A New Awakening, Part 3

In books such as The Power of Myth, a series of interviews conducted by PBS's Bill Moyers in the 1980s, the late Joseph Campbell laid out the wisdom he gained over a lifetime of studying human mythology. He said myths, rather than being disposable relics of ancient times, have four main functions even today:

1. The metaphysical function: awakening a sense of awe before the mystery of being.
2. The cosmological function: explaining the shape of the universe.
3. The sociological function: validating and supporting the existing social order.
4. The pedagogical function: guiding the individual through the stages of life.

In this series of posts I am exploring how a "new awakening" of myth-aware spirituality might help cure us of such ills as today's widespread acts of sexual harassment and assaults perpetrated by men on women in the military services, and other forms of sexual abuse and bullying in the wider society.

My personal entry point into this whole discussion has to do with what I consider today's near-total lack of Campbell's fourth function of mythology. Guiding us through the stages of life, according to the old myth-oriented way of organizing our lives, was accomplished by a system of regular celebrations that included rites of initiation. These were rituals that would swiftly convey teenagers from childhood into adulthood. They served to yank them into a new mode of being, after which the initiand would be able to participate as a full-fledged adult in the existing social order.

Poet and social critic
Robert Bly

My belief is that an awful lot of today's crimes of personal misbehavior — bullying, sexual harassment, rape, etc. — are perpetrated by "adultescents," people (not always males) who are well above the erstwhile threshold age of adulthood but are still (as Robert Bly calls them in The Sibling Society) "half-adults." Another term for them is "post-adolescents." Whatever they are called, many of them seem to be missing the internal constraints, seated within the personal soul, that traditionally put the brakes on our tendencies to misbehave.

The old codes of adult behavior reined in the "lower" aspects of the human psyche, those which are responsible for various behaviors, good and bad, associated with self-preservation, sexuality, aggression, and so forth. Those aspects of the psyche are fine in their proper context, the old codes said, but they need to be tempered by the "higher" aspects of the soul that give us

• compassion, tenderness, and a capacity for unconditional love
• a capacity for growth and maturation, including a sense of inner security amid life's chaotic vicissitudes
• balance, inner guidance, and the ability to see the real, but hidden, relationships among things
• ultimately, a sense of universal consciousness and unity

The personal misbehavior "graph" of our society has climbed steeply in recent decades, I am convinced. Yet I believe it was already climbing well before the onset of the "sexual revolution" in the 1960s, when kids such as myself looked around us and said, in effect, why not? Why not go ahead and violate all the old taboos, including those that said no sex outside of marriage? Why not ascribe the old no-no's to superstitions associated with nearly defunct religions? Why not, then, a lot of us said, fully abandon those old religions?

The old religions and mythologies served to rein us in, or at least tried to. They invited us to instead take what Campbell called the "hero's journey." He said that "by overcoming the dark passions, the hero symbolizes our ability to control the irrational savage within us." If we successfully complete the hero's journey, we find we have tamed the lower, darker aspects of the psyche.

Chartres Cathedral

But our religions have long lost sight of how myths further that journey aspect of faith ... and now we find we have too many empty pews on the sabbath. I think our religions began to lose their grip on us Westerners as far back as the time of the Renaissance which took place in Europe during the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries. We have to go all the way back to medieval times to find an ethos in which the old myth- and ritual-based spirituality was still on top.

Those were the times when the great Gothic cathedrals were built. Joseph Campbell goes into raptures when he describes the most beautiful of all, the cathedral at Chartres in France. He tells Bill Moyers of his visits there:

I consider Chartres my parish. I've been there often. When I was a student in Paris, I spent one whole weekend in the cathedral, studying every single figure there. I was there so much that the concierge came up to me one noontime and said, "Would you like to go up with me and ring the bells?" I said, "I sure would." So we climbed the tower up to the great bronze bell. There was a little platform like a seesaw. He stood on one end of the seesaw, and I stood on the other end of the seesaw, and there was a little bar there for us to hold on to. He gave the thing a push, and then he was on it, and I was on it. And we started going up and down, and the wind was blowing through our hair, up there in the cathedral, and then it began ringing underneath us -- "Bong, bong, bong." It was one of the most thrilling adventures of my life ... 

I'm back in the Middle Ages. I'm back in the world that I was brought up in as a child, the Roman Catholic spiritual-image world, and it is magnificent ... That cathedral talks to me about the spiritual information of the world. It's a place for meditation, just walking around, just sitting, just looking at those beautiful things ... 

Why do we like to talk about these things again? Because it puts us back in touch with the essential archetypology of our spiritual life. Going through a ritual day after day keeps you on the line.

A everyday way of doing things that keeps you "on the line" is something sorely lacking in today's culture. That, in a nutshell, is my complaint.