In the human heart and in the human mind — no matter what the race, the culture, the language, the tradition — there is at least the sense of a mystery, and an awesome …

In the wonderful Inferno of Dante, as he wandered through these hell pits, he recognized all of his friends. In the Greek world, when the heroes go to the underworld, they recognize their friends, …

These two systems of ideal–one teaching the beauty and majesty of the religious submission before God, the other the heroism of the humanistic insistence of the values of man–are in collision, and distinctly so …

The old texts comfort us with horizons, they tell us that a loving, a kind, a just father is out there. But according to the scientific view, nobody knows what is out there, or …

Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth-world in which you live. But just as in dream, the …

The first function [of mythology] is to reconcile consciousness to existence or to reject existence. The second function is to present an image of the universe through which the sensed meaning, or power, or …

When one studies primitive mythologies, the imagery of the mythological world derives from the psychological experiences of the shamans. The source of the imagery of primitive myths is the shaman’s psychological crisis. The shaman …

Just as for the American Indian the buffalo dropped away, and with it their public social mythology, so for us: the world has moved past, and our mythology has dropped off, and we are …

The realms of the gods and demons — heaven, purgatory, hell — are of the substance of dreams…. The mythology is the dream of the world. And if taken objectively as though there were …

In the ultimate illumination, all pairs of opposites are transcended, are left behind. And this world as we know and experience it is the perfect lotus world — this is nirvana, as it looks…. …

The whole point of the Oriental wisdom and mythic themes is that we are not in exile, but that the god is within you. You can’t be exiled from it. All that can happen …

Yoga is the intentional stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind substance. Now the notion is that within what is called the gross matter of the mind… there functions what we now call …

In traditional Hinduism, each caste has its own laws, its own morality, its own place in the society, and the individual is given so many laws to attend to that his whole life is …

No experience can be taught; all that can be taught is the way to an experience. Hence Buddhism is something that is implicit in ourselves and is to be achieved through experience but cannot …

When one looks at the glorious panorama of Indian art one sees a repetition of themes; beautiful themes, dependable themes, motifs that recur time and time again. And if you compare that galaxy of …

There are two orders of dream. There is the simple personal dream, where you get tangled up in your own personal twists and resistances to your life and so forth…. But then there is …

Jung began reading ravenously the works that had already been published on mythology, and this thought came to him—what it means live by and with a myth and what it means to live without …

I think one could define a symbol as an energy-releasing and -directing image, and since the symbolic systems of the world include many symbols that are practically universal, the questions comes up as to …

Life is a monstrous, horrendous presence and you live on it. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that. The first function of a mythological order has been to reconcile consciousness to this …

Now what do you have in your life for which you would sacrifice your life…? What is the great thing? What makes you do what you do, what is the call of your life …

One way… to destroy the value and spiritual effect of a symbol of this spiritual kind is to say that it refers to a historical event. A spiritual symbol, a religious symbol, a mythic …

The mythological realm is the realm that supports our realm. In philosophical language it could be compared to the realm of Platonic ideas. It is that realm of eternal principals, eternal forms which bring …

When our guiding mythology corresponds to that of our culture, our dreams will be regarded, so to say, as visions. We will be experiencing the divine in the form in which our society regards …

A myth is a poetic image that points past itself to an ineffable truth and so it can’t be called a concept…. But a myth, a mythology is a total image of the universe …

We have a highly differentiated society able to absorb people of many, many different faiths, but that means that the society itself cannot be governed by a single faith. Even that phrase that we …

As I say, the function finally of myths is to introduce you by way of the mārga, of the [universal] path, to the deep psychological and mystical the two being ultimately one. The mystery …

The Persian poets asked, “What is it that sustains Satan in his eternal, infinitely painful exile?” Because the deepest pain of Hell is not the fire or the stench but the depravation of the …

Europe had perfectly good religions and mythologies going fine and then [Christianity] is brought in on top of it. And what you get then… is an attempt on the part of the European mind …

Galahad is a word from the Old Testament that means Mountain of Testimony; [Sir Galahad] is a mountain of testimony to Christ. The whole tradition of the virgin knight as the Grail knight belongs …

We left our two heroes, Percival and Gawain, on their quest, and we now come to the story of the resolutions…. Percival has been wandering for some five years on his steed through this …

…the origin of the mythological symbols is not pseudo-scientific, pseudo-historical. They spring from the psyche. They are not the consequence of observations, they are the consequence of observations misinterpreted through projections from the human …

In this talk, Joseph Campbell explores way in which myth expressed itself in the first cities, in classical India and East Asia, and in the birth of our modern world. This series was recorded …

In this talk, never before commercially released, Joseph Campbell sums up the subject that he has been exploring: a brief history of world mythology. He then moves on to discussing with his audience the …

“‘Tat Tvam Asi’. You are it. That mystery which you seek to know, which you look for outside, which you project into personifications such as Yahweh, is your own very being, and looking for …

All of these possibilities are before you. And then… when you come down finally to the last, you are born. And this little thing comes into the world, ignorant of all that it has …

I suppose if you were to try to invent two peoples at opposite poles of any spectrum you chose, Chinese and Hindus would be perfectly good candidates for the opposition. […] Think of the …

In this talk, Joseph Campbell begins looking at the psychological underpinnings of myth, and the way in which the modern revolution in psychiatric knowledge led by Freud and Jung has altered our view of …

In this talk, Joseph Campbell explores the connection between mythology and the depth psychology of Carl Jung.

In this talk, Joseph Campbell explores the mythologically inflected novels of Thomas Mann and James Joyce. This series was recorded at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California during the summer of 1969, immediately …

In this talk, Joseph Campbell explores the Arthurian tales of the Grail–both in their humanist form, featuring the quest of the unsophisticated Sir Parzival, and in their spiritual form, featuring the quest of the …

In this talk, Joseph Campbell explores way in which myth expressed itself in the earliest human cultures. This series was recorded at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California during the summer of 1969, …

Creative mythology, then, is the rendition of images, of life, of poetic statements, of the orders that you perceive underlying the purposes of the world in terms of your experience. — Joseph Campbell In …

Hermes is the lord of the road to rebirth. He is the one who meets the soul at death and guides the path to eternal life of one kind or another. In that way, …

Each one brings the myth right out of himself. And what the analyst does is help you recognize it as the image carrier of your own affects, your own energies. The value of the …

Whereas in the ancient world one could speak of two mythologies — the mythology of the people staying in the village, doing as they were told, guarded by the village compound and the village …

It is impossible to communicate an experience to someone who has not had the experience. Try to communicate the experience of skiing down a wonderful mountain slope to someone who has never been on …

Why do we yearn? What is it we yearn for? It’s for something that was never on land or sea. And this is a peculiar European romantic thing. And that is the fulfillment of …

The wheel of fortune is usually represented as a revolving wheel with a person up here in victory, in triumph. A person here on the way down, the depression, the crackup, the falling stock …

These are the principal archetypes, I would say, in the Jungian psychological opus: the center; the figures representing the functions — sensation, thinking, and so forth; the personae, these are culturally conditioned; the anima/animus, …

All I can tell you about mythology is what men have said and men experience. And now women have to tell us from their point of view what the possibilities of the feminine future …

Whether there is a God, whether one can be united with God, whether one can transcend God, and all that, it’s a perfect matter simply of vocabulary. And since the ultimate mystery of being …

One can take anything – this watch – draw a ring around it. Forget that you know hot to use it. What is it? The mystery of the being of this object is exactly …

Everywhere you turn you find the same myths . . . not always with the same emphases . . . but the same symbols. How is it that these symbols keep returning? There are …

As I said to begin: life, the universe and all things are first and last absolutely without meaning. And this term of the Buddha, the tathagata, the one ‘thus come,’ points to that. As …

You ask about eternal life. Shall I be alive after death? This is lunar eternity. This is a long time. The eternity is that dimension which the screen of time shuts out. The obscuring …

The first encounter of the West with this type of yoga was that of Alexander the Great. When he arrived in Taxila, in 327 B.C., he and his young officers heard that there was …

When people ask me what is the myth today, I always have the feeling there is no myth, there can be no myth anymore. A mythology requires a homogeneous population, a group of people …

A movement from what Spengler called culture to civilization … is marked by revolutions and radical transformations of culture, where everything that had been natural became a problem, intellectually considered, criticized, and taken apart. …

My subject tonight is the androgyne as mystical symbol. And the first point I want to make before engaging in the argument is that a symbol derives from the psyche, speaks to the psyche …

There is a beautiful saying by Novalis: The seat of the soul is there where the inner world and the outer world meet. This is the secret of all myth. The imagery of myth …

In India the ultimate mystery is defined in three terms: being, consciousness, and bliss. Where your bliss is, there’s your adventure. And it will be a bliss that will involve pain. It will involve …

And so we come to the next part of the problem: what about aesthetic arrest, what about the static? Well Joyce turns for his authority here to Aquinas. And Aquinas speaks of three moments …

Myths do a number of things for us – from social and cultural to psychological and spiritual. Joseph Campbell offers a modern perspective on the Illumination of myths. After delving into the perspectives of …

Speaking at Bennett College in Greensboro NC, Joseph Campbell addresses the psychological perspective of freedom as it relates to Modern Man. He touches on Roman perspectives and the “Tree of Enlightenment” and once again …

Joseph Campbell explores the Grail Legend and the cosmological function of mythology, offering us a unique perspective on “Mythology Today”. Listen as he describes the Levantine forms that collided with Europe and how that …

Campbell looks at what happens when you mix religion and society. He begins by looking at the recognition of the divine, and brings us to a conclusion of the affirmation of life. How? Listen …

This talk, the first in Volume 1, “The Mythic Novels of James Joyce” is entitled “On Wings of Art.” It was recorded at the Esalen Institute on November 25, 1983. Only Campbell could make …

This talk, the second in Volume 1,“The Mythic Novels of James Joyce” is entitled “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” It was recorded at the Esalen Institute on November 25, 1983. …

This talk, the third in Volume 1,“The Mythic Novels of James Joyce” is entitled “Ulysses, pt. 1.” It was recorded at the Esalen Institute on November 26, 1983. Molly Bloom is equated with Penelope …

This talk, the fourth in Volume 1,“The Mythic Novels of James Joyce” is entitled “Ulysses, pt. 2.” It was recorded at the Esalen Institute on November 26, 1983. Joseph Campbell continues the reading of …

This talk, the fifth in Volume 1,“The Mythic Novels of James Joyce” is entitled “Finnegans Wake.” It was recorded at the Esalen Institute on November 27, 1983. Mythologist Joseph Campbell and author Henry Morton …