The Purpose of Mythology

Over the past holiday I spent three weeks with my parents in very rural Kentucky. I always seem to have a selective memory about growing up in the South. There are lots of things I really love about Southern culture, but there are also many many reasons I chose to set out and try and find my own way to live. One thing with which I always struggle is the nature of how the people of that area choose to think about spirituality. In short they seem to have a very literal interpretation of the Bible. I am not exactly sure how this all came about, but it seems to be becoming more and more so every visit I make. One of my ancestors was a Universalist preacher, a religion that focuses on the elemental truth behind the dogma of structured religions, it embraces all religions and seeks meanings which are beyond the surface. My third-great grandfather's church has been gone for decades and sometimes I wonder if his enlightened ideals disappeared with it.

The whole literalism movement currently taking place in many places in America seems problematic to me. Joseph Campbell is one of my heroes and I agree with him that we have lost our mythology. For him myths were more important than our history as history is basically journalism, written by man and therefore subject to misinterpretation, personal agendas, and biases. This seems to be what has happened to religion. It has been misinterpreted, taken as a literal truth. We have lost the story behind the story.

Myths describe with story and on an emotional level the universal truths of our world and our relationship to it. These Universal truths are beyond man and often difficult to convey with language so metaphor, and allegory were used to facilitate understanding. If the stories are taken as literal truth, then the Universal truth is lost, the story of how to be human is lost.  We have forgotten that facts are not necessarily truths. Can you imagine a war being fought by groups of people who believe that what they are fighting for is a metaphor? When individual religious structures each claim to own the real truth, conflict is created. This was never the intention. Individual religions were just cultural permutations of the same Universal truths; the same stories told in different ways.

Myths are essential to human existence. The show us that there is something greater than ourselves. They evoke archetypal life events allowing us to identify with a greater cause. We can see our own lives in the stories conveyed by myths, we learn about ourselves. They are a container for our emotions. If the protagonist in a myth is the subject of our own life rather than our lives being the object of someone else's idea, then we are empowered rather than victimized. Myths also help us negotiate the transitions from one phase of life to another. They create rights of passage from childhood to adult and from adult to decrepitude and death.  Myths let us know where we are in our own lives within the structure and order of the universe.

Here are some amazing quotes from Joseph Campbell:

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”

“God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, 'Ah!”

“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.”

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances without own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”

“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.” 

“All religions are true but none are literal.” 

“We save the world by being alive ourselves.” ― Joseph Campbell

Mythic Journeys is not your typical documentary. Like a mythological story it is a multi-layered experience, rich and stimulating interviews with philosophers and spiritual leaders are interwoven with a gorgeous animated tale of a king, a sorcerer, and a mischievous corpse. The film takes the audience on a powerful spiritual journey.