Campbell: Symbolization

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Joseph Campbell, _Creative Mythology_, _The Masks of God, Vol.IV_.

 

II. Symbolization

 

1.

The Indian Mandukya Upanishad, in its analysis and exposition of the

four elements of the mystic syllable AUM, supplies a touchstone for the

classification of symbols.

"AUM," the text begins: "This imperishable sound is the whole of this

visible universe. Its explanation is as follows. What has become, what is

becoming, what will become - verily, all of this is the sound AUM. And what

is beyond these three states of the world of time - that, too, is the sound

AUM."

The element A, we are next told, denotes Waking Consciousness and its

world (what has become); the element U, Dream Consciousness and its world

(what is becoming); the element M, Deep Dreamless Sleep, the unconscious

state (what will become); while the fourth element - the SILENCE before,

after, and around AUM - denotes that absolute, unqualified, unconditioned

state-that-is-no-state of "consciousness in itself" to which Erwin

Schrodinger refers in his passage above quoted.

Expounded in detail: first, _The Element A_:

Waking Consciousness, which is outward-turned, is called the

Common-to-All-Men. Its objects are of gross matter and are separate from

each other: a is not b. Perceived by the senses, named by the mind, and

experienced as desirable or fearful, they compose the world of what Goethe

called "the become and the set fast: the dead," of which the understanding

(Verstand) is concerned "only to make use." This is the aspect of

experience that Mephistopheles comprehends and controls: the world of

empirical man, his desires, fears and duties, laws, statistics, economics,

and "hard facts." It is the world, as Stephen Dedalus judged, of the shells

left behind by life: "Crush, crack, crik, crick. Wild sea money." Money and

securities, banalities and fixed forms. It is the Waste Land, Dante's Hell:

the world of naturalistic art and intellectual abstraction. Its order of

symbols can best be studied today in Ludwig Wittgenstein's comanding

_Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_; as, for example, in the following

selection of his scrupulously dry formulae.

Proposition 2.1 "We picture facts to ourselves." 2.12 "A picture is a

model of reality." 2.161 "There must be something identical in a picture

and what it depicts, to enable the one to be a picture of the other at

all."

Proposition 3 "A logical picture of facts is a thought." 3.1 "In a

proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the

senses." 3.31 "I call any part of a proposition that characterizes its

sense an expression (or a symbol)...." 3.32 "A sign is what can be

perceived of a symbol."

Proposition 4 "A thought is a proposition with sense." 4.001 "The

totality of propositions is language." 4.11 "The totality of true

propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of the

natural sciences)." 4.111 "Philosophy is not one of the natural

sciences...." 4.112 "Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of

thoughts.... Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and

indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp

boundaries. 4.1121 "Psychology is no more closely related to philosophy

than any other natural science. Theory of knowledge is the philosophy of

psychology...." 4.116 "Everything that can be thought at all can be thought

clearly. Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly...."

Bertrand Russell, in this same tombstone spirit, has summarized in one

sentence both his own idea and Wittgenstein's of the aim of symbolization:

"The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts." A more

usual business of language, however, has been to motivate action and, to

this end, to excite fear, rage, or desire, to indoctrinate, to prevaricate,

to intimidate, and to brainwash. Indeed, to assert or deny "fact" is about

the last thing language has ever been used for. "Fiction," rather, would

have been the honest term for this master of clarity to have used - for, as

Nietzsche already knew, "whatever can be thought, cannot but be a fiction."

"There are many kinds of eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes. Therefore, there

are many kinds of truths - and therefore, there is no truth.Truth is

that form of error without which a thinking subject cannot live." And

"Logic rests on presuppositions to which nothing in the actual world

corresponds."

The psychological functions chiefly involved in the outward-turned,

"objective" order of cognition, "common to all men," are sensation and

thinking. Feeling and intuition, on the other hand, lead inward, to private

spheres. As Jung declares: "The pain-pleasure reaction of feeling marks the

highest degree of subjectivation of the object"; whereas intuition is that

mode of perception which includes the apprehension of subliminal factors:

"the possible relationship to objects not appearing in the field of vision,

and the possible changes, past and future, about which the object gives no

clue. Intuition is an immediate awareness," Jung continues, "of

relationships that could not be established by the other three functions at

the moment of orientation."

In the arts of both Joyce and Mann, such intuited subliminal

relationships are indicated by the echoing motifs in which their works

abound, suggesting analogies, homologies, significant synchronicities, and

so forth; the recurrent "dog" motif in Ulysses, for example, or, in "Tonio

Kroger," the musically developed contrasting themes of "dark gypsies" and

"blue-eyed blonds."

So we are led to _the Element U, the second element of AUM_:

Dream Consciousness, called the Shining One, is inward-turned, where

it coincides with the movement of the will, i.e., "what is becoming." Its

objects are not of gross but of subtle matter, which, like fire, like the

sun, is self-luminous, not, like gross matter, illuminated from without. In

the world of Waking Consciousness, the fire of the hearth and of the

funeral pyre, as well as the blazing sun door, open to this visionary

world, which is beyond all pairs of opposites. For here, since the dreamer

and his dream are the same, the subject-object opposition falls: the

visions are of his own motivating powers; their personifications are his

gods - or, if improperly served, disdained, or disregarded, become his

fiends. Furthermore, since the powers of nature in this dreamer, in that

dreamer, and in the macrocosm of nature itself, are the same, only

differently inflected, the powers personified in a dream are those that

move the world. All the gods are within: within you - within the world. And

it will be according to the inward tensions and resolutions, balances and

imbalances, of the individual that his visions will be of either infernal

or celestial kind: confused and personal, or enlightening and generic:

negative, dark, and monstrous (like Dante's three-headed Satan) or positive

and radiant (like his Trinity). For the hells, purgatories, and heavens are

within, as but modes of experience of the one terror-joy of Dream

Consciousness at the burning point of what Goethe called "the becoming and

the changing: the living," through which it is the concern of Reason

(Vernunft) "to strive toward the divine." Here all pairs of opposites

coincide, whether of subject and object, the dreamer and his dream, desire

and loathing, terror-joy, or the micro- and the macrocosm.

Freud, in his epochal work _The Interpretation of Dreams_ (published

1900), which is based on insights derived from years devoted to the

fantasies of neurotics, concentrates all attention upon those distorting

personal anxieties and fixations of his patients which were, in fact, the

"sins" (to use a theological term) that bound them to their hells, from

which it was the aim of his compassionate science to release them. And for

those self-condemned, tortured wretches, the whole world was an Inferno -

as it is in Marlowe's _Doctor Faustus_ for his Mephistophilis:

 

FAUST. Where are you damned?

MEPH. In hell.

FAUST. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?

MEPH. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it:

Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God,

And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

In being deprived of everlasting bliss?

 

And again, a little later:

 

FAUST. Tell me where is the place that men call hell?

MEPH. Under the Heavens.

FAUST. Ay, but whereabout?

MEPH. Within the bowels of these elements,

Where we are tortured and remain for ever;

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed

In one self place; for where we are is hell,

And where hell is there must we ever be:

And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,

And every creature shall be purified,

All places shall be hell that is not Heaven.

FAUST. Come, I think hell's a fable.

MEPH. Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.

 

"I believe that a large portion of the mythological conception of the

world which reaches far into the most modern religions, is nothing but

psychology projected to the outer world," Freud wrote in his early paper on

_The Psychopathology of Everyday Life_ (1904). "The dim perception (the

endo-psychic perception, as it were) of psychic factors and relations of

the unconscious was taken as a model in the construction of a

_transcendental reality_, which is destined to be changed again by science

into _psychology of the unconscious_.... We venture to explain in this way

the myths of paradise and the fall of man, of God, of good and evil, of

immortality and the like - that is, to transform _metaphysics_ into

_meta-psychology_."

So too in Nietzsche's _Human, All-Too-Human_ (1878): "In the ages of

the rude beginnings of culture, man believed that he was discovering a

second real world in dream, and here is the origin of all metaphysics.

Without dream, mankind would never have had occasion to invent such a

division of the world. The parting of soul and body goes also with this way

of interpreting dream; likewise, the idea of a soul's apparitional body:

whence, all belief in ghosts, and apparently, too, in gods." Compare Occam,

supra, p. 583.

Freud, we have said, was concerned in his science primarily with

pathology. He read the symbols of dream aIlegorically, as masked references

to the psychological shocks sustained in infancy by the dreamer, chiefly in

relation to parental figures; and in turning from dreams to mythologies, he

diagnosed these, accordingly, as symptomatic of equivalent shocks in the

formative past of the peoples to whom the myths in question appertained.

"We base everything upon the assumption of a psyche of the mass," he wrote

in _Totem and Tabu_ (1913), "in which psychic processes occur as in the

life of the individual. Moreover, we let the sense of guilt for a deed

survive for thousands of years, remaining effective in generations which

could not have known anything of the deed."

Jung, on the other hand, gives stress in his interpretations of both

dreams and myth not so much to history and biography as to biology and

those initiations into the nature and sense of existence that all, in the

course of a lifetime, must endure.

According to my view [he states], the unconscious falls into

two parts which should be sharply distinguished from one an-

other. One of them is the personal unconscious; it includes all

those psychic contents which have been forgotten during the

course of the individual's life. Traces of them are still preserved

in the unconscious, even if all conscious memory of them has

been lost. In addition, it contains all subliminal impressions or

perceptions which have too little energy to reach consciousness.

To these we must add unconscious combinations of ideas that

are too feeble and too indistinct to cross over the threshold. Fi-

nally, the personal unconscious contains all psychic contents

that are incompatible with the conscious attitude. This com-

prises a whole group of contents, chiefly those which appear

morally, aesthetically, or intellectually inadmissible and are re-

pressed on account of their incompatibility. A man cannot al-

ways think and feel the good, the true, and the beautiful, and in

trying to keep up an ideal attitude everything that does not fit in

with it is automatically repressed. If, as is nearly always the case

in a differentiated person, one function, for instance thinking, is

especially developed and dominates consciousness, then feeling

is thrust into the background and largely falls into the uncon-

scious.

The other part of the unconscious is what I call the imper-

sonal or collective unconscious. As the name indicates, its con-

tents are not personal but collective; that is, they do not belong

to one individual alone but to a whole group of individuals, and

generally to a whole nation, or even to the whole of mankind.

These contents are not acquired during the individual's lifetime

but are products of innate forms and instincts. Although the

child possesses no inborn ideas, it nevertheless has a highly de-

veloped brain which functions in a quite definite way. This brain

is inherited from its ancestors; it is a deposit of the psychic func-

tioning of the whole human race. The child therefore brings with

it an organ ready to function in the same way that it has func-

tioned throughout human history. In the brain the instincts are

preformed, and so are the primordial images which have always

been the basis of man's thinking - the whole treasure-house of

mythological motifs...."

 

In the course of the six and a half decades of his development of his

theories of the unconscious (1896-1961): exactly the years during which a

formidable company of creative artists and authors - Yeats, Pound, Eliot,

Joyce, Mann, Picasso, and Klee, for example - were exploring the same "dark

wood," each in his own direction and where there was no way or path), Dr.

Jung used the terms "archetype" and "primordial image" interchangeably, to

designate those formative powers of the psyche that have been discussed at

length in the first chapters of the opening volume of this study:

_Primitive Mythology_, Chapter I, "The Enigma of the Inherited Image," and

II, "The Imprints of Experience." Our pages, chapters, and volumes since

have been devoted to a systematic survey of the changes throughout space

and time of these protean, timeless "forms," which the poet Robinson

Jeffers termed "the phantom rules of humanity / That without being are yet

more real than what they are born of, and without shape, shape that which

makes them:

 

The nerves and the flesh go by shadowlike, the limbs and the lives

shadowlike, these shadows remain, these shadows

To whom temples, to whom churches, to whom labors and wars,

visions and dreams are dedicate."

 

Adolf Bastian (1825-1905) coined the term "ethnic ideas"

(Volkergedanke) for the local, historic transformations of the archetypes,

and the term "elementary ideas" (Elementargedanke) for the archetypes

themselves. Leo Frobenius then employed the term "Culture Monad" to

represent an operative constellation of ethnic ideas in historic

manifestation. The constellating force of such a "Monad" would be,

according to his view, an intuition of order inspired by some fascinating

presence: for instance, among primitive hunters, the striking presences of

the animal world, where the permanence of each unique species appears

through ephemeral individuals; among primitive planters, the miracle of the

plant world, where life springs from decay; and in the city-states of

Sumer, the wonder of the night sky, where a mathematically calculable

cosmological order was recognized in the passages of the planets, moon, and

sun.

Such revelations of subliminal relationships behind and within fields

of temporal-spatial observation were received with awe, according to

Frobenius, and the associated phenomena themselves, regarded with

fascination, then supplied both the imagery and the chief foci of a system

of mythology and cult through which the affected social group attempted to

bring itself into accord with the intuited principle of order. Frobenius

thus gave stress in his studies of the genesis of mythology to the

phenomena of the environment, whereas Freud, who in relation to myth also

treats chiefly of historical factors, found that in no matter what

environment, the nuclear theme of all myth, art, religion, and

civilization, up to his own time, had been of the nuclear human family

scene of desire, jealousy, and guilt in the inevitable triadic romance of

Mother, Father, and Child.

It is reasonable to assume, however, that in the shaping of

mythologies both environments must have counted. Where such differences

appear as between, say, the primitive hunting and planting mytho!ogies, or

the Syrian of Astarte and biblical of Yahweh, the larger environmental

factor will surely merit prime consideration, whereas in the case of a

wealthy Viennese fantasizing on a couch, the family drama of his own

half-forgotten infancy may well have built the labyrinth in which his hero

soul has become lost.

In any case, whether as a reflex of a) the natural environment, b)

historic tribal or national life, c) the family triangle, or d) the

inevitable biological course of human maturation and aging, together with

what James Joyce termed "the grave and constant in human sufferings," - to

which I would add, "in human joy" - it is clear that the actual images and

emphases of any mythological or dream system must be derived from local

experience, while the "archetypes," the "elementary ideas," the

"roles"

that the local images serve, must be of an order antecedent to experience;

of a plot, so to say, a destiny or wyrd, inherent in the psychosomatic

structure of the human species.

In the opening pages of the first volume of his great biblical

tetralogy, _Joseph and His Brothers_, which in sense and inspiration is an

unfoldment - large and beautiful - of the seed of Hans Castorp's dream in

_The Magic Mountain_, Thomas Mann writes of the backward thrust of

scholarship questing for the origins of those mythic forms that have been

the support of all human life and culture whatsoever. And as he there

declares: "The deeper we sound, the further down into the lower world of

the past we probe and press, the more do we find that the earliest

foundations of humanity, its history and culture, reveal themselves

unfathomable." He then calls upon the Gnostic myth that we have already

considered - of creation as a function of the soul's descent or "fall"

before the beginning of time - to suggest that the actual garden of

Paradise inheres in the soul itself and antecedes creation. "We have

sounded the well of time to its depths, and not yet reached our goal," he

writes: "the history of man is older than the material world which is the

work of his will, older than life, which rests upon his will."

So, also, Jung: "The deeper 'layers' of the psyche lose their

individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness.

'Lower down,' that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional

systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized

and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances.

The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence, 'at bottom' the psyche is simply

'world.' "

One cannot help thinking here of the Upanishadic myth of the Self in

the form of a man who became this whole creation, and of Schopenhauer's

view of the world as will: the will that is all in all of us and in which

each of us is the all.

But the "archetypes," which are of this primal order of the psyche,

are not to be thought of as of determined content.

 

Again and again [states Jung] I encounter the mistaken notion

that an archetype is determined in regard to its content, in other

words that it is a kind of unconscious idea (if such an expres-

sion is admissible). It is necessary to point out once more that

archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only

as regards their form and then only to a very limited degree. A

primordial image is determined as to its content only when it

has become conscious and is therefore filled out with the mate-

rial of conscious experience. Its form, however,... might

perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, as

it were, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid,

although it has no material existence of its own. This first ap-

pears according to the specific way in which the ions and mole-

cules aggregate. The archetype in itself is empty and purely for-

mal, nothing but a _facultas praeformandi_, a possibility of repre-

sentation which is given _a priori_. The representations themselves

are not inherited, only the forms, and in that respect they corre-

spond in every way to the instincts, which are also determined in

form only. The existence of the instincts can no more be proved

than the existence of the archetypes, so long as they do not

manifest themselves concretely.

 

_And so we are led from the sphere of the element U to that of M,

Deep Dreamless Sleep, where potentiality, or "what will become," resides:_

"Here," states the Upanishad, "a sleeper neither desires anything

desirable nor beholds any dream. Undivided, he is an undifferentiated,

homogeneous lump or mass of consciousness, consisting of bliss and feeding

on bliss, his only mouth being spirit. He is here 'The Knower': the Lord of

All, the Omniscient, the Indwelling Controller, the Source or Generative

Womb of All: the Beginning and End of beings."

From the point of view of either Waking or Dream Consciousness, Deep

Sleep would seem to be darkness, a mere blank; yet dreams pour forth from

it, and out of it comes waking. Moreover, back into it, all disappears.

It is the dark into which Stephen Dedalus disappeared, following his

kitchen conversation with Bloom in the basement of Bloom's castle, Bloom's

temple, his home, where he lived with his goddess Molly, who was at that

hour in bed upstairs. It is the dark into which Bloom disappeared, when he

had mounted to that second floor and in the grotto of his goddess mounted

the bed, his Cross.

 

How?

With circumspection, as invariably when entering an abode

(his own or not his own): with solicitude, the snakespiral

springs of the mattress being old, the brass quoits and pendent

viper radii loose and tremulous under stress and strain: prudent-

ly, as entering a lair or ambush of lust or adder: lightly, the less

to disturb: reverently, the bed of conception and of birth, of

consummation of marriage and of breach of marriage, of sleep

and of death.

 

What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?

New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a

human form, female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male,

not his, some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat, recooked,

which he removed.

 

If he had smiled, why would he have smiled?

To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the

first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding

series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining

himself to be first, last, only and alone, whereas he is neither

first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and re-

peated to infinity.

 

Molly, the goddess, roused a little, asked sleepily, and was answered,

of her returning consort's Odyssey that day. And, just as at the end of

Dante's heaven-ascent, _The Divine Comedy_, the poet, beholding the

ultimate vision of God, saw above the heads of the Persons Three the marvel

of a Living Light, of which the Trinity itself was a reflex, and of which

he states that

 

within the profound and clear subsistence of that lofty Light

there appeared three circles of three colors and of one dimen-

sion,

 

so, on the ceiling above the adulterated marriage bed of Marian and Leopold

Bloom, there was to be seen, as she listened to his saga,

 

the upcast reflection of a lamp and shade, an inconstant series of

concentric circles of varying gradations of light and shadow.

 

In what directions did listener and narrator lie?

Listener: S.E. by E: Narrator N.W. by W: on the 53rd

parallel of latitude, N. and 6th meridian of longitude, W.: at an

angle of 45' to the terrestrial equator.

 

In what state of rest or motion?

At rest relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion

being each and both carried westward, forward and rereward re-

spectively, by the proper perpetual motion of the earth through

everchanging tracks of neverchanging space.

 

In what posture?

Listener: reclined semilaterally, left, left hand under head,

right leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg,

flexed, in the attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big

with seed. Narrator: reclined laterally, left, with right and left

legs flexed, the indexfinger and thumb of the right hand resting

on the bridge of the nose, in the attitude depicted on a snapshot

photograph by Percy Apjohn, the childman weary, the manchild

in the womb.

 

Womb? Weary?

He rests. He has travelled.

 

With?

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer

and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the

Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Mind-

bad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer

and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the

Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

 

When?

Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor

roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs

of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.

 

Where?

* [a filled black circle]