Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

this documentary contains six one-hour conversations between mythologist Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers….

Episode 1 ‘The Hero’s Journey’ ..discusses

• Hero types and hero deeds
• Jesus Christ and the Buddah
• Movie heros
• Star Wars as a metaphor
• An Iroquis story: the refusal of suitors, dragons dream and Jugian psychology
• “Follow your Bliss”
• Consciousness in plants

Star Wars is the main influence is Campbell’s work.

The hero with a thousand faces

There is a typical hero, a sequence of actions, that can be detected in most films and stories throughout history. ‘The one deed done by many many different people’

Hero – has done something beyond the normal range of achievement, given their live to someone bigger/other than themselves

Deed- physical, performed war act/physical act of heroism, sacrifice

         -spiritual hero, learned/found a mode of experiencing the supernormal range of human spiritual lives and communicated it.

Death and rebirth – basic moftif of the hero journey, death and resurrection. eg someone giving up their childhood to become an adult (reborn) experience everyone has to undergo. From phscological dependency to physiological self responsibility.

Moral objective- saving a people/person/idea, sacrificing himself for something.

‘Prometheus brings fire back, sharing it with civilisation’

Illumination of the action makes the heros different.

Typical early culture hero-slays monsters, man is shaping world out of savaged unshared world, historical times.

Hero evolves as culture evokes

Moses a hero figure, ascent of mountain and meeting with God, returning with rules of formation of a new society- departure, fulfillment and return.

Christ hero deed formula met, 3 temptations by devil, returned and chose disciples to teach the newly found ways to, what they learnt and gained from the ordeal.

The above are spiritual hero deeds.

Religion teaches the trials of the heros journey are significant, there will be no reward without renounceation without a price.

Transformation of consciousness, transformed by trials and revelations.

Star Wars shows the hero cycle, physical and spiritual perfectly, deals with power of life and their infliction through the action of man.

Lucas was using standard mythological figures, old man as advisor, hero helped by stanger that has given him an instrument and a psychological feature. Climax brings around elation and applause from audience- Obi Wans vioce advising Luke.

Hero is after something or can be a serendipitous adventure. Hero is ready for his achievement, ready for the adventure. Solo begins as mercenary ends up a hero, adept rue evokes a quality of his character he doesn’t know existed- compassion.

Garbage compactor- belly of the whale is a standard motif, descent into the dark.

Belly of the whale represents the personification of all that is in the unconscious, first stage of heroic adventure is leaving the area he knows everything about and into the threshold, meets a monster- either descents into the abyss or succeeds (killing monster) and has transcended humanity.

We operate within society through a system- will it eat you up and relieve you of your humanity or can you use the system to human purposes.

Hero can lurk in each of us, life evokes our character, learning more about ourselves as life goes on, can put ourselves in situations that will evoke our higher nature rather than our lower.

Stories of mythology are trying to express a truth that can be grapsed, the edge between what can be known and what is to be discovered, a mystery transcended beyond all human research, the source of life.

Dragons (European)represent greed, they guard things in their cave, usually things they can’t make use of, no way to see the value of the experience. Psychologically the dragon represents ones own binding of ones self to ones ego, captured in your own dragon cave.

Gold is a sign of the vitality of life.

To slay the dragon within ourselves we must follow our bliss, what we enjoy.

Nirvana is the condition that comes when you are not compelled by desire or by fear or social commitments, acting from you own center, have found truth and peace.

We are built from consciousness’, plants have a consciousness- phototropism.

Myths bring us into a level of consciousness that is spiritual.

Episode 2 ‘The Message of Myth’..discusses

• Creation myths
• Transcending duality
• Pairs of opposites
• God vs Nature
• Sin and morality
• Participation in sorrow
• The Gospel of Thomas
• Old time religion
• The Story of Indra

Joseph Campbell was driven by wanting to understand the power of the stories and legends of the human race.

all myths call men and women to a deeper awareness of the very act of living itself, guiding us through trials and traumas from birth to death.

Myths are stories of the search of men and women throughout the ages, the experience of being alive, to feel life’s rapture

Myths are clues to the spirtiual potentialities of the human life.

The ultimate word for that which transcended is God

Eventing in the field of time is duel

the Mind is put between the middle of the good and bad ‘I know the center and that good and evil are only temporal apparitions.

God sees his creation, you are the creature therefore God is within you.

Forbidden fruit- the one forbidden thing. Humans looks for someone to blame “the woman… She gave me” “the serpent.. deceived me” serpent = seducer

Snake sheds it’s skin, transcending and moving forward

Who are we to judge?

Pain is part of there being any world at all- sorrow, loss

The hero is the one who can participate in life decently in the way of nature and not in personal rank/revenge.

Mythology is the homeland of the muses, the spirers of art/poetry- to see life as a poem and yourself participating in the poem in the result of the myth.

Heaven and hell are within us- between the good and the bad

Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, metaphorical images.

The virtues of the past are the vices of today, vices of the past may be the necessities of today.

Star Wars is a valid mythological perspective and the problem of the machine (the state) will it crush humanity or serve humanity, humanity comes not from the machine but the Heart.

Turning out a nature to your service is forming a machine, then comes the time that it begins to dictate to you.

Lotus-symbol of divine grace.

 Episode 3 ‘The First Storytellers’..discusses

• Animal memories
• Harmonisation with body and life cycle
• Consciousness vs it’s vehicle
• Killing for food
• Initiation ritual and and rituals diminishing

Ancient myths were designed to put the mind into accord with the body, to harmonise.

The way of life is in accord with the way nature dictates.

Stages of human development have not changed since ancient times, a child’s dependence on others has to be transcended to self responsive authority.

Myths help us accept natures ways, myths tell us how others have lived this passage, like messages in bottles washing up on the shore while we are currently living the passage.

The body is a vehicle of the consciousness.

The beginning of death is the beginning of mythology, something was there but not now so where is it?

Burials show mythological thinking.

There is an invisible plane supporting the visible one-basic theme of mythology eg a world, an energy, what we don’t know supports what we do.

Psychology changes when thou changes to it.. American war they called the enemy it, dehumanising them.

The message of the cave is a relationship of time to eternal powers that is to be experienced in that place. Caves are the primary world, possibly used as an initiation stage for boys becoming hunters. Hunting was the way of life, part of their culture.

Woman beocomes the vehicle of nature man becomes the vehicle of society, woman becomes even with Mother Nature- both give life and provide nourishment, boy has to be turned into a man through rituals.

Today’s society provides no rituals to transform the younger generations.

Episode 4 ’Sacrifice and Bliss‘ discusses

• The sacred earth
• Human sacrifice
• Agricultural renewal
• Transcendence of death
• Social dictates vs following bliss

From death comes life, from sacrifice comes bliss.

Sacred place- a room/ an hour a day, a time when you can simply experience what you are and what you might be, a place of creative inspiration.

An animal is an entity, once killed it is dead however when you cut a plant new sprouts appear.

Forests are a huge source of life, tree stumps can provide for new life, death is somehow required for new life, an individual is not an individual but a member of that plant. (Jesus and the Vine- we are all members of one body.)

The same stories can be found throughout different cultures unrelated to each other- the human psyche may be same all over the world, the inward aspect of the human body, same organs/impulses and fears. A counter theory of diffusion. There are historical and physiological explanations to the similarities within these stories. Hero dies in each story for new life to appear.

The tree of knowledge, of duality was the way out of the garden, Adam and Eve expelled themselves by eating from it but the way back into the garden is the tree of mortal life, Christ, Buddah, the one who has died to the flesh and been reborn in the spirit, an essential experience to any mystical realisation, you identify yourself with the consciousness of life which your body is but the vehicle. Identity- behind the surface display of duality, manifestations of the radiance, the one that shines through all things.

“The God of death is the God of dance.”

Life is always on the edge of death

3 transformations of the spirit.

Follow your bliss- doing/going where you body and soul want to, when that feeling is found stick with it. (Film-Babbitt, “I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life.”)

Episode 5 ‘Love and Goddess’ ..discusses

• The troubadours
• Eros
• Romantic love
• Tristan
• Separation from love, Satan
• Loving your enemy
• Crucifixion as atonement
• Virgin birth
• The correlation between the earth or mother Goddess and images of fertility (the scared feminine)

Eros = Cupid

The meeting of the eyes, person to person, originates as an ideal to be lived for with the Troubadours.

The courage to love became the courage to affirm against tradition- important for the evolution of the west.

The worst pain of hell is the absence of God, God created angels and told them to bow to none other than him, he then created man, whom he thought superior to angels and told them to serve man, Satan would not do this, he would only bow to God, he only loved God. The pain of satan is being separated from God?

Joy and pain within love, all of life is sorrowful, the stronger the love the more that the pain of love is felt.

The virgin birth represents the conversion of spirit to matter, compassion in the heart.

In Some religions it can be found that the mother is the being, image of the world is the mother.

The desires of the flesh are against the spirit and the desires of the spirit are against the flesh. (Paul)

A ritual can be defined as the enactment of a myth.

Episode 6 ‘Masks of Eternity’..discusses

• Identifying with the infinite
• The circle as a symbol
• That which is beyond words

The reference of God transcends all thought, he is beyond being.

He who thinks he knows doesn’t know, he who knows that he doesn’t know knows!

If you are God in your deepest identity you are one with the Transcended.

The images of God are many- the masks of eternity, they both reveal and cover the face of glory.

Anyone who has an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not available to his senses.

If there was a way to prove the existence of a personal God what then would be the purpose of faith?

The circle is a universal symbol, can be seen everywhere and in everything.

Archetype- a constant form which appears in the works of a number of people with nothing connecting them to one another, expressions of the structure of the human psyche.

The images of myth are reflections of a spiritual and death potentialities of every one of us.

There are certain motifs appearing in religions all over the world- could this be a result of spiritual power?

Eternal is beyond time, the concept of time shuts out eternity, time is our experience/ our invention.