Tag Archives: Ben Leib

I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell’s writing on myth and on ritual. He has a specific view of the role of religion, myth, and ritual in the lives and beliefs of contemporary civilization, and points to science as the source of a contemporary crisis, in that science has dispelled literalist interpretations of biblical legend (and other religious narrative):

“And in this there is serious danger. For not only has it always been the way of multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally, but such literally read symbolic forms have always been – and still are, in fact – the supports of their civilizations, the supports of their moral orders, their cohesion, vitality, and creative powers. With the loss of them there follows uncertainty, and with uncertainty, disequilibrium, since life, as both Nietzsche and Ibsen knew, requires life-supporting illusions; and where these have been dispelled, there is nothing secure to hold on to, no moral law, nothing firm.”

I can see that crisis as it plays out in the US (and perhaps all Judeo-Christian traditions). Literalism tends to coincide with fundamentalism, because to continue to understand the Bible, and biblical texts, in a literalist sense, one must diverge from a fact-based, “scientific” understanding of humanity and of history all the more rigorously. This not only polarizes humanity, but it further activates the isolationist notions of supremacy that are born of literalist understandings of religious texts: “Now the peoples of all the great civilizations everywhere have been prone to interpret their own symbolic figures literally, and so to regard themselves as favored in a special way, in direct contact with the absolute.”

Furthermore, Campbell sees a crisis in those who lack faith. He possesses a more traditional view of society and culture, and saw the counterculture springing up around him during the sixties as an example of the loss of foundational belief systems. He was also critical of the new age (my term) tendency to adopt piecemeal bits of eastern religions and philosophies divorced from their cultural context:

“With our old mythologically founded taboos unsettled by our own modern sciences, there is everywhere in the civilized world a rapidly rising incidence of vice and crime, mental disorders, suicides and dope addictions, shattered homes, impudent children, violence, murder, and despair.”

Though I’m not certain if these ailments of mankind didn’t exist with equally alarming regularity before the contemporary moment, and though I don’t qualify each of them as a societal loss, I do generally agree with Campbell that today’s secular world is marked by a sense of despair and helplessness. I also agree that this helplessness is in part rooted in the loss of faith-based belief systems that have traditionally provided a recipe and justification for decency and kindness (at least within one’s own community). They have also provided a meaning or a justification for such behaviors, in that human decency and just participation within a given social order may be rewarded in a religious sense. This reward or promise, in its basest form, is a pleasurable existence in some heavenly afterlife. In more heady interpretations of religion, redemption comes in the form of transcendence.

So that is the current predicament: between “the cries of preachers for repentance, conversion, and return to the old religion,” and their challenges to “the modern educator with respect to his own faith and ultimate loyalty,” and, on the other hand, the perceived nihilism of the secular world, themselves suffering from the loss of guiding principles.

And this is where, at least in Campbell’s earlier lectures, he loses focus on the potentiality for a new guiding myth. He limply suggests that it may be found in psychology, with its exploration of the unknown that resides within each of us. If psychology were to investigate the history of myth and ritual, identify the causes and sources of human faith in these systems, and relate that to unconscious needs or desires, then perhaps we could reconstitute a mythos of the individual, a mythos that accommodates personal identity (essential, as it turns out, for better or for worse, in Western traditions).

The primary mistake that I see in this reasoning, and this is not to discount Campbell, because his lectures are masterpieces, and I can see the foundation for much of the contemporary understanding of culture and religion embedded in his philosophies. But I don’t believe that he was able enough to identify the mythological systems already functioning in western society, beliefs and rituals that, while they may not have liturgical foundation, are taken as guiding principles, and are also products of our contemporary moment. I also think that this is a result of a common assumption that we make about science, which is that it exists outside of ideology or ideological determinations – that it is objective.

On the other hand, Campbell sees myths as inherently subjective, reflective of the contexts in which they are believed and practiced. He theorized that the foundational function of myth was to explain the unknown, and, in particular, to make sense of death. Furthermore, there was necessity for individuals to participate within a society, which subsequently required shared rules and beliefs. And finally, at a broader level, the natural context, the environment itself, provided the symbolic material for myth. An example that he uses often is ritual sacrifice within primitive farming communities. A specifically agricultural understanding off the cyclically of birth, life, death, and rebirth led these societies to enact ritual sacrifice in something like emulation of these natural processes.

So the formation of myth and ritual are narrative traditions used to explain natural phenomena and to understand humankind’s role within the natural universe. Yet, the arrival of science appears, at first glance, to be in conflict with these traditions. Campbell believes that: “as a result of the continuing open-hearted and open-minded quest of a few brave men for the bounds of boundless truth, there has been a self-consistent continuity of productive growth.” So, early on at least, Campbell believes that scientific investigation has led to a new and essential understanding of the world, but one that diverged from mythological narrative historically believed to be true.

The old texts comfort us with horizons. They tell us that a loving, kind, and just father is out there, looking down upon us, ready to receive us, and ever with our own dear lives on his mind. According to our sciences, on the other hand nobody knows what is out there, or if there is any “out there” at all. All that can be said is that there appears to be a prodigious display of phenomena, which our senses and their instruments translate to our minds according to the nature of our minds.

It seems that myths and religious narratives, especially in a literalist tradition, are believed to be true by the faithful – to the exclusion of all contradictory thought. And that, with the advent of a revolutionized understanding of the world, with advanced instruments of measurement and observation, the ground or base of understanding is more “sophisticated” or at least different from, say, primitive agricultural societies. Thus, we have a newer context in which our own mythologies are generated.

This being the case, and according to Campbell’s logic, if one believes that there might be a contemporary belief system or matrix of narratives that constitute our current mythology, it would have to be born of this new context which has proved older understandings of the world obsolete. All faith-based belief systems, and particularly those which practice literalist interpretations of liturgy, believe in the truth of that which they are faithful to. And in certain ways, absolute belief makes it impossible for the believer to interrogate their own system. We become blind to the faults of those things we accept as fact. Campbell writes: “For the really great and essential fact about the scientific revelation – the most wonderful and most challenging fact – is that science does not and cannot pretend to be “true” in any absolute sense.” Contemporary secularism has created a sort of dichotomy between science and religion, but, despite Campbell’s more nuanced understanding of science, we have come to take “science” as synonymous with fact.

Before proposing that psychology, and psychological understandings of myth, might be a means to salvaging our dying mythos, Campbell writes:

“In moral disequilibrium, we must now ask whether it is not possible to arrive scientifically at such an understanding of the life-supporting nature of myths that, in criticizing their archaic features, we do not misrepresent and disqualify their necessity – throwing out, so to say, the baby (whole generations of babies) with the bath water.”

And what I would argue is that we are still living in a time of ritual and mythology. Those living within the myth are unable to see it as such. It is naturalized in society as “the way” rather than an object of study, and for that reason, we cannot exactly turn to the old myths for guidance. They are already perceived as such, despite that many elements of those myths and rituals are still evident in current practices (dates of the resurrection coinciding with harvests and such).

That said, perhaps we are still living under the sway of a new narrative, something that provides meaning and guidance, is a reflection of our contemporary society and our physical surroundings, and is taken to explain the world in such a way that accounts for available and observable phenomenon.

Campbell describes something like this reflection of contemporary society as explained through mythology, though he focuses in this case on the pervasive effect of Judeo-Christian religion in the Occident. Campbell, in critiquing the new age fad of sampling, piecemeal, bits of eastern religion in order to establish some form of meaning, says that a western emphasis on the individual, a consequence of religious traditions, precludes us from adopting eastern philosophies. He argues that an emphasis on individuality has prompted humans to do great things, but he also sees the limitations of the ideal, and through recourse to eastern religions illustrates that our certainty in the value of individuality is simply a matter of cultural tradition.