Let me very briefly touch once again on the functions that traditional mythology presents. I’d like to look at how much of this traditional myth- ology (and its functions) remains in our lives today.

The first function is awakening in the individual a sense of awe and mystery and gratitude for the ultimate mystery of being. In the old tradi- tions-the very old ones the accent was on saying yea to the world as it is. That’s not easy; you look at the world, and you see creatures eating each other, killing each other, and you realize that life is something that eats

itself. You may have the feeling that some have had, that this cannibalism is just too horrible to bear: “I will not cooperate, I will not play.” This change in thinking I call the Great Reversal. Historically, it comes along about the sixth century B.C. with the Buddha’s statement “All life is sorrowful.” Well,

there is escape from sorrow.

I would not play.

“Okay. Pull out. Take your bat and ball and go home.”

So here we have two main attitudes toward the central horrific mystery, this thing beyond good and evil: affirmation and negation.

Zoroastrianism introduced a third way of reacting to life’s terrible mystery pin the idea of two deities, one good and one evil. One god represented truth and light, and the other represented darkness and lies. The good deity created a good world, and the evil deity corrupted that world. So the world that we’re in is a corrupt world. There is a contest going on between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, and you are invited to join the forces of the light against the forces of darkness and struggle to reconstitute the good world. Neither affirming nor negating life as is, this one might call it compromise-presents a sort of progressive view.

As far as I’ve been able to discover, these are the three views of life as life. You can live in total affirmation. As one of the Buddhist aphorisms states marvelously: “This world-just as it is with all its horror, all its dark- ness, all its brutality-is the golden lotus world of perfection.” If you don’t see it as such, that’s not the world’s fault. You can’t improve what is perfect. You can only see it and so come to realize your own perfection. That is to say, you can come to that depth in yourself which is deeper than the pains and sorrows. You have deities named bhairavānanda: “the bliss and ecstasy of terror.”50 That’s what life is a terrible, terrible ordeal.

The life-negating way seeks purity: “I am so spiritual, I will go through the sun door and not participate in this darkness of the lunar cycle at all, and you won’t see me coming back.”

The progressive or ameliorative way says, “Let’s get in there and im- prove it.” This is like marrying someone in order to improve that person. I don’t call this affirmation. It usually puts you in the position of being a little bit superior: “If God had only asked me, I could have given Him some pointers.”

Now, the second function serves to present a universe within which the mystery as understood will be present, so that everywhere you look it is, as it were, a holy picture, opening up in back to the great mystery. The work of the artist is to present objects to you in such a way that
they will shine. Through the rhythm of the artist’s formation, the object that you have looked at with indifference will be radiant, and you will be fixed in esthetic arrest.

In our cosmology today, we envision a prodigious universe that isn’t matched at all by the little kindergarten thing presented by our religious tradition. Think of the moon walk. To me, man’s first walk on the moon is the most important mythological event of the twentieth century. Before everybody’s eyes, that one event transformed the fundamental basis for our view of the universe and ourselves within that universe. In all earlier peri- ods, the notion was that these lights the moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and all the rest-represented the radiance of a higher mode of being, much higher than this poor miserable earth. When Galileo recognized that the laws of ballistics on earth are the laws that operate on the planets, he began something that reached fulfillment in these strolls on the lunar surface.

I remember hearing a great, cosmologically profound statement from the trip before the first moon walk, Apollo 10. When they had circled the moon and were coming back-just after they had read the first verses of Genesis-the astronauts were asked who was navigating. They answered, “Newton.”

In his introduction to Metaphysics, Kant asked the question, “How is it that I can make mathematical calculations in this space here that I know, with apodictic certainty, will be valid in that space over there?

How is it that I can be so sure of the continuity of space that I know that the laws which my head can evolve will be valid elsewhere? When it came to going down onto the moon, nobody knew how deep the dust was going to be. I’ll never forget that first foot coming down; it was a terrific moment-man on the moon. Nobody knew what it was going to be like, yet they did know just how many ounces of fuel to emit from those jets to bring that craft back within a mile of the boat that was waiting for it in the Pacific Ocean.

In other words, the laws of space and mass and energy were precisely known to man; we carry those laws within our own heads. The laws of time and space and causality are in us, and anything we can see or know anywhere will involve these laws. What is the universe? Space. Out of space came a coagulation that became a nebula, and out of the nebula, millions of galaxies, and within one constellation of galaxies, a sun, with our little planet circling it. Then out of the earth came us, the eyes and the consciousness and the ears and the breathing of the earth itself. We’re earth’s children, and, since the earth itself came out of space, is it any wonder that the laws of space live in us? There’s this wonderful accord between the exterior and interior worlds, and it’s not as though God had breathed anything into us; the gods we know are projections of our own fantasies, our own consciousness, our own deep being. They are our match, in a way. Well, when I state it that way, you can see that ours is simply another mythology, expressed in another cosmology. Every time you look at the moon now, think about it that way, and you’ll have a very different experience.

The third, sociological function of mythology gives you laws for living
within your own society. Of course, no society today is in a position to say that it knows what the laws for the next ten years are going to be. Everything that we thought was good has turned out to be inconvenient. We have this whole ecological crisis, and all this kind of business. Every day drives home the fact that the laws of life have to change along with the modes of life. So we don’t have security. We have to wing it. The final, pedagogical function of mythology gives the individual a way to connect the inner psychological world to the external world of phe- nomena. As I’ve tried to suggest, the pedagogy of our inherited traditions does not work for all of us, so you have to work out your own pedagogy. Now, let me give a notion of the ways, as Jung describes them, in which the mythic images come to life in you. I had a very amusing experience once lecturing in the Pacific North- west. I was talking about Dante’s view of the ages of man-he, too, came up with an astrological schema for the great cycle of life.

Unlike the Yeatses with their lunar metaphor, Dante likens life to the daily transit of the sun. He names four ages, each of which corresponds to a time of day, and each of which has its proper set of virtues. The first is infancy, which goes to the age of twenty-five, would you believe. The qualities for infancy obedience, are a sense of shame, comeliness of appearance,
and sweetness of conduct. This is the morning.

Then you come, at the age of twenty-five, to what he calls maturity, and this stage will last to year forty-five. You have reached the high mo- ment of life, and for this stage he names the values of the medieval knight: temperance, courage, love, courtesy, and loyalty. When you have lived your life in terms of what the society asks of you, you will come to a moment at midcareer, at around thirty-five, when you will actually have the experience of what, formerly, you had simply been taught; then you are eligible to teach. This is the afternoon.

Dante calls the age from forty-five to seventy the age of wisdom. In India, the wise get sent out to the forest; not here in the West. Here we ex- pect the aged to stay in society, look around with a critical eye, and share the benefit of their experience. At this stage, the qualities are wisdom, jus- tice, generosity, and humor or cheerfulness. After all, you’ve got nothing to lose; you’ve reached the evening.

From seventy on he calls decrepitude, and the qualities are looking back over your life with gratitude and forward to death as a return home. Now it is night.

This little schedule, this life pattern-this is mythos.

In any case, when I’d finished my lecture up in Seattle, one young lady came up to me, and she said, very seriously, “Oh, Mr. Campbell, you just don’t know about the modern generation. We go directly from infancy to wisdom.”

I said, “That is great. All you’ve missed is life.”

So, I say the way to find your myth is to find your zeal, to find your support, and to know what stage of life you’re in. The problems of youth are not the problems of age. Don’t try to live your life too soon. By lis- tening too much to gurus, you try to jump over the whole darn thing and back off and become wise before you’ve experienced that in relation to which there is some point to being wise. This thing, wisdom, has to come gradually.

There are something like 18 billion cells in the brain alone. There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your instructions and your guidance from oth- ers, but you must find your own path, just like one of Arthur’s knights seeking the Grail in the forest.

It is this quality of the Occidental spirit that strikes other cultures as so silly and romantic. What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself.

There’s nothing you can do that’s You become a more important than being fulfilled. signal, transparent to sign, you become a this way, you will find, live, and become myth. transcendence; in a realization of your own personal

She said, what does the owls mean?

I can’t say what the owls mean? It would matter what the owls have done to you in your dreams.

But the owls are associated with wisdom principally because they are associated with Athena.

She said, In her dream :she was standing in front of the cave and she was unwilling to go into the cave but felt it was important there for her.

And some owls came out with round shining eyes and immediately the garments that she was wearing caught the fire and the ashes.

She saw little gold pieces around the ashes and her problem now is to fetch the gold out of ashes.

Dream interpretation:

Well, that’s very obvious, now this is a mythological dream.

The dark cave is the abyss of the unconscious, the psyche, the ground out of which We have all come,any manager coming out of.

There is a message out from the unconscious system.

Owls are associated with this because they are night flying.so it would be associated.

Here, something comes out of your unconscious,a realisation that has come to you and round shining eyes of the owls are the energy, the life,the fire and it ignites your garments that is to say your notion of yourself, your social posture and everything else about yourself.

Life Situation here is:

You have undergone a transformation of consciousness here and gold they are the same size as the eyes of the owls.

It’s your business now to fetch out,to pull out the massage that owls have brought to you from the unconscious.

“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego- consciousness may extend. For all ego-consciousness is isolated: because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only what can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him,

indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. “It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, or immoral. So flowerlike is it in its candor and veracity that it makes us blush for the deceitfulness of our lives.”-Jung

The secret of dreams is that subject and object are the same. The object is self-luminous, fluent in form, multivalent in its meanings. It’s your dream, the man- ifestation of your will, and yet you are surprised by it. This is the relationship of ego-consciousness to the unconscious. Ego-consciousness has to learn about the unconscious, and dreams are the vocabulary of the unconscious speaking to the conscious mind. Yet, in dreams and in visions, subject and object are the same.

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energy of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation.

Religion, philosophy,art , the social form of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dream that blister sleep boils up from the basic , magic ring of myth.

For the symbol of mythology are not manufactured, they can’t be invented,or permanently suppressed.They are spontaneous production of the psyche.

Dream:

I was reshingling our roof. Suddenly I heard my father’s voice on the ground below, calling to me. I turned suddenly to hear him better, and, as I did so, the hammer slipped out of my hands, and slid down the sloping roof, and disappeared over the edge. I heard a heavy thud, as of a body falling.

Terribly frightened, I climbed down the ladder to the ground. There was my father lying dead on the ground, with blood all over his head. I was brokenhearted, and began calling my mother, in the midst of my sobs. She came out of the house, and put her arms around me. “Never mind, son, it was all an accident,” she said. “I know you will take care of me, even if he is gone.” As she was kissing me, I woke up.

I am the eldest child in our family and am twenty-three years old. I have been separated from my wife for a year; somehow, we could not get along together. I love both my parents dearly, and have never had any trouble with my father, except that he insisted that I go back and live with my wife, and I couldn’t be happy with her. And I never will.

Dream interpretation:

The unsuccessful husband here reveals, with a really wonderful innocence, that instead of bringing his spiritual energies forward to the love and problems of his marriage, he has been resting, in the secret recesses of his imagination, with the now ridiculously anachronistic dramatic situation of his first and only emotional involvement, that of the tragicomic triangle of the nursery-the son against the father for the love of the mother.

We see mythology when its social functioning was serving four functions:

The first function is what I would call the mystical function.

It opens up a realisation of the mystical dimensions that behind the surface phenomenology of the world.

There is a transcendent mystery source and that’s the source also within yourself.

The second function has to do with the image of the world what I would call a cosmological function.

This changes radically from time to time.

Very early hunting, planting and gathering society had a relatively small horizon and science was that of what was visible.

In terms of the visible world.The sun rose it went down.The moon rose ,it went down.

With Kopernikus,this all changed.The sun is not rising,it’s Earth that is twisting .The cosmology and science has totally changed.

The third function of mythology is to validate and maintain a curtain, Social order , here and now this specific society.

The fourth function is to carry the individual through various stages and crises of life.that is to help a person grasp the unfolding of life with integrity.

I greatly admire the psychologist Abraham Maslow. As I was reading one of his books, however, I found a sort of value schedule, values that his psychological experiments had shown that people live for. He gave a list of 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 loseth 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.”)

The awakening of awe is the key here, what Leo Frobenius, the won- derful student of African cultures, called Ergriffenheit, being seized by something so that you are pulled out.

Now, it’s not always easy or possible to know by what it is that you are seized. You find yourself doing silly things, and you have been seized but you don’t know what the dynamics are. You have been struck by that awakening of awe, of fascination, of the experience of mystery-the awareness of your bliss. With that, you have the awakening of your mind in its own service. The brain can enable you to found a business in order to maintain your family and get you prestige in the community; given the right mind, it can do these things very well. But the brain can also impel you to give all that up because you become fascinated with some kind of mystery.