Late-Night Thoughts from Sisyphus to Sinatra
TWO The Myth of Time: From the Valley of the Kings to Silicon Valley
THREE The Mythic Power of Mentorship: From Odysseus to Zorba
FOUR The Myth of Travel: From Easter Island to the Moon
FIVE The Myth of the City: From the Walls of Jerusalem to the Cafes of Paris
SIX The Myth of Sports: From the Fields of Olympia to the Field of Dreams
The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance
of Beauty and the Beast, stands this afternoon
on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue
waiting for the traffic light to change.
—JOSEPH CAMPBELL
Perhaps if we could really listen to what the myths are
telling us
we could hear what I heard myself saying not so long ago:
“Everybody has to be the hero of one story: his own.”
I said it lightly; or rather something said it in me,
for we know more than we know, more than we
understand.”
And if it is true, what an awesome undertaking!
—P. L. TRAVERS
Maybe true.
Maybe not true.
Better you believe.
—OLD SHERPA SAYING
FOREWORD
by STEPHEN LARSEN, Ph.D.,
author of A Fire in the Mind:The Life of Joseph Campbell and The Mythic Imagination
Human beings ceaselessly mythologize their environments. That is why most traditional cultures have a sacred well, tree, or mountain, in which this or that event is conceived of as happening in illo tempore, “that time” in which the veil parted between this world and the invisible one, and something sacred took place. Around that something they will embroider a web of stories, establish a “frame of reverence” and perhaps base a culture or a way of life upon it. Thus sacred space is established, and equally, sacred time, marking when as well as where the event took place (celebrating the birth of Christ in Bethlehem each year at Christmastime).
The stories become “testaments,” old or new, that choreograph the life of the community, giving it a mythic warrant, a sacred raison d'être. According to historian of religion Mircea Eliade, the profane, a temporal order, looks toward the sacred, an eternal order of things, to dignify it with greater meaning. The tracks of the encounter with the sacred in human history are found everywhere. They are synonymous with the human quest for meaning. An understanding of human culture, then, seems inseparable from what is generically called “mythology.” James Joyce said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” and the reverse seems equally true: Mortality conducts a perennial love affair with immortality. The personal and the universal dance in and out of our lives and our dreams.
The urge to understand mythology as a discipline in and of itself began in the latter part of the nineteenth century and then broke forth riotously, as if it were some new species of life, long denied recognition, in the twentieth. The early “ethnographers” were scholars who studied the “ethnicities” (the bewildering variety of world cultures other than monolithic Euro-American) to look for patterns that might help to explain the roots of their own culture. Sir James Frazer's monumental twelve-volume The Golden Bough showed scholars—and the educated public—that crosscultural themes and patterns were widespread and persistent. A divine figure, the dying and reviving God of Spring and the equivalent human figure of the “Year King” (the king who “must die”) permeated European and Middle Eastern history.
A perennial landscape began to be discerned, with its mythic dramatis personae and events. Beneath the human realm lay a spooky underworld—often equated with the land of the dead, into which all mortal beings pass and from which they make an eternal return. Existence on the human levels was to be ennobled and immortalized by heroes and their miraculous quests. The origins of things, the encounter of good and evil, the nature of destiny and the meaning of life—all are addressed in mythology.
Anthropologists began systematic studies of cultures in hope of contributing to the world of social science. The structural patterns that underlie mythic forms were investigated. Theories of the why and how of mythology began to become current in the early twentieth century. Novelists and artists realized that there were untold riches of inspiration in dusty old volumes. Consider some of the great names: European ethnographers Leo Frobenius, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, and the founder of structural anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss; the American anthropologists Clyde Kluckholn and Margaret Mead.
Nor could a new generation of depth psychologists resist the mythic, for therein lay the perennial patterns that fascinate and compel the psyche: Oedipus, Narcissus, and the “hero with a thousand faces” who shows up in myriad cultural inflections. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung found ancient myths being enacted in the dreams of common folk, and developmental psychologist Jean Piaget showed how “magical” or mythic thinking dominates the mental world of childhood. In the literary domain, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Robert Graves, and the poets Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were exploring the evocative and dramatic powers of myth. In French philosophy, a new “postmodern” school that followed the writings of Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes (who showed that ancient myths permeate popular modern culture) emerged, and influenced academia profoundly.
But then there was the great twentieth-century mythologist Joseph Campbell, of whom depth psychologist James Hillman has said, “No one in our century, not Freud not Jung, not Thomas Mann, not Lévi-Strauss, has so brought a mythic sense of the world back into our daily consciousness.”1
“And why should it be,” asks Campbell, “that when men have looked for something solid on which to base their lives, they
