The Hero With a Thousand Faces: Joseph Campbell and the Rising from Within
John Keating
In our fellowship, people often take a turn at offering topics for the services. I thought I
would share the notes from which I worked. I tried to tie together themes from six
source books:
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Myths to Live By
Joseph Campbell
The Masks of God
Joseph Campbell
The Nag Hammedi Library Gnostic texts discovered in 1945 in Egypt.
The Gospel According to Jesus
Stephen Mitchell
The Hero Of a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell
The Golden Bough
Sir James Frazer
I started with a reference to Joseph Campbell, who said in a Bill Moyers interview (The
Power of Myth, a wonderful 6-part video series) that most world religions engaged in
metaphor, in order to explain their spiritual beliefs. However, Christians, especially
those who took the bible literally, had gotten “stuck in their metaphor,” unable to grow
because they had become cut off from the inner lesson the metaphor had surely meant
to convey. Why “surely”? Because inner journeys are the form spiritual lessons have
always taken in cultures around the world. And this particular metaphor was not
unique. Campbell read a voice-over at the beginning of the series from his book, The
Hero Of a Thousand Faces:
“Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone;
for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is
thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the
hero-path.
And where we had thought to find an
abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to
slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought
to travel outward, we shall come to the center of own
existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be
with all the world.” (p25)
What follows are notes organized under the headings of the source books:
Myths to Live By
As a source about mythology, and specifically about magic and religion (paganism)
many people refer to Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. His belief was that of a
Victorian rational scientist: that once it is explained, magic disappears. In a way this is
also the Freudian cure.
Campbell and Jung disagree with Frazer, believing that he had no sense of the relevance
and importance of these themes to the inward life. Science makes us increasingly sure
there was no real garden, no serpent, no tree of life, no deluge. Yet these themes show
up everywhere on Earth, independently. Why? Campbell’s answer is that they
represent archetypes that guide the living of a flourishing life. Jung said images from
myths promote psychological health because they guide us towards growth and lifefurthering ends.
1)
There are four functions of a properly operating mythology
a)
awaken a sense of awe and gratitude towards the mystery of existence, of
which we are a participant (cross reference the Lord’s Prayer)
b)
offer a picture in accord with the knowledge of the time (this is the
function of mythology most people think about).
c)
provide a validated moral position, to speak of how the individual will
live within society. This fails when the myth has no other functions. “In
Christian Europe already in the 12th century, beliefs no longer universally
held were universally enforced” p5 Myths
d)
foster the centering and unfolding of the individual in accord with the self,
the culture, the world, and the ultimate mystery “where words turn
back.”
The Masks of God
p26 “The myth of the dead and resurrected god whose being is the life-pulse of the
universe had been known to the pagans millenniums before the crucifixion of
Christ. In the earliest agricultural communities the image had been rendered in
rites of actual human sacrifice, the aim of which had been magical, to make the
crops grow. In the later cities…the ancient myth became interiorized, from the
work of enlivening fields to that of livening the soul.
P19 The early church had two theories about the resurrection: the ransom doctrine
for the first 1200 years; and the penal doctrine after 1200, the latter emphasizing
atonement towards God of redemption. Abelard had a third theory to awaken
love and effect a return to God. Since Jesus did not come back immediately, the
theological choice was between bringing an end to the world postponed to some
future date, or an end not of the world but of delusion.
P 157 The nature of the universe is mixed, not merely matter but matter animated by
life and the spirit. Therefore while Gnostics were usually known to be worldhating, “it is possible to find in certain other Gnostic remains passages of
inspiring affirmation: The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and
men do not see it.” “The Kingdom of God is within you and without you.”
P158 Gnosis means knowledge as does Bodhi “referring to knowledge …transcending
that derived either empirically from the senses or rationally by way of the
categories of thought. …Our usual Christian way has been to take the
mythological metaphors of the Credo literally, maintaining that there is a Father
in a Heaven that does exist; that there is a Trinity, there was an Incarnation, there
will be a Second Coming, and that each of us does have an eternal souls to be
saved.
The Gnostic-Buddhist schools on the other hand, make use of their images and
words, myths rituals, and philosophies, as convenient means or approaches by
and through which their ineffable gnosis or bodhi is suggested. Such means are
not ends in themselves but points of departure.
P373 “The Wasteland is the land where the myth is patterned by authority, not
emergent from life, where there is no poet’s eye to see, no adventure to be lived,
where all is set for all and forever: Utopia! …This blight of the soul extends from
the cathedral close to the university campus. …There is no time, no place, no
permission-let alone encouragement-for experience.” In other words no time
spent inwardly for understanding, just causes which rob us of what little time we
try to devote to spiritual growth.
P480 “In the Hero of a Thousand Faces I have shown that myths and wonder tales of
this kind belong to a general type, which I have called “The Adventure of the
Hero” that has not changed in essential form throughout the documented history
of mankind.
1) A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of
supernatural wonder.
2) fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won
3) the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to
bestow boons on his fellow man.”
The Nag Hammedi Library
P543 Reference to the two ways of gnosticism: asceticism and orgy also mentioned in
“The Masks of God”.
P4
Gnosticism is a form of transcendentalism Therefore the resurrection of our spirit
has already taken place.
P52
Traditional Christian teaching is that the basis of hope for survival after death
was the resurrection of Jesus, and the resurrection of individuals would entail
their retention of personal identity upon the final return of Jesus
“The Treatise on the Resurrection”: one of the texts from Nag Hammedi
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resurrection must be taken on faith; can’t be proven rationally or persuaded
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spiritual resurrection is a separation of the inner from the outer self
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has already happened among believers
“The Gospel according to Thomas”: another text from Nag Hammedi
His disciples said to him, “When will the Kingdom come?”
Jesus said, “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying
‘here it is’ or ‘there it is’. Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the
earth, and men do not see it.”
The Gospel According to Jesus
Mitchell is by training and belief a Buddhist. Like Thomas Jefferson, Mitchell believes
that you can tell from internal consistency what Jesus actually said and didn’t say. It
boils down to what kind of lesson a “perfect master” from any of the world’s spiritual
traditions would want to impart, in contrast to the lessons of an imperfect student who
had not entered the Kingdom of God (enlightenment; see Gnostic heresy above).
pp 174-180 The Lord’s prayer is seen as a way of becoming centered for spiritual
beginners. Campbell saw the Hero adventure enacted in many different cultures and
civilizations. Mitchell saw all spiritual masters as teaching the same basic lesson: the
love we need is already here, and the present is the only real state of being that allows
us to “live at ease among the joys and sorrows of our world.” P11 Forgiveness of others
releases us from ourselves, letting us be in touch with the nowness of everything.
Appendix on Nietzsche: The idea of the resurrection may have been so strong precisely
because it was of pagan origin. Seen in this light, the radical teaching of
Christianity aligned with other spiritual masters, that the Kingdom of God is
already here, is subverted by pagan tendency i.e. Nietszche who believed that
evidence of the guilt sacrifice distracts from the real message and puts the
mechanism of the Church as mediator in its place.
p 278 Thomas Jefferson:
The whole history of these books is so defective and doubtful that it
seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have
been played with their text, and with the texts of other books
relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain
much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament
there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an
extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very
inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out
diamonds from dunghills.
p 281 Thomas Jefferson:
No one sees with greater pleasure than myself the progress of
reason in its advances towards rational Christianity. When we shall
have done away with the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian
arithmetic, that three are one, and one is three; when we shall have
knocked down the artificial scaffolding, reared to mask from view
the simple structure of Jesus; when, in short, we shall have
unlearned everything that has been taught since his day, and got
back to the pure and simple doctrines he inculcated, we shall then
be truly and worthily his disciples.
The Hero Of a Thousand Faces
p388 The problem of mankind today is that the institutions are actually barriers to the
quest for meaning which is unconscious. Religious institutions are secondary.
Consciousness cannot create its own symbols. It is being worked out below. But
we do know that when emergent, the forms will be diverse. Therefore, “through
various symbols the same redemption is revealed” Therefore we have become
our own mystery, after animals, plants, the universe. The modern hero must not
wait for its community to “cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice,
and sanctified misunderstanding. Nietzsche said “Live as though the day were
here.”