Thought-provoking and controversial, Campbell wrote “Myths to Live By” as a comparative study of world religious traditions with a special focus on differences between East and West, religion and war, and the underlying psychological needs fulfilled by religion. He doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to Christianity - a religion whose central text is a “nursery tale of disobedience and its punishment, inculcating an attitude of dependency, fear, and respectful devotion, such as might be thought appropriate for a child in relation to a parent... the Buddhist teaching, in contrast, is for self-responsible adults.” Certainly provocative! While Campbell’s writing style feels condescending at times, the book is a highly accessible intro to comparative world religions and he actually has some pretty interesting things to say about the fundamental similarities between religions. I’m planning on taking a literary dive into world religions over the next few months and this book was a great way to get my initial bearings. I’ve included some representative passages below.

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I like to think of the year 1492 as marking the end—or at least the beginning of the end—of the authority of the old mythological systems by which the lives of men had been supported and inspired from time out of mind.

… now demonstrated beyond question that similar mythic tales are to be found in every quarter of this earth. When Cortes and his Catholic Spaniards arrived in Aztec Mexico, they immediately recognized in the local religion so many parallels to their own True Faith that they were hard put to explain the fact.

Today the same thing is happening to us. With our old mythologically founded taboos unsettled by our own modern sciences, there is everywhere in the civilized world a rapidly rising incidence of vice and crime, mental disorders, suicides and dope addictions, shattered homes, impudent children, violence, murder, and despair. These are facts; I am not inventing them. They give point to the cries of the preachers for repentance, conversion, and return to the old religion.

Or is there not some point of wisdom beyond the conflicts of illusion and truth by which lives can be put back together again? … most guardians of society have a tendency in that direction, asserting their authority not for, but against the search for disturbing truths. Such a trend has even turned up recently among social scientists and anthropologists with regard to discussions of race. And one can readily understand, even share in some measure, their anxiety, since lies are what the world lives on, and those who can face the challenge of a truth and build their lives to accord are finally not many, but the very few.

One of the most interesting histories of what comes of rejecting science we may see in Islam, which in the beginning received, accepted, and even developed the classical legacy. For some five or six rich centuries there is an impressive Islamic record of scientific thought, experiment, and research, particularly in medicine. But then, alas! the authority of the general community, the Sunna, the consensus—which Mohammed the Prophet had declared would always be right—cracked down. The Word of God in the Koran was the only source and vehicle of truth.

And is there no implied intention, then, to rest satisfied with some final body or sufficient number of facts? No indeed! There is to be only a continuing search for more—as of a mind eager to grow. And that growth, as long as it lasts, will be the measure of the life of modern Western man, and of the world with all its promise that he has brought and is still bringing into being: which is to say, a world of change, new thoughts, new things, new magnitudes, and continuing transformation, not of petrifaction, rigidity, and some canonized found “truth.”

This recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend it is the first great impulse to mythology. And along with this there runs another realization; namely, that the social group into which the individual has been borne, which nourishes and protects him and which, for the greater part of his life, he must himself help to nourish and protect, was flourishing long before his own birth and will remain when he is gone. That is to say, not only does the individual member of our species, conscious of himself as such, face death, but he confronts also the necessity to adapt himself to whatever order of life may happen to be that of the community into which he has been born,

In the Buddhist view, that is to say, what is keeping us out of the garden is not the jealousy or wrath of any god, but our own instinctive attachment to what we take to be our lives. Our senses, outward-directed to the world of space and time, have attached us to that world and to our mortal bodies within it. We are loath to give up what we take to be the goods and pleasures of this physical life, and this attachment is the great fact, the great circumstance or barrier, that is keeping us out of the garden. This, and this alone, is preventing us from recognizing within ourselves that immortal and universal consciousness of which our physical senses, outward-turned, are but the agents.

Whereas the level of instruction represented in the Bible story is that, pretty much, of a nursery tale of disobedience and its punishment, inculcating an attitude of dependency, fear, and respectful devotion, such as might be thought appropriate for a child in relation to a parent, the Buddhist teaching, in contrast, is for self-responsible adults.

In those zones, furthermore, the common sight of rotting vegetation giving rise to new green shoots seems to have inspired a mythology of death as the giver of life; whence the hideous idea followed that the way to increase life is to increase death. The result has been, for millenniums, a general rage of sacrifice through the whole tropical belt of our planet, quite in contrast to the comparatively childish ceremonies of animal-worship and -appeasement of the hunters of the great plains: brutal human as well as animal sacrifices, highly symbolic in detail; sacrifices also of fruits of the field, of the firstborn, of widows on their husbands’ graves, and finally of entire courts together with their kings. The mythic theme of the Willing Victim has become associated here with the image of a primordial being that in the beginning offered itself to be slain, dismembered, and buried; and from whose buried parts then arose the food plants by which the lives of the people are sustained.

A neurotic might be defined, in this light, as one who has failed to come altogether across the critical threshold of his adult “second birth.” Stimuli that should evoke in him thoughts and acts of responsibility evoke those, instead, of flight to protection, fear of punishment, need for advice, and so on. He has continually to correct the spontaneity of his response patterns and, like a child, will tend to attribute his failures and troubles either to his parents or to that handy parent substitute, the state and the social order by which he is protected and supported. If the first requirement of an adult is that he should take to himself responsibility for his failures, for his life, and for his doing, within the context of the actual conditions of the world in which he dwells, then it is simply an elementary psychological fact that no one will ever develop to this state who is continually thinking of what a great thing he would have been had only the conditions of his life been different: his parents less indifferent to his needs, society less oppressive, or the universe otherwise arranged. The first requirement of any society is that its adult membership should realize and represent the fact that it is they who constitute its life and being.

It is not easy for Westerners to realize that the ideas recently developed in the West of the individual, his selfhood, his rights, and his freedom, have no meaning whatsoever in the Orient… They had no meaning for primitive man. They would have meant nothing to the peoples of the early Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, or Indian civilizations. They are, in fact, repugnant to the ideals, the aims and orders of life, of most of the peoples of this earth. And yet—and here is my second point—they are the truly great “new thing” that we do indeed represent to the world and that constitutes our Occidental revelation of a properly human spiritual ideal, true to the highest potentiality of our species.

One’s birth determines what one is to be, as well as what one is to think and to do. And the great point that I most want to bring out is that this early Bronze Age concept of a socially manifest cosmic order, to which every individual must uncritically submit if he is to be anything at all, is fundamental in the Orient—one way or another—to this day.

For, as Jung has stated: “In the last analysis, every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can be called ‘individuation.’ All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of this alone makes sense of life.” Which is precisely the opposite to the ideal enforced upon everyone—even the greatest saints and sages—in the great East, where the only thought is that one should become identified absolutely with the assigned mask or role of one’s social place, and then, when all assigned tasks shall have been

The philosophies of India have been classified by the native teachers in four categories, according to the ends of life that they serve, i.e., the four aims for which men strive in this world. The first is dharma, “duty, virtue,” of which I have just spoken, and which, as we have seen, is defined for each by his place in the social order. The second and third are of nature and are the aims to which all living things are naturally impelled: success or achievement, self-aggrandizement, which is called in Sanskrit artha; and sensual delight or pleasure, known as kāma. These latter two correspond to the aims of what Freud has called the id. They are expressions of the primary biological motives of the psyche, the simple “I want” of one’s animal nature; whereas the principle of dharma, impressed on each by his society, corresponds to what Freud has called superego, the cultural “Thou shalt!” In the Indian society one’s pleasures and successes are to be aimed for and achieved under the ceiling (so to say) of one’s dharma: “Thou shalt!” supervising “I want!”

to the forest, to some hermitage, to wipe out through yoga every last least trace of “I want!” and, with that, every echo also of “Thou shalt!” Whereupon the fourth goal, the fourth and final end of life, will have been attained, which is known as mokṣa , absolute “release” or “freedom”: not “freedom,” however, as we think of it in the West, the freedom of an individual to be what he wants to be, or to do what he wants to do. On the contrary, “freedom” in the sense of mokṣa means freedom from every impulse to exist.

In contrast, the great contemporary Greek playwright Aeschylus, of about the same fifth-century date as the anonymous author of the Book of Job, puts into the mouth of his Prometheus—who was also being tormented by a god that could “draw Leviathan out with a fishhook, play with him as with a bird, and fill his skin with harpoons”—the following stunning words: “He is a monster... I care less than nothing for Zeus. Let him do as he likes.” And so say we all today in our hearts, though our tongues may have been taught to babble with Job.

In the Orient the ultimate divine mystery is sought beyond all human categories of thought and feeling, beyond names and forms, and absolutely beyond any such concept as of a merciful or wrathful personality, chooser of one people over another, comforter of folk who pray, and destroyer of those who do not. Such anthropomorphic attributions of human sentiments and thoughts to a mystery beyond thought is—from the point of view of Indian thought—a style of religion for children.

When Jesus said, “I and the Father are one,” he was crucified for blasphemy; and when the Moslem mystic al-Hallaj, nine centuries later, said the same, he too was crucified. Whereas just that is the ultimate point of what is taught throughout the Orient as religion.

A ritual is an organization of mythological symbols; and by participating in the drama of the rite one is brought directly in touch with these, not as verbal reports of historic events, either past, present, or to be, but as revelations, here and now, of what is always and forever. Where the synagogues and churches go wrong is by telling what their symbols “mean.” The value of an effective rite is that it leaves everyone to his own thoughts, which dogma and definitions only confuse.

And when these are compared with the galaxies of Renaissance and post-Renaissance Europe, what is perhaps most striking is the absence in the Oriental traditions of anything like significant portraiture.

“The adult workman should be ashamed,” wrote Dr. Coomaraswamy in one of his discussions of this subject, “if anything he makes falls short of the masterpiece standard.”

When I was in India I met and conversed briefly with the saintly sage Shri Atmananda Guru of Trivandrum; and the question he gave me to consider was this: Where are you between two thoughts?

“Man,” in the words of the American novelist Hawthorne, “must not disclaim his brotherhood even with the guiltiest.”

Plainly and simply: it has been the nations, tribes, and peoples bred to mythologies of war that have survived to communicate their life-supporting mythic lore to descendants.

One of the great problems, I would say, of our own variously troubled society is just this, that youths brought up to function in the protected fields of peacefully domestic life, when suddenly tapped to play the warrior role, are provided with little or no psychological induction.

But when we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament, it is to a mythology with a very different upper story and very different power up there: not a polytheistic pantheon favoring both sides simultaneously, but a single-minded single deity, with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled in this literature in a manner in striking contrast to the Greek, pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a “Thou” (to use Martin Buber’s term), but a thing, an “It.”

However, to return in thought to the past, of which our present is the continuation: the old Biblical ideal of offering a holocaust to Yahweh by massacring every living thing in a captured town or city was but the Hebrew version of a custom general to the early Semites: the Moabites, the Amorites, the Assyrians, and all. However, about the middle of the eighth century B.C. the Assyrian Tiglath Pilesar III (r. 745–727 B.C.) seems to have noticed that when everybody in a conquered province is slain there is no one left to enslave. Yet if any remain alive, they presently pull themselves together, and one has a revolt to put down. Tiglath Pilesar invented the procedure, therefore, of transferring populations from one region to another: when a city had been taken, its entire population was to be condemned to forced labor elsewhere, and the inhabitants of that other place transferred to the vacated site. The idea was effective and caught on; so that by the time two centuries more had elapsed, the entire Near East had been unsettled. There was hardly a land-rooted people left. When Israel fell its people were not massacred, as they would have been half a century earlier. They were taken somewhere else, and another people (known later as Samaritans) was brought to inhabit their former kingdom. And so also when Jerusalem fell in the year 586 B.C., its people were not massacred but transferred to Babylon, where, as we read in the famous Psalm 137:

Reviewing the mythologies of war, we have found in both the Torah and Koran a belief that God, the creator and sole governor of the universe, was absolutely and always on the side of a certain chosen community, and that its wars, consequently, were Holy Wars, waged in the name and interest of God’s will. A not very different notion inspired the “Flowery Wars” of the Aztecs for the capture of sacrifices to keep the sun in motion. In the Iliad, on the other hand, the sympathies of the Olympians are on both sides of the combat, the Trojan War itself being interpreted not in cosmic but in earthly, human terms: it was a war for the recovery of a stolen wife. And the noble ideal of the human warrior-hero was there expressed in the character and words not of a Greek, but of a Trojan hero, Hector. I see here an evident contrast to the spirit of the two Semitic war mythologies, and an affinity, on the other hand, to the Indian Mahābhārata. The forthright resolution of Hector, going into combat in fulfillment of his clear duty to his family and city, and the “self-control” (the yoga) required of Arjuna in the Gītā, in fulfillment of the duties of his caste, are of essentially the same order. Moreover, in the Indian as in the Greek epic, there is equal honor and respect bestowed on the combatants of both sides.

“All humanity,” Buckminster Fuller once said, in prophecy of these transforming forces working now upon our senses, “is about to be born in an entirely new relationship to the universe.”

Similarly, in relation to the plant world: there again, the apparition is of an aspect of ourselves, namely our nourishment and growth. Many mythologies, and not all of them primitive, represent mankind as having sprung plant-like from the earth—the earth “peopling”—or from trees. And we have the image of the “Second Adam,” Christ crucified, as the fruit of the tree of life. There is also the Buddha’s tree of wisdom; and Yggdrasil of the early Germans. All are trees revelatory of the wisdom of life, which is inherent already in the plant-like processes by which our bodies took shape in our mothers’ wombs, to be born as creatures already prepared to breathe the world’s air, to digest and assimilate the world’s food through complex chemical processes, to see the world’s sights and to think the world’s thoughts according to mathematical principles that will be operative forever in the most distant reaches of space and of time.

It is my whole present thesis, consequently, that we are at this moment participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit to a knowledge not only of outside nature but also of our own deep inward mystery that has ever been taken, or that ever will or ever can be taken.

Our mythology now, therefore, is to be of infinite space and its light, which is without as well as within…. On our planet itself all dividing horizons have been shattered. We can no longer hold our loves at home and project our aggressions elsewhere; for on this spaceship Earth there is no elsewhere any more. And no mythology that continues to speak or to teach of elsewheres and outsiders meets the requirement of this hour. And so, to return to our opening question: What is—or what is to be—the new mythology? It is—and will forever be, as long as our human race exists—the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its “subjective sense,” poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor of a projected future, but of now: addressed, that is to say, not to the flattery of “peoples,” but to the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves, not simply as egos fighting for place on the surface of this beautiful planet, but equally as centers of Mind at Large—each in his own way at one with all, and with no horizons.

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