Joseph Campbell

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed.

One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua franca that expresses something basic about our deepest humanity. It is variously inflected in its various provinces.

When a judge walks into the room, and everybody stands up, you__e not standing up to that guy, you__e standing up to the robe that he__ wearing and the role that he__ going to play. What makes him worthy of that role is his integrity, as a representative of the principles of that role, and not some group of prejudices of his own. So what you__e standing up to is a mythological character. I imagine some kings and queens are the most stupid, absurd, banal people you could run into, probably interested only in horses and women, you know. But you__e not responding to them as personalities, you__e responding to them in their mythological roles. When someone becomes a judge, or President of the United States, the man is no longer that man, he__ the representative of an eternal office; he has to sacrifice his personal desires and even life possibilities to the role that he now signifies.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.

The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart, that like Hamlet, or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false finally unjustified image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world--not guilty as others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning, because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself, but of the nature of both Man and the Cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life-ignorance by affecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will, and this is affected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all.

Awe is what moves us forward.

Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood.

In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.

A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important.

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, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.

Poets are simply those who have made a profession ans a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.

If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money [not for purpose or passion]- has turned himself into a slave.

How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)

I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import - what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion ... What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC ... and the science of the 20th century AD.

Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.

The hero, the waker of his own soul, is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution.