A New Awakening, Part 11

Bill Moyers introducing
The Power of Myth

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I call a potential "new awakening" of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

Campbell, who died not long after the series was completed, hoped for a new awareness of the importance of myth in human history and spirituality. But he was doubtful that that could occur any time soon. My hope is that perhaps, a quarter-century later, the time is now ripe.

Joseph Campbell
on The Power of Myth
PBS series

Campbell, as I am, was a Catholic. Unlike my own upbringing, which was not Catholic, Campbell's was in the Irish-American Catholic tradition. In talking to Moyers, he discusses what that meant to him:

“I was brought up as a Roman Catholic. Now, one of the great advantages of being brought up a Roman Catholic is that you’re taught to take myth seriously and to let it operate on your life and to live in terms of these mythic motifs. I was brought up in terms of the seasonal relationships to the cycle of Christ’s coming into the world, teaching in the world, dying, resurrecting, and returning to heaven. The ceremonies all through the year keep you in mind of the eternal core of all that changes in time. Sin is simply getting out of touch with that harmony.”

While still a young man, Campbell discovered other mythic motifs, such as those of the Delaware and Iroquois Indians. Moyers asks him whether their stories began to collide with his Catholic faith. Campbell responds:

“No, there was no collision. The collision with my religion came much later in relation to scientific studies and things of that kind. Later I became interested in Hinduism, and there were the same stories again. And in my graduate work I was dealing with the Arthurian medieval material, and there were the same stories again. So you can’t tell me that they’re not the same stories. I’ve been with them all my life. The themes are timeless, [while] the inflection is to the [particular] culture.”

Those particular cultures, though their mythic stories have common themes, can come into sectarian conflict in today's world. Campbell says:

“Look at Ireland. A group of Protestants was moved to [Northern] Ireland in the seventeenth century by Cromwell, and it never has opened up to the Catholic majority there. The Catholics and Protestants represent two totally different social systems, two different ideals.”

The solution? Campbell says:

The face of the Buddha

“Each needs [not a new myth but] its own myth, all the way. Love thine enemy. Open up. Don’t judge. All things are Buddha things. It is there in the myth. It is already there.”

I have to think Campbell's "own myth, all the way" orientation is crucial to us in this land of immigrants from all parts of the world who have brought diverse cultural outlooks here with us. We today, however, have taken the opposite approach to diversity and multiculturalism: the various mythic stories have been relegated to a set of private shelves in the public library, where they are never shared and compared. Secularism has replaced sectarianism in our public square.

My suggestion is that this approach has run its course, even though it has long seemed an entirely sensible strategy to keep the peace. Campbell refers to it this way:

“... in America we have people from all kinds of backgrounds, all in a cluster, together, and consequently law has become very important in this country. Lawyers and law are what hold us together.”

He is here lamenting that we'd be better off if held together by a shared "ethos":

“... in a culture that has been homogeneous for some time, there are a number of understood, unwritten rules by which people live. There is an ethos there, there is a mode, an understanding that, ‘we don’t do it that way.’ ”

Campell calls such an ethos an "unstated mythology":

“This is the way we use a fork and knife, this is the way we deal with people, and so forth. It’s not all written down in books.”

He implies, taking all this together, that we can bolster our ethos — our inbuilt sense of right and wrong — by figuring out how all our specific sectarian myths can together be taken "all the way": "Love thine enemy. Open up. Don’t judge. All things are Buddha things."

That notion of the ultimacy of "Buddha things" comes, of course, from Buddhism. Campbell has much to say to Moyers about Buddhism and "Buddha consciousness." That might seem a tilt in favor of one religion over all the others. Perhaps it is, but in Campbell's view the teachings of the Buddha and the lore of Buddhism represent something beyond ordinary religion. In fact, Campbell tells Moyers interprets the teachings of Christ as parallel to those of the Buddha. That is a subject I will explore further, later on.