Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth” is a deeply revelatory book which discusses all aspects of mythology in interview form. Bill Moyers asks the questions to Campbell, who manages to stay humble despite his opinions. The book is divided into eight different sections and is beautifully illustrated with photos, paintings, drawings and sculptures.
This book can best be revealed by the quotations contained therein, but above all the book pledges that every person should take part in life, and not just observe it. As Campbell frequently states, “Follow your bliss.”
Here are some quotations from the book:
(From the Introduction): “It’s what Goethe said in Faust but which (George) Lucas has dressed in modern idiom- the message that technology is not going to save us. Our computers, our tools, our machines are not enough. We have to rely on our intuition, our true being.”
(From the Introduction): “One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero, is that one lives only for self while the other acts to redeem society.”
“One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We’re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.”
“We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.”
“…This whole problem of the difference between the mystical experience and the psychological crack-up: The difference is that the one who cracks up is drowning in the water in which the mystic swims. You have to be prepared for this experience.”
“…When you come to the end of one time and the beginning of a new one, it’s a period of tremendous pain and turmoil.”
“We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.”
(Discussing the Great Seal of the US Dollar Bill): “When you’re down on the lower levels of this pyramid, you will be either on one side or the other. But when you get to the top, the points all come together, and there the eye of God opens.”
“The individual has to find an aspect of myth that relates to his own life…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.”
“When you see the Earth from the moon, you don’t see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come.”
“One thing that comes out of myths, for example, is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message and transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”
“Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other.”
“The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.”
“Life lives by killing and eating itself, casting off death and being reborn.”
“A serpent flows like water and so is watery, but its tongue continually flashes fire. So you have the pair of opposites together in the serpent.”
“…It’s absurd to speak of God as of either this sex or that sex. The divine power is antecedent to sexual separation.”
“The Garden of Eden is a metaphor for that innocence that is innocent of time, innocent of opposites, and that is the prime center out of which consciousness then becomes aware of the changes.”
“The myth is for spiritual instruction. The folk tale is for entertainment.”
“You’ve got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on the condition that it follows your rules. Otherwise, you’ll never get through to the metaphysical dimension.”
“…Animals have the experience of watching their companions dying. But, as far as we know, they have no further thoughts about it…There is no evidence that humans thought about death in a significant way until the Neanderthal period, when weapons an animal sacrifices occur with burials…Until you have writing, you don’t know what people were thinking.”
“The basic hunting myth is of a kind of covenant between the animal world and the human world. The animal gives its life willingly, with the understanding that its life transcends its physical entity and will be returned to the soil or to the mother through some ritual of restoration.”
“Now, when we sit down to a meal, we thank God for giving us the food. (Primitive peoples) thanked the animal.”
“The Indians addressed all of life as a ‘thou’- the trees, the stones, everything. You can address anything as a ‘thou,’ and if you do it, you can feel the change in your own psychology. The ego that sees a ‘thou’ is not the same ego that sees an ‘it.’ And when you go to war with people, the problem of the newspapers is to turn those people into ‘its.'”
“The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience- this is the mythological experience.”
“The artist is the one who communicates myth for today. But he has to be an artist who understands mythology and humanity and isn’t simply a sociologist with a program for you.”
“Society is always patriarchal. Nature is always matrilineal.”
“The Garden (of Eden) is the place of unity, of non-duality, of male and female, good and evil, God & human beings. You eat the duality (Tree of Knowledge), and you’re on the way out…We’re kept out of the garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.”
“Abelard’s idea was that Christ came to be crucified to evoke in man’s heart the sentiment of compassion for the suffering of life, and so to remove man’s mind from the blind commitment to the goods of this world. It is in compassion with Christ that we turn to Christ, and the injured one becomes our savior.”
“The hero is today running up against a hard world that is in no way responsive to his spiritual need.”
“Desire and fear: These are the two emotions by which all life in the world is governed. Desire is the bait, death is the hook.”
“If the person insists on a certain program, and doesn’t listen to the demands of his own heart, he’s going to risk a schizophrenic crackup. Such a person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a program for life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all.”
“…The great western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s.”
“…On the cross, Jesus leaves his body on the mother, from whom he has acquired his body, and he goes to the father, who is the ultimate transcendent mystery source.”
“There are gods of violence, gods of compassion, gods that unite the two worlds of the unseen and the seen, and there are gods that are simply the protectors of kings or nations in their war campaigns. These are all personifications of the energies in play. But the ultimate source of the energies remains a mystery.”
