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Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes

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Famous Joseph Campbell Quotes

“My definition of mythology is "other people's religion", which suggests that ours must be something else. My definition of religion, then, is "misunderstood mythology" — and the misunderstanding consists in mistaking the symbol for the reference. So all the historic events that are so important to us in our tradition should not be important to us in any way except as symbols of power within ourselves.”

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Book:The Hero with a Thousand Faces
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“But if we are to grasp the full value of the materials, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream. Their figures originate from the same sources -- the unconscious wells of fantasy-- and their grammar is the same, but they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary their patterns are consciously controlled. And their understood function is to serve as powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom.”

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Book:The Hero with a Thousand Faces
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“When a judge walks into the room, and everybody stands up, you’re not standing up to that guy, you’re standing up to the robe that he’s wearing and the role that he’s 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’re 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’re not responding to them as personalities, you’re 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’s the representative of an eternal office; he has to sacrifice his personal desires and even life possibilities to the role that he now signifies.”

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Book:The Power of Myth
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“The child's world is alert and alive, governed by rules of response and command, not by physical laws: a portentous continuum of consciousness, endowed with purpose and intent, either resistant or responsive to the child itself. This infantile notion of a world governed by moral rather than physical laws, kept under control by a superordinated parental personality instead of impersonal physical forces, and oriented to the weal and woe of man, is an illusion that dominates men's thoughts all over the world. The sense then, of this world as an undifferentiated continuum of simultaneously subjective and objective experience (Participation), which is all alive (Animism), and which was created by a superior being (Artificialism), may be said to constitute the frame of reference of all childhood experience no matter where in the world. No small wonder then, that the above Three Principles are precisely those most represented in the mythologies and religious systems of the whole world.”

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Book:The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology
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“There were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together. And so we are right now in an extremely perilous age of thunder, lightning, and hurricanes all around. I think it is improper to become hysterical about it, projecting hatred and blame. It is an inevitable, altogether natural thing that when energies that have never met before come into collision—each bearing its own pride—there should be turbulence. That is just what we are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of mankind—to which no one anywhere alive today can say that he has the key, the answer, the prophecy, to its dawn. Nor is there anyone to condemn here (”Judge not, that you may not be judged!”). What is occurring is completely natural, as are its pains, confusions, and mistakes.”

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Book:Myths to Live By
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“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.”

Mythology
Book:The Hero with a Thousand Faces
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“All of the great mythologies and much of the mythic story-telling of the world are from the male point of view. When I was writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces and wanted to bring female heroes in, I had to go to the fairy tales. These were told by women to children, you know, and you get a different perspective. It was the men who got involved in spinning most of the great myths. The women were too busy; they had too damn much to do to sit around thinking about stories. [...] In the Odyssey, you'll see three journeys. One is that of Telemachus, the son, going in quest of his father. The second is that of the father, Odysseus, becoming reconciled and related to the female principle in the sense of male-female relationship, rather than the male mastery of the female that was at the center of the Iliad. And the third is of Penelope herself, whose journey is [...] endurance. Out in Nantucket, you see all those cottages with the widow's walk up on the roof: when my husband comes back from the sea. Two journeys through space and one through time.”

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Author:Joseph Campbell
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“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.”

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Book:Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation
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“In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship. You become mature when you become the authority of your own life. Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it. Awe is what moves us forward.”

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Book:A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
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“Our time has changed, and it's changed and changed, and it continues to change so fast, that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. So the virtues of the past are the vices of today, and many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. And the moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now, and that's what it's not doing, and that's why it's ridiculous to go back to the old-time religion.”

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Book:The Power of Myth
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“The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.”

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Book:Myths to Live By
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“So during the years of the Depression I had arranged a schedule for myself. When you don’t have a job or anyone to tell you what to do, you’ve got to fix one for yourself. I divided the day into 4 four-hour periods, of which I would be reading in three of the four-hour periods, and free one of them. By getting up a 8 o’clock in the morning, by 9 I could sit down to read. That meant that I used the first hour to prepare my own breakfast and take care of the house and put things together in whatever shack I happened to be living in at the time. Then three hours of that first four-hour period went to reading. Then came an hour break for lunch and another three-hour unit. And then comes the optional next section. It should normally be three hours of reading and then an hour out for dinner and then three hours free and an hour getting to bed so I’m in bed by 12. On the other hand, if I were invited out for cocktails or something like that, then I would put the work hour in the evening and the play hour in the afternoon. It worked very well. I would get nine hours of sheer reading done in a day. And this went on for five years straight. You get a lot done in that time.”

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Book:The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work
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“Nevertheless, every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women...The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls.”

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Book:The Hero with a Thousand Faces
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“The figure of the tyrant monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares of the world, and his characteristics are everywhere essentially the same. He is the hoarder of the general benefit, he is the monster avid for the greedy rites of my and mine. The havoc wrought by him is described in mythology and fairy tales as being universal throughout his domain. This may be no more than his household, his own tortured psyche, or the lives that he blights with the touch of his friendship and assistance, or it may amount to the extent of his civilization. The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and to his world, no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear haunted, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world's messenger of disaster, even though in his mind he may entertain himself with humane intentions.”

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Book:The Hero with a Thousand Faces
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