December 23, 2007 – The beginning of a mythical world, a mythical experience, an individual myth, is a seizure, says Joseph Campbell, something that pulls you out of yourself, beyond yourself, beyond rational patterns.
You find yourself doing silly or odd things, and you’ve been struck by that awakening of awe, of fascination, of the experience of mystery – the awareness of your bliss. If you’re lucky, and a little crazy, you are living your myth. Soon, you may be a lot crazier.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote about a value schedule, values that his psychological studies found that most people live for – security, personal relationships, prestige, and self-development. Campbell, a mythologist, looked at the list and was puzzled by it, found it boring. Those were exactly the values, he thought, that mythically inspired people don’t live for.
Mythology, he claimed, begins with madness.
A person who is truly gripped by a calling, a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth. Christ said “he who loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”
I share Campbell’s view. Those are not my values. That is not my life. I am belatedly realizing that I am living my own myth, experiencing the drama and challenge of myth. I’m no hero, but I am the hero in a classic myth, perhaps the most common myth:
Symbolic figures, found Campbell, arise spontaneously from the broken-off, tortured state of mind of modern individuals disconnected from myth, nature, and the animal world, from the condition of one who has lost touch with the life and thought of his community and is compulsively fantasizing out of his own disconnected base. In extreme cases, this disconnection can be schizophrenic. For others, it can simply be isolating, disconnecting, frightening.
The usual pattern of myth is this: First, of a break away or departure from the local social order and context; next, a long, deep retreat inward and backward, as it were, in time, and inward, deep into the psyche. Often, the hero finds a chaotic series of encounters, some strange, some even terrifying, and if he is fortunate, he also encounters fulfilling, centering, harmonizing experiences, giving him renewed strength and courage. Often, animals come along on the journeys, as companions or guides.
Then, finally, and importantly, a return journey of rebirth of life. Our hero is changed, enriched.
This, says Campbell, is the universal formula of the mythological hero journey: Separation. Initiation. Return.
Reading Campbell had a significant impact on me, because it made me see that I was the narrator of my own myth.
I left my community, my everyday life, and set out to find my farm in a strange and faraway place where I encountered new, challenging, even disturbing things. I experienced a long and difficult initiation, and have experienced something of a rebirth of life. I’ve experienced this sense of disconnection, of
being broken off from
my world, and suddenly found myself dealing with sadness and fright.
We do make and live our own myths, and thus, they are important. When I think about it, I see how so many people around me are on their own journeys, living their own myths, brushing against their own madness.
If we are, some of us, living our myths, we are also wearing our masks, another staple of myth. When the mask that we are wearing cracks, writes Campbell, when we lose faith in it, we regress, at any stage of life.
Campbell thought a good life was one in which there is one hero journey after another.
Over and over again, we are called to the realm of adventure, to new horizons, challenges.
Each time, there is the same question:
Do I dare?
And then if I do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment of the fiasco.
There’s always the possibility of fiasco.
There’s always the possibility of bliss.