Joseph Campbell's Theory of Myth The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion by Joseph Campbell

Review by: Robert A. Segal The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Autumn 1987), pp. 5-12 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of The C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jung.1.1987.7.4.5 . Accessed: 14/01/2014 08:34
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Joseph Campbell's Theory of Myth

Joseph Campbell. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. New York, Alfred van der Marck Editions, 1986. Reviewed by Robert A. Segal [This essay was, in an earlier draft, in the hands of the Editor of the Library Journa 1 when Joseph Campbe11' s swi ft fi na 1 ill ness became known. I have decided to let it be published now after his death even though it is often critical because I think Campbell's work deserves an honest response. I would not have given it so much study if I did not think Campbell's work important and its limitations instructive.]

No one in thi s generati on has done more than Joseph Campbe 11 to revi ve interest in myth. Numerous others have devoted themselves to analyzing myths, but Campbell devoted himself to resurrecting them, to inspiring persons to "1 i ve by" them. Because 1i vi ng by myths nevertheless requi res understandi ng them, Campbell not only collected myths but also worked out a theory of their origin, function, and above all meaning. That theory is closer to Jung's than to anyone else's, but it is really Campbell's own. It is in Campbell's theory of myth that I am interested. As a student of religious studies, I am especially interested ;n his view of the relationship between myth and religion. Because Campbell's most recently published book, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, is more a restatement than either a revision or an expans i on of his 1i fe long approach to myth, I wi 11 use it both to reconstruct and to assess his theory. I have discussed Campbe11's approach at 1ength ; n my new book on h; m (Joseph Campbell: An Introduct ion. New York, Garland Publishing, 1987). Here I will focus on the basic issues.

As in his other writings, so in Inner Reaches: Campbell's view fluctuates. At times he argues that the meaning of myth is universal rather than local. Lambasting ancient Israelites and others for failing to recognize the uni versa1 meani ng of thei r myths (see pp. 32-34, 43-44), he contrasts parochial Biblical prophets to the American Indian Black Elk, whom he calls Ita true prophet, who knew the difference between his ethnic [i.e., local] ideas and the elementary [i.e., universal] ideas that they enclose, between a metaphor and its connotation, between a tribal myth and its metaphysical import. 1I (p. 34) In his dismissal of the local meaning Campbell is like those quasi-Jungians who stop at amplification--for instance, contributors to the magazine Parabola. But he is unlike Jung himself, who merely begins with amplification and with it seeks the specific meaning of a myth for the individual or culture whose myth it is. Other times, however, Campbell asserts that the meaning of myth is local as well as universal. (See pp. 11-13, 99-100):
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Such a recognition of two aspects, a universal and a local, in the constitution of religions everywhere clarifies at one stroke those controversies touching eternal and temporal values, truth and falsehood, which forever engage theologians The first task of any systematic comparison of the myths and religions of mankind should therefore be (it seemed to me) to identify these universals and as far as possible to interpret them; and the second task then shou 1d be to recogni ze and interpret the vari ous 1oca 11 y and historically conditioned transformations of the metaphorical images through which these universals have been rendered. (pp. 11, 99) In his attention to the local expression of the universal meaning of myth Campbell is like Jung. To whatever degree the mean i ng of myth for Camp be 11 is uni versa 1, the meaning is doubly universal: not only do symbols in myths always refer to universal archetypes, but archetypes in turn always refer to either the cosmos as a who 1e or the psyche in everyone-ei ther to "outer space" or to "i nner. " Here Campbell's view differs incontestably from Jung's. For Jung, archetypes do not refer to someth i ng else but are the referent i tse 1f For Campbell, archetypes refer to something else, and it, not archetypes, gives myths their meaning. Indeed, the cosmic or psychological referent gives archetypes their meani ng--the reverse of Jung' s vi ew. In fact, by "archetypes" Campbe 11, 1i ke Northrop Frye, often means similarities themselves rather than any entities accounting for the similarities. The only difference between archetypes and symbols would, then, be that the similarities called archetypes are broader and more fundamental than the ones found in symbols. When Campbell praises Black Elk for distinguishing "between a tribal myth and its metaphysical import" (p. 34), he is clearly deeming the referent of myth cosmic. But when he argues that outer space is only a projection of inner space, the referent is entirely psychological. For example, of the ascents to heaven described in the Bible he says: " where those bodies went was not into outer space, but into inner space." (p. 31) At still other times the referent of myth for Campbe 11 is both metaphys i ca 1 and psycho 1ogi ca 1: ". the figurations of myth are metaphorical (as dreams normally are not) in two senses simultaneously, as bearing (1) psychological, but at the same time 12) metaphysical, connotations." (p. 56) Whether myth refers to the cosmos or the psyche, its meani ng and, more, message are for Campbell uniformly mystical: myth not only assumes but outright preaches the oneness of all things. (See pp. 110-114.) Metaphysically, not.on ly is there an unknown part of the cosmos--the part eventua 11y discovered by Campbell's hero--but it and the known part prove to be identical. (A discovery of this k-ind occurs at the end of Return of the Jedi, a film inspired by Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces; New York, Pantheon, 1949.) Psychologically, not only is there an unknown part of the psyche, but it and the known part turn out to be one. Indeed, the cosmos and the psyche themselves turn out to be one. Outer space is now identical with inner space rather than the project i on of it: ". outer and inner space are the same." (p. 28) The unity of all things is temporal as well as ontological: all things not only are essentially one but also inevitably return to their primordial, undifferentiated state. (See pp. 34-39.) This mystical unity of
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- - - Campbell

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Myth

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all things differs sharply from the mere harmony of distinct psychological parts sought by Jung. Campbell may well differ with Jung over the origin as well as the final state of archetypes. Again, his view shifts. He alternatively attributes archetypes to independent invention and to diffusion. (See pp. 13-15, 80-92.) Perhaps he is attributing to independent invention archetypal similarities and to diffusion some of the symbolic ones. In that case he would be akin to Jung. But he just is not clear. Since for Campbell the similarities in myths are what need explaining, and since for him archetypes either cause or constitute those similarities, the ambiguity in his account of the origin of archetypes makes his account of the origin of myth itself ambiguous as well. Campbell's account of the function of archetypes is unambiguous. Campbell argues, as he first argued in The Masks of God (4 vols. New York, Viking, 1959-1968), that any living mythology fulfills four functions: instilling and maintaining a sense of awe and mystery before the world, providing an image for explaining the world, upholding the social order, and guiding the individual through the stages of 1ife. (See pp. 18, 20.) Why these four functions of myth are the central ones Campbell never says. Why, as he stresses, myth can fulfill them only when it is taken symbolically he never says either.

Throughout his writings Campbell contends that traditional Western mythology is dead, or "dysfunctional," exactly because it is conventionally taken literally. By Western mythology he means that of the Bible rather than of Greece and Rome. In the volume of Masks on Creative Mythology (New York, Viking, 1968) Campbell argues that Biblical mythology has been dead since the twelfth century and has been succeeded by the "creative" mythology of artists. But in Inner Reaches, as elsewhere, he argues that Biblical mythology is dead because, taken literally, it clashes with science, which for him emerges considerably after the twelfth century. Taken symbolically, the Bible refers to either metaphysical or psychological reality and therefore runs askew to science, which deals with physical reality. Taken literally, the Bible covers the same domain as science and therefore competes with it. If the demise of Biblical mythology began in the twelfth century, science cannot be the cause. If science is nevertheless the cause, Campbell is saying that prior to science the Bible worked mythologically even though it was taken literally. Campbell certainly assumes that the stories that came to form the Bible worked literally for both ancient Israelites and early Christians. Conversely, Campbell especially in Hero says that "ancients" generally, in contrast to obtuse moderns, recognized the symbolic meaning of their myths.

Campbell's relentless animus toward institutionalized religion distorts his view of it. "Organized" Christianity and Judaism have traditionally interpreted the Bible sYmbolically as well as literally, and some of the staunchest antinomians have interpreted the Bible literally. Campbell's equation of institutionalization with corruption and ignorance and of individualism with purity and truth is hopelessly romantic. As Max Weber and others have shown, the institutionalization of a religion or any other charismatic movement is not only inevitable but also necessary: the alternative is extinction. The di fference here between Campbell and Jung cou 1d not be more stark.
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Jung is wary of the psychological risks' of spontaneous religiosity, praises quintessentially institutionalized Catholicism for its psychological efficacy, nearly equates mainstream Protestantism with modern atheism, nevertheless bemoans the decline of Christianity generally, and turns anxiously to analytical psychology as a modern substitute. Far closer to Nietszche than to Jung, Campbell, in polar contrast, castigates traditional Christianity generally ~ institutionalized and therefore psychologically impotent, damns his childhood Catholicism above all, revels in the demise of Christianity as a whole, and sees no need for a substitute for at least organized religion. For Jung, psychology at once replaces religion and interprets its extant myths. For Campbell, psychology recaptures the interpretations of myths directly imbibed by the earliest believers but haplessly missed ever since by their "churched" successors. Like Mircea Eliade, Campbell seemingly writes in the name of believers in myth and religion themselves. Seemingly, he writes to present their collective view of myth. But like Eliade as well, he in fact scarcely confines himself to their own view. In berating ancient Israelites and others for missing the universal meaning of myth, Campbell is conspicuously venturing beyond any meaning that, according to him, they even unconsciously imagined. Campbell goes so far as to distinguish the true meaning of myth from the intended meaning, which presumably includes unconscious intent: "Every myth, that is to say, whether or not by intention, is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and ima~~es are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors." (p.
55)

To claim to know how those who create or use myth themselves read it would be heady enough. Not only anthropologists but also Jungian analysts usually stop here. To claim to know how myth itself is to be read is far headier. Even literary critics and archetypal reductionists normally stop here. Yet Campbell himself is likely going still further: he seemingly claims to know that myth, read correctly, is itself correct. He apparently claims to know not only what the true meaning of myth is but also that that meaning is itself true. $i nce Campbe 11 says that myth preaches the oneness of all thi ngs, he would be claiming to know that all things are in fact one. Campbe 11' s sheer enthus i asm for the myst i ca 1 message of myth suggests mightily that he is endorsing as well as explicating that message, as many of his followers have assumed . In Inner Reaches he commits himself explicitly. Having asserted that "proper" art conveys the same message as myth (see chapter 3), he describes the truth it conveys: "The way of art, when followed 'properly' (in Joyce's sense), leads also to the mountaintop that is everywhere, beyond opposites, of transcendental vision, where, as Blake discovered and declared, the doors of perception are cleansed and everything appears to man as it is, infinite." (p. 126) Campbell ;s saying that art, and therefore myth, are proper because they preach the ultimate oneness of all things. Campbell is doubtless a v1s1onary, writing less to prove than to spread his vision. Demanding of him proof may, then, be egregiously unfair. Certainly he makes none of the standard appeals to arguments, facts, or experiences. He appeals to nothing outside myths themselves. Still, he does appeal to the mystical meaning of myths and therefore is presuming to muster evidence for mysticism. It is not, then, unfair to evaluate that evidence.
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- - - Campbell

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Myth

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Even Campbell would concede that not all myths transparently propagate mysticism. He himself often labors hard at extricating a mystical message from Western myths. How, then, does he justify his mystical reading of all myths? He can hardly appeal to the meaning believers themselves find in myth, for he says that many Westerners are oblivious to the mystical as well as the universal meaning of their own myths. Nor can he appeal to the intelligibility or coherence of his proposed mystical interpretations of myths. For even though he loves to tell myths, he actually interprets few whole myths. How he knows that the meaning of all myths is mystical is unclear. Even if all myths did declare reality one, why believe them? Campbell must still justify his claim that myths are right. He can invoke intuition as the source of his rendering of both myth and reality, but he cannot escape the need to justify his rendering of either. Otherwise his interpretation, no matter how inspiring, becomes dogmatic. The undeniable effect of his interpretation on his followers does not make his interpretation correct.

As justification for his interpretation of myth, though not of reality, Campbell does perennially make one appeal: to the comparative method, which he garnered less from anthropology than from 1iterature. From Hero on, Campbell fervently employs the method to reveal similarities ;n myths. But to seek similarities is not always to find them, and Campbell often strains to detect them. For example, few Biblicists would support his claim that the seemingly linear ~ime span in Biblical genealogies masks a cyclical alternative (see pp. 35-37) and therefore evinces the cyclical outlook that he maintains is uni versa 1. Even finding similarities worldwide is insufficient. They must be important. The perennial debate in many fields between comparativists and particularists is less over the existence of similarities than over the significance of them. A particularist like Clifford Geertz spurns as vague and banal the similarities adduced by a universalist like Melford Spiro. Campbell cannot, then, merely cite even clearcut similarities. He must show the importance of them.

Despite Campbell's undeniable assertion that the meaning of myth is local as well as universal, he remains at heart a universalist. Rather than preserving the balance that he says he seeks, he ultimately dismisses the local meaning. For example, he says that tithe Biblical version of The Fall is but a variant of the universally known Separation of Heaven and Earth 11 (p. 61) For Campbell, the local meaning adds little to the universal one. Specific symbols are either only a colorful way of expressing archetypes or, at most, a necessary means of conveying them. Even then, they are dispensable once the archetypes get conveyed. For Jung, by contrast, sYmbols not only are a permanently necessary means of conveying archetypes but also shape the archetypes they convey. Put another way, Campbell effaces Jung's distinction between symbols and archetypes. He dissolves symbols into archetypes. For instance, where Jung wou 1d say that a 1oca 1 conception of god as rna 1e rather than fema 1e thereby discloses only the male side of an androgynous god, Campbell says that the
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Lord's Prayer, though addressed to a rna 1e god, somehow manages to transcend itself and reveal an androgynous, if not impersonal, entity: at the open; ng of the Lord's Prayer ("Our Father, who art in Heaven ."), the i nvocat ion, "Ou r Father," is metaphori ca 1, since the des i gnated subject is not, in fact, a ma 1e parent, nor even a human being An equivalent prayer could as well have been addressed to "Ou r Mother, who art wi th in or beneath the ea rth." In fact, there have been many religions, and there may yet be many more, for which the preferred "as if," or "make believe," is of the child to its mother (p. 58) The transmission of the archetype is unaffected by the symbol tr~nsmitting it. Nor does the symbol transmitting the archetype affect the archetype itself, the way the symbols Christ and Satan nurture the god archetype in Jung's "Answer to Job." Even grant Campbell both the fact and the primacy of universals. He must still prove their meaning symbolic. Campbell assumes that because the difference among myths lies at the literal level, any universal meaning must be symbolic. But it need not be. Comparativists Vladimir Propp and Lord Raglan assert that all hero myths have a similar plot, but neither takes the meaning of that plot symbolically. To qualify as a hero, a figure in a story must, for both theorists, undertake a prescribed set of actions, but neither proceeds to interpret those actions or the hero himself other than literally. The fact that at the 1itera1 1evel hero myths di ffer in detai 1 does not mean that at that same level they differ in outline as well. Surely the very categorization of myths as heroic rests on literal, not symbolic, similarities. Symbolic similarities themselves are ones in outline, not in detail. Of course, one might, like Jung himself, try to demonstrate that a symbolic interpretation is needed, but its necessity must be demonstrated. Campbell simply assumes that a symbolic interpretation is the only possible universal one. Campbell does give a pragmatic argument for a symbolic interpretation: that myth taken literally contradicts science and is therefore unacceptable to moderns. Of the Biblical accounts of ascents to heaven Campbell says: It is believed that Jesus, having risen from the dead, ascended physically to heaven (Luke 24:51), to be followed shortly by his mother in her sleep (Early Christian belief, confirmed as Roman Catho1i c dogma on November 1, 1950). It is a1so wri tten that some nine centuries earlier, Elijah, riding a chariot of fire, had been carried to heaven in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:11). Now, even ascending at the speed of light, which for a physical body is impossible, those three .ce1est i a1 voyagers wou 1d not yet be out of the ga 1axy. (pp. 30-31) But even in the face of science many "moderns" do read the Bible literally. Campbell's disdain does not explain their capacity to do so. Even if no modern proved able to stomach the Bible literally, its true meaning would not automatically be symbolic, especially when Campbell himself refuses to defer to believers for the true meaning of myth. The Bible may, alas, simply be incompatible with science and thereby lost to moderns.
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- - - Campbell's Myth

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In contrast to Campbe11, Jung does not base the true mean; ng of myth on something external to it like science. Doing so would rob myth of its autonomy. But perhaps Campbell is really no different. Though he does not say so, perhaps he, 1ike Jung and, even more, Rudo 1f Bu 1tmann, is assumi ng that science provides the opportunity rather than the justification for recovering the true, symbolic meaning of myth. Like them, he would thereby be making an interpretive virtue out of an interpretive necessity. But he would still have to justify the symbol ic meaning of myth as the true one. He could no longer appeal to the rise of science ~ his justification. Even grant that the universal meaning of myth is symbolic. Must the symbolic meaning be either metaphysical or psychological? Without any justification Campbell limits the possible subject matter of myth to either ultimate reality or the human mind. Perhaps Campbell is assuming that the subject matter can be the physical world only when myth is taken literally.. But for Max Muller, for example, the names and attributes of the gods explained by myths were originally mere metaphors for the processes of nature--metaphors that were later wrongly taken literally. For Edward Tylor, the activities of the gods deta i 1ed in myths may be 1i tera 1 exp1anat ions of the processes of nature, but they are not literal descriptions of those processes . Just as Campbell assumes rather than proves that the symbolic meaning of myth is metaphysical or psychological, so he assumes rather than proves that the psychological meaning is archetypal rather than psychosexual, Jungian rather than Freudian. Although many Jungians have long turned to Campbell for theoretical support precisely because he partly interprets myths archetypally, Campbell's assumption of a Jungian meaning undercuts his authority. He needs Jungians to justify his interpretation as much as they need him to justify theirs. Though Campbell remains much more his own man than a Jungian disciple, he presupposes rather than defends the viewpoint that many Jungians look to him to defend. Campbell declares that myth, rightly understood, preaches acceptance rather than rejection of the everyday, physical world. Myth, he says, espouses a Jungi an-l ike ba 1ance between phys i ca1 rea 1i ty and deeper, psycho 1ogi ca 1 or metaphysical reality. Here Campbell offers considerable evidence: the return of saviors like Buddha and Christ from the heretofore unknown reality to the everyday one. (See pp. 69-73.) But Campbell adds that the savior, who is identical with the hero, returns not only because he wants to reveal to others the existence of the unknown reality but also because he realizes that everyday reality harbors the deeper one: the two realities are actually one. If Campbell is right about the hero's motive, there looms a danger--the danger for Jung of inflation and even psychosis. To value everyday reality because in it lies a deeper reality is not only to collapse the distinction between the two realities but invariably to devalue everyday reality itself. In endorsing the mystical message that he finds in myth, Campbell seems committed to the rejection of everyday reality rather than, as he assumes, to a balance between the deeper reality and it. Campbell's criticism of Judaism for believing that "there is in nature itself no divinity" (p. 114) reveals his outlook. Campbell's criticism of Judaism, which he groups with other overtly nonmystical religions, prompts the key question that can be asked of Campbell's lifelong efforts: why must all mythologies preach the same message? Maybe mythologies simply differ. Maybe only some are mystical. Campbell
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conspicuously recognizes that at first glance Biblical myths are nonmystical. But just as the mystic in him insists that beneath the surface divisions reality is one, so the comparativist in him insists that beneath the surface differences mythology is one. To the uroboric state of undifferentiated oneness all things for Campbell must return. True, Campbell devotes each volume of Masks, as he began to do in his Historical Atlas of World Mythology (vol. 1. San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1983), to the distinctive mythologies of hunters, planters, Easterners, Westerners, and moderns. But all those mythologies finally prove to be one, as Campbell first declared unabashedly in Hero and as he reaffirms in his Mythic Image (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1974). Campbell the stalwart comparativist fails to see that no one "lives by" myth generically. Living by myth requires the particularism that Campbell' s universalism scorns. Even if the meaning of myth is universal, no one can live it out in the abstract. One needs a specific myth or, better, mythology in all its idiosyncratic particularities. Campbell's indefatigable pursuit of a comparativist, symbolic, mystical, and psycho1ogi ca1 approach to myth di d much to 1i berate those hewn on a particularistic, literalist, worldly, and historical approach to the Bible above all. Campbell's talent for taking familiar stories out of familiar trappings and transforming them into something far more grandiose has rightly dazzled and inspired many. My largely academic criticisms are meant not to reject his global vision but only to suggest how much more work is required to make that vision stick.

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