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The Initiatory Function of Creativity
- Bradley Olson, PhD
- 10 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Joseph Campbell remains one of the twentieth century's great scholars of mythology—a well-deserved reputation, but it can obscure another aspect of his work. Long before I read all of Campbell's writings, I was struck by the way he wrote. It has a quality unlike most academic writing, in that it borrows as much from art and literature as from scholarship. He moves effortlessly from Joyce to Sanskrit, from medieval romance to modern psychology. He makes Isadora Duncan seem less like a troubled, tragic figure and more like a brilliant theorist of dance. He wrote not so much academically but in a style I was familiar with—cadence, pacing, and beautiful prose—from reading the likes of Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, or Thomas Mann. Looking back, I responded to Campbell because he didn’t construct an argument so much as create an atmosphere that made ancient myth breathe and the old, distant world come alive.
While compiling the latest Joseph Campbell Essentials book, On Creativity, I combed through his collected works, unpublished writings, and lecture transcripts. His beautiful prose, so elegant in its strength and balance, sturdy and modern, prevented long, complex sentences and thoughts from buckling under their own weight. Yet those same sentences managed to maintain just the faintest whiff of romanticism. I don’t think this was merely a stylistic preference of the author. I think it reflected Campbell's own experience of how creativity works.
A message to you of your own being
Often, we assume that art is the product of creativity— a communication from the artist to the public. Campbell sees art and creativity differently. He tells us that “Art is a message to you of your own being” (On Creativity, 5). The primary communication flows not from the artist to a receptive audience, but from our own, sometimes unrecognized depths to ourselves. The artist simply creates the conditions for that communication. That aligns with Campbell’s understanding of myth: it doesn't tell you what to think; rather, it evokes recognition. Something in you responds to something in the story. Meaning is disclosed rather than explained. In this way, myth functions very much like art: it doesn't bridge the gap by explanation, rather, it creates the conditions for an event—an experience—to unfold.'
In discussing James Joyce's theory of art, Campbell says that art orients us to something more than a new way of seeing. That art, at its best, produces what Joyce called aesthetic arrest, which carries us beyond desire, fear, and literality. Campbell senses that this is a significant breakthrough: when arrested by a work of art, we experience the transcendence that manifests through it, a transcendence of which we ourselves are a manifestation. The object doesn’t disappear; if anything, it becomes more fully itself. What changes is our relationship with it. We no longer see a mere thing in the world. We realize the same energy of life—fecund, creative, inexhaustible—moves through us and it. This experience extends beyond art to nature, literature or any creative endeavor, and perhaps most especially to another human being.
This may be what Campbell means when he says that artwork should produce "an epiphany, a revelation" (85). He contrasts this with the desire to teach a lesson or to improve the world. The great mythologies, he argues, sought not to improve the world but to harmonize ourselves with it. The distinction matters because Campbell is implying we should be less concerned with what it means than with what it actually does. An epiphany does not necessarily provide new information. It makes something present to us—something is now somehow more alive to us.
Campbell calls that presence radiance. The artist arranges the world’s elements so that, through them, we may experience the light of consciousness that all things both conceal and reveal. The creative act is not simply a matter of imposing one's intentions upon a blank canvas, a page, or other inert material. Campbell describes the artist as discovering an implicit form already living in the work and learning to recognize it as it emerges. This is the astonishing alchemy of the encounter between the maker and the material that neither could have expected.
Creation requires consenting to being changed by what one is creating
Perhaps creativity becomes initiatory at this point. To create requires, in some measure at least, consenting to being changed by what one is creating. The old methods and forms of understanding should not, and perhaps cannot, always be carried forward. Campbell speaks of the courage to release the past, "to die to the world and to come to birth from within" (112). This is unmistakably the language of initiation. Death carries forward life; something must be relinquished for something new to emerge.
And perhaps what we’re initiated into is not a body of secret knowledge occulted by the material forms of the world but rather, we’re initiated into the world itself: its radiance, its mystery, and—importantly—its mortality. Campbell remarks that “the grand lines of nature” are reflected in death, suffering, and sorrow, and the artist's task is to view and affirm them beyond fear and desire (77). The epiphany, then, is not an escape from life into transcendence. It is the recognition of transcendence already existing within life, the realization that the world we ordinarily pass through without seeing is always more alive, more mysterious, and more terrible than we had dared imagine.
Understood this way, creativity becomes one of the more efficacious ways we learn to live. It teaches us to relinquish the world we thought we knew while simultaneously experiencing the world itself more deeply. The discipline of creativity asks us to remain open to what is emerging, even when that emergence requires the death of something familiar, even of something loved. Perhaps that’s why creativity can feel so much like initiation. Life continually asks the same thing of us that the creative act asks of the artist: to release what has become routine, domestic and fixed, and attend to what is coming into being, while simultaneously recognizing that the old, familiar life we cling to must be relinquished in order to more fully live the life that beckons us.
This, I think, is what makes On Creativity more than a collection of Campbell's reflections on creativity, artists, and artistic practice. Creativity, for Campbell, is not confined to the studio or to the page. It’s a way to enter a deeper relationship with the world and with the deeper movements of one's own life. The artist learns to attend to what is struggling to emerge rather than simply reproducing familiar ideas and forms. The same could be said of living. We are continually tempted to return to forms and concepts that at one time served us well, even though they’re now antiquated, inadequate to face possibilities we cannot yet see clearly enough to name.
One of Joseph Campbell's great gifts was pointing out that the creative act and the mythic imagination inhabit the same territory. Both ask us to encounter what lies beyond the familiar furnishings of consciousness. Both can bring us to a moment when the unseen becomes visible. And both can change our relationship to the world without dictating what that relationship ought to be. Perhaps this is why Campbell could move so freely among mythology, literature, psychology, and art. He cared less about maintaining boundaries between disciplines than about what became possible when they fertilized one another.
If creativity is a form of initiation, it is not an initiation into some hidden world in or beyond this one. It is an initiation into this world, exactly as it is, but seen in all its radiance, a radiance that illuminates what ordinarily remains hidden. The artist arranges the colors and forms of the world so that, for a moment, we see that radiance held within them. Myth does something similar. And perhaps life itself presents us with the same task over and over again: to become attentive enough to see what’s emerging, courageous enough to release the past, and receptive enough to discover that what seemed to be merely ordinary has been extraordinary all along.
That may be the deeper promise of creativity. It does not rescue us from the conditions of life. It immerses us into them more completely. Conceiving of creativity this way is often discomfiting, but it teaches us to sharpen our vision, to dwell, however briefly, in a world whose mystery exceeds our understanding. And, for my money, that beats comfort every time. One may discover great satisfaction in living into the mystery of becoming—even while knowing that becoming also means passing away; living without the need to explain life but instead have the rapturous experience of being alive. In Campbell's vision, explanatory collapse is not a defeat so much as an important—even necessary—constituent of rapture.
Thanks for reading.
MythBlast authored by:
Bradley Olson is a writer, depth psychologist in private practice, teacher, speaker, and Director of Publications for the Joseph Campbell Foundation. His work explores the status of myth after belief—what it means to take myth seriously in a world where its metaphysical claims no longer hold in any straightforward way.
He is the author of The Mythopoetic Impulse and a Skeleton Key Study Guide for Pathways to Bliss. His current writing pushes against the dominant tendency to treat myth as a repository of timeless meanings or archetypes, arguing instead that myth functions as a form that brings the mind into contact with its own limits—where coherence breaks down and the desire for explanation remains.
Before his work in psychology and mythology, Olson worked as a police officer in North Dakota and Arizona. There, he encountered the world less as a smooth narrative than as rupture—moments of consequence without clear origin, human situations that resist explanation or moral symmetry. That experience continues to inform his understanding of myth—not as a system that resolves the world into meaning, but as a form that emerges in proximity to what cannot be made coherent.
In both his clinical practice and his writing, Olson is interested in how people live with those limits—how meaning persists, not as resolution, but as a problem that cannot finally be solved.
