[In the following essay, Underwood finds parallels between the approaches of Campbell and C. G. Jung to the de-mystification of religion and the “natural history of religious myth, symbol, and sentiment.”]

CAMPBELL:
… Myths grab you somewhere down inside. As a boy, you go at it one way, as I did reading my Indian stories. Later on, myths tell you more, and more, and still more. I think that anyone who has ever dealt seriously with religious or mythic ideas will tell you that we learn them as a child on one level, but then many different levels are revealed. Myths are infinite in their revelation.
MOYERS:
How do I slay that dragon in me? What's the journey each of us has to make, what you call “the soul's high adventure”?
CAMPBELL:
My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don't be afraid to follow it.(1)

The purpose of this series of reflections is to explore some of the connections between the psychiatrist C. G. Jung's ideas and Joseph Campbell's as they relate to their common concerns regarding myth, religion, and the metaphor of journey: some of the major themes, that is, relating to the concerns of the discipline of Religious Studies as well as the deeper preoccupations of contemporary human beings.

My fundamental assumption in this essay is that both Jung and Campbell participate in the long history of religious studies in its most general nature, even before the nomenclature of “Religious Studies” was developed. These two thinkers are involved insofar as part of the task of the academic study of religion is to help provide a degree of rational comprehension of how and why religious phenomena have played so vast a role in the affairs of humankind. Jung and Campbell fit into this, I submit, by participating in what might be called the history of the “de-mystification” of religion. This process begins, in Western tradition at any rate, with the Hebrew break from the Ancient Near Eastern cosmological myth into the myth of history and the Greek break (through the creation of philosophical-scientific discourse) from Homeric myth (the move from Mythos to Logos).² It should be immediately added, however, that Jung's and Campbell's participation in this “de-mystification project” does not involve the debunking of religion and religious belief associated with the Modern Enlightenment and its consequent “dis-enchantment” of the world.

On the contrary, both Jung and Campbell engage in what could be called a “natural history” of religious myth, symbol, and sentiment, a natural history that seeks to honor the function of the religious imagination without granting it a super-natural authority. For Jung this approach is manifest in his career as a physician, empiricist, phenomenologist, and therapist. Indeed, at the end of his life, while composing his memoirs, Jung reiterated once again his concern to place his inquiries in the context of biology and natural history.³ Joseph Campbell states quite explicitly in his prologue to volume 1 of the Masks of God series (Primitive Mythology) that he is engaged in a “natural history”: the title of the prologue is “Toward a Natural History of the Gods and Heroes,” with the first section being called “The Lineaments of a New Science.” The allusion here is not only to Bacon and Galileo but also to the “New Science” of Giambattista Vico, who figured so prominently in the works of James Joyce, about whom Campbell wrote in his first comprehensive study of myth, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.

This broad context for Jung and Campbell in relation to the discipline (or “inter-discipline”) of Religious Studies is important: “demystification without dis-enchantment.” It is important in the first place because it helps the academic study of religion guard against excesses in the direction of an Apollonian rationalism to which the critical intellect is so often prone. It is important also because it provides an antidote to those who would turn Jung and Campbell into New Age prophets exclusively, tending to see in them justification for any amalgam of subjective, pseudo-mystical, occultish spirituality that simply feels good.

Within this general framework of “natural history” and “de-mystification,” the fundamental starting point for both Jung and Campbell was the psychology of the unconscious, and both began their researches by dealing with the myth of the hero-journey: Jung in the work that marked his break with Freud in 1913 (Symbols of Transformation) and Campbell with his Hero with a Thousand Faces, published some thirty-five years later. In the preface, written in June of 1948, Campbell begins with a statement from Freud's Future of an Illusion and then observes that a key to learning the grammar of symbols has to do with the psychology of the unconscious:

I know of no better tool than modern psychoanalysis. Without regarding this as the last word on the subject, one can nevertheless permit it to serve as an approach.⁴

Campbell's use of Freud was balanced by his growing interest in Jung—an interest that was evident already in Hero when it came out a year later. But Campbell (as was the case with Jung himself) never left Freud behind and at several crucial points in the development of his work he returns to the insights of Freud and Freudian-influenced anthropology. I am not sure, therefore, that the label of “Jungian” so often applied to Campbell is appropriate. Admittedly, Campbell's search for correspondences and even unity underlying the various forms of world mythologies throughout diverse cultural locales and historical epochs made Jung's hypothesis of the archetypes of the collective unconscious a useful interpretive tool. But Campbell is equally indebted, as far as the sources of his critical understanding are concerned, to Vico, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Robinson Jeffers—not to mention Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg. Furthermore, it was not necessary for Campbell to read Jung in order to inspire his quest for the underlying unity of the world's mythologies. He had already discovered this in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, as is so beautifully stated in the conclusion to A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake:

Besides being a Dream Confessional, Finnegans Wake is also a Treasury of Myth. Myths, like dreams, are an upworking of the unconscious mind—and western scholarship has recently become aware of their essential homogeneity throughout the world. … Other writers—Dante, Bunyan, Goethe—employed mythological symbolism, but their images were drawn from the reservoirs of the West. Finnegans Wake has tapped the universal sea.

The complexity of Joyce's imagery—as distinguished from that of his language—results from his titanic fusion of all mythologies. …⁵

Jung's works, therefore, helped Campbell find a theoretical framework for what he had already discovered in Joyce.

From the retrospective of the seventy-five years since Jung's Symbols of Transformation was published and the forty years since Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, we can see that the joining together of depth-psychological method with the theme of the hero-myth unites the two authors in another common concern: namely, the theme of transformation of consciousness and the ways in which participation in myth and ritual facilitates this.

The dynamics of transformation in Jung's psychology are the equivalent of what in Freudian terminology is called “sublimation,” though there are some important, even radical, differences that have to do with the theories of dream and repression and the nature of libido. The importance of these differences lies in the fact that, from the beginning marked by Symbols of Transformation, Jung was profoundly concerned with the processes of wholeness and the coincidence of opposites, processes that the theory of sublimation could not take into account since it depended, at least in part, on a mind-body dualism inimical to any theory of holistic processes.

Campbell's concern with transformation of consciousness was developed in his Hero [Hero with a Thousand Faces] book, though the term he used (“monomyth”) to describe the basic stages of the hero-journey was derived from Joyce. Campbell both builds upon and goes beyond the work of Jung. He builds upon it insofar as he shows how the hero-journey parallels what Jung later came to call the individuation process, including the reconciliation of opposites by a journey of descent into the “lower round” of the unconscious. He goes beyond Jung by showing, even more explicitly than Jung had, how the dynamics of myth and dream are identical. Campbell also succeeds, at least in my opinion, in placing the whole moment of twentieth-century depth psychology in the context of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and its elaboration in the nineteenth century. He does this by way of describing what he calls “the descent of the Occidental sciences”

from the heavens to the earth (from seventeenth-century astronomy to nineteenth-century biology), and their concentration today [Campbell writes this in 1949], at last, on man himself (in twentieth-century anthropology and psychology). … [Thus the descent of the Occidental sciences] marks the path of a prodigious transfer of the focal point of human wonder. Not the animal world, not the plant world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the crucial mystery.⁶

This formulation by Campbell, incidentally, is reminiscent of what Freud calls the “three narcissistic wounds” inflicted by the “researches of science”: the cosmological wound inflicted by Galileo, the biological wound inflicted by Darwin, and the psychological wound inflicted by Freud himself. They can also be seen as three ordeals besetting the modern hero-journey.

The themes of “hero” and “transformation” are inseparable from the theme or image of “journey” in both Jung and Campbell. This, of course, is due to no idiosyncrasy on their part. “Journey” is a theme of archetypal significance in the history of Western religious consciousness, as is evident when one thinks of the Exodus, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and Dante's Comedy.

In the works of Jung and Campbell, as in contemporary psychological theory generally, the theme of “journey” has been transmuted into that of “stages of life”—where “stage” should be understood not only as that “place” where the drama of life is played out, but also as the “vehicle” of time (the developing body) that carries the player through the journey of life. Each stage, in both senses of the word, has its own psychological-spiritual task, where the “task” is cooperatively defined by the intersection of biological potential and societal custom.

The most direct statement by Jung on the stages of life, and thus, implicitly, on the metaphor of journey and its relation to the religious quest, is an essay entitled just that: “The Stages of Life.” It is of more than passing interest to note that Campbell's edition of selected works of Jung begins with this essay.⁷ The basic thrust of Jung's essay is the principle of enantiodromia: the reversal of values that begins in the “healthy” life (“healthy” understood as wholeness) at its mid-point. This reversal involves a transition from the energies and strivings devoted, in the first half of life, to the building of a viable and strong ego-identity to a different sort of task during the second half: a task that becomes more “interior” in the sense that the awareness of finitude and death becomes more pressing, revealing at the same time that the values strived for in the first half of life must be let go now in the second half. Thus Jung:

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning. The significance of the morning undoubtedly lies in the development of the individual, our entrenchment in the outer world, the propagation of our kind, and the care of our children. This is the obvious purpose of nature. But when this purpose has been attained … shall the earning of money, the extension of conquests, and the expansion of life go steadily on beyond the bounds of all reason and sense? Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning, or the natural aim, must pay for it with damage to his soul, just as surely as a growing youth who tries to carry over his childish egoism into adult life must pay for this mistake with social failure.⁸

This illuminates, in a sense, what Jung means when he says on occasion that Freud's psychology, with its emphasis on the Oedipal conflict (that is, the struggle to gain self-identity and self-sufficiency in the face of parental power and the establishment-institutional forms of that power vested in education, law, and religion), is relevant to the first half of life, whereas his own psychology is appropriate to the second half of life.

It is not clear whether Campbell is indebted to Jung at this point—indebted, that is, in terms of specific, concrete influence—or whether he arrives at something of the same view independently. What is clear is that Campbell cites Jung to support his own view. But Campbell does amplify Jung's thesis regarding the stages of life by giving it a different twist, and this different twist issues, eventually, in Campbell's famous formulation of the fourfold myth-function.

Part of this “new twist” is Campbell's attempt to provide a biological basis for myth and its various functions. This is, of course, already implied in Jung's distinction between the first half of life being directed by nature, while the second half “belongs to culture.” Campbell adduces, at this point, the biological fact that human beings are born too soon, born incomplete, thus remaining in a stage of dependency for a considerably longer period, proportionately, than other mammals. (This is an insight derived, at least in part, from the work of the German biologist Adolf Portmann.) Culture, then, in Campbell's view, becomes a “second womb,” the “organism” that supports, protects, sustains, and guides human life into its precarious post-natal, life-long, neo-nate situation of fragility and dependency.

Campbell's critique can be seen in rough analogy to Freud's “civilization and its discontents.” What Campbell does here, however (and Jung, too, though with a somewhat different inflection), goes beyond Freud's basic stoicism and sees in the myths, rituals, and symbolisms of culture (including its specifically religious forms) dynamics of transformation that provide the possibility not only of coping with but of going beyond the dangers posed to human being by the “superior powers of nature.” So Campbell (in both the “Bios and Mythos” and “Mythogenesis” essays in The Flight of the Wild Gander) distinguishes two general aspects of mythology in the “marsupial pouch” called culture: there is an adaptive aspect and there is a transcendental aspect. Furthermore, these can be seen in relation to the fourfold function of mythology spelled out by Campbell at the end of volume 3 and the beginning of volume 4 of the Masks of God: the mystical-metaphysical, the cosmological, the sociological, and the psychological-spiritual.

The adaptive aspect, appropriate to the first half of life, is manifest in the cosmological and sociological functions: namely, the processes of acculturation whereby the individual is taught (if everything is working “right”) the fundamental rules of both the cosmic order and the social order. Campbell compares this adaptive-pedagogical feature of mythology, in both its cosmological and its sociological functions, to the first two stages of life as specified in classical Hinduism: the student and the householder. The adaptive aspect of mythology, however, is to be superseded by the transcendental function, if indeed humans are to recognize and affirm their destiny beyond mere conformity to the authority of social teachings regarding the moral law and the cosmic order. The function of the social teaching is the development of a self-sufficient adult ego-consciousness in accord with the cultural definitions of the cosmos and the socius. What lies beyond this requirement of adaptation? Campbell raises the question this way:

… [humans have] not only to be led by myth from the infantile attitude of dependency to an adult assumption of responsibility in terms of the system of sentiments of [their] tribe, but also, in adulthood, to be prepared to face the mystery of death: to absorb the mysterium tremendum of being: for [humans], like no other animal, … [know] that [they] too will die. … Furthermore, even in the period of childhood, and certainly throughout one's adult years, the wonder of death—the awesome, dreadful transformations that immediately follow death—strike the mind with an impact not to be dismissed. …⁹

So, beyond the function of the “imprinting of a sociology,” myth has a transcendental aspect, an aspect that is to help initiate one into the great mystery of Being and Death, an aspect manifest in the other two of the four myth-functions specified above: (1) the metaphysical-mystical and (4) the psychological-spiritual.

These two functions are rooted in the religious vision of the culture and are thus still a function of the society and its transmission of the tradition through its foundational myths. But this transcendent feature is, in Campbell's view, a means of “seeing-through” the lessons and symbols of the adaptive stage. He uses the image of “second birth” (and extends this image in a comparative way to various religious traditions) to describe this second set of functions (the mystical and the psychological): that is, just as the organism must be delivered from the first, biological womb at the “right time” or suffer consequences of malformation and maladaption, so it must be delivered from the “second womb” of culture at the “right” time or the journey of life will not be appropriately consummated. And the “obstetric device” by which this second birth is to be facilitated is myth in its mystical and psychological functions.

In clarifying what he means by this, Campbell appeals to the third and fourth stages of life in Hinduism: the stage of the Forest Dweller and the stage of the Sunyassin: leaving the adaptive-pedagogical dharma which has been fulfilled in order to live in the forest and seek the metaphysical bliss of the true self—which bliss is ultimately enlightening beyond the power of the adaptive aspect ever to achieve. It is important that this be understood in light of what Campbell reiterated on the PBS Power of Myth series with Bill Moyers: the injunction, namely, to “follow your bliss.” The possibility of “following your bliss” presupposes, if I read Campbell correctly, one's having experienced already the painful discipline of the adaptive aspect of mythology in order to discover that this “dharmic necessity” does not constitute fulfillment of the psychological-spiritual function of mythology's transcendental aspect: initiation into the authentic and mysterious depths of one's own being. If this is not understood, then “follow your bliss” can become a mindless principle, an example of the most vacuous and hedonistic dimensions of the worst aspects of “New Ageism.”

Up to this point there has been a certain congruence between Jung and Campbell. This congruence includes also a concern by both that the transformational journey of life, in its various stages, issue in an experience of one's own individuality, one's special uniqueness. What this involves for both Jung and Campbell is a deliverance from unconscious identification with or participation in the collective, be it the archetypal dimensions of the collective unconscious, which the adaptive function of mythology is to help one differentiate from in growing into a self-conscious ego identity, or the collective of the social group itself, identification with which can prevent the “second birth” and thus inhibit the journey toward realization of one's authentic being. Jung's name for this process is “individuation”—the journey toward wholeness and completion. Campbell's vision of the heroic journey is analogous with Jung's understanding of the process of individuation, but Campbell does, I think, begin to articulate the nature of this journey in significantly different ways. It is in the specifying of these “different ways” that we come to what I think is Campbell's own unique “re-visioning” of the religious life-journey.

I want to state my “thesis” here in at least two ways.

• (1) Jung remains a Christian—a Gnostic Christian, to be sure, but a Christian nevertheless. Campbell, on the other hand, breaks through the Christic mandala to a Buddhist-like experience of the No-thing in the Every-thing.
• (2) Jung's de-mystification of mythology issues in a re-enchantment of the symbol, which continues to assume an uncanny archaic sacredness of the unconscious that we must both journey from and return to.

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recalling his break with Freud and his “confrontation with the unconscious,” Jung asks what myth he lives by. He wonders if it is the Christian myth, but says to be honest he must admit it is not. Then he raises a more general question: “‘Do we any longer have any myth?’ ‘No, evidently we no longer have any myth.’”¹⁰ The myth Jung eventually found, announced to him in a 1926 dream as a task he would have to pursue, was the myth of alchemy; he lived by the myth of alchemy throughout his entire life from 1926 until his death in 1961. That was thirty-five years, the traditional length of the second half of life, even though he surpassed the traditional three-score-and-ten by some sixteen years (roughly the number of years, interestingly enough, he lived mythlessly in search of his own myth).

The myth of alchemy, as interpreted and experienced by Jung, was not only a disguised Christianity but also a disguised-symbolic prefiguration of his own analytical psychology of the unconscious. Thus Jung could say (without it being a contradiction) in a talk before a group of Anglican clergy in London in 1939 that the Catholic Church still had a symbolic life as expressed in the living mystery of the Mass and that “it works!”:

… when I say a “living mystery,” I mean nothing mysterious, I mean mystery in the sense which the word has always had—a mysterium tremendum. And the mass is by no means the only mystery in the Catholic Church. … So you see, if I treat a real Christian, a real Catholic, I say “you stick to it!” …¹¹

Jung, the scion of a long line of Swiss Protestants, discovers, through the myth of alchemy, the mysterious, mandalic meaning of the Roman Catholic Mass and becomes a twentieth-century mystagogue of the symbolic life.

Campbell, on the other hand, raised in the tradition of Roman Catholicism and its mysteries, is delivered into another vision. He says somewhere that the myth should be a bow and not a snare: it should be that which catapults one forward into a new experience of being and self, not a trap that inhibits the movement through and out of the mandala.

Given the importance of mandalic symbolism in Jung's psychology (see the entry on “mandala” in the Glossary to Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections), Campbell poses a series of questions that strikes at the very heart of Jungian theory: is the mandala an archetype of the collective unconscious? Or is it, rather, a form that appears at a specific time for a specific function under specific societal-cultural conditions? To be sure, Jung does not interpret the mandala as a vehicle revelatory of the gods, unless the “gods” are seen themselves as being born out of the unconscious. Nevertheless, Jung seems constantly to insist that the mandala represents an archetypal pattern of psychic order, and it is this which Campbell is calling into question (although he continues to cite Jung's analyses of the mandalic construction as late as the appearance of his own Mythic Image in 1974).

But let me return now to Campbell's response to his question: is the mandala something “eternal” and archetypal or is it to be seen in a different light? Basically, Campbell suggests that the mandalic symbol arose as a result of the shift from the hunting age to the agricultural age and that its highly differentiated geometric design can be seen as a way to express the increasingly complex division of labor associated with village-agricultural life. In contrast to this new and relatively complex division of labor, Campbell suggests (referring to the researches of Geza Roheim), for the pre-agricultural hunting group “the community was constituted by a group of practically equivalent individuals, each in adequate control of the whole inheritance.”¹² The “sacred” geometric form of the mandala, Campbell therefore argues, appeared “suddenly” at a specific time in history, an appearance that can be explained only by the new conditions imposed by the shift into a community where one felt himself or herself to be only a fraction of a larger whole. Thus:

The problem of existing as a mere fraction instead of as a whole imposes certain stresses on the psyche which no primitive hunter ever had to endure, and consequently the symbols giving structure and support to the development of the primitive hunter's psychological balance were radically different from those that arose in the settled villages, in the Basal and High Neolithic, and which have been inherited from that age and continued into the present by all the high civilizations of the world.¹³

“… continued into the present by all the high civilizations of the world”: the dominance of the sacred form of the mandala (in a variety of ways) as the inheritance of the psychological stress of the archaic agriculturalist persisted for some 6,500 years, continuing into our own modern age. It remained, and in some instances still remains, as the symbolic code designed to express the spiritual relationship between the microcosmic psyche, the mesocosmic society, and the macrocosmic universe. In this code there is a radical tension between the shaman and the priest, where the shaman represents the “titanic individual” seeking on his or her own. The priest, on the other hand, represents the acquiescent group subservient to the authority of the divine as represented in the traditional mandalic closures and their symbolic-dogmatic formulations.

Campbell's fundamental challenge is to the continuing authority of this symbol over our contemporary religious life-journey, a challenge that is spelled out tentatively in the important 1957 lecture “The Symbol without Meaning” and then in profuse and profound detail in Creative Mythology appearing in 1968. Creative Mythology is the fruition of an intuition that, in my opinion, first came to Campbell in his experience of and critical reading of James Joyce, especially in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, published in 1944. The term “creative mythology” itself indicates a return to the way of art. This would be a return to the role of the artist, understood by Campbell to be identical with that of the shaman, as first revealed in the hunting culture of the cave paintings, the pre-geometric, pre-mandalic figuration of the mysterious presence of That Which Is, Being, in its immediate, mysterious, overwhelming Presence.

In the area of twentieth-century philosophy, Martin Heidegger has argued that Plato's “turn” from the concern for Being in the pre-Socratic philosophers was the beginning of a 2500-year detour, a history of the metaphysical forgetting of Being. Similarly, one might say, the mandalic structure originating with the “turn” from hunting to agriculture, with its corresponding hierarchies in architecture, city planning, temples, cathedrals, dogmas, and organizations of priestly personnel, was the beginning of another detour, beginning a history of the forgetting of the sacred (a necessary detour and history, to be sure, in order to concentrate the prodigious, Promethean energies of early humankind on “world-building” and “psyche-making”). However, in wondering, in Creative Mythology, if the historical-psychological-spiritual function of the once-sacred mandala has outlived its “usefulness,” Campbell is posing the possibility of the individual now becoming his or her own shaman-artist, following the creative way through the mandalic form to a renewed experience of the mystery of Being.

Just as the historical event that marked the appearance of the mandala was the shift from one cultural experience to another, new one, so the historical events that signal the “emergent new symbol” can be precisely dated: 1492, “when Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue,” and 1609-1611, when Galileo spotted, with his telescope, the imperfections on the surface of the moon and the system of moons orbiting the planet Jupiter, thus confirming the Copernican hypothesis of a heliocentric solar system.

Columbus and Galileo figure prominently in both “Symbol without Meaning” and Creative Mythology. They are the shamanic-visionaries who paint new images on the cave walls of our imagination. Both break, not only figuratively, but literally, the prevailing mandalic structures: Columbus breaks the mesocosmic medieval Christian geography, stretching the bounds of the then-known world to discover a new world beyond the European mandala, and Galileo breaks the mandala of the Ptolemaic universe, rooted in Plato's Timaeus, with its concentric circles from the sub-lunar sphere of miserable earth—the realm of birth, life, suffering, and death—to the Heavenly Empyrean, the Abode of God and of all the Angels and the Elect. To the dates of the fracturing represented by Columbus and Galileo should be added, as Campbell does most emphatically and poetically, the date of July 20, 1969, the occasion of the first moon walk.¹⁴ Now the mandala of Mother Earth herself had been left, and we saw her floating there against the blackness of space from the perspective of the moonscape, the logical extension of the voyages of Columbus and the viewings of Galileo.

In Campbell's view, the new age emergent requires a joining together of the way of science and the way of art: both are “ways” to be seen under the paradigm of the shaman, not the mandala:

Let us … recognize … that what is intended by art, metaphysics, magical hocus-pocus, and mystical religion, is not the knowledge of anything, not truth, or goodness, or beauty, but an evocation of a sense of the absolutely unknowable. Science, on the other hand, will take care of what can be known.

Art and science … constitute a “pair of aspects” system. The function of art is to render a sense of existence, not an assurance of some meaning: so that those who require an assurance of meaning, or who feel unsure of themselves and unsettled when they learn that the system of meaning that would support them in their living has been shattered, must surely be those who have not yet experienced profoundly, continuously, or convincingly enough, that sense of existence—of spontaneous and willing arising—which is the first and deepest characteristic of being, and which it is the province of art to waken.¹⁵

Here we have, I suggest, the fundamental “re-visioning” by Campbell of Jung's perception of the religious life-journey: a journey that moves from the quest for meaning as expressed in the quaternal-mandalic representation of the psychic structure to an experience of Being, which renders all specific mythological forms as something to be seen through, as vehicles, so to speak, to assist in that journey, as the “bow” to catapult us into that experience.

And it is here, too, that we see Campbell the Buddhist, if by Buddhist we mean the Zen variety, as revealed in the following story Campbell re-tells in another context. Some five hundred monks were gathered together in a contest to see “who could summarize best in a single stanza the essence of Buddhist teaching.” The one expected to win was the “extraordinarily gifted” Shen-hsiu. And indeed, they were his four lines that were selected and formally inscribed on the wall by the door of the refectory:

The Body is the Bodhi-tree
The mind, a mirror bright,
Take care to wipe them always clean,
Lest dust on them alight.

The idea here being that the essence of the Buddhist way is diligent purification.

[An] illiterate kitchen boy, however, having learned of the competition, asked a friend that night to read to him the poem inscribed there on the wall; and when he had heard, begged to have the following set beside it:

The body is no Bodhi-tree,
The mind no mirror bright,
Since nothing at the root exists,
On what should what dust alight?

The abbot, next morning, hearing the excited talk of his monks, came down, stood a while before the anonymous poem, took his slipper and angrily erased it. But he had correctly guessed the author and, sending that night for the kitchen boy, presented him with the robe and bowl. “Here my son,” he said: “here are the insignia of this office. Now depart! Run away! Disappear!”¹⁶

It is the way of art and the artist that Campbell opens up for us in his “creative mythology” as the response to the fracturing of the mandala and that leads, in the end, to his Buddhist-like vision. The earliest, apparently most powerful visionary artist who revealed to Campbell the lineaments of his own new science was James Joyce. Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were, it could be said, the koan that opened up Campbell's vision.

One of the shortcomings of most criticism of Joseph Campbell—whether from the side of the history of religion, psychology, anthropology, theology, and/or literary criticism—is that his view of the way of art and its power is not sufficiently taken into account. Consider for example the following passages: one from Skeleton Key in 1944 and the other from The Inner Reaches of Outer Space in 1986, just a year before Campbell's death:

… Joyce actually plunges into a region where myth and dream coalesce to form the amniotic fluid of Finnegans Wake. Joyce well knew that this deepest level of creation could not be tapped by the siphons of conventional literature. He believed also that somewhere in the noncerebral part of man dwells an intelligence which is the most important organ of human wisdom. He knew further that it operated most typically during the mysterious process of sleep. And for these reasons, he chose night logic, expressed in dream language, as his method of communication.¹⁷

And:

James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, like every one of those young artists of his time who, during the century that has now run its course became the masters of the period, put his mind to the problem of reawakening the eye and heart to wonder. With the profound sense of a call, a vocation, he turned his mind (like the ancient Greek master craftsman Daedalus, when he found himself entrapped in a labyrinth of his own fashioning) to the invention of a hitherto unknown science of escape from bondage on “wings of art.”¹⁸

Jung began as a clinician with a clinician's interest in myth and dream as clues to unconscious processes—clues which, if read in the context of the mythological tradition, might help restore lost meaning to a patient's life. Jung became a physician, and he transformed the physician's craft into the alchemical art of the therapy of soul. He was also sage, philosopher, mystic, and visionary. He opened up new worlds within. In the end, his understanding of the religious life-journey involved the expansion of consciousness so as to include these “worlds.”

Campbell, even though he found useful the theoretical framework provided by Jung, began at a different place. He began with myth as a work of art as presented in the creative mythology of James Joyce. Following the directions suggested by Joyce, the lineaments of Campbell's own new science of mythology led him to see the ultimate function of mythology as one of providing “Wings”: Wings of liberation and releasement from bondage to the traditional mandalic forms now in the process of dissolution. The conventional and exoteric use of mythology is to maintain control of the religious imagination. In Campbell's viewing, however, the true power of myth lies in its capacity to move one through and beyond so as to experience the mysterious Presence of Being. In the end, then, Campbell's understanding of the religious life-journey was an understanding that enables one to live by myth, not in myth.

Notes

1. Power, 148.

2. Cf. Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), and Eric Voegelin, The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957). These volumes discuss the break with the myth in both Hebrew and Greek tradition.

3. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. A. Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), 339.

4. Hero, vii.

5. Skeleton Key, 361.

6. Hero, 391.

7. The Portable Jung, edited, with an introduction, by Joseph Campbell, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: The Viking Press, 1971), 3-22.

8. Ibid., 17-18.

9. Flight, 110.

10. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 171.

11. C. G. Jung, The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings, Collected Works: vol. XVIII, trans. R. F. C. Hall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 270.

12. Flight, 144.

13. Ibid.

14. Myths to Live By, chap. 11, “The Moon Walk—The Outward Journey.”

15. Flight, 188.

16. Myths to Live By, 143.

17. Skeleton Key, 360-61.

18. Inner Reaches, 130.