Campbell: All the Gods within You

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Joseph Campbell, _Creative Mythology_.

 

Chapter IO

 

THE EARTHLY PARADISE

 

I. All the Gods within You

 

"We of the Occident," declared Heinrich Zimmer at the opening of a

course on Indian philosophy delivered in 1942,

 

are about to arrive at a crossroads that was reached by the

thinkers of India some seven hundred years before Christ. This

is the real reason why we become both vexed and stimulated,

uneasy yet interested, when confronted with the concepts and

images of Oriental wisdom. This crossing is one to which the

people of all civilizations come in the typical course of the de-

velopment of their capacity and requirement for religious expe-

rience, and India's teachings force us to realize what its prob-

lems are. But we cannot take over the Indian solutions. We

must enter the new period our own way and solve its questions

for ourselves, because though truth, the radiance of reality, is

universally one and the same, it is mirrored variously according

to the mediums in which it is reflected. Truth appears differently

in different lands and ages according to the living materials out

of which its symbols are hewn.

Concepts and words are symbols, just as visions, rituals, and

images are; so too are the manners and customs of daily life.

Through all of these a transcendent reality is mirrored. They are

so many metaphors reflecting and implying something which,

though thus variously expressed, is ineffable, though thus ren-

dered multiform, remains inscrutable. Symbols hold the mind to

truth but are not themselves the truth, hence it is delusory to

borrow them. Each civilization, every age, must bring forth its own.

We shall therefore have to follow the difficult way of our own

experiences, produce our own reactions, and assimilate our

sufferings and realizations. Only then will the truth that we bring

to manifestation be as much our own flesh and blood as is the

child its mother's; and the mother, in love with the Father, will

then justly delight in her offspring as His duplication. The in-

effable seed must be conceived, gestated, and brought forth from

our own substance, fed by our blood, if it is to be the true child

through which its mother is reborn: and the Father, the divine

Transcendent Principle, will then also be reborn - delivered,

that is to say, from the state of non-manifestation, non-action,

apparent non-existence. We cannot borrow God. We must effect

His new incarnation from within ourselves. Divinity must de-

scend, somehow, into the matter of our own substance and par-

ticipate in this peculiar life-process."1

>snip<

 

The functions of mythological symbols, we have said, are four: mystic,

cosmological, sociological, and psychological; and today, as we have seen,

not only has science dissolved the claim of the Church and its Book to

represent the second of these, the cosmological, but the social order once

supposed to have been supported by scriptural authority also has dissolved.

Even its social horizon has dissolved. The way in which India might

contribute - and indeed already is contributing - to our rescue in this

circumstance is through its teaching in the Upanishadic and Buddhist

doctrines of the basically psychological origin, force, and function of the

same symbols that in our system have been read as a) revealed from a

jealous personal God "out there" and b) historically unique.

On the popular side, in their popular cults, the Indians are, of

course, as positivistic in their readings of their myths as any farmer in

Tennessee, rabbi in the Bronx, or pope in Rome. Krishna actually danced in

manifold rapture with the gopis, and the Buddha walked on water. However,

as soon as one turns to the higher texts, such literalism disappears and

all the imagery is interpreted symbolically, as of the psyche.

 

This that people say [we read in the Brihadaranyaka Upani-

shad]: Worship this god! Worship that god! One god after an-

other! The entire world is his creation, and he himself all the

gods. . . .

He has entered into all this world, even to the tips of one's

fingernails, like the razor in a razor case, like fire in firewood.

Him they see not; for as seen, he is incomplete.

When breathing, he is called the vital breath; when speaking,

voice; when seeing, the eye; when hearing, the ear; when think-

ing, mind. These are but the names of his acts. Anyone meditat-

ing on one or another of these aspects, knows not; for as in one

or another of these, he is incomplete. One should worship with

the idea that he is one's Self (atman); for therein all these be-

come one. This - the Self - is the footprint of this All: and just

as, verily, one finds cattle by a footprint, so one finds this All by

its footprint, the Self.

Whoever knows "I am brahman!" becomes this All, and not

even the gods can prevent his becoming thus, for he becomes

their very Self. But whoever worships another divinity than his

Self, supposing "He is one, I am another," knows not. He is like

a sacrificial beast for the gods. And as many animals would be

useful to a man, so is even one such person useful to the gods.

But if even one animal is taken away, it is not pleasant. What

then, if many? It is not pleasing to the gods, therefore, that peo-

ple should know this.6

 

Contrast Genesis 3:22-24!

The same idea appears to have been rendered in the Pyramid Texts of

Egypt (c. 2350-2175 B.C.) and the later Book of the Dead (c. 1500), where

the soul of him who has died is conceived of as reabsorbing the gods. "He

is equipped," we read in a Pyramid charm, "he who has incorporated their

spirits. He dawns as the Great One, the lord of those with ready hands."

"It is he who eats their magic and swallows their spirits; their Great Ones

are for his morning meal, their middle-sized ones are for his evening meal,

their little ones are for his night meal, their old men and old women, for

his fire."7 And from the Book of the Dead: "My hair is the hair of Nu, my

face the face of the Disk. My eyes are the eyes of Hathor, my ears the ears

of Apuat. . . . My feet are the feet of Ptah. There is no member of my body

that is not the member of some god.I am Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,

and I have the power to be born a second time; I am the divine hidden Soul

who creates the gods. . . . Hail, lord of the shrine that stands in the

middle of the earth. He is I, and I am he, and Ptah has covered his sky

with crystal." 8

James Joyce's _Finnegans Wake_ is on one level a parody of this Book

of the Dead: "We seem to us (the real Us!), to be reading our Amenti in the

sixth sealed chapter of the going forth by black."9 "The eversower of the

seeds of light to the cowld owld sowls that are in the somnatory of Defmut

after the night of the carrying of the word of Nuahs and the night of

making Mehs to cuddle up in a coddlepot, Pu Nuseht, lord of risings in the

yonderworld of Ntamplin, tohp triumphant, speaketh." 10 *

 

[* Amenti: Egyptian region of the dead; also, amenty, madness. Owl: bird

of death and wisdom. Cow and Sow: animals of Hathor, respectively, and

Epet ("She Who Bears the Sun"). Defmut: Deaf-mute;also, Jeff-Mutt, code

names of the dreamer's contending sons, Shaun and Shem. Nuahs: Shaun

reversed. Mehs: Shem reversed. Pu Nuseht: The Sun Up, reversed.

Ntamplin: Dublin. Tope, a Buddhist reliquary shrine; also, tamp. Tohp: a

kind of fish; also, to tope (drink hard), and Tophet, Hell.]

 

"If it were permissible to personify the unconscious," wrote Dr. Jung

in a paper on modern man in search of a soul,

 

we might call it a collective human being combining the charac-

teristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and

death, and, from having at his command a human experience of

one or two million years, almost immortal. If such a being ex-

isted, he would be exalted above all temporal change; the

present would mean neither more nor less to him than any year

in the one-hundredth century before Christ; he would be a

dreamer of age-old dreams and, owing to his immeasurable ex-

perience, would be an incomparable prognosticator. He would

have lived countless times over the life of the individual, of the

family, tribe and people, and he would possess the living sense

of the rhythm of growth, flowering, and decay.11

 

Just so was Joyce's hero, H.C.E. ("Here Comes Everybody"). So too

the embalmed Pharaoh in his pyramid. So each of us in the ground of his

being. So Christ, the Word made Flesh.

 

In the course of any manifestation of this unspecified

Master-Mistress Everybody in a field of space and time - in the way of a

biological progress from infancy and dependency, through adulthood with its

specific duties, on toward age and a preparation for departure - two main

motives are to be recognized: first, in youth, engagement and commitment to

the modes of the local culture (the ethnic motive), and second, emotional

disengagement from the role one has learned to play and reconciliation with

the inward self (the archetypal-individua1 motive).

In India these two ends were served in the course of the classical

order of a lifetime by dividing the life in two: the first half to be lived

in the village and the second in the forest, with each half, in turn,

divided in two, the first part of each a preparation for the second, as

follows: 1. as student, practicing obedience, learning the skills and

duties of one's caste (antevasin); 2. as a responsible householder in

marriage, fulfilling without question all of one's caste duties (grhastha);

3. in middle life, departure to the forest, to undertake seriously

meditation (vanaprastha); and 4. achievement of the goal of life (moksa:

"release" from the will to live) and aimless wandering thereafter, as a

rootless, lifeless mendicant (bhiksu, sannyasin), until the body finally

"drops off." 12

In the West, on the other hand, we have had an altogether different

classical view, for which Dante's formulation in the _Convito_ of his own

ideal of the four stages of life may be taken as an example. The course of

a life Dante compares to an arch. "It is hard to say," he concedes, "where

the highest point of this arch is...; but in the majority I take it to be

somewhere between the thirtieth and the fortieth year. And I believe that

in those of perfect nature it would be in the thirty-fifth year": which is

where he was himself at that moment "in the middle of the road of his life"

when, at the opening of the _Commedia_, he discovered himself to be in a

"dark wood" alone, confronted by three beasts. Moreover, his own

thirty-fifth year fell precisely in the year of Our Lord 1300, which he

took to be the apex year of the history of the world. And finally, Christ,

who was "of perfect nature," was crucified, he believed, at the end of his

thirty-fourth year, at noon, the apex of the day.

_Adolescence_, the first stage, in Dante's view, extends to the age

of twenty-five. Its virtues are four: obedience, sweetness, sensitiveness

to shame, and grace of body. "The adolescent," he writes, "who enters into

the wandering wood of this life would not know how to keep the right path

if it were not shown him by his elders." The aim of this period of life is

increase, it is comparable to spring. The second portion is that of

_Manhood_, ten years on either side of the apex, twenty-five to forty-five.

Its proper virtues are temperance, courage, love, courtesy, and loyalty,

its aim is achievement, and its season summer. Instead of retirement to the

forest, however, the next stage is to be of usefulness, bestowal. "After

our own proper perfection, which is acquired in manhood," Dante writes,

"that perfection should also come which enlightens not only ourselves, but

others." The virtues of _Age_, therefore, the autumn of life, from

forty-five to seventy, are again four: prudence, justice, generosity, and

affability. After which, finally, in the winter of _Decrepitude_, the noble

soul does two things: "she returns to God, as to that port whence she

departed when she came to enter upon the sea of this life," and "she

blesses the voyage she has made.... And even as the good sailor, when he

draws near to the port, lowers his sails, and gently with mild impulse

enters into it, so ought we to lower the sails of our worldly activities

and turn to God with all our purpose and heart; so that we may come to that

port with all sweetness and all peace." 13

A very different picture indeed from the Oriental, marked particularly

by the contrast of the ideals for period three: retreat from the world, in

the first case; service to the world in the second - which accounts in

large measure for the contrast in the economic and political institutions,

sciences and arts of the Orient and the West. "For, as Aristotle says,"

declares Dante, "'a man is a civic animal,' wherefore he is required not

only to be useful to himself but also to others." Furthermore, throughout

the history of the properly European tradition, from the period of the

Greeks onward, the ideal of maturity has nowhere been obedience, which is

the virtue rather of adolescence. The ideal is of responsible critical

judgment and decision.

But this requires age. As again in Dante's words: "the senior...

should follow the laws only in so far as his own right judgment and the law

are one and the same thing; and he should follow his own just mind, as it

were, without any law; which the man in his prime cannot do." 14

The critical period of the transit, then, from adolescent obedience to

the prudence and justice, generosity and affability of age, is the period

of the mid-span of twenty years of manhood, at the middle of which, at the

apogee, the adventure of the dark wood will occur: the crucifixion, death,

descent to Hell, and passage through Purgatory to Paradise - and return,

then, to the service of the world. Dante continually cites the paradigmatic

history of Virgil's hero Aeneas, who in mid-career, on leaving behind the

Asian phase of his life, when about to undertake the task of the founding

of European Rome, "hardened himself to enter alone with the Sybil into hell

and search for the soul of his father Anchises, in the face of so many

perils."15 Likewise Odysseus, though in a different order of life, on

returning from his army duty to the governing of his own palace in his own

kingdom, descended first to the Underworld, guided by Circe, and, beyond

that, passed to the mythic Island of the Sun. Goethe, also, in _Faust_,

divides the work into Parts I and II: the first devoted, as he himself

tells, to "the development of a somewhat obscure individual condition,

almost wholly subjective," and the second bearing the hero from "the little

world" of his individual life, to "the great," of his labors in the field

of history; while between the two occur his visits to the mythic realms of

the Gothic and great classical Walpurgisnacht scenes. Wolfram's Parzival,

we have seen, rode forth to the ordeal of those desert years in his transit

from adolescence to the realization of his high social role as King and

Guardian of the Grail, and Stephen Dedalus, strolling, brooding, by the

sea, was also at what he took to be the meridian of his life. Stephen

associated the moment with the Crucifixion: "Come. I thirst." With the fall

of Lucifer: "Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect." With

Hamlet and Ophelia: "My cockle hat and staff and his my sandal shoon.... He

took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it still." Moreover, the time

of day was noon: "Pan's hour, the faunal noon." And the date was June 16,

1904, five days before the summer solstice.

"Yes," thought Stephen, "evening will find itself in me, without me.

All days make their end. By the way next when is it? Tuesday will be the

longest day. Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum."

16

But that same June 16 had been in the author's own life the day of

his first evening meeting - on that same shore - with Nora Barnacle, the

woman who became his wife.

"The appointment was made," Richard Ellmann tells in his biography of

Joyce, "and for the evening of June 16, when they went walking at Ringsend,

and thereafter began to meet regularly. To set _Ulysses_ on this date, was

Joyce's most eloquent if indirect tribute to Nora, a recognition of the

determining effect upon his life of his attachment to her. On June 16 he

entered into relation with the world around him and left behind him the

loneliness he had felt since his mother's death. He would tell her later,

'You made me a man.' June 16 was the sacred day that divided Stephen

Dedalus, the insurgent youth, from Leopold Bloom, the complaisant

husband."17

And in Thomas Mann's unassuming Hans, whose family name suggests the

mortal member of the classical twins Castor and Pollux (Figure 3, Stations

12 and 13), another life is shown in the attainment of its faunal hour.

Mann explicitly compares the sanatorium to the alchemist's _vas

Hermeticum_. Already in the course of the two-day railroad journey to the

whirling mountain summit, much of the outside world had been left behind;

for, as the author tells: "Space, rolling and revolving between Hans and

his native heath had possessed and wielded the powers that we generally

ascribe to time, yet in a way even more striking. Space, like time,

engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us free from our

surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state."18 Like

the flakes falling from the dragon of Figure 40, the sentiments of the

social setting in which Hans had been reared dropped away, up there, and

left him to his own ungoverned self. The Old Adam disintegrated, the Adam

of the toils and duties of his temporal condition, and a New came into

being - like Homunculus in the _vas_ of Goethe's _Faust_.

The pedagogue Settembrini, whom Mann compares to Goethe's

Mephistopheles - a dapper rhetorician working to win men's souls to his own

purposes - recognized in the young German signs of an increasing

fascination for the spectacle of that dissolute Mountain of Venus and both

warned and begged him to go home. However, such advice, while prudent, like

that of Gurnemanz to Parzival, or of the ferryman to Gawain, was contrary

to this young man's sense of life, and in the interest not of prudence but

of wyrd - his own unfolding adventure - Hans let the beat of his excited

heart hold and guide him to his own uncharted way.

The first stage of his adventure, would have to be of social

disengagement, with a deep trust thereby both in his own nature, and in the

nature of the world. Settembrini feared and rejected nature. "In the

antithesis of body and spirit," he said very sternly one day, "the body is

the devilish, evil principle; for the body is Nature, and Nature - within

the sphere, I insist, of her antagonism to the Spirit, to Reason - is evil,

mystical and evil."19 And the second pedagogue, Naphta, the Jewish

Jesuit-Communist due to appear in the story later, would equally, though

differently, be antagonistic to the influence of the principle of nature in

the individual. As he was to say one afternoon to all three, to Hans,

Settembrini, and Joachim:

 

"Either Ptolemy and the schoolmen were right, and the world

is finite in time and space, the deity is transcendent, the antithe-

sis between God and man is sustained, and man's being is dual;

from which it follows that the problem of his soul consists in the

conflict between the spiritual and the material, to which all so-

cial problems are entirely secondary - and this is the only sort

of materialism I can recognize as consistent - or else, on the

other hand, your Renaissance astronomers hit upon the truth,

and the cosmos is infinite. Then there exists no suprasensible

world, no dualism; the Beyond is absorbed into the Here, the

antithesis between God and nature falls; man ceases to be the

theater of a struggle between two hostile principles, and be-

comes harmonious and unitary, the conflict subsists merely be-

tween his individual and his collective interest; and the will of

the State becomes, in good pagan wise, the law of morality." 20