What is the source of that life?

It must be a recognition of your life in the other, of the one life in the two of us. God is an image for that one life. We ask ourselves where this one life comes from, and people who think everything has to have been made by somebody will think, “Well, God made it.” So God’s the source of all this.

Well then, what is religion?

The word “religion” means religio, linking back. If we say it is the one life in both of us, then my separate life has been linked to the one life, religio, linked back. This has become symbolized in the images of religion, which represent that connecting link.

Jung, the famous psychologist, says that one of the most powerful religious symbols is the circle. He says that the circle is one of the great primordial images of mankind and that, in considering the symbol of the circle, we are analyzing the self. What do you make of that?

The whole world is a circle. All of these circular images reflect the psyche, so there may be some relationship between these architectural designs and the actual structuring of our spiritual functions.

When a magician wants to work magic, he puts a circle around himself, and it is within this bounded circle, this hermetically sealed-off area, that powers can be brought into play that are lost outside the circle.

I remember reading about an Indian chief who said, “When we pitch camp, we pitch a camp in a circle. When the eagle builds a nest, the nest is in a circle. When we look at the horizon, the horizon is in a circle.” Circles were very important to some Indians, weren’t they?

Yes. But they’re also in much that we’ve inherited from Sumerian mythology. We’ve inherited the circle with the four cardinal points and three hundred and sixty degrees. The official Sumerian year was three hundred and sixty days with five holy days that don’t count, which are outside of time and in which they had ceremonies relating their society to the heavens. Now we’re losing this sense of the circle in relation to time, because we have digital time, where you just have time buzzing by. Out of the digital you get the sense of the flow of time. At Penn Station in New York, there’s a clock with the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the tenths of seconds, and the hundredths of seconds. When you see the hundredths of a second buzzing by, you realize how time is running through you.

The circle, on the other hand, represents totality. Everything within the circle is one thing, which is encircled, enframed. That would be the spatial aspect. But the temporal aspect of the circle is that you leave, go somewhere, and always come back. God is the alpha and the omega, the source and the end. The circle suggests immediately a completed totality, whether in time or in space.

No beginning, no end.

Round and round and round. Take the year, for example. When November rolls around, we have Thanksgiving again. Then December comes, and we have Christmas again. Not only does the month roll around again, but also the moon cycle, the day cycle. We’re reminded of this when we look at our watches and see the cycle of time. It’s the same hour, but another day.

China used to call itself the kingdom of the centre, and the Aztecs had a similar saying about their own culture. I suppose every culture uses the circle as the cosmological order puts itself at the center. Why do you suppose the circle became so universally symbolic?

Because it’s experienced all the time in the day, in the year, in leaving home to go on your adventure-hunting or whatever it may be and coming back home. Then there is a deeper experience, too, the mystery of the womb and the tomb. When people are buried, it’s for rebirth. That’s the origin of the burial idea. You put someone back into the womb of mother earth for rebirth. Very early images of the Goddess show her as a mother receiving the soul back again.

When I read -The Masks of God, or The Way of the Animal Powers, or The Mythic Image-I often come across images of the circle, whether it’s in magical designs or in architecture, both ancient and modern; whether it’s in the dome- shaped temples of India or the Paleolithic rock engravings of Rhodesia or the calendar stones of the Aztecs or the ancient Chinese bronze shields or the visions of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, who talks about the wheel in the sky. I keep coming across this image. And this ring, my wedding ring, is a circle, too. What does that symbolize?

That depends on how you understand marriage. The word “sym-bol” itself means two things put together. One person has one half, the other the other half, and then they come together. Recognition comes from putting the ring together, the completed circle. This is my marriage, this is the merging of my individual life in a larger life that is of two, where the two are one. The ring indicates that we are in one circle together.

When a new pope is installed, he takes the fisher- man’s ring-another circle.That particular ring is symbolic of Jesus calling the apostles, who were fishermen. He said, “I will make you fishers of men.” This is an old motif that is earlier than Christianity. Orpheus is called “The Fisher,” who fishes men, who are living as fish in the water, out up into the light. It’s an old idea of the metamorphosis of the fish into man. The fish nature is the crudest animal nature of our character, and the religious line is intended to pull you up out of that.

A new king or new queen of England is given the coronation ring.

CAMPBELL: Yes, because there’s another aspect of the ring- it is a bondage. As king, you are bound to a principle. You are living not simply your own way. You have been marked. In initiation rites, when people are sacrified and tattooed, they are bonded to another and to the society.

Jung speaks of the circle as a mandala.

“Mandala” is the Sanskrit word for “circle,” but a circle that is coordinated or symbolically designed so that it has the meaning of a cosmic order. When composing mandalas, you are trying to coordinate your personal circle with the uni- versal circle. In a very elaborate Buddhist mandala, for example, you have the deity in the center as the power source, the illu- mination source. The peripheral images would be manifestations or aspects of the deity’s radiance.

In working out a mandala for yourself, you draw a circle and then think of the different impulse systems and value systems in your life. Then you compose them and try to find out where your center is. Making a mandala is a discipline for pulling all those scattered aspects of your life together, for finding a center and ordering yourself to it. You try to coordinate your circle with the universal circle.

The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.

And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearn- ing, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed-whether she will or no. And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace.

The Arapaho girl who followed the porcupine up the stretching tree was enticed to the camp-circle of the people of the sky. There she became the wife of a heavenly youth. It was he who, under the form of the luring porcupine, had seduced her to his supernatural home.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is full of gods pursuing nymphs; the god appears as a bull or a golden shower, and suddenly you’ve got a little bundle of joy. The child then becomes symbolic of the  coordination of the opposites, male and female. Of course, this is the real mean- ing of the motif of the Virgin Birth. It represents the woman receiving inspiration for the new life through a divine visitation.

In myths of this kind, the next stage of the adventure, of course, is bearing the child and, frequently, fostering it, as Jochebed gives up Moses. Remember, however, that the child here does not represent a physical child; it is spiritual life.

So, the first stage along the road is the sacred marriage. The fairy tale always ends in that kind of thing: the couple kiss and live happily ever after. Well, as someone who has been happily married for almost half a century, I can say with authority that happily ever after is just the beginning. Like life, most myths go on from there.

The second kind of fulfillment along the road of trials is what is called atonement with the father, and this trial is definitely a male rite of passage. The son has been separated from the father; he has been living a life inap- propriate to his true heritage. Perhaps he has been living like a girl, as Achilles does, or a farm boy, as Parsifal does. Perhaps he has been taken in as a prince, but for the wrong people, as happens to Moses. As he struggles along his quest, he finds the father, who is really in the abyss beyond the mother-you might say he has to go through the mother’s world to reach the father’s.

In stories of atonement with the father, the woman becomes either the guide or the seductress that blocks the way. Now, in Indian thought, maya, the feminine principle that engenders the phenomenal universe, has both a revealing power and an obscuring power. In her obscuring guise, she becomes the witch, and in her revealing form, she is the guiding woman clothed in light, the Lady of the Lake.

In India the same two aspects are recognized. There they are called marga and desi, respectively. Marga comes from a root that has to do with an animal trail; it means “the path.” By this, Indians mean the path by which the particular aspect of a symbol leads you to personal illumination; it is the path to enlightenment. Desi means “of the province.” All mythological symbols, therefore, work in two directions: in the direction of marga and in the direction of desi. The desi, or local, aspect links the individual to the culture.

A mythologically grounded culture presents you with symbols that immediately evoke your participation; they are all vital, living connections, and so they link you both to the underlying mystery and to the culture itself. Yet when that culture uses symbols that are no longer alive, that are no longer effective, it cuts you off. The marga or the Elementargedanken provide a path back to the heart of the issue. Looking at the symbol in terms of its universal meaning rather than its local, specific reference takes you down the path to self-discovery and illumination. bols that speak to you and use them, you might say, as bases for medita- tion. Let them work on you. A ritual is nothing by the dramatics, visual, active manifestation or representation of a myth. By participating in the rite, you are engaged in myth, and the myth works on you-provided, of course, that you are caught by the image.

The way to find your own myth is to determine those traditional symbols that speak to you and use them,you might say,as based on meditation.Let them work on you.

A ritual is nothing but dramatic, visual,active manifestation or representation of a myth.By participating in the rite,you are engaged in the myth.Myth works on you-provided,of course,that you are caught by the image.

But when you just go through the routine without real commitment, expecting it to work magically and get you into heaven-because you know that when you’re baptized, you get into heaven, after all-you’ve turned away from the proper use of these rites and images.

First, think about your own childhood, as Jung did-the symbols that were put into you then remain. Think not how they relate to an institution, which is probably defunct and likely difficult to respect. Rather, think how the symbols operate on you. Let them play on the imagination, acti- vating it. By bringing your own imagination into play in relation to these symbols, you will be experiencing the marga, the symbols’ power to open a path to the heart of mysteries.

It is my belief, drawn from experience, that there’s nothing better than comparative mythological studies to let you grasp the big, general form of an image and to give you many different ways of approaching that image. Images are eloquent in themselves; they talk to you. When the intellect tries to explicate an image, one can never exhaust its meaning, one can never exhaust its possibility. Images don’t essentially mean anything: they are, just as you are. They talk to some kernel in you that is.

So ask an artist, “What does your picture mean?” Well, if he despises you enough, he’ll tell you.

The point is that if you need him to tell you what it means, then you haven’t even seen it. What’s the meaning of a sunset? What’s the meaning of a flower? What’s the meaning of a cow?

The Buddha is called the tathāgata, “the one thus come ,.” He is as he is. The universe is “t “thus come ,” too. Every piece of it arises out of the same ground. This is called the Doctrine of Mutual Arising.

Mythological images are the images by which the consciousness is put in touch with the unconscious. That’s what they are. When you don’t have your mythological images, or when your consciousness rejects them for some reason or other, you are out of touch with your own deepest part. I think that’s the purpose of a mythology that we can live by. We have to find the one that we are in fact living by and know what it is so that we can direct our craft with competence.

Now, many of us live by myths that guide us,

There is a level of your dream consciousness that springs from your nature, not from your personal biography. Your nature itself is of two orders. First comes the order of animal nature: the instinct system which is the same in all human beings. Next comes the order of your spiritual life: what goes from the neck up.

No other animal has this great thing up there, this mind. When Dr. Freud began interpreting the inspirations and zeals of the top end of the spinal column in terms of the other end, he misunderstood the whole thing. Since the whole sense of mythological imagery is to propel you up into the spiritual realm, interpreting these things in a purely physical, biological way pulls you down again; it punctures and deflates the symbol. We share with the animals the desire to live, the urge toward survival and security. We share with the animals the zeal for sex and the zeal for winning and pres- tige-I’m the winner. Yet we bear within us the potential for an entirely dif- ferent level of experience, a level that can come to us in a moment.

Dante described this enlightened moment in his Vita nuova-the mo ment when he beheld Beatrice, the moment that turned him from a mere human animal into a poet. One might see her as an erotic object, yet what he saw was a manifestation of beauty; he experienced her presence on a different level altogether.

Five values: survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, and self- development. I looked at that list and I wondered why it should seem so strange to me. I finally realized that it struck me as strange because these are exactly the values that mythology transcends.

Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development- in my experience, those are exactly the values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for. They have to do with the primary biological mode as understood by human consciousness. Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth. Christ gives you the clue when he says, “He that loses his life for my sake shall find it.”

Maslow’s five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to. These are the bores. (In a marvelous footnote to an essay on Don Quixote, Ortega y Gasset once wrote, “A bore is one who deprives us of our solitude without providing companionship.

How do we find this thing in ourselves, that which truly moves us? Well, as I’ve said, mythologies are basically the same everywhere. Consequently, mythic images do not refer primarily to historical events. They come from the psyche and talk to the psyche; their primary reference is to the psyche-to the spirit, as we call it-and not to a historical event.

Now, there’s no doubt about it that there are certain sensations which spontaneously activate responses in the human body. You don’t have to be told what sexual signals are; in fact, very often one isn’t told at all, yet the biological imperative takes hold, and everything works just fine. Everything gets started and the parents begin to wonder what’s happening. So we don’t have to receive instructions there-though it doesn’t hurt.

Libresse, certain odors immediately start the salivary glands going. Sleep overtakes you when you find a place to lie down. There are given sig- nals to which the human body responds. These we share with the animals: torpor, activity, sexual zeal, mother love for the just-born creature, aggres- sion toward the one who threatens you, and so on.

There’s another level of consciousness in the human psyche, which I would associate with those levels of the wonderful thing that is human consciousness from the heart up to the crown of the head. When the awe and the zeal and the human mind yearning to know are awakened, a new sense of what it is to be human is born. Just as we have a physical body that we share with each other so that we can respond similarly to the same smells, so also we have a spiritual consciousness that is responding comparable to signals, and the whole concept of the archetypes of the human psyche is based on the notion that in the human brain, in the human sympathetic nervous system, there are structures that create a readiness to respond to certain signals. These are shared by all of humanity, with variations individually, but essentially pretty close along the line. And when these are triggered, there is the automatic response, just as there would be to an odor, whether that odor of bananas comes from an African cooking pot or from the fruit basket in my beautiful hotel room. Over the millennia, we have developed some experience of how people respond to spiritual symbols and how contemplating a particular symbol slants the mind places the mind on a certain plane of consciousness, which activates deeper spiritual powers in the individual. Everyone has his own favorites; everyone is ready for an experience unlike that of anybody else. The symbol which you are ready for

evokes a response in you. In our tradition, however, these images-these symbols- have been applied to historical events. In our religious traditions, we interpret the motifs of the Virgin Birth, death, Resurrection, and ascension as particular, temporal episodes. If you begin to doubt the possibility of these occurrences, your faith may be troubled. You will lose the symbol because you reject it. It was

given to you as a kind of newspaper report of something that’s supposed to have happened somewhere; now, you’ve studied biology, and you don’t even want to consider whether or how a virgin birth can have been accomplished. Is that what it referred to; is that what the mystery is? No, the mystery does not refer to something that might or might not have happened at a certain date in a certain place. It is a motif that is found in myths all over the world, and so must speak to the human psyche in another way entirely.

When these symbols disappear, we have lost the vehicle for communication between our waking consciousness and our deepest spiritual life. We have to reactivate the symbol, to bring it back to life, and to find what it means, to relate it to ourselves in some way or another.

Now, what did Jung do when he decided to seek out his myth? His process of discovery is interesting in that it was so childish. Here he was, thirty-seven years old or so, and he asked himself, What was it I most enjoyed doing as a little boy when I was alone and allowed to play? As it turned out, what he liked to do was put rocks together and make little cities out of stone.

So he said, Why, I’m a big man now, so I’ll play with big stones. He bought himself a piece of property in a beautiful place on the lake opposite the city of Zürich. He began planning and building a house in this lovely place, Ascona, and as he worked with his hands, he activated his imagination.

Now, that’s the big thing, to activate your imagination somehow. You can’t do this by taking suggestions from somebody else. You must find that which your own unconscious wants to meditate on. With his imagination activated, Jung found all kinds of new fantasies coming, dreams of all kinds. He began making records of what he had dreamed and then amplifying it by all kinds of associations.

By doing this, he began the work of discovering his myth. He found that his dreams were becoming very important to him and very rich; he began writing about his dreams in a little journal. He put down each silly little impulse, each theme that came up in his dreams. He recorded the dreams so as to bring them up into his consciousness, and as he kept the journal, the underlying images began coming through. Then he would take pictures of some of these dream things always in a very solemn way. Now, this book is the kind of thing one would not wish to have published; it is just too private. It was his ceremonial, ritualistic exploration of the place from which the mystery of his life came.

A mythologically grounded culture presents you with symbols that im- mediately evoke your participation; they are all vital, living connections, and so they link you both to the underlying mystery and to the culture it- self. Yet when that culture uses symbols that are no longer alive, that are no longer effective, it cuts you off. The marga or the Elementargedanken provide a path back to the heart of the issue. Looking at the symbol in terms of its universal meaning rather than its local, specific reference takes you down the path to self-discovery and illumination.

The way to find your own myth is to determine those traditional sym- bols that speak to you and use them, you might say, as bases for medita- tion. Let them work on you.

A ritual is nothing but the dramatic, visual, active manifestation or rep- resentation of a myth. By participating in the rite, you are engaged in the myth, and the myth works on you-provided, of course, that you are caught by the image.

But when you just go through the routine without real commitment, expecting it to work magically and get you into heaven-because you know that when you’re baptized, you get into heaven, after all-you’ve turned away from the proper use of these rites and images.

First, think about your own childhood, as Jung did-the symbols that were put into you then remain. Think not how they relate to an institu- tion, which is probably defunct and likely difficult to respect. Rather, think how the symbols operate on you. Let them play on the imagination, acti- vating it. By bringing your own imagination into play in relation to these symbols, you will be experiencing the marga, the symbols’ power to open a path to the heart of mysteries.

It is my belief, drawn from experience, that there’s nothing better than comparative mythological studies to let you grasp the big, general form of an image and to give you many different ways of approaching that image. Images are eloquent in themselves; they talk to you. When the intellect tries to explicate an image, one can never exhaust its meaning, one can never ex- haust its possibility. Images don’t essentially mean anything: they are, just as you are. They talk to some kernel in you that is.

So ask an artist, “What does your picture mean?” Well, if he despises you enough, he’ll tell you.

The point is that if you need him to tell you what it means, then you haven’t even seen it. What’s the meaning of a sunset? What’s the meaning of a flower? What’s the meaning of a cow?

The Buddha is called the tathāgata, “the one thus come.” He is as he is. The universe is “thus come,” too. Every piece of it arises out of the same ground. This is called the Doctrine of Mutual Arising.