Your Kindle Notes For:

The Power of Myth

Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers

Last accessed on Monday April 11, 2022

-- Highlight(s) | -- Note(s)

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Yellow highlight | Location: 107 Note | Location: 107

by overcoming the dark passions, the hero symbolizes our ability to control the irrational savage within us.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Location: 172 Note | Location: 172

the Koran: “Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed away before you?”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 1 Note | Page: 1

One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 5 Note | Page: 5

Read other people’s myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts—but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 6 Note | Page: 6

When people get married because they think it’s a long-time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 6 Note | Page: 6

By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that’s what marriage is.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 7 Note | Page: 7

Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 7 Note | Page: 7

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 8 Note | Page: 8

Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that’s what is threatening the world at this minute.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 16 Note | Page: 16

The old-time religion belongs to another age, another people, another set of human values, another universe. By going back you throw yourself out of sync with history. Our kids lose their faith in the religions that were taught to them, and they go inside.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 19 Note | Page: 19

All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional. A lot of people spend most of life in meditating on where their money is coming from and where it’s going to go.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 20 Note | Page: 20

Movies seem to create these large figures, while television merely creates celebrities. They don’t become models as much as they do objects of gossip. CAMPBELL: Perhaps that’s because we see TV personalities in the home instead of in a special temple like the movie theater.

Note:Will Smith said the same

Yellow highlight | Page: 25 Note | Page: 25

If a person is really involved in a religion and really building his life on it, he better stay with the software that he has got. But a chap like myself, who likes to play with the software—well, I can run around, but I probably will never have an experience comparable to that of a saint.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 41 Note | Page: 41

Chief Seattle was one of the last spokesmen of the Paleolithic moral order.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 43 Note | Page: 43

“This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. “One thing we know: our god is also your god. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 45 Note | Page: 45

One thing that comes out in myths, for example, is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 61 Note | Page: 61

What do you think we are looking for when we subscribe to one of these myths? CAMPBELL: I think what we are looking for is a way of experiencing the world that will open to us the transcendent that informs it, and at the same time forms ourselves within it. That is what people want. That is what the soul asks for.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 66 Note | Page: 66

religion is really a kind of second womb. It’s designed to bring this extremely complicated thing, which is a human being, to maturity, which means to be self-motivating, self-acting. But the idea of sin puts you in a servile condition throughout your life.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 70 Note | Page: 70

And what does the idea of reincarnation suggest? CAMPBELL: It suggests that you are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 80 Note | Page: 80

“Do you have optimism about the world?” And I say, “Yes, it’s great just the way it is. And you are not going to fix it up. Nobody has ever made it any better. It is never going to be any better. This is it, so take it or leave it. You are not going to correct or improve it.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 88 Note | Page: 88

The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 93 Note | Page: 93

You know what the Freudians say, that the first enemy is the father, if you are a man. If you are a boy, every enemy is potentially, psychologically associated with the father image.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 102 Note | Page: 102

Now he has a man’s body. There’s no chance of relapsing back to boyhood after a show like that. MOYERS: You don’t go back to Mother. CAMPBELL: No, but in our life we don’t have anything like that. You can have a man forty-five years old still trying to be obedient to his father. So he goes to a psychoanalyst, who does the job for him.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 107 Note | Page: 107

The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 110 Note | Page: 110

Nietzsche who said, “Be careful lest in casting out the devils you cast out the best thing that’s in you.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 124 Note | Page: 124

When you’re out in the desert with one sky and one world, then you might have one deity, but in a jungle, where there’s no horizon and you never see anything more than ten or twelve yards away from you, you don’t have that idea anymore.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 127 Note | Page: 127

So in the forest and planting cultures, there is a sense of death as not death somehow, that death is required for new life. And the individual isn’t quite an individual, he is a branch of a plant.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 134 Note | Page: 134

Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object. When you see the beautiful organization of a fortunately composed work of art, you just say, “Aha!” Somehow it speaks to the order in your own life and leads to the realization of the very things that religions are concerned to render.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 135 Note | Page: 135

Those people were to be the young brave’s sacrificial priests. This was to be a sacrifice of the altar and, by analogy, that boy was the like of Jesus.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 136 Note | Page: 136

When you go to your death that way, as a god, in the knowledge of the myth, you are going to your eternal life. So what is there in that to be sad about? Let us make it magnificent—as it is. Let us celebrate it.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 137 Note | Page: 137

The god of death is at the same time the lord of sex. MOYERS: What do you mean? CAMPBELL: It’s amazing: one after another, you discover these gods who are at once of death and of generation. The death god, Ghede, of the Haitian Voodoo tradition, is also the sex god. The Egyptian god Osiris was the judge and lord of the dead, and the lord of the regeneration of life. It is a basic theme—that which dies is born. You have to have death in order to have life.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 143 Note | Page: 143

Dante says that, in the middle year of his life, he was lost in a dangerous wood. And he was threatened there by three animals, symbolizing pride, desire, and fear. Then Virgil, the personification of poetic insight, appeared and conducted him through the labyrinth of hell, which is the place of those fixed to their desires and fears, who can’t pass through to eternity. Dante was carried through to the beatific vision of God.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 145 Note | Page: 145

“The function of the orthodox community is to give the mystic his desire, which is a union with God, through mortification and death.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 146 Note | Page: 146

Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt? MOYERS: Not in a long time. CAMPBELL: Remember the last line? “I have never done the thing that I wanted to in all my life.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 147 Note | Page: 147

That’s the man who never followed his bliss. You may have a success in life, but then just think of it—what kind of life was it? What good was it—you’ve never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 149 Note | Page: 149

Are you going to think of fortune, or are you going to think of your bliss?

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 151 Note | Page: 151

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 151 Note | Page: 151

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 152 Note | Page: 152

there are two types of deed. One is the physical deed, in which the hero performs a courageous act in battle or saves a life. The other kind is the spiritual deed, in which the hero learns to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life and then comes back with a message.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 159 Note | Page: 159

Quixote saved the adventure for himself by inventing a magician who had just transformed the giants he had gone forth to encounter into windmills. You can do that, too, if you have a poetic imagination. Earlier, though, it was not a mechanistic world in which the hero moved but a world alive and responsive to his spiritual readiness. Now it has become to such an extent a sheerly mechanistic world, as interpreted through our physical sciences, Marxist sociology, and behavioristic psychology, that we’re nothing but a predictable pattern of wires responding to stimuli. This nineteenth-century interpretation has squeezed the freedom of the human will out of modern life.

Note:Mimetics

Yellow highlight | Page: 161 Note | Page: 161

S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that you are describing, a sociological stagnation of inauthentic lives and living that has settled upon us, and that evokes nothing of our spiritual life, our potentialities, or even our physical courage—until, of course, it gets us into one of its inhuman wars.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 161 Note | Page: 161

A Hindu text says, “A dangerous path is this, like the edge of a razor.” This is a motif that occurs in medieval literature, also. When Lancelot goes to rescue Guinevere from captivity, he has to cross a stream on a sword’s edge with his bare hands and feet, a torrent flowing underneath.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 162 Note | Page: 162

When you follow the path of your desire and enthusiasm and emotion, keep your mind in control, and don’t let it pull you compulsively into disaster.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 166 Note | Page: 166

A legendary hero is usually the founder of something—the founder of a new age, the founder of a new religion, the founder of a new city, the founder of a new way of life. In order to found something new, one has to leave the old and go in quest of the seed idea, a germinal idea that will have the potentiality of bringing forth that new thing.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 172 Note | Page: 172

The messages of the great teachers—Moses, the Buddha, Christ, Mohammed—differ greatly. But their visionary journeys are much the same. At the time of his election, Mohammed was an illiterate camel-caravan master. But every day he would leave his home in Mecca and go out to a mountain cave to meditate. One day a voice called to him, “Write!” and he listened, and we have the Koran. It’s an old, old story.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 174 Note | Page: 174

The Buddha walked on water, as did Jesus. The Buddha ascended to heaven and returned.

Note:Mohammad too

Yellow highlight | Page: 174 Note | Page: 174

remember a lecture in which you drew a circle, and you said, “That’s your soul.”

Note:Hana!!

Yellow highlight | Page: 174 Note | Page: 174

Plato has said somewhere that the soul is a circle. I

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 176 Note | Page: 176

It’s quite possible to be so influenced by the ideals and commands of your neighborhood that you don’t know what you really want and could be. I think that anyone brought up in an extremely strict, authoritative social situation is unlikely ever to come to the knowledge of himself. MOYERS: Because you’re told what to do.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 176 Note | Page: 176

A good teacher is there to watch the young person and recognize what the possibilities are—then to give advice, not commands. The command would be, “This is the way I do it, so you must do it this way, too.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 177 Note | Page: 177

the success of Star Wars. It wasn’t just the production value that made that such an exciting film to watch, it was that it came along at a time when people needed to see in recognizable images the clash of good and evil. They needed to be reminded of idealism, to see a romance based upon selflessness rather than selfishness.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 178 Note | Page: 178

This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 178 Note | Page: 178

Ben Kenobi says to Skywalker in the climactic moment of the last fight, “Turn off your computer, turn off your machine and do it yourself, follow your feelings, trust your feelings.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 178 Note | Page: 178

It asks, Are you going to be a person of heart and humanity—because that’s where the life is, from the heart—or are you going to do whatever seems to be required of you by what might be called “intentional power”? When Ben Kenobi says, “May the Force be with you,” he’s speaking of the power and energy of life, not of programmed political intentions.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 181 Note | Page: 181

consciousness thinks it’s running the shop. But it’s a secondary organ of a total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body. When it does put itself in control, you get a man like Darth Vader in Star Wars, the man who goes over to the consciously intentional side.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 182 Note | Page: 182

there is no “up there.” We know that. That old man up there has been blown away. You’ve got to find the Force inside you. This is why Oriental gurus are so convincing to young people today. They say, “It is in you. Go and find it.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 184 Note | Page: 184

the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 184 Note | Page: 184

Western dragons represent greed. However, the Chinese dragon is different. It represents the vitality of the swamps and comes up beating its belly and bellowing, “Haw ha ha haww.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 185 Note | Page: 185

Sometimes we look for great wealth to save us, a great power to save us, or great ideas to save us, when all we need is that piece of string.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 192 Note | Page: 192

students in art studios. There comes a moment when they have learned what the artist can teach them. They have assimilated the craft, and they are ready for their own flight. Some of the artists allow their students to do that. They expect the student to fly off. Others want to establish a school, and the student finds he has got to be nasty to the teacher, or to say bad things about him, in order to get his own flight. But that is the teacher’s own fault. He ought to have known it was time for the student to fly. The students I know, the ones who are really valid as students, know when it is time to push off.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 193 Note | Page: 193

You’ve got only one life to live, and you don’t have to live it for six people.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 194 Note | Page: 194

With the refusal of suitors, of the passing over a boundary, the adventure begins. You get into a field that’s unprotected, novel. You can’t have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 196 Note | Page: 196

“I’ll help you,” it says and, to her surprise, he’s pulling her out of the water. She hadn’t known that she was in water. That is to say, that with her marriage she had moved out of the rational, conscious sphere into the field of compulsions of the unconscious. That’s always what’s represented in such adventures under water. The character has slipped out of the realm of controlled action into that of transpersonal compulsions and events. Now, maybe these can be handled, maybe they can’t.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 197 Note | Page: 197

The adventure is its own reward—but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control. We are following our own way, not our daddy’s or our mother’s way. So we are beyond protection in a field of higher powers than we know.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 197 Note | Page: 197

If we have been impudent and altogether ineligible for the role into which we have cast ourselves, it is going to be a demon marriage and a real mess.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 199 Note | Page: 199

Here is true religion, alive—today. MOYERS: Love thine enemies. CAMPBELL: Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 202 Note | Page: 202

There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, the “love of your fate,” which is in fact your life.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 202 Note | Page: 202

the Indian idea of karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 204 Note | Page: 204

the hungry ghosts, the souls of those in whose love for others there was attachment, clinging, and expectation. The hungry ghosts have enormous, ravenous bellies and pinpoint mouths. However, in the midst of each of these realms there is a Buddha, signifying the possibility of release and illumination.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 205 Note | Page: 205

is art the only way one can achieve this illumination? CAMPBELL: Art and religion are the two recommended ways. I don’t think you get it through sheer academic philosophy, which gets all tangled up in concepts. But just living with one’s heart open to others in compassion is a way wide open to all.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 210 Note | Page: 210

I once saw a marvelous scientific movie about protoplasm. It was a revelation to me. It is in movement all the time, flowing. Sometimes it seems to be flowing this way and that, and then it shapes things. It has a potentiality for bringing things into shape. I saw this movie in northern California, and as I drove down the coast to Big Sur, all the way, all I could see was protoplasm in the form of grass being eaten by protoplasm in the form of cows; protoplasm in the form of birds diving for protoplasm in the form of fish. You just got this wonderful sense of the abyss from which all has come. But each form has its own intentions, its own possibilities, and that’s where meaning comes. Not in the protoplasm itself.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 215 Note | Page: 215

It was the male’s job to protect the women. MOYERS: That’s where the paternalistic idea grew. CAMPBELL: Women are booty, they are goods. With the fall of a city, every woman in the city would be raped.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 215 Note | Page: 215

ethical contradiction mentioned in your book, quoting Exodus: “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife—except abroad. Then you should put all males to the sword, and the women you shall take as booty to yourself.” That’s right out of the Old Testament.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 215 Note | Page: 215

something that is inherent in most sociologically oriented mythologies. That is to say, love and compassion are reserved for the in-group, and aggression and abuse are projected outward on others.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 216 Note | Page: 216

Many of the Hebrew kings were condemned in the Old Testament for having worshiped on the mountaintops. Those mountains were symbols of the Goddess.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 217 Note | Page: 217

The virgin birth comes into Christianity by way of the Greek tradition.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 217 Note | Page: 217

in the Greek tradition there were images, legends, myths of virgin births? CAMPBELL: Oh, yes—Leda and the swan, Persephone and the serpent, and this one and that one and the other one. The virgin birth is represented throughout.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 221 Note | Page: 221

Osiris got in, the sarcophagus fitted him perfectly. Immediately seventy-two accomplices came rushing out, and they clapped the lid on, strapped it together, and threw it into the Nile.

Note:72

Yellow highlight | Page: 222 Note | Page: 222

Isis removes the lid of the coffin, lies upon her dead husband, and conceives. This is a motif that appears in the ancient mythologies all the time under many symbolic forms—out of death comes life.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 231 Note | Page: 231

as all true lovers Know, love is perfect kindness, Which is born—there is no doubt—from the heart and eyes. The eyes make it blossom; the heart matures it:

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 234 Note | Page: 234

the courage to love became the courage to affirm one’s own experience against tradition—the tradition of the Church.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 234 Note | Page: 234

it gave the West this accent on the individual, that one should have faith in his experience and not simply mouth terms handed down to him by others. It stresses the validity of the individual’s experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the monolithic system. The monolithic system is a machine system: every machine works like every other machine that’s come out of the same shop.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 235 Note | Page: 235

The true marriage is the marriage that springs from the recognition of identity in the other, and the physical union is simply the sacrament in which that is confirmed. It doesn’t start the other way around, with the physical interest that then becomes spiritualized. It starts from the spiritual impact of love—Amor.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 237 Note | Page: 237

Any life career that you choose in following your bliss should be chosen with that sense—that nobody can frighten me off from this thing. And no matter what happens, this is the validation of my life and action. MOYERS: And in choosing love, too? CAMPBELL: In choosing love, too.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 238 Note | Page: 238

Love is the meaning of life—it is the high point of life.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 238 Note | Page: 238

these pioneers in love is that they decided to be the author and means of their own self-fulfillment, that the realization of love is to be nature’s noblest work, and that they were going to take their wisdom from their own experience and not from dogma, politics, or any current concepts of social good.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 239 Note | Page: 239

The best part of the Western tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 244 Note | Page: 244

what is the nature of the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. That is the wasteland. And that is what T. S. Eliot meant in his poem The Waste Land.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 255 Note | Page: 255

And yet one of my favorite myths is the story from Persia that Satan was condemned to hell because he loved God so much.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 258 Note | Page: 258

the Upanishads: “When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 259 Note | Page: 259

The influence of the dominant divinity in my mind will be what determines my decision. If my guiding divinity is brutal, my decision will be brutal, as well.

Note:

Would you like to take some notes?

You haven’t created any notes for this book yet. You can add or remove bookmarks, highlights, and notes at any location in a Kindle book.

Learn more about notes and highlights

Sorry, we''ve experienced a problem. Please try again.