Joseph Campbell
The Four Functions of Mythology
Joseph Campbell (l904-1987) was born in New York and studied
Medieval Literature at Columbia University. He dropped out of the doctoral
program there after being informed that mythology was not an acceptable subject
for his dissertation. Campbell taught mythological studies at Sarah Lawrence
College for many years before retiring to Hawaii and pursuing his interests in
writing and lecturing. In later life he became a popular figure in contemporary
culture, inspiring George Lucas's Star Wars films and doing a number of
interviews with Bill Moyers on public television. Campbell shared Carl Jung's
belief in the archetypal patters of symbolism in myths and dreams. He was author
and editor of many books on world mythology, including The Hero With a Thousand
Faces (1949) and the four-volume The Masks of God (1962). In the following
selection from "Mythological Themes in Creative Literature and Art," an essay
included in the collection Myths, Dreams, and Religion (1970), Campbell explores
what he considers to be the major functions of mythology in the life of
individuals, cultures, and societies.
Traditional mythologies serve, normally, four functions, the
first of which might be described as the reconciliation of consciousness with
the preconditions of its own existence. In the long course of our biological
prehistory, living creatures had been consuming each other for hundreds of
millions of years before eyes opened to the terrible scene, and millions more
elapsed before the level of human consciousness was attained. Analogously, as
individuals, we are born, we live and grow, on the impulse of organs that are
moved independently of reason to aims antecedent to thought – like beasts:
until, one day, the crisis occurs that has separated mankind from the beasts:
the realization of the monstrous nature of this terrible game that is life, and
our consciousness recoils. In mythological terms: we have tasted the fruit of
the wonder-tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and have lost our animal
innocence. Schopenhauer's scorching phrase represents the motor of this fallen
state: "Life is something that should not have been!" And, in fact, in the long
and varied course of the evolution of the mythologies of mankind, there have
been many addressed to the aims of an absolute negation of the world, a
condemnation of life, and a backing out. These I have termed the mythologies of
"The Great Reversal." They have flourished most prominently in India,
particularly since the Buddha's time (sixth century B.C.), whose First Noble
Truth, "All life is sorrowful," derives from the same insight as Schopenhauer's
rueful dictum. However, more general, and certainly much earlier in the great
course of human history, have been the mythologies and associated rites of
redemption through affirmation. Throughout the primitive world, where direct
confrontations with the brutal bloody facts of life are inexcapable and
unremitting, the initiation ceremonies to which growing youngsters are subjected
are frequently horrendous, confronting them in the most appalling, vivid terms,
with experiences – both optically and otherwise – of this monstrous thing that
is life: and always with the requirement of a "yea," with no sense of either
personal or collective guilt, but gratitude and exhilaration.
- For there have been finally, but three attitudes taken
toward the awesome mystery in the great mythological traditions: namely, the
first, of a "yea": the second, of a "nay"; and the last, of a "nay," but with
a contingent "yea," as in the great complex of messianic cults of the late
Levant: Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In these last, the
well-known basic myth has been, of an originally good creation corrupted by a
fall, with, however, the subsequent establishment of a supernaturally endowed
society, through the ultimate world dominion of which a restoration of the
pristine state of the good creation is to be attained. So that, not in nature
but in the social order, and not in all societies, but in this, the one and
only, is there health and truth and light, integrity and the prospect of
perfection. The "yea" here is contingent therefore on the ultimate world
victory of this order.
- The second of the four functions served by traditional
mythologies – beyond this of redeeming human consciousness from its sense of
guilt in life – is that of formulating and rendering an image of the universe,
a cosmological image in keeping with the science of the time and of such kind
that, within its range, all things should be recognized as parts of a single
great holy picture, an icon as it were: the trees, the rocks, the animals,
sun, moon, and stars, all opening back to mystery, and thus serving as agents
of the first function, as vehicles and messengers of the teaching.
- The third traditional function, then, has been ever that of
validating and maintaining some specific social order, authorizing its moral
code as a construct beyond criticism or human emendation. In the Bible, for
example, where the notions of a personal god through whose act the world was
created, that same god is regarded as the author of the Tablets of the Law;
and in India, where the basic idea of creation is not of the act of a personal
god, but rather of a universe that has been in being and will be in being
forever (only waxing and waning, appearing and disappearing, in cycles ever
renewed), the social order of caste has been traditionally regarded as a piece
with the order of nature. Man is not free, according to either of these mythic
views, to establish for himself the social aims of his life and to work, then,
toward these through institutions of his own devising; but rather, the moral,
like the natural order, is fixed for all time, and if times have changed (as
indeed they have, these past six hundred years), so that to live according to
the ancient law and to believe according to the ancient faith have become
equally impossible, so much the worse for these times.
- The first function served by a traditional mythology, I
would term, then, the mystical, or metaphysical, the second, the cosmological,
and the third, the sociological. The fourth, which lies at the root of all
three as their base and final support, is the psychological: that, namely, of
shaping individuals to the aims and ideals of their various social groups,
bearing them on from birth to death through the course of a human life. And
whereas the cosmological and sociological orders have varied greatly over the
centuries and in various quarters of the globe, there have nevertheless been
certain irreducible psychological problems inherent in the very biology of our
species, which have remained constant, and have, consequently, so tended to
control and structure the myths and rites in their service that, in spite of
all the differences that have been recognized, analyzed, and stressed by
sociologists and historians, there run through the myths of all mankind the
common strains of a single symphony of the soul. Let us pause, there, to
review briefly in sequence the order of these irreducible psychological
problems.
- The first to be faced derives from the fact that human
beings are born some fourteen years too soon. No other animal endures such a
long period of dependency on its parents. And then, suddenly, at a certain
point in life, which varies, according to the culture, from, say, twelve to
about twenty years of age, the child is expected to become an adult, and his
whole psychological system, which has been tuned and trained to dependency, is
now required to respond to the challenges of life in the way of
responsibility. Stimuli are no longer to produce responses either of appeal
for help or of submission to parental discipline, but of responsible social
action appropriate to one's social role. In primitive societies the function
of the cruel puberty rites has been everywhere and always to effect and
confirm this transformation. And glancing now at our own modern world,
deprived of such initiations and becoming yearly more and more intimidated by
its own intransigent young, we may diagnose a neurotic as simply an adult who
has failed to cross this threshold to responsibility: one whose response to
every challenging situation is, first, "What would Daddy say? Where's Mother?"
and only then comes to realize, "Why gosh! I'm Daddy, I'm forty years old!
Mother is now my wife! It is I who must do this thing!" Not have traditional
societies ever exhibited much sympathy for those unable or unwilling to assume
the roles required. Among the Australian aborigines, if a boy in the course of
his initiation seriously misbehave, he is killed and eaten* - which is an
efficient way, of course, to get rid of juvenile delinquents, but deprives the
community, on the other hand, of the gifts of original thought. As the late
Professor A.R. Radcliffe-Brown of Trinity College, Cambridge, observed in his
important study of the Andaman Island pygmies: "A society depends for its
existence on the presence in the minds of its members of a certain system of
sentiments by which the conduct of the individual is regulated in conformity
with the needs of the society…The sentiments in question are not innate but
are developed in the individual by the action of the society upon him."† In
other words: the entrance into adulthood from the long career of infancy is
not, l of a blossom, to a state of naturally unfolding potentialities, but to
the assumption of a social role, a mast or "persona," with which one is to
identify. In the famous lines of the poet Wordsworth:
Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing
boy.
A second birth, as it is called, a social birth, is effected,
and, as the first had been of Mother Nature, so this one is of the Fathers,
Society, and the new body, the new mind, are not of mankind in general but of a
tribe, a caste, a certain school, or a nation.
Where after, inevitably, in due time, there comes a day when
the decrees of nature again break forth. That fateful moment at the noon of life
arrives when, as Carl Jung reminds us the powers that in youth were in ascent
have arrived at their apogee and the return to earth begins. The claims, the
aims, even the interests of society, begin to fall away and, again as in the
lines of Wordsworth:
Our noisy years seem moments in the beings
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor made endeavourer,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
8. Both the great and the lesser mythologies of mankind
have, up to the present, always served simultaneously, both to lead the young
from their estate in nature, and to bear the aging back to nature and on
through the last dark door. And while doing all this, they have served, also,
to render an image of the world of nature, a cosmological image as I have
called it, that should seem to support the claims and aims of the local social
group; so that through every feature of the experienced world the sense of an
ideal harmony resting on a dark dimension of wonder should be communicated.
One can only marvel at the integrating, life-structuring force of even the
simplest traditional organization of mythic symbols
*G ?za Róheim, The Eternal
Ones of the Dream (New York: International Universities Press, 1945), pp. 243,
citing K. Langloh Parker, The Euahlayi Tribe (London: A. Constable & Co., 1905),
pp. 72-73.
†A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (Cambridge: The
University Press, 1933), pp. 233-234
‡William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood, II. 64-65.
