Joseph Campbell (1904-87) began his career in 1934 as an instructor at Sarah Lawrence College, where he taught for almost forty years, and where the Joseph Campbell Chair in Comparative Mythology was established in his honour. He is an author of numerous books, including the bestselling The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

'The Power of Myth' is a book based on the 1988 PBS documentary 'Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.' The documentary was originally broadcast as six one-hour conversations between 'Joseph Campbell' and journalist Bill Moyers.

These quotes were taken from an edition produced by Anchor books in 1991.

 

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Chapter I: Myth and the Modern World

p.16
Campbell: [Discussing mystical experiences induced by psychotropic drugs] ... 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.

p.18
Campbell: [Consciousness ... what do you mean by it?] ... It is part of the Cartesian mode to think of consciousness as being something peculiar to the head, that the head is the organ originating consciousness. It isn't. The head is an organ that inflects consciousness in a certain direction, or to a certain set of purposes. But there is a consciousness here in the body. The whole living world is informed by consciousness.
     I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow. Where you really see life energy, there's consciousness. Certainly the vegetable world is conscious. And when you live in the woods, as I did as a kid, you can see all these different consciousnesses relating to themselves. There is a plant consciousness and there is an animal consciousness, and we share both these things. You eat certain foods, and the bile knows whether there is something there for it to work on. The whole process is consciousness. Trying to interpret it in simply mechanical terms won't work.

p.23
Campbell: Man should not submit to the powers from outside but command them. How to do it is the problem.

p.25
Campbell: You must understand that each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work.
     If a person is really involved in a religion and really building his life on it, he better stay with the software that he has got. But a chap like myself, who likes to play with the software — well, I can run around, but I probably will never have an experience comparable to that of a saint.
  ... You can keep an old tradition going only by rewiring it in terms of current circumstances ... when the world changes, then the religion has to be transformed.

p.26a
Campbell: There [Beirut] you have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical god, they can't get on together. They are stuck with the metaphor and don't realize its reference. ... All things are Buddha things. It is there in the myth [of all religions]. It is already there.

p.26b
Moyers: You tell a story about a local jungle native who once said to a missionary, Your god keeps himself shut up in a house as if he were old and infirm. Ours is in the forest and in the fields and on the mountains when the rain comes.

p.26c
Campbell: The Yahweh cult was a specific movement in the Hebrew community which finally won. This was a pushing through of a certain temple-bound god against the nature cult, which was celebrated all over the place ...

p.27
Campbell: We moderns are stripping the world of its natural revelations, of nature itself...
Moyers: ... What happens when human beings destroy their environment? Destroy their world? Destroy nature and the revelations of nature?
Campbell: They destroy their own nature too. They kill the song.

p.28a
Campbell: The only mythology that is valid today is the mythology of the planet—and we don't have such a mythology. The closest thing I know to a planetary mythology is Buddhism, which sees all things as Buddha beings. ... Now brotherhood in most of the myths I know of is confined to a bounded community. In bounded communities, aggression is projected outward.      For example, the ten commandments say, Thou shalt not kill. then the next chapter says, Go into Canaan and kill everybody in it. That is a bounded field. The myths of participation and love pertain only to the in-group, and the out-group is totally other. This is the sense of the word gentile—the person is not of the same order.

p.28b
Campbell: Yes. Now, what is a myth? The dictionary definition of a myth would be stories about gods. So when you have to ask the next question: What is a god? A personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe—the powers of your own body and of nature. The myths are metaphorical of spiritual potentiality in the human being, and the same powers that animate our life animate the life of the world. But also there are myths and gods that have to do with specific societies or the patron deities of the society. In other words, there are two totally different orders of mythology. There is the mythology that relates you to your nature and to the natural world, of which you're a part. And there is the mythology that is strictly sociological, linking you to a particular society. You are not simply a natural man, you are a member of a particular group. In the history of European mythology, you can see the interaction of these two systems. Usually the socially oriented system is of a nomadic people who are moving around, so you learn that's where your center is, in that group. The nature-orientated mythology would be of an earth-cultivating people.      Now the biblical tradition is a socially oriented mythology. Nature is condemned. In the nineteenth century, scholars thought of mythology and ritual as an attempt to control nature. But that is magic, not mythology or religion. Nature religions are not attempts to control nature but to help you put yourself in accord with it. But when nature is thought of as evil, you don't put yourself in accord with it, you control it, or try to, and hence the tension, the anxiety, the cutting down of forests, the annihilation of native people. And the accent here separates us from nature.

p.30a
Campbell: But in the Bible, eternity withdraws, and nature is corrupt, nature has fallen. In biblical thinking, we live in exile.

p.30b
Campbell: We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.

p.35
Campbell: There is a verse in Lao-Tzu's Tao-te Ching which states that out of the Tao, out of the transcendent, comes the One. Out of the One comes Two [pairs of opposites]; out of the Two comes Three [one dominating the other and vice versa, and both in balanced accord]; and out of Three comes all things.

p.37
Campbell: You have to distinguish between reason and thinking ... your reason is one kind of thinking, but thinking things out isn't necessarily reason in this sense ... reason has to do with finding the ground of being and the fundamental structuring of the universe.

p.38
Campbell: Myth basically serves four functions. First is the mystical function ... realizing what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are, and experiencing awe before this mystery ... The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is concerned—showing you what the shape of the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through ... The third function is the sociological one—supporting and validating a certain social order ... It is this sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world—and it is out of date [e.g. Biblical rules relating to Hebrew society in the first millennium B.C.] [The] fourth function of myth, ... is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. Myths can teach you that.

p.39
Campbell: The story that we have in the West, so far as it is based on the Bible, is based on a view of the universe that belongs to the first millennium B.C. It does not accord with our concept either of the universe or of the dignity of man. It belongs entirely somewhere else.      We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea. To say that the divinity informs the world and all things is condemned as pantheism. But pantheism is a misleading word. It suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is trans-theological. It is of an indefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being.

p.40
Campbell: The biblical condemnation of nature ... god is separate from nature, and nature is condemned of God. It's right there in Genesis we are to be the masters of the world.
     But if you think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth and this is the voice of the earth.
Moyers: Scientists are beginning to talk quite openly about the Gaia principle.
Campbell: There you are the whole planet as an organism.

p.41a
Campbell: ... exactly what all myths have dealt with — the maturation of an individual, from dependency through adulthood, through maturity, and then to the exit; and then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos.

p.41-42
Campbell: 1854 ... chief Seattle's speech at a gathering, including Governor Isaac Stevens, emisary from the federal government.

 

Chapter II: The Journey Inward

p.45
Campbell: [Talking about myths of different cultures having common core themes] Yes. It's as though the same play were taken from one place to another, and at each place the local players put on local costumes and enact the same old play. ... They are speaking about the deep mystery of yourself and everything else.

p.46
Campbell: The Christ in you doesn't die. The Christ in you survives death and resurrects.

p.48
Campbell: The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. ... Jung speaks of two orders of dream, the personal dream and the archetypal dream.

p.60
Campbell: what Jung has called the archetypes, which are the common ideas of myths. ... The difference between the Jungian archetypes of the unconscious and Freud's complexes is that the archetypes of the unconscious are manifestations of the organs of the body and their powers. Archetypes are biologically grounded, whereas the Freudian unconscious is a collection of repressed traumatic experiences from the individual's lifetime.

p.61
Campbell: I think what we are all looking for is a way of experiencing the world that will open us to the transcendent that informs it, and at the same time forms ourselves within it. That is what people want. That is what the soul asks for.

p.65a
Campbell: Chinese Tao-te Ching ... : ‘He who thinks he knows doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows. For in this context, to know is not to know. And not to know is to know.’

p.65b
Moyers: Far from undermining my faith, your work in mythology has liberated my faith from the cultural prisons to which it had been sentenced.

p.67
Campbell: The biblical traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all speak with derogation of the so-called nature religions. ...      Every religion is true in one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

p.68
Campbell: Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that's what it is. The nature is our nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

p.69a
Campbell: [purgatory] ... one has to be purged clean of one's limitations. The limitations are what are called sins. Sin is simply a limiting factor that limits your consciousness and fixes it in an inappropriate condition.

p.69b
Campbell: We are all manifestations of Buddha consciousness, or Christ consciousness, only we don't know it. The word Buddha means the one who waked up. We are all to do that — to wake up to the Christ or Buddha consciousness within.

p.70
Campbell: No, the idea of life as an ordeal through which you become released from the bondage of life belongs to the higher religions. I don't think I see anything like that in aboriginal mythology.

p.71
Campbell: There has to be training to help you open your ears so that you can begin to hear metaphorically instead of concretely.

p.74
Moyers: Do you ever think that it is the absence of the religious experience of ecstasy, of joy, this denial of transcendence in our society, that has turned so many young people to the use of drugs?
Campbell: Absolutely. That is the way in.

p.76
Campbell: The transcendent transcends all of these categories of thinking. Being and non-being—these are categories. The word God properly refers to what transcends all thinking, but the word God itself is something thought about.    ... One problem with Yahweh, is they used to say in the old Christian Gnostic texts, is that he forgot he was a metaphor. He thought he was a fact.

p.77
Campbell: Brahma sits on a lotus, the symbol of divine energy and divine grace. The lotus grows from the navel of Vishnu, who is the sleeping god, whose dream is the universe.

p.82
Campbell: Heraclitus said that for God all things are good and right and just, but for man some things are right and others are not.

p.84
Campbell: Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere.

 

Chapter III: The First Storytellers

p.87
Campbell: The ancient myths were designed to harmonize the mind and the body. The mind can ramble off in strange ways and want things that the body does not want. The myths and rites were means of putting the mind in accord with the body and the way of life in accord with the way that nature dictates.

p.90
Campbell: I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology — that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one.

p.105
Campbell: There's been a reduction of ritual. Even the Roman Catholic Church, my God—they've translated the Mass out of ritual language and into a language that has a lot of domestic associations. The Latin of the Mass was a language that threw you out of the field of domesticity. The altar was turned so that the priest's back was to you, and with him you addressed yourself outward. Now they've turned the altar around — it looks like Julia Child giving a demonstration — all homey and cozy.
   ... They've forgotten that the function of ritual is to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time. ... the rituals that once conveyed an inner reality are now merely form.

p.106
Campbell: But now we have a tradition that doesn't respond to the environment — it comes from somewhere else, from the first millennium B.C. It has not assimilated the qualities of our modern culture and the new things that are possible and the new vision of the universe.
     Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.

p.111
Campbell: There is a definition of God which has been repeated by many philosophers. God is an intelligible sphere — a sphere known to the mind, not to the senses — whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.

 

Chapter IV: Sacrifice and Bliss

p.130
Campbell: ...every people is a chosen people in its own mind. And it is rather amusing that their name for themselves usually means mankind. They have odd names of the other people — like Funny face, or Twisted Nose.

p.131
Campbell: The death and resurrection of a saviour figure is a common motif in all of these legends ... Somebody has had to die in order for life to emerge ... Every generation has to die in order that the next generation can come.
   ... And the firm conclusion drawn was that the way to increase life is to increase death. Accordingly, the entire equatorial belt of this globe has been characterized by a frenzy of sacrifice — vegetable, animal and human sacrifice.

p.133a
Campbell: In the hunting cultures, when a sacrifice is made, it is, as it were, a gift or a bribe to the deity that is being invited to do something for us or give us something. But when a figure is sacrificed in the planting cultures, that figure itself is the god. The person who dies is buried and becomes the food. Christ is crucified, and from his body the food of the spirit comes.

p.133b
Campbell: Jesus is the fruit of eternal life, which was on the second forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. When man ate of the fruit of the first tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was expelled from the Garden. The garden is the place of unity, of non-duality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings. You eat the duality, and you are on the way out. The tree of coming back to the Garden [Christ crucified on the cross] is the tree of immortal life, where you know that I and the father are one.

p.142-143
Campbell: This is the final secret of myth — to teach you how to penetrate the labyrinth of life in such a way that its spiritual values come through.

p.145
Moyers: Can Westerners grasp the mystical experience that leaves theology behind? If you're locked to the image of God in a culture where science determines your perceptions of reality, how can you experience this ultimate ground that the shamans talk about?

 

Chapter V: The Hero's Adventure

p.160
Campbell: Now it has become to such an extent a sheerly mechanistic world, as interpreted through our physical sciences, Marxist sociology, and behaviouristic psychology, that we're nothing but a predictable pattern of wires responding to stimuli. This nineteenth-century interpretation has squeezed the freedom of the human will out of modern life.

p.163
Campbell: [Society needs heroes] because it has to have constellating images to pull together all these tendencies to separation to pull them together into some intention.

p.173
Moyers: I've always liked that image of life being breathed back into the dry bones, back into the ruins and the relics.
Campbell: There is a kind of secondary hero to revitalize the tradition. This hero reinterprets the tradition and makes it valued as a living experience today instead of a lot of outdated clichés. This has to be done with all traditions.

p.174a
Campbell: That's the reduction of mythology to theology. Mythology is very fluid. Most of the myths are self-contradictory ... Then theology comes along and says it has got to be just this way. Mythology is poetry, and poetic language is very flexible.
     Religion turns poetry into prose. God is literally up there, and this is literally what he thinks, and this is the way you've got to behave to get into proper relationship with that god up there.
   ... Three or four times I've seen what appear to be magical effects occur: men and women of power can do things that you wouldn't think possible. We don't really know what the limits of the possible might be. But the miracles of legend need not necessarily have been facts.

p.174-175
Campbell: [Image of a circle representing your soul (the whole sphere of the psyche). A horizontal line drawn through the circle represents the separation of the conscious and unconsciousness. A dot in the center below the horizontal line represents the center from which all our energy comes. Above the horizontal line is the ego, represented by a square.] ... the aspect of our consciousness we identify as our center. But, you see, it's very much off center. We think that this is what's running the show, but it isn't. ... What's running the show is what's coming up from way down below. ... It's surprising how much memory there is down there.
   ... Myths primarily are for fundamental instruction in these matters. Our society today is not giving us adequate mythic instruction of this kind, and so young people are finding it difficult to get their act together.

p.181a
Campbell: You see, consciousness thinks it's running the shop. But it's a secondary organ of a total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body. When it does put itself in control, you get a man like Darth Vader in Star Wars, the man who goes over to the consciously intentional side.

p.181b
Campbell: the world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbours to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for.

p.182
Moyers: ... is there a port of wisdom beyond the conflicts of truth and illusion by which our lives can be put back together again? Can we develop new models?
Campbell: They're already here, in the religions. All religions have been true for their time. If you can recognize the enduring aspect of their truth and separate it from the temporal applications, you've got it.

p.184
Campbell: Psychologically, the dragon is one's own binding of oneself to one's ego. We're captured in our own dragon cage.

p.185
Moyers: Like all heroes, the Buddha doesn't show you the truth itself, he shows you the way to truth.
Campbell: But it's got to be your way, not his. The Buddha can't tell you exactly how to get rid of your particular fears, for example.

p.186
Campbell: This, I believe, is 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 fulfilment of our own potentialities, not someone else's.

p.187
Campbell: You don't understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death ... The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life's joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life but as an aspect of life.

p.206
Campbell: No, mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth — penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images, ... mythology pitches the mind ... to what can be known but not told.

 

Chapter VI: The Gift of the Goddess

p.207
Campbell: All of the references of religious and mythological images are to planes of consciousness, or fields of experience that are potential in human spirit.

p.209
Campbell: ... the finding of the father has to do with finding your own character and destiny. There's a notion that the character is inherited from the father, and the body and very often the mind from the mother. But it's your character that is the mystery, and your character is your destiny. So it is the discovery of your destiny that is symbolised by the father quest.

p.210
Campbell: And when you have a Goddess as the creator, its her own body that is the universe. She is identical with the universe.

p.223
Campbell: The death and resurrection of the god is everywhere associated with the moon, which dies and is resurrected every month. It is for two nights, on three days dark. And we have Christ for two nights, or three days in the tomb.
     No one knows what the actual date of the birth of Jesus might have been, but it has been put on what used to be the date of the winter solstice, December 25, when the nights begin to be shorter and the days longer. This is the moment of the rebirth of light. That was exactly the date of the birth of the Persian God of light, Mithra, Sol, the Sun.

p.228
Campbell: ... By participating in a ritual, you are actually experiencing a mythological life. And it's out of that participation that one can learn to live spiritually.

p.229 Campbell: when Yahweh creates, he creates man of the earth and breathes life into the formed body. He's not himself there present in that form. But the Goddess is within as well as without. Your body is of her body. There is in these mythologies a recognition of that kind of universal identity.

 

Chapter VII: Tales of Love and Marriage

p.239
Campbell: [The five main virtues of the medieval knight] ... one is temperance, another is courage, another is love, another is loyalty, another is courtesy. Courtesy is respect for the decorum of the society in which you are living.

p.248
Campbell: The vandalism involved in the destruction of the pagan temples of antiquity is hardly matched in world history ... [destroyed] by the organized church. And why couldn't Christians live with another religion? ... It's power ... I think the power impulse is the fundamental impulse in European history.

 

Chapter VIII: Masks of Eternity

p.258
Campbell: Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses.

p.260
Campbell: ... there is a tendency in the West to anthropomorphize and accent the humanity of the gods, the personifications ... But in the East, the gods are much more elemental, much less human and much more like the powers of nature.

p.261
Campbell: ... The psychologist Jung has a relevant saying: religion is a defence against the experience of God.

p.263
Campbell: There is a Hindu saying, None but a god can worship a god. You have to identify yourself in some measure with whatever spiritual principle your god represents to you in order to worship him properly and live according to his word.

p.264
Campbell: You are God, not in your ego, but in your deepest being, where you are at one with the non-dual transcendent.

p.282
Campbell: ... when immortality is misunderstood as being an everlasting body, it turns into a clown act, really. On the other hand, when immortality is understood to be identification with that which is of eternity in your own life now, it's something else again.

p.283
Campbell: But to see through the fragments of time to the full power of original being — that is the function of art.

p.286
Campbell: AUM is a word that represents to our ears that sound of the energy of the universe of which all things are manifestations. You start in the back of the mouth ahh, and then oo, you fill the mouth, and mm closes the mouth. When you pronounce this properly, all vowel sounds are included in the pronunciation. AUM. Consonants are here regarded simply as interruptions of the essential vowel sound. All words are thus fragments of AUM, just as all images are fragments of the Form of forms. AUM is a symbolic sound that puts you in touch with that resounding being that is the universe.