1) Campbell: Creative Symbolization

[Guest guest]

[i came across something wonderful today, and - as often happens - it was

in a book I had read before, but had not seen with the same eyes. It is in

the last volume of Joseph Campbell's _The Masks of God_, the first volume

of which gives his general theory of symbol and myth and then his overview

of _Primitive Mythology_. The next two volumes cover _Oriental Mythology_

and _Occidental Mythology_ up to roughly 1200 A.D. Beginning at about that

time with the Grail literature, he sees a new development in the history of

man... he sees man consciously creating his own mythology, and so the

fourth volume is called _Creative Mythology_.

 

What I want to share is in the last chapter of this last book, but first,

here's part of the first chapter:]

 

Chapter 1

 

EXPERIENCE AND AUTHORITY

 

 

I. Creative Symbolization

 

In the earlier volumes of this survey of the historical transformations

of those imagined forms that I am calling the "masks" of God, through which

men everywhere have sought to relate themselves to the wonder of existence,

the myths and rites of the Primitive, Oriental, and Early Occidental worlds

could be discussed in terms of grandiose unitary stages. For in the history

of our still youthful species, a profound respect for inherited forms has

generally suppressed innovation. Millenniums have rolled by with only minor

variations played on themes derived from God-knows-when. Not so, however,

in our recent West, where, since the middle of the twelfth century, an

accelerating disintegration has been undoing the formidable orthodox

tradition that came to flower in that century, and with its fall, the

released creative powers of a great company of towering individuals have

broken forth: so that not one, or even two or three, but a galaxy of

mythologies - as many, one might say, as the multitude of its geniuses -

must be taken into account in any study of the spectacle of our own titanic

age. Even in the formerly dominant, but now distinctly subordinate, sphere

of theology there has arisen, since the victories of Luther, Melanchthon,

and the Augsburg Confession of 1530, a manifold beyond reckoning of variant

readings of the Christian revelation; while in the fields of literature,

secular philosophy, and the arts, a totally new type of non-theological

revelation, of great scope, great depth, and

infinite variety, has become the actual spiritual guide and structuring

force of the civilization.

In the context of a traditional mythology, the symbols are presented in

socially maintained rites, through which the individual is required to

experience, or will pretend to have experienced, certain insights,

sentiments, and commitments. In what I am calling "creative" mythology, on

the other hand, this order is reversed: the individual has had an

experience of his own - of order, horror, beauty, or even mere exhilaration

- which he seeks to communicate through signs; and if his realization has

been of a certain depth and import, his communication will have the value

and force of living myth - for those, that is to say, who receive and

respond to it of themse!ves, with recognition, uncoerced.

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the

reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion. The light-world modes of

experience and thought were late, very late, developments in the biological

prehistory of our species. Even in the life-course of the individual, the

opening of the eyes to light occurs only after all the main miracles have

been accomplished of the building of a living body of already functioning

organs, each with its inherent aim, none of these aims either educed from,

or as yet even known to, reason; while in the larger course and context of

the evolution of life itself from the silence of primordial seas, of which

the taste still runs in our blood, the opening of the eyes occurred only

after the first principle of all organic being ("Now I'll eat you; now you

eat me!") had been operative for so many hundreds of millions of centuries

that it could not then, and cannot now, be undone - though our eyes and

what they witness may persuade us to regret the monstrous game.

The first function of a mythology is to reconcile waking

consciousness to the _mysterium tremendum et fascinans_ of this universe

_as it is_: the second being to render an interpretive total image of the

same, as known to contemporary consciousness. Shakespeare's definition of

the function of his art, "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature," is

thus equally a definition of mythology. It is the revelation to waking

consciousness of the powers of its own sustaining source.

A third function, however, is the enforcement of a moral order: the

shaping of the individual to the requirements of his geographically and

historically conditioned social group, and here an actual break from nature

may ensue, as for instance (extremely) in the case of a _castrato_.

Circumcisions, subincisions, scarifications, tattoos, and so forth, are

socially ordered brands and croppings, to join the merely natural human

body in membership to a larger, more enduring, cultural body, of which it

is required to become an organ - the mind and feelings being imprinted

simultaneously with a correlative mythology. And not nature, but society,

is the alpha and omega of this lesson. Moreover, it is in this moral,

sociological sphere that authority and coercion come into play, as they did

mightily in India in the maintenance of caste and the rites and mythology

of suttee. In Christian Europe, already in the twelfth century, beliefs no

longer universally held were universally enforced. The result was a

dissociation of professed from actual existence and that consequent

spiritual disaster which, in the imagery of the Grail legend, is symbolized

in the Waste Land theme: a landscape of spiritual death, a'world waiting,

waiting - "Waiting for Godot!" - for the Desired Knight, who would restore

its integrity to life and let stream again from infinite depths the lost,

forgotten, living waters of the inexhaustible source.

The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of

history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and

cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but

aspiration is the motivater, builder, and transformer of civilization. A

mythological canon is an organization of symbols, ineffable in import, by

which the energies of aspiration are evoked and gathered toward a focus.

The message leaps from heart to heart by way of the brain, and where the

brain is unpersuaded the message cannot pass. The life then is untouched.

For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience

both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For

those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work - or, if

working, produce deviant effects - there follows inevitably a sense both of

dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without,

for life, which the brain will take to be for "meaning." Coerced to the

social pattern, the individual can only harden to some figure of living

death; and if any considerable number of the members of a civilization are

in this predicament, a point of no return will have been passed.

Jean Jacques Rousseau's _Discours sur les arts et sciences_, published

1749, marked an epoch of this kind. Society was the corruption of man;

"back to nature" was the call: back to the state of the "noble savage" as

the model of "natural man" - which the savage, with his tribal imprints,

was no more, of course, than was Rousseau himself. For as faith in

Scripture waned at the climax of the Middle Ages, so at the climax of the

Age of Enlightenment, did faith in reason: and today, two centuries later,

we have T.S. Eliot's _The Waste Land_ (published 1922, with footnotes):1

 

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

 

The fourth and most vital, most critical function of a mythology,

then, is to foster the centering and unfolding of the individual in

integrity, in accord with d) himself (the microcosm), c) his culture (the

mesocosm), b) the universe (the macrocosm), and a) that awesome ultimate

mystery which is both beyond and within himself and all things:

 

Wherefrom words turn back,

Together with the mind, not having attained.2

 

Creative mythology, in Shakespeare's sense, of the mirror "to show virtue

her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time

his form and pressure,"3 springs not, like theology, from the dicta of

authority, but from the insights, sentiments, thought, and vision of an

adequate individual, loyal to his own experience of value. Thus it corrects

the authority holding to the shells of forms produced and left behind by

lives once lived. Renewing the act of experience itself, it restores to

existence the quality of adventure, at once shattering and reintegrating

the fixed, already known, in the sacrificial creative fire of the becoming

thing that is no thing at all but life, not as it _will be_ or as it

_should be_, as it _was_ or as it _never will be_, but as it _is_, in

depth, in process, _here and now_, inside and out.

Figure 1 shows an early Christian painting from the ceiling of the

Domitilla Catacomb in Rome, third century A.D. In the central panel, where

a symbol of Christ might have been expected, the legendary founder of the

Orphic mysteries appears, the pagan poet Orpheus, quelling animals of the

wilderness with the magic of his Iyre and song. -snip-

 

The syncretism is deliberate, uniting themes of the two traditions of which

Christianity was the product, and thus pointing through and beyond all

three traditions to the source, the source-experience of a truth, a

mystery, out of which their differing symbologies arose. Isaiah's prophecy

of the Messianic age, when "the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the

leopard lie down with the kid" (Isaiah 11:6), and the Hellenistic mystery

theme of the realization of harmony in the individual soul, are recognized

as variants of one and the same idea, of which Christ was conceived to be

the fulfillment: the underlying theme in all being of the life transcending

death.

We may term such an underlying theme the "archetypal, natural, or

elementary idea," and its culturally conditioned inflections "social,

historical, or ethnic ideas."4 The focus of creative thought is always on

the former, which then is rendered, necessarily, in the language of the

time. The priestly, orthodox mind, on the other hand, is always and

everywhere focused upon the local, culturally conditioned rendition.