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Welcome to our discussion with writer, director, artist, teacher, and mythologist Norland Téllez, our guest this week in Conversations of a Higher Order, to discuss “The Blooming of Truth: Campbell on the Mythic Past,” his latest entry in JCF’s MythBlast series (click on title to read Dr. Têllez’ thought-provoking essay).
I will get the conversation started, but it’s your participation that counts: please feel free to join the discussion and engage Dr. Tellez directly with your observations and questions.
So let’s begin.
Norland, you write
Although we tend to think of the Campbellian enterprise of Mythological Studies as providing honey-sweet ‘positive’ content for our lives, passages like the ones above tell a slightly different story, more critical of the positivity of mythic ideology.”
This is one of the reasons why I look forward to your essays. I’m as drawn to the precious gems mythology offers us as anyone, but know that a polyannish, “Happy Happy Joy Joy” perspective ignores what lies beneath the surface. Your writings stretch beyond that one-sided superficial perspective, reminding us that there would be no sweet, fragrant, brightly-colored blossoms without the buried roots that reach down and draw sustenance from the decaying, worm- and grub-infested humus hidden from the light.
There is so much to explore in your essay, but I’d like to start with something that’s not clear to me. It’s not my intention to seem to be challenging your premise (far from it – this is an important piece that speaks not just to the past, but to where we find ourselves today). That said, I have to confess I’m not sure from the context what you mean when you use the phrase “personal mythology” – though it does seem you have little use for the concept, associating the term with the “honey-sweet ‘positive'” perspective noted above.
It almost sounds as if you are saying “personal mythology” is something one consciously “adopts,” and that it is blindly optimistic – two characterizations very much at odds with both Campbell and Jung, not to mention my own experience and understanding.
Briefly recapping for those who don’t know the story that served as the genesis of the concept of “personal mythology,” Jung first noticed mythological imagery welling up from the unconscious of patients at Zurich’s Burghölzi Clinic suffering from neurosis or psychosis; he then discovered the same happens with relatively well-adjusted individuals, often unconsciously driving behavior – observations which led to his writing Symbols of Transformation (Volume V of Jung’s Collected Works), the volume that precipitated his break with Freud and set the tone and direction of Jung’s subsequent career.
In Campbell’s discussion of personal myth, he describes what happened next:
When Jung finished this book, it did not mark the end of his insights on the topic. ‘Hardly had I finished the manuscript,’ he says in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, “when it struck me what it means to live with a myth, and what it means to live without one. . . .” It occurred to him to ask himself by what myth he himself was living, and he realized he did not know. ‘So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know my myth, and this I regarded as my task of tasks.'”
Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss (86)
Jung is not here consciously choosing and adopting a myth, but attempting to come to know the mythological dynamics unconsciously driving his behavior.
That motivation provides the basis for the Campbellian concept of personal mythology.
Campbell observes there is no mythology anymore that everyone in contemporary society knows as a given, governing our lives in the same way as past cultures with an active, living mythology. It’s true that many today still consciously embrace and are guided by the myths of an inherited religious tradition, but there are just as many or more who live outside a religious tradition – and even among those who do go to church and believe the Bible, often “those symbols aren’t speaking to them. The driving power is coming from somewhere else” (Pathways to Bliss, 88).
Finding one’s personal myth, in Campbell’s formulation, isn’t about selecting and adopting a myth one likes, but rather making the unconscious conscious:
When Jung said he wanted to find out what the myth was by which he was living, what he wanted to find out was what that unconscious or subliminal thing was that was making him do these peculiar, irrational things and giving him problems that his consciousness then had to resolve. So let us say now that it’s with the awakening of awareness . . . that our subject begins” (Pathways to Bliss 90)
Joseph Campbell’s advocacy of seeking one’s personal myth, as inspired by Jung, seems very much aligned with your advocacy of discovering the
painful truth that speaks at the place where psyche must enter the flesh. For there is the existential rub, the irrepressible edge of the symptom, where the unconscious mind forces itself upon the conscious ego and breaks down all its defense mechanisms.”
Uncovering my own personal myth – exploring the unconscious mythological dynamics at play in my own life, as encouraged by Campbell and Jung – has proven both painful and rewarding. Delving into the dark, coming to recognize, know, and integrate aspects of my personal shadow – an ongoing, lifelong process – hardly provides “honey-sweet positive content” in my life, though it is enriching and life-sustaining.
Why, in Campbell’s mind, is this is so important?
One final excerpt:
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.” (Pathways to Bliss, 88)
We may not be as far apart as my question suggests. I suspect that your objection isn’t to Campbell’s conceptualization of personal myth, but rather to popular misconceptions from those with only a cursory knowledge of the mythologist’s work (akin to those who understand the advice to “follow your bliss” as either advocating some sort of vaporous wishcraft – hazy, lazy positive thinking carried to an extreme – or irresponsible pursuit of hedonistic pleasure as the highest good . . . either of which would be anathema to Campbell). If that’s the case, we’re pretty much on the same page.
It’s not my intention to focus on picking at a loose end – your paper is about so much more. I do believe it’s essential, though, to observe the original understanding of the man who introduced the concept of personal mythology, rather than inadvertently appear to abandon the phrase to those well-intended but mistaken light warriors to define who skim the surface and miss out on the depths.
I do notice an intriguing, unexpected correspondence. In much the same way that Jung did not know the myth by which he was living, so too it seems there is no active, living mythology universal to contemporary culture. Jung resolved his question by acknowledging and going into some very dark spaces in his psyche, a long and disturbing process – which brings me to your observation: “What is true of the individual is also true of entire nations and their mythic pasts.”
Becoming aware of and acknowledging those painful truths, we have the opportunity to, as you describe, eliminate “repressive elements that block the spontaneous outpouring of mytho-historic truth.” Indeed, this seems what this moment in time demands of us, when we can no longer deny the widespread racism that riddles society here in the United States, or a harsh, edgy, defiant magical thinking that trumps fact and science.
Could you speak a little more to what exactly you mean by “mytho-historic”? This really strikes a chord for me, but I would love to hear more. How would you say “mytho-historic truth” differs from either myth or history?
Thanks for bearing with me, Norland.
Stephen Gerringer
tie-dyed teller of tales
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