Once Upon a Time
“How about this one, C.J.?” I asked, handing my seven-year-old son the
storybook I had pulled from the library shelf. He studied the cover. “Do you
want to try to read it?”
“I already know how it starts,” he asserted, not opening the book.
“You do? How?”
““Once upon a time…’ They all start like that. Why?”
“Because they’re stories about things that happened long ago.”
“Yeah. But the same things happen now, too.”
“Sometimes.”
“Uh-huh,” he mumbled, flipping through the pages. “But you know what
else, Bob?”
“What’s that?”
“Sometimes… I mean, some stories… I don’t think they really happened
at all.”
“Probably not.”
“But that’s O.K.” he added quickly. “They’re still good stories.”

Nearly everybody loves a good story. Certainly every child does. Man, in fact,
has been called “the storytelling animal.” Our sense of self—our notion of
who we are, from whence we came, and whither we are going—is defined by the
tales we tell. We are, in essence, who we tell ourselves we are. The narrator
of a recent novel has exactly that revelation:
Standing on the rock, looking out, I understood what
the story was.
Here’s the story: life is a dream.
It’s all a story we’re telling ourselves. Things are
dreams, just dreams, when they’re not in front of your
eyes. What is in front of your eyes now, what you can
reach out and touch, now, will become a dream.
The only thing that keeps us from floating off with
the wind is our stories. They give us a name and put us
in a place, allow us to keep on touching.i
Stories do enable us “to keep on touching” one another. They are, as
it were, windows, each framing a particular view of a distinct landscape we
might otherwise have never known; and, paradoxically, no matter how unique the
perspective, how foreign the vista, if we observe carefully, we can learn
something about ourselves. My friend and mentor, Joseph Campbell, a skilled
raconteur who appreciated a well-told tale, explains:
The retelling of age-old tales for the sheer delight of
their “once-upon-a-time” is an art little practiced in
our day, at least in the Western world; and yet, when…a
colorful sampling of the art…is brought to us, the
enchantment works and we are carried in imagination to a
Never-Never-Land that we, somehow, have long
known.…Their fascination is of ways of life
fundamentally different from our own, which yet speak,
somehow, to some part of us to which, perhaps, we have
not been paying attention: the part of fantasy and
dream, which may lead to vision and from vision on to a
revelation of some kind—if not about the universe, then
at least about ourselves.
For in the past, and today throughout the primitive
world that is so fast disappearing even from the hidden
corners of the earth, people lived largely out of the
visions, either of great teachers, such as the Buddha,
Moses, Zarathustra, Jesus, and Muhammad, or, in less
developed lands, of their own village seers and shamans.
The fabrics and art works of their hands, consequently,
were shaped by the visions that had shaped their lives,
and these speak subliminally to our own possibilities of
vision, telling of qualities of life either lost to us
or waiting to be realized.ii
Implicit in Campbell’s remarks is a critical distinction: almost any
good story will enchant and can teach us something, but only certain beguiling
visions, stories with the power to shape and control our lives, can inspire
and, far too often, destroy us. Such potent timeless tales, he would insist,
are the only ones that can properly be called “myths.” By extension,
mythology is, for Campbell, the study of all stories with this puissance.
Not everyone, however, would agree; many, arguably most, are far more
comfortable with Robert Graves’ circumscribed definition in the New Larousse
Encyclopedia of Mythology:
Mythology is the study of whatever religious or heroic
legends are so foreign to a student’s experience that
he cannot believe them to be true. Hence the English
adjective ‘mythical,’ meaning ‘incredible’; and
hence the omission from standard European mythologies,
such as this, of all Biblical narratives even when
closely paralleled by myths from Persia, Babylonia,
Egypt and Greece; and of all hagiological legends.iii
These observations warrant consideration, especially here in a book
where similar omissions have been made; but from Campbell’s unprejudiced
perspective, no hagiology—including the Bible—is the divine revelation of
incontrovertible Truth, for all are, in actuality, fabulous human constructs,
wondrous tales of “once upon a time,” marvelous myths:
From the point of view of any orthodoxy, myth might be
defined simply as ‘other people’s religion,’ to which
an equivalent definition of religion would be
‘misunderstood mythology,’ the misunderstanding
consisting in the interpretation of mythic metaphors as
references to hard fact…
Like dreams, myths are productions of the human
imagination. Their images, consequently, though derived
from the material world and its supposed history, are,
like dreams, revelations of the deepest hopes, desires
and fears, potentialities and conflicts, of the human
will—which in turn is moved by the energies of the
organs of the body operating variously against each
other and in concert. Every myth, that is to say,
whether or not by intention, is psychologically
symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read,
therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.iv
For Campbell, then, all myths are “transparent to transcendence,” that
is, they are psychic metaphors revelatory of universal axioms; but for many,
their own myths are literal facts, while everybody else’s are sheer fancy.
Lest you think this distinction is merely academic, simply switch on the
evening news or scan the headlines in any daily paper. Here’s a sampling from
a single issue of The New York Times: “India Battered by Religious Violence /
Over 3000 Muslims Dead in Attacks by Hindu Militants,” “Serbia Accused of
‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Bosnia,” “Rioting by Warlord’s Supporters Creates
Havoc in Somali Capital,” “No Progress Reported in Middle East Peace
Talks.” Even in the so-called entertainment section of that same paper we can
read:
Salman Rushdie has spent the last four years hoping for
some diplomatic and political miracle that would end the
life of hiding and fear he has endured since the Iranian
authorities offered a multi-million-dollar bounty for
his execution after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenie of Iran
declared his novel “The Satanic Verses” (Viking)
blasphemous to Islam.v
Bounties, barrages of bullets and bombs, brazen brutality, almost
unimaginable barbarism… It’s incredible, is it not? We think ourselves an
intelligent species, and yet, on the eve of the twenty-first century, we are
still ravaged by ancient tribal enmities, most of which are fueled by
reductive interpretations of exemplary tales and heroic sagas, of myths that
have been handed down from generation to generation. Moreover, as Campbell has
noted again and again, such mayhem is, and always has been, the inevitable,
tragic consequence of literal readings of mythological images, of metaphors:
In the popular nightmare of history, where local
mythic images are interpreted, not as metaphors, but as
facts, there have been ferocious wars waged between the
parties of such contrary manners of metaphoric
representation.…
One cannot but ask: What can such tribal literalism
possibly contribute but agony to such a world of
intercultural, global prospects as that of our present
century? It all comes of misreading metaphors, taking
denotation for connotation, the messenger for the
message; overloading the carrier, consequently, with
sentimentalized significance and throwing both life and
thought thereby off balance. To which the only generally
recognized correction as yet proposed has been the no
less wrongheaded one of dismissing the metaphors as lies
(which indeed they are, when so construed), thus
scrapping the whole dictionary of the language of the
soul (this is a metaphor) by which mankind has been
elevated to interests beyond procreation, economics, and
“the greatest good of the greatest number.”
Do I hear, coming as from somewhere that is nowhere,
the frightening sound of an Olympian laugh?vi

You hold in your hands a book of myths, which is to say, a book of metaphors,
the tools of poets and artists. Its pages are alive with the voices and
visions of the artists/mythmakers who have gone before us, with mythological
narratives and images, with the “language of the soul.” Read these pages as
you would read a dream journal, for the task of the modern human being is to
interiorize mythic symbology; to realize that all the gods and demons are
within; to understand that heaven, hell, and other such realms are not places
somewhere “out there” to which you go when you die, but psychological states
within us all; to comprehend, in short, that all mythological images are
aspects of your own immediate experience.
Accordingly, if you approach this book with an open mind, with the
innocence of the child for whom the world is inherently magical, you will
explore exotic landscapes and discover untold wonders; you will become
reacquainted with the gods of old, with the ancestral demiurges that live
within us still; you will learn much about your forbears and neighbors, and
even more about yourself; and, of course, you will hear many delightful
stories of “once upon a time.”
—Robert Walter
Easter, 1993
[foreword to World Mythology, Roy Willes, gen. ed (Henry Holt: New York,
1993)]
i
Tom Spanbauer, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon ((New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991), p. 190.
ii
Joseph Campbell, “Myths from West to East,” an essay in Alexander
Eliot’s Myths (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), p. 31)
iii
New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, translated by Richard
Aldington and Delano Ames and revised by a panel of editorial advisers from
the Larousse Mythologie Générale edited by Felix Guirand and first
published in France (1959) by Augé, Gillon, Hollier-Larousse, Moreau et Cie,
the Librairie Larousse, Paris (New York: Putnam, 1968), p. v.
iv
Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as
Myth and as Religion (New York: Van der Marck Editions, 1985; Harper
Perennial, 1988), p. 55.
v
Esther B. Fine, “Book Notes,” The New York Times, February 17, 1993, p.
C17.
vi
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, op. cit., p. 58.