Interview excerpt with Bill Moyers; Campbell’s Functions of
Myth
CAMPBELL: The individual has to find a aspect of myth that relates to his own
life. Myth basically serves four functions. The first is the mystical function – that
is the one I’ve been speaking about, realizing what a wonder the universe is, and
what a wonder you are, and experiencing awe before this mystery. Myth opens
the world to the dimension of mystery, to the realization of the mystery that
underlies all forms. If you lose that, you don’t have a mythology. If mystery is
manifest through all things, the universe becomes, as it were, a holy picture. You
are always addressing the transcendent mystery through the conditions of your
actual world.
The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is
concerned—showing you what the shape of the universe is, but showing it in
such a way that the mystery again comes through. Today we tend to think that
scientists have all the answers. But the great ones tell us, “No, we haven’t got all
the answers. We’re telling you how it works—but what is it?” You strike a match,
what’s fire? You can tell me about oxidation, but that doesn’t tell me a thing.
The third function is the sociological one—supporting and validating a certain
social order. And here’s where the myths vary enormously from place to place.
You can have a whole mythology for polygamy, a whole mythology for
monogamy. Either one’s okay. It depends on where you are. It is this
sociological function of myth that has been taken over in our world—and it is out
of date.
MOYERS: What do you mean?
CAMPBELL: Ethical laws. The laws of life as it should be in the good society.
All of Yahweh’s pages and pages and pages of what kind of clothes to wear, how
to behave to each other, and so forth, in the first millennium B. C.
But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is one that I think everyone
must try today to relate to—and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a
human lifetime under any circumstances. Myths can teach you that.
MOYERS; So the old story, so long known and transmitted through the
generations, isn’t functioning, and we have not yet learned a new one?
CAMPBELL: The story that we have in the West, so far as it is based on the
Bible, is based on a view of the universe that belongs to the first millennium B.C.
It does not accord with our concept either of the universe or of the dignity of man.
It belongs entirely somewhere else.
We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and
realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea.
To say that the divinity informs the world and all things is condemned as
pantheism. But pantheism is a misleading word. It suggests that a personal god
is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is transtheological. It is of an indefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power,
that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being.
Joseph Campbell and the Four Functions of Myth
In an interview with Bill Moyers, scholar Joseph Campbell explains his concept of
the functions that myth serves in our lives. Please read the interview and use it to
answer the following questions:
List and define the four functions of myth:
1.
2.
3.
4.
According to Campbell, the most well known and the most out of date function of
myth is the _____________________ function.
Why do you think he says it is out of date?
According to Campbell, the most important function, the one we should all try to
relate to today is the ______________________ function.
Why do you think he wants us to concentrate on this function?