Once and Future Myths. Phil Cousineau

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 have chosen, not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination, preferring even to make life a hell for themselves and their neighbors in the name of some violent god, to accepting gracefully the bounty the world affords?” And elsewhere, “In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream. The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”² Further, Campbell showed that when the myths are held unconsciously, as in fundamentalist Christianity or Islam, or even in secular social movements such as Nazism or Marxism, they can operate with catastrophic consequences. He seconded Jung's belief that we ignore mythology at our own peril.

      Cultivated consciously, however, Campbell shows us, the mythic sensibility incomparably enriches our lives. We understand how typical human situations have been handled since time immemorial. Campbell called it “the secret opening” through which mythological understanding breathes life into psychology, and also into the creative arts and literature, music, dance, theater and film. Timeless messages are delivered in timely ways!

      Surely then, Joseph Campbell has shown how contemporary culture needs a “mythic sense of the world.” But the inevitable question then also arises, What then?

      This leads us to the book you hold in your hand, and—this is consistent with Phil Cousineau's essential message—to a story. In May 1987 Campbell was already carrying the aesophogeal cancer that would claim his life five months later, but it had not yet been diagnosed. He was living in Hawaii in those years, but returning to New York fairly often to meet with his publishers or to accompany his wife Jean, whose Theater of the Open Eye was giving regular performances in New York. So Robin and I were delighted when Joe called us to let us know he was back in town, and asked us, “Would you like to get together?” He was his usual cordial, warm self, but I thought there was just a little edge of an unknown anxiety in his voice.

      A few days later we met for dinner and watched the screening of The Other Side of Life, a new film on death and dying we had been working on at the Swedenborg Foundation. After the viewing, Campbell stood up in the distinguished company and said what he most liked about the film was that it opened the metaphysical perspective without proselytizing for any creed. After dinner we left to see an Open Eye presentation of a contemporary Japanese Noh play: The Dream of Kitamura. As the cab crossed the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan (the play was in Brooklyn Heights) Campbell froze