Campbell: Symbol3

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The question arises as to whether in the human species any of the

codes of communication on this pre- or unconscious level are inherited.

Among the animals from whose midst our species arose, patterns of

controlled behavior comparable to ritual forms appear spontaneously on

occasions of social excitation: most notably in the highly stylized

courtship exchanges of certain species of bird. And these extensions of

action beyond the strictly necessary have been frequently compared to the

rites of mankind, not only because of their formality, but also because of

their function, which is, in a word, to engage the individual in a

superindividual event, conducive to the well-being not of himself but of

the race. On all such ceremonious occasions, the cries, attitudes, and

movements elicit reciprocal responses from those to whom they are

addressed; and these, in counterplay, conduce to the unfoldment of a kind

of ritual ensemble, not invented either by the creatures performing it or

by any choreographer, but grounded in the species and brought forth by all

members everywhere in exactly the same way. The most elaborate of these

festivals appear among the species with the best eyes; for the various

displays are signals to be seen, depending for effect on correlations

between the sending apparatus and a receiving organ - what is technically

termed an "instinct crossing" structure. The sign stimuli work

automatically as energy-releasing and -directing agents; so that the

interlacing sequences, though apparently of the individuals, are actually

unwilled, like the processes of a dream. The performing bees, birds, fish,

or quadrupeds are moved spontaneously from centers of memory antecedent to

their own lives. Through each, the species speaks. And since in human

traditional rites also spontaneous collective responses to formalized

displays occur, the earliest creators of the myths and rites of primitive

mankind may not have been individuals at all, but the genes of the species.

And since in human traditional rites also a certain psychological readiness

to respond to certain specific sign stimuli is to be remarked -

particularly among primitives - the earliest individual creators of myths

and rites must not have been merely freely inventive fantasists, but

inward-gazing, inward-listening seers (shamans), responding to some inner

voice or movement of the species.

However, already in the animal kingdom, on the higher levels, and

particularly among apes, instances have been observed of individual wit and

invention, as well as of individual cases (as it were) of fetish-worship.

In _Primitive Mythology_ I have quoted to this point from Dr. Wolfgang

Kohler's _The Mentality of Apes_, where he tells of an adult female

chimpanzee named Tschengo who became so attached to a round stone that had

been polished by the sea that, as Kohler states, "on no pretext could you

get the stone away, and in the evening the animal took it with it to its

room and its nest." I have also quoted his description of the spinning game

and dance invented by Tschengo and another ape named Chica, where the

occasion was mere disinterested play, of no use to the species, no

"survival value" whatsoever, but only delight, which might be escalated to

rapture: the field, that is to say, of creative art.

At the opening of _Primitive Mythology_ I have discussed the old

problem of nature and nurture in relation to the forms of myth and rite;

and throughout the subsequent chapters of our survey, not only in the

Primitive, but also in the Oriental and Occidental volumes, evidence enough

has appeared to warrant the statement now that there are indeed universal

mythological themes, which in the various provinces have appeared in local

transformations appropriate to the differing local scenes; that,

furthermore, the ultimate source and references of such enduring themes

cannot have been the changing outward environments of geography, history,

and belief, but only some enduring inward realities of the species; and

finally that, since man, in contrast to the beasts, is endowed with a brain

and nervous system not as stereotyped as theirs but greatly open to imprint

and to learning, the signals to which the race responds do not remain

unchanged throughout the centuries, but are transformed through experience.

Basically, the responses remain associated with what James Joyce termed

"the grave and constant" in human suffering and joy; but the stimuli

through which such responses have been released have greatly altered in the

course of human events. So also have the "meanings" attached to them. The

large human brain, with its capacity for unforeseen experience and

unprecedented thought, and the long human infancy, which is longer far than

that of any other species, have endowed our race with a capacity for

learning that greatly exceeds that of any other creature, and with a danger

thereby of disorientation. One of the chief concerns of the ritual lore of

primitive and developed human groups, therefore, has always been that of

guiding the child to the adult state. The infantile response system of

dependency must be transformed to responsibility, and specifically in terms

of the requirements of the local social order. The son has to become

father, and the daughter, mother, passing from the sphere of childhood,

which is everywhere essentially the same, to that of the variously offered

social roles, which radically differ according to the modes of human life.

The instincts have to be governed and matured in the interests both of the

group and of the individual, and traditionally it has been the prime

function of mythology to serve this social-psychological end. The

individual is adapted to his group and the group to its environment, with a

sense thereby of gratitude for the miracle of life. And that I would call

the function of _the Mythology of the Village Compound_: the training of

the instincts and inculcation of sentiments.

But there is the other function, beyond that: of _the Mythology of the

Forest, the Quest, the Individual:_ the SILENCE. And there is in Thomas

Mann's _Magic Mountain_ a charming scene in which the sense of the silence

comes through. It is the picnic scene of the last chapter of the epic,

where that manly old colonial Dutchman, a retired coffee-planter, Mynheer

Pieter Peeperkorn (who had arrived late in the story, together with the

much younger Frau Chauchat, when she had returned to the Mountain Palace

after a sojourn in the flatland), led an expedition of his friends, one

blissful day in May, to enjoy together a picturesque cascade in the valley

of the Fluela. I shall leave it to my reader to discover for himself in the

novel, if he has not already done so, Mann's affectionate treatment of this

sturdy, tragicomic personality, with his way of talking, flourishing his

large broad hands with their pointed nails, leading on, it always seemed,

to some revelatory climax, which, however, no one ever quite caught. His

was a conversation of expectancy, of sentences not completed. And when he

chose for his picnic site a spot directly by the waterfall, where the roar

of nature's wonder drowned completely all conversation, so that Settembrini

and Naphta, that pair of verbal prodigies, were silenced absolutely to

nonentity, it was a high moment when he himself stood up, delivering to his

company an address of which not a single word could be heard.

On arriving at the romantic spot - Frau Chauchat and five gentlemen -

their ears were saluted with the maximum of sound. The tumbling water,

foaming white, sent sprays over the rocks, and the visitors moved close in

toward the roaring, enveloped in its mist, exchanging glances, headshakes,

and gestures of amaze. Their lips formed soundless phrases of admiration

and marvel. Then Hans, Settembrini, and the fifth gentleman, a Russian,

Anton Karlovitch Ferge by name, began climbing a series of narrow steps up

the side of the chute to a bridge that spanned the water just where it

arched to pour downward; and, while crossing, they paused midway, to lean

on the rail and wave to the party below, then, continuing, climbed

laboriously down on the other side of the stream to rejoin their friends. A

journey without goal, a circle, for the pleasure merely of itself!

And when they had settled to their picnic, suddenly the old Dutchman,

Peeperkorn, began to speak. Extraordinary man!

 

It was impossible for him to hear his own voice, [declares our

author] still more for the others to catch a syllable of what he

let transpire without its in the least transpiring. But with the

winecup in his right hand, he raised his forefinger, stretching his

left arm palm outwards toward the water. They saw his kingly

features move in speech, the mouth form words, which were as

soundless as though spoken into empty, etherless space. No one

dreamed he would continue; with embarrassed smiles they

watched his futile activity, thinking every moment it would

cease. But he went on, with tense, compelling gesture, to ha-

rangue the clamour that swallowed his words; directing upon this

or that one of the company by turns the gaze of his pale little

weary eyes, spanned wide beneath the lifted folds of his brow;

and whoever felt himself addressed was constrained to nod back

again, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, hand to ear, as though any

sort of effort to hear could better the utterly hopeless situation.

He even stood up! There, in his crumpled ulster, that reached

nearly to his heels, the collar turned up; bare-headed, cup in

hand, the high brow creased with folds like some heathen idol's

in a shrine, and crowned by the aureole of white hair like flicker-

ing flames; there he stood by the rocks and spoke, holding the

circle of thumb and forefinger, with the lancelike others above

it, before his face, and sealing his mute and incomprehensible

toast with that compelling sign of precision. Such words as they

were accustomed to hearing from him, they could read on his

lips or divine from his gestures: "Settled" and "Absolutely!"

- but that was all. They saw his head sink sideways, the broken

bitterness of the lips, they saw the Man of Sorrows in his guise.

But then quite suddenly flashed the dimple, the sybaritic ro-

guishness, the garment snatched up dancewise, the ritual impro-

priety of the heathen priest. He lifted his beaker,.waved it half-

circle before the assembled guests, and drank it out in three

gulps, so that it stood bottom upwards. Then he handed it with

outstretched arm to his Malay servant, who received it with an

obeisance, and gave the sign to break up the feast.

 

Once again, the words of Wittgenstein:

Proposition 6.44 "It is not _how_ things are in the world that is

mystical, but _that_ it exists."

Proposition 6.522 "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into

words. They _make themselves manifest_. They are what is mystical."

And finally, Proposition 6.4311 "If we take eternity to mean not

infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to

those who live in the present."

"C'est la personnalite qui conte," the old master sculptor Antoine

Bourdelle used to say to the students in his Paris studio; and in the

guiding of their work: "L'art fait ressortir les grandes lignes de la

nature." The imagery of art, that is to say, as of myth and religious

ritual, is presentational, beyond "meaning"; hence, of many possible

"meanings" simultaneously (many dogmas), on both dream and waking levels,

and with effects, as well, in the unconscious. "During the course of the

spiritual adventure inward," Heinrich Zimmer remarks in a comment on the

syllable AUM, "the emphasis shifts from the outer world to the inner, and

finally from the manifest to the unmanifest, and there is a prodigious

increase in the powers gained; nevertheless, the inferior, as well as

superior, states remain as constituents of the whole.... Each quarter is on

an equal footing, somehow, with the others." So too in every mythic symbol:

it touches and unites in the actuality of a person the whole range of his

living present: the ultimate mystery of his being and of the spectacle of

his world, the order of his instincts, of his dreams, and of his thought.

And this today in a way of especial immediacy.

For even in the sphere of Waking Consciousness, the fixed and the set

fast, there is nothing now that endures. The known myths cannot endure. The

known God cannot endure. Whereas formerly, for generations, life so held to

established norms that the lifetime of a deity could be reckoned in

millenniums, today all norms are in flux, so that the individual is thrown,

willy-nilly, back upon himself, into the inward sphere of his own becoming,

his forest adventurous without way or path, to come through his own

integrity in experience to his own intelligible Castle of the Grail -

integrity and courage, in experience, in love, in loyalty, and in act. And

to this end the guiding myths can no longer be of any ethnic norms. No

sooner learned, these are outdated, out of place, washed away. There are

today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone

is the individual heart. Individualism and spontaneous pluralism - the free

association of men and women of like spirit, under protection of a secular,

rational state with no pretensions to divinity - are in the modern world

the only honest possibilities: each the creative center of authority for

himself, in Cusanus's circle without circumference whose center is

everywhere, and where each is the focus of God's gaze.

The norms of myth, understood in the way rather of the "elementary

ideas" (_marga_) than of the "ethnic" (_desi_), recognized, as in the

Domitilla Ceiling (Figure 1), through an intelligent "making use" not of

one mythology only but of all of the dead and set-fast symbologies of the

past, will enable the individual to anticipate and activate in himself the

centers of his own creative imagination, out of which his own myth and

life-building "Yes because" may then unfold. But in the end, as in the case

of Parzival, the guide within will be his own noble heart alone, and the

guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of divinity, that wakes in

his heart _amor_: the deepest, inmost seed of his nature, consubstantial

with the process of the All, "thus come." And in this life-creative

adventure the criterion of achievement will be, as in every one of the

tales here reviewed, the courage to let go the past, with its truths, its

goals, its dogmas of "meaning," and its gifts: to die to the world and to

come to birth from within.