we all live by a myth

Mythological images are the images by which the consciousness is put in touch with the unconscious. That’s what they are. When you don’t have your mythological images, or when your consciousness rejects them for some reason or other, you are out of touch with your own deepest part. I think that’s the purpose of a mythology that we can live by. We have to find the one that we are in fact living by and know what it is so that we can direct our craft with competence.

Now, many of us live by myths that guide us, myths that may prove adequate for our entire lives. For those who live by such myths, there’s no problem here. They know what their myth is: one of the great inherited religious traditions or another. In all likelihood, this myth will suffice to guide them along the path of their lives.

There are others in this world, however, for whom these guideposts lead nowhere. You find these folks especially among university students, professors, people in the cities, folks whom the Russians call the intelligentsia. For these, the old patterns and the old instructions just don’t hold, so that when it comes to a life crisis, they are of no help.

There are others who may feel that they are living in accord with a certain system but actually are not. They go to church every Sunday and read the Bible, and yet those symbols aren’t speaking to them. The driving power is coming from something else.

You might ask yourself this question: if I were confronted with a situation of total disaster, if everything I loved and thought I lived for were devastated, what would I live for? If I were to come home, find my family murdered, my house burned up, or all my career wiped out by some disaster or another, what would sustain me? We read about these things every day, and we think, well, that only happens to other people. But what if it happened to me? What would lead me to know that I could go on living and not just crack up and quit?

I’ve known religious people who have had such experiences. They would say, “It is God’s will.” For them, faith would work. Now, what do you have in your life that would play this role for you? “What is the great thing for which you would sacrifice your life? What makes you do what you do; what is the call of your life to you—do you know it? The old traditions provided this mythic support for people; it held whole culture worlds together. Every great civilization has grown out of a mythic base.

In our day, however, there is great confusion. We’re thrown back on ourselves, and we have to find that thing which, in truth, works for us as individuals. Now, how does one do this? I think one of the great calamities of contemporary life is that the religions that we have inherited have insisted on the concrete historicity of their symbols. The Virgin Birth, for example, or the ascension into heaven--these are symbols that are found in the mythologies of the world. Their primary reference must be to the psyche from which they have come. They speak to us of something in ourselves. They cannot primarily refer to historical events. And one of the great problems that is confronting us now is that the authority of the institutions that have been presenting us with these symbols—the religions in which we have been raised—has come into doubt simply because they have insisted on talking about their underlying myths as historical events somewhere. The image of the Virgin Birth: what does it refer to? A historical, biological problem? Or is it a psychological, spiritual metaphor?

I greatly admire the psychologist Abraham Maslow. As I was reading one of his hooks, however, I found a sort of value schedule, values that his psychological experiments had shown that people live for. He gave a list of five values: survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, and self-development. I looked at that list and I wondered why it should seem so strange to me. I finally realized that it struck me as strange because these are exactly the values that mythology transcends.

Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development in my experience, those are exactly the values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for. They have to do with the primary biological mode as understood by human consciousness. Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth. Christ gives you the clue when he says, "He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."

Maslow’s five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to. These are the bores. (In a marvelous footnote to an essay on Don Quixote Ortega y Gasset once wrote, “A bore is one who deprives us of our solitude without providing companionship”).

The awakening of awe is the key here, what Leo Frobenius, the wonderful student of African cultures, called Ergnjfenheit, being seized by something so that you are pulled out. Now, it’s not always easy or possible to know by what it is that you are seized. You find yourself doing silly things, and you have been seized but you don’t know what the dynamics are. You have been struck by that awakening of awe, of fascination, of the experience of mystery awareness of your bliss. With that, you have the awakening of your mind in its own service. The brain can enable you to found a business in order to maintain your family and get you prestige in the community; given the right mind, it can do these things very well. But the brain can also impel you to give all that up because you become fascinated with some kind of mystery.

One of the most vivid examples I know of this phenomenon is the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin. He was a perfectly prosperous businessman with a family and a house; then he simply became fascinated by what began to open up for him in painting. You start doodling with things, like painting and they might doodle you out of your life—that’s what happened to Gauguin. He just went off on this adventure, forgot his family and everything else. His awakening led him to Tahiti and all of those beautiful paintings. He forgot all about Maslow’s values and began simply to live his bliss.

- Joseph Campbell