Often in actual life and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered: for it is always possible to turn the ear to other interests. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into it's negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or "culture," the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved.
His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless - even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire of renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from his minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration...
The Hero With A Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell
(First published 1949)
4 comments:
1.
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.
The darkness within the darkness is better understood by some, as the Great Spirit within, or as part of the Great Mystery.
The darkness always seeks the light, it would not be darkness without it. This is best expressed in the Yin Yang symbol, in which darkness and light are also represented as containing an element of each other.
More commonly though, darkness and light are viewed as opposites, needing to be balanced, and are perceived as a representation of dualism. For some, the notion of the Great Spirit as part of the Great Mystery, rather than it's opposite, makes for a more genteel approach towards the metaphysical.
The use of pseudo-names, that is to say-depersonalisation, could possibly be a useful tool, with the potential to act as 'psychic doorways' helping us to see beyond our own narrow views, ironically, for some though, life is rarely ever limited to just one view- just one option. This is why the 'Hero With A Thousand Faces' is so intriguing-for having a thousand faces, he highlights that there is always a more extensive view, a multiplicity of ways of seeing.
Campell just sounds bitter, rigid-inflexible and uptight, failing to understand that death is a part of life not separate from it. The Hero with a thousand faces, gets to live a thousand lives, they may be short, but he really lives- every single one of them, where as Campell lived only once, weighed down double in the darkness.
The poor man, never realised that the world is littered with the works of writers and artists (indeed, the true creatives) blinkered by their own tunnel vision, deluded, schizoid, knowing no humility, their monstrous ego's needing so desperately to be fed, that easy fools are made of them, in the small mean minded theatres of cruelty, which they themselves create. Campell spoke with a corpse in his mouth and ate ashes all his days.
Romanticise your heroes, quote from the great the good and the dead, but your still on your own at night. Ahhh.....swirling rhetoric from the tomb.
Dear Anonymous,
From this statement it is almost certain that you have not read Campbell or his The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
The Great Mystery and The Great Spirit are the basis of every part of his learning. He is a conduit back to cultures, life rituals, our selves even, things that this current "civilization" has forgotten or more cynically rides rough-shod over.
Ego and the id, darkness and the light, love and hate, yin and the yang are not specific to any one demographic, they are rooted in all men, be they a stock broker or Swahili tribesman.
His understanding of man and the passage of life, the cycles from darkness to light and their return gave him a levity like few people I've met, seen or heard.
Your last sentence is very clever but it is so far from his truth that it better fits the likes of GW Bush than the late Mr. Campbell.
Safe travels on your quest...
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