Women, on the other hand, still go through puberty, and the moment she has her first period, she knows she is no longer a girl.
We don’t have that kind of symbolic tearing away anymore. The men would literally come and take them from their mothers to initiate them.
More on puberty rites: Boys have to be “ripped” away from their mothers to see when it’s time to grow up. That relationship truly exists, Santa Claus doesn’t. There is no Santa Claus, but he is a metaphor for the relationship between parents and children. He has a good bit on Santa Claus, that an initiation is when you move past the false reality and understand the deeper meaning. The denial of mythology, and the absence of transcendent religious experiences, is what Campbell thinks has turned young people to drugs. We typically live in a world of duality: good and bad, true and untrue, but mythology shows us that there’s an underlying union between the polarities, a Yin and Yang where there is always some good in bad and vice versa. Likewise, the Sumerian people had an old myth about a man the gods created to tend to their garden (Adam).Įvery religion is true when thought of metaphorically, but you get in trouble when you start thinking of the metaphors as facts. These kinds of stories repeat throughout history, and have some sort of pervasive significance beyond any one religion. The Bassari people of Togo have a creation myth similar to the Christian one, in which a snake tricks the first persons into eating fruit, and their god, Unumbotte, asks who told them they could eat the fruit and they say the snake did.
And then the dragon is the combination of the two: a mythological fusion of the earthly and heavenly beings.Ĭertain mythological themes repeat throughout history. The serpent and eagle are timeless symbols: the serpent is bound to the earth, the eagle is in flight, it’s a conflict we all experience. In this section, Campbell explores the internal struggles and developments that we all go through, and how myth aids their development. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. “One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. We’ve lost these points of transition, no one goes through a specific struggle to reach a new plane of life, and no one has to make that kind of sacrifice to transition. It’s brutal, but tribal and communal, and once you go through it, you know you are not a boy anymore. You go kill the lion, get beat up, get circumcised. Puberty Rites: In primal societies you go through a puberty rite, especially as a boy. You’re not sacrificing for the other person, you’re sacrificing for the marriage, the union you’ve created together. Marriage: True mythological marriage is the sacrifice of the one individual for the union, for creating a whole that is greater than its parts. that we forget about the inner value, our internal development, and that’s all the real value there is anyway. We’re so obsessed with outer value: money, status, etc. This section covers how we’ve lost the power of myth in the modern world, and according to Campbell, this explains many of the strifes and feelings of lostness that we experience, especially youths. 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 within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. The winged steed Pegasus, after skimming the air all day, went every night to a comfortable stable in Corinth.The book is broken out by 8 interviews done over two years, so my notes here are organized by those sections. The exact spot where Aphrodite was born of the foam could be visited by any ancient tourist it was just offshore from the island of Cythera. Hercules, whose life was one long combat against preposterous monsters, is always said to have had his home in the city of Thebes. Anyone who reads them with attention discovers that even the most nonsensical take place in a world which is essentially rational and matter-of-fact. It may seem odd to say that the men who made the myths disliked the irrational and had a love for facts but it is true, no matter how wildly fantastic some of the stories are. The terrifying incomprehensibilities which were worshiped elsewhere, and the fearsome spirits with which earth, air, and sea swarmed, were banned from Greece. “That is the miracle of Greek mythology-a humanized world, men freed from the paralyzing fear of an omnipotent Unknown.
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