The power of myth

This is a red-blooded book from a man who lived a very full life.
Campbell was essentially a storyteller, spending his days uncovering
and telling old stories and myths that he felt had the power to
soak up the alienation of modern life. Though a respected academic
mythologist, he also played a key role in the creation of a definitive
modern tale, Star Wars. Director George Lucas said that Campbell's
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) was the catalyst in dreaming
up the film, and that the inspiration for Yoda, the ancient and wise
one, was Campbell himself.
Yet Campbell should not have been too ironic about his life taking
on mythical proportions, since one of his key ideas was that everyone's
life could resemble a great myth. His idea of the "hero's journey" has
had a huge impact, launching many an unassuming person on a great
trajectory.
The Power of Myth is a sort of campfire dialog between Campbell and
writer/journalist Bill Moyers, covering the stories and symbols of civilization.
Filmed for a television series at George Lucas's Skywalker ranch, the
series caught the American public's imagination and the book became a
bestseller. Campbell did not live very long after the taping, and The
Power of Myth became a final snapshot of his wisdom and knowledge.
The power of myth
Campbell's big question was: "How can myth be powerful for a person
living today?" Are our lives really comparable to the likes of Odysseus
or the goddess Artemis?
He believed that mythical characters act as archetypes of human
possibility: They are confronted with problems and their ensuing action
gives us an idea about how life might be handled. To identify ourselves
with, for instance, the young warrior Arjuna in The Bhagavad-Gita is
not an inflation of our ego, but an acceptance that this figure has something
to teach us. In mythology we could never really feel alone, for
within it were guides for the human spirit belonging to everyone, providing
a map for every cycle of life or experience through which we
may go. He called mythology "the song of the universe," put into tune
by a thousand different cultures and peoples. With myth, all experience
can be empowering; without it, life can seem merely a meaningless
series of ups and downs.
We don't look to myth to find the meaning of life, Campbell said, its
purpose is to make us appreciate "the adventure of being alive." Without
some sense of ourselves within a larger history of human imagination
and experience, our life would inevitably lack romance and depth.
The stories and imagery that we have in our heads are only a tiny fraction
of what is available to us and, in increasing our knowledge of past
culture and art, life is enriched immeasurably.
Following your bliss
In The Power of Myth Campbell talked about the medieval idea of the
wheel of fortune, a metaphor for life that has had us in its thrall for
millennia. The wheel has a hub, radiating out to its rim. As it turns
through time, we hang on to its rim, either going up or down, experiencing
the great highs and lows. In modern terms, chasing rewards like
a higher salary or power or beautiful bodies is rim hanging. We hang
on, sometimes for dear life, in this relentless cycle of pleasure and pain.
The wheel of fortune idea nevertheless contains its own solution: the
possibility of learning to live at the hub, centered, focusing on what
Campbell called one's "bliss." Our bliss is an activity, work, or passion
with the power to fascinate endlessly. It is unique to us, yet may come
as a total surprise, and we may resist it for years. In modern psychological
phraseology, bliss is the state of "flow" (see Csikszentmihalyi) that
we experience when we are doing what we are best at; time seems to
stand still and we feel effortlessly creative. Here is joy, as distinct from
merely pleasure.
Campbell portrayed bliss as the track that has always been waiting
for you, with "hidden hands" seeming to help you attract the right circumstances
for the fulfillment of your work. In mythological terms,
bliss is represented by the cosmic mother, who guards an inexhaustible
well offering solace, joy, and protection from mundane life.
In another book, The Way of Myth, Campbell talked about the people
he had seen who had spent their lives climbing the "ladder of success,"
only to find that it was put up against the wrong wall. Kevin
Spacey's character in the movie American Beauty is a portrayal of a man
whose whole life has been dictated by other people's expectations, who
then decides to do what he wants. He has had enough of rim life. The
message of this film, and of the sum of Campbell's writings, is that the
banality of your current life is always waiting to yield to a greater story.
The hero's journey
Campbell's voluminous reading was legendary. He came back from
Europe to the United States just a few weeks before the Wall Street
Crash and didn't have a job for five years. Nevertheless it was a rich
time: "I didn't feel poor. I just felt that I didn't have any money." His
bliss was basically reading every day, all day, in a shack rented for virtually
nothing.
What began as a simple thirst for knowledge became a quest to find
"the key to all mythologies." The more he read of the world's stories,
the clearer it became that there was an underlying template that most
followed: the "hero's journey," a sequence of experiences that both
tests and proves the person-cum-hero.
Myths typically begin with the protagonist on home turf, living a
quiet but unfulfilled life. Then something happens and he or she gets
the "call" to leave on an adventure with some specific goal or quest. In
Arthurian legend, Arthur begins a search for the grail; in The Odyssey,
Odysseus simply tries to return home; in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker
must rescue Princess Leia. Following numerous smaller trials, the hero
endures a supreme ordeal in which all seems lost, followed by a
triumph of some sort. The hero must then try to bring his "magic
elixir" (some secret knowledge or thing) back home, to reality. There
are many subtleties and variations to the pattern, but these are the
basic stages.
What is the relevance of the hero's journey to our age? Or, as
Moyers put it to Campbell, how is the hero different to the leader? The
leader, Campbell said, is one who sees what can be done and accomplishes
it, who is good at organizing a company or a country; a hero actually creates something new. (With today's business focus on innovation,
personal journeys clearly become important.)
Final comments
Myths reveal to us the incredible potential for more life, in whatever
form it comes. "I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about
ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or
child," Campbell stated. Yet he acknowledged that too many accept the
sadness and desperation of inauthentic lives, living without their bliss
or not even knowing that it exists.
Campbell was a polymath, fascinated by everything. He noticed that
the trend of western civilization was toward specialization, yet was
proud of being a generalist, able to see the commonality of all human
stories and life experience. His resurrection of the idea of the hero gave
people a template on to which they could mount their own experiences
and dreams; being present in all human myths, it knows no national
boundaries. The idea involves no grasping or hurry (Campbell's life
itself is a good example), but enjoyment of the richness of the moment.
And significantly, it focuses on self-knowledge rather than aggrandizement
of the ego.
The "human potential" movement of the 1960s and 1970s may
have been important, but it took Campbell to remind us what myths
have been saying for thousands of years: that everyone has the right to
become a hero of some kind.