches of inner space: a journey toward the true source of light after the black moment of the crucifixion. By the term “inward” is meant here not the region of the dark spaces where the inner organs of the body reside, but rather refer to the lighted “space” of the mind freed from the confines of “the dark labyrinth” within the body. This, Campbell argues, is the real denotation of the ascension myth which is a metaphor for representing the transformation involved in a living process of actualisation occurring in a medium of images generated by a concert of bodily organs. This image of Jesus ascending, leaving us to our fates, is intended for the religious man to identify himself with, and in the process strive to become a holy “I”, that has another life somehere other than on earth— a life that begins again after death.
This scenario, for some philosophers stretches the imagination to breaking point because for them the essence-specifying definition of life is that it must come to an end, in what Socrates claimed, resembled a long dreamless sleep. Moyers, the interviewer of Campbell specifically asks how man came to believe in a life after death, one of the universal motifs of mythologies all over the world. Campbell replies:
“I dont know. It would probably come from people of spiritual power and depth who experienced their lives as being inadequate to the spiritual aspect or dimension of their being.” (Power of Myth, P.70)
The images of myths are often presented to us in the form of metaphors which occur in the medium of language, a medium of sound, and these metaphors carried the intention of saying (predicating) something essential about something. When, for example, someone claims that “Man is a wolf”, the intention is to say something essential about man which will provide us with an explanation of his nature. Aristotle expressed this in his Hylomorphic Philosophy by maintaining that man had the potential to be both the best of the animals, but also the worst of the animals. Man, in accordance with the Aristotelian essence-specifying definition, was also capable of discourse, which includes using metaphors and symbolic language in myths, in order to open a window out onto the region of transcendence. Finally, man is potentially also a rational being, and it is these two characteristics, rather than his animality, which drive an actualisation process that results in a satisfactory completion of a life that can be truly described as a good-spirited flourshing life which included an understanding of the transcendence of Being. This understanding, however does not occur in the medium of metaphorical images but in the medium of the conceptual organisation of sensory data in accordance with categories of existence and judgement which, for example, separate the animal-forms of pusché from the plant and human forms. The Philosopher, the lover of wisdom, in the evolution of civilisation replaced the mystical “seer”, and provided competing views of the world and Being , seeking a form of universality which was not monadic, not confined to a particular space and time and not ethnically biased.
Campbell brings the seer back to life and attempts to articulate the relation between the seer and the community in terms of the subliminal unconscious mind, whose medium is images rather than conceptually structured thoughts. The “stories” of the seer are metaphorical, about the darkness inside or the black moments of life in a dark labyrinth that can be suddenly illuminated by the “light” of the story. We are not in the domain of rationality which only actualises itself once man had been led out into the sun outside of the labyrinth, and can search for Being in a discourse that systematically aims at the “forms”(principles) of “The True and “The Good”. What the “seer” on the other hand, brings into the light of consciousness in the medium of metaphors, symbols, and images, are elementary ideas that will serve as prototypes for the above “forms”.
Campbell, in this chapter, draws an interesting distinction between the priest and the monk of religion. The former has an ideology or theology and the latter seeks merely a particular kind of experience of transcendence. He claims interestingly that a Catholic Monk can understand a Buddhist monk better than the priests of these respective religions can understand one another.(Page 73). Moyers rsponds to this point by claiming, somewhat puzzlingly, that monks/shamans project their experience in images, and he further insists that this is an art that has been lost in our contemporary societies. Campbell paradoxically agrees with this point by claiming:
“There is more reality in an image than in a word.” (Page 74)
It is further claimed by both interlocutors that the youth of our contemporary societies attempt to seek this experience of transcendence via the use of drugs. Campbell elaborates upon this discussion with the words:
“Religions are addressing social problems and ethics instead of mystical experience” (Page 74)
The position being outlined here is not entirely clear ,especially considering the fact that Campbell, later in the text, refers to Kant’s idea of the “transcendent”, being beyond the conceptual understanding. Kant’s position is complex and for him the Transcendent ideas of God and Freedom are ideas of reason located respectively in the realms of the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals. Both ideas stand outside of the sensory realm of the space-time continuum and the intuitions of sensibility. Indeed for Kant the idea of freedom is connected to an “I” that has two aspects, as an empirical phenomenon and an ideal noumenon that man can never “know” but perhaps can “think” without contradiction, thus making the “I think” an essential element of man and his search for insight into the transcendence of the realm of Being qua Being. Here the idea is located clearly in the faculty of reason, and not in the sensible faculty of the imagination.
Campbell characterises the phenomenal world we live in, as a dialectical field created by oppositions such as good and evil, male and female, love and war, thereby embracing a Hegelian world-view in which a thesis competes with an antithesis for the resolution of a synthesis which contains the partial truth of both thesis and antithesis. This kind of thinking jettisons “Aristotelian” logic in which two premises, a minor premise and a major premise are both true and logically lead to a conclusion which is rationally secure. The most topical form of this kind of argument would be:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a Man
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
This argument is conceptually true, that is to say, it is true in virtue of the meaning of the concepts of “Life” and “Man”. Mortality in this context means “must die” and further entails that no life can end and begin another life again in the same form. This idea of life (psuché) applies equally to plant and animal life. Forms of life must die, that is their essence, their nature, which, for Aristotle, would form the basic term for the sciences that study these “forms of life”. Images can certainly be dialectical as Wittgenstein has pointed out. I can see one and the same configuration of lines as a rabbit and as a duck . Elisabeth Anscombe in her Work, “Introduction to Wittgensteins Tractatus” also points to two stick men fencing and claims that what the picture actually denotes is ambiguous and can be interpreted depending upon the story that surrounds the stickmen fencing, for example, “this is how to defend”, “this is how to attack”.
Heroes from the past come alive for us in the stories about them and these heroes, Campbell argues, operate in the field of opposites. He begins Chapter three entitled “The First Storytellers” by referring to the Biological conditions for stories, namely, that “the nerves in our body carry the meories that shaped the organisation of our nervous system to certain environmental circumstances and to the demands of an organism.” (Page87)
This last remark resembles Hylomorphic positions and support the complex idea that the body and its organs generate the human powers of perception, memory, consciousness, speech and rationality. Ancient myths, it is then argued by Campbell, intend to unify the body and its powers, creating harmony where there was conflict. Indeed, the actualising process that moves from the darkness of the “black moment” to the “light of salvation”, is the movement toward unifying the powers of the body.
These powers subsequently wane, and demand a form of disengagement from both the body and its environment as we watch the body deteriorate and the light of life shrink to a pinpoint, perhaps leaving us with minimal powers of perception and consciousness before even these are shut down at the black moment of death. Such is the logos of the telos of our inward journey, which ends at the point of the body where it emerged. Campbell claims in the context of this discussion that the problem is not to do with the passing through the gates of darkness. We need, he claims to cease to identify ourselves with the will of our body, and identify instead with its powers of perception and consciousness ( a phenomenological dream, if ever there was one)
One of the elementary ideas of mythology is that of the old wise man who has witnessed the different phases of the actualisation process having engaged with the good and evil in the world, but is now engaging with the process of the deterioration of his powers and the prospect of pasing through the gates of darkness. Campbell points out in this context that the earlier mythologies were associated with graves, which remind one of Julian Jaynes and the Chapter “The Houses of God” in his work on the Origins of Consciousness:
“Let us imagine ourselves coming as strangers to an unknown land and finding its settlements all organised on a similar plan: ordinary houses and buildings grouped around one larger and more significant dwelling. We would immediately assume that the larger magnificent dwelling was the house of the prince who ruled there. And we might be right. But in the case of older civilisations, we would not be right if we supposed such a ruler was a person like a contemporary prince. Rather he was an hallucinated presence, or, in the more general case, a statue, often at one end of his superior house with a table in front of him where the ordinary could place their offerings to him.” (The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Page 150)
In the above Chapter Jaynes insists that we speak to the God and expect hallucinated answers for which we offer gifts in return. The archaeological evidence largely supports Jaynes’ hypothesis which extends down to the nerves of the brain in different regions including the so-called reticular activating system of nerves, which he claims are the physical substrate of consciousness. Yet no archaeological dig could uncover the hallucination of a voice so the hypothesis remains speculative. Archaeological digs have however often uncovered the presence of skulls and heads in these magnificent dwellings and these have been interpreted to be the site of the hallucinated voices which have come to be thought of as “gods”. Jaynes elaborates upon this hypothesis by referring to the Hittites from Biblical times:
“That the mountains themselves were hallucinatory to the Hittites is indicated by the relief sculptures still clearly visible on the rocks within the sanctuary….On one of the faces of this mountain temple the robed king is carved in profile. Just behind him in the stone, towers a god with a much loftier crown: the gods right arm is outstretched, showing the king the way, while the gods left arm is hugged around the kings neck and grasps the kings right wrist firmly.” (Origins, Page 153)
If we add to this scenario the possibility that the voices of authority, whilst they were still alive, were awesome and probably carried a form of hypnotic effect, that then also became associated with the skulls and the heads of these deceased gods, then the power of an admonishing and angry God becomes a formidable one. Jaynes claims that Yahwehs voice was often admonishing and angry and this in turn suggests that his subjects may well have been identifying with the aggressor as Freud suggested occurred in the case of subjects or patients with weak egos. It was probably this kind of consideration that led Freud to the inevitable conclusion that religion was a kind of mass psychosis. This in fact hindered rather than promoted the actualisation process that in his eyes led to strong egos and manageable superegos which inhibited rather than repressed strong desires and fears.
The Greek Gods were far more “rational”. Zeus was a god for strangers which the Old Testament suggested were persona non grata if they were not of the Jewish faith, as far as Yahweh was concerned. Indeed the Promised Land would be constituted of conquering the civilisations of strangers, killing the men and using the surviving women for ones own ends. Indeed sometimes killing everything that breathes is recommended. This is a very different mythology/religion to that of the Ancient Greeks who admitted females in their pantheon of gods, and used primarily females as oracles to commnicate the wisdom of Apollo who recommended an actualisation pocess involving the challenge to “Know Thyself!”.
Jaynes’s hypothesis includes suggesting that we, as a species, may not have been conscious before 1200 BC, and most of us may have been directed by hallucinated voices in our everyday life when important problems arose that fell outside of the scope of our comptetence. Such states of affirs caused anxiety, which in turn released a voice in a brain where language was bilaterally located. The voice moved from one hemisphere to another before the message contained was enacted or alternatively, recommended refraining from action (as might have been the case with Socrates’ daimon). Jaynes interestingly analyses the rise and fall of many so-called “bicameral kingdoms” such as the Aztecs and the Incas, and notes the instability of such kingdoms which did not persist in the way that the Kingdom of Greece did. Jaynes’s thesis would also explain why important men and women were buried as if they were still alive, sometimes with their partners and servants who might have been buried alive with them. Jaynes also reports that the Conquistadors noted that the people they conquered claimed that dead people stayed alive for a while before completely passing away. The moment of death presumabley was when the hallucinated voices could no longer be heard. This Jaynes also reports, was an idea also found in Plato’s writings:
“Plato refers to heros who after death become the demons that tell people what to do”( Page 164)
This possible speculative account stretching back beyond 1200 BC might also explain the pathological symptoms of those amongst us who suffer from schizophrenia,, a condition in which in moments of anxiety or hysteria patients hear voices tellng them what to do. Jaynes also points to the prevalence of so-called “eye-idols” during these times. Coming face to face and eye to eye with figures of authority must have been daunting for those who had limited knowledge of their societies and the roles authority figures played. These “eye-idols” often occurred together with a mouth that was open, as if speaking.(Page 171)
Jaynes also referred to the writings of Homer, especially the Iliad, which depicted the heros waiting for and hearing the voices of the gods. This excursus into the reflections of Julian Jaynes suggests that it is not the fear of death as such that is the transcendental focus of graves, but rather the way in which graves suggest that the dead remain in some sense alive for us. Campbell, however, takes this reasoning one step further and suggests:
“That burials always involve the idea of continued life beyond the visible one, of a plane of being that is behind the visible plane, and that is somehow supportive of the visible one to which we have to relate, I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology– that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one.” (Power of Myth, Page 90)
This move from the wish that people important to us were still alive, to a metaphysical idea of Nature or God, is however, questionable. It is certainly true that very different forms of life will give rise to different forms of mythology. Nomadic, more primitive peoples, undoubtedly held nature and animals in nature to be sacred, in spite of the fact that the animals needed to be killed and eaten for food. These animals were never turned into objects of consumption. The paintings in the caves painted by primitive peoples not dwelling in these sacred spaces testify to the attitude of these peoples to Nature: an attitude very close to the images of the imagination.
It is clear from several different remarks by Campbell related to the primacy of experience over “theory”, that Mythology could never be a theoretical type of reflection. He turns often to art which he regards as a practical activity that aims to open a window out onto transcendence. Aesthetic appreciation, we ought to remember in the context of this discussion, for Kant, involved speaking with what he called a “universal voice”.
The artist works with images, it is claimed, and mythology is the song and dance of life insofar as human forms of life involve the doings and undergoings of the actons and happenings of life. Campbell refers to an experience in Japan, when a Shinto monk is confronted by a Western sociologist who failed to see any ideology or theology in Shintoism. The Shinto monk was unapologetic and agreed there was neither ideology nor theology because “We dance”. Campbell connects this reflection to an idea promoted by T S Eliot in his work “Four Quartets”, namely, that the dance occurs “at the still point of the turning world”. This of course is Campbells rejection of the role of theorising in the study of Mythology.
The idea of Transcendence does occur in Modern Philosophy and it might prove worthwhile to refer to how the themes of self-consciousness or self-knowledge are accounted for. O Shaughness in hs work “Consciousness and the World, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2000, Page 103:
“When we speak of persons we have in mind beings endowed with a distinct set of properties, consisting mostly in capacities , such as for thought and reasoning, but also in the knowledge of certain fundamentals like, self, world, time, truth.”
He continues:
“Prior to the onset of the more developed (“higher”) form of consciousness, one great sector of Reality lay outside the scope, not of experience, but of the cognition of conscious beings: namely, their own minds. then as a correlate of this lack, the full reality of the psychological life of other beings must along with it also have been inaccessible to cognition. In short, with the advent of self awareness the entire realm of the mental must for the first time have become an object of knowledge…….while rationality does not make possible self-knowledge, self-knowledge is a functionally active necessary condition of both rationality and self-determination of freedom.”
This, of course, suggests that the “experience” of a being that does not know itself may be very different from a being that does have such knowledge. Prior to becoming self-conscious, the species of man in his primitive state (nomadic forms of existence), or in the state of early settled civilisations, may not have had this power, although certain individuals may have had such powers of self reflection, and this in turn may have accounted for their superior standing amongst their peers. Is the Shinto monk capable of such self-reflection? Indeed one may even wonder whether the Western Sociologist is fully capable of this form of self reflection.
Kant, referred to this project of “knowing oneself” in both phenomenal and noumenal terms. The “I think” (transcendental unity of apperception) is the spontaneous act of our intellect and as such is transcendent: it connects all our thoughts and intuitions into a whole or unity. Our empirical self-consciousness, on the other hand ,is that which we are aware of in our mental states, feelings, and sensations. Such a form of awareness however is incapable of grasping the spontaneous and spiritual acts of a rational noumenal self. The “I think”, for Kant is a priori and a condition of experience, rather than an object. Indeed it is probably only accessible via the kind of theorising about it that we encounter in the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts. The enigmatic advice of the Delphic oracle to “Know thyself!” indeed testifies to the difficulty of this enterprise.
Campbell, as we have indicated, is somewhat ambiguous on the topic of Rationality and the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of its importance in the actualisation process which may well contain many of the moments uncovered by mythological and artistic thinking. Freud, rather than Jung would seem to carry the keys to resolving the problematic relation between stories couched in the images of the imagination and arguments couched in concepts and rational ideas. Freud claims that Consciousness and the defence mechanism of the ego are vicissitudes of the instincts, which can be deflected into activities such as science and the arts. He never specifically included Mythology under the arts, but we know that this might have been one of the disgreements between himself and Jung, who also claimed Kant as an influence in his theorising. This would put Jung’s so called analytical Psychology into the existential field of Heidegger who claimed that Kants most important discovery was that of the transcendental Imagination, a claim that confuses the Sensible function of the mind with the intellectual function and moreover chooses to forget that Kant spent 12 years on his table of categories for the faculty of the understanding/judgement, the third realm of mind which he added to the realms of sensibility and reason. Reason in this new trilogy of powers was given the task of searching for the totality of conditions of any given phenomenon or set of phenomena. In logic this amounted to a principle of sufficent reason.
Indeed some of the descriptions of the disengagement of the Eastern mystic from both his body and the world would seem to be psychotic (as conceived of by Freud). Campbell attempts to draw a distinction between the psychotic drowning in his sea of images from the unconscious, and the mystic who in some mysterious fashion is able to swim comfortably in such a sea. The question that ought to be asked in this context is what the “knowing how to swim” means. Do the images occur in consciousness in a more orderly manner? Is this apriori knowledge–some kind of instinctive knowledge which Mythology alone can give us an account of?