Selections from Thou Art That, Transforming Religious Metaphor
by Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell (1904 - 1987) was an American author and teacher best known for his work in the field of comparative mythology. Campbell was educated at Columbia University, where he specialized in medieval literature. His first original work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, was published in 1949 and was immediately well received; in time, it became acclaimed as a classic. In this study of the "myth of the hero," Campbell asserted that there is a single pattern of heroic journey and that all cultures share this essential pattern in their various heroic myths. This theme of essential universality pervades all of Campbell's work and he offers it as the context in which new mythologies may be born which will spiritually unite mankind.

This copyrighted material is reproduced with the written permission of the Joseph Campbell Foundation . The Joseph Campbell Foundation is a partner of the Mythic Imagination Institute, and the Foundation's President, Robert Walter, is a presenter at Mythic Journeys 06.

Editor's Note: Thou Art That is a volume from The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell and includes material from writings and lectures unpublished at the time of Campbell's death in 1987. The title, Thou Art That, is a phrase Campbell uses often throughout this volume and is a translation of the Sanskrit phrase, Tat tvam asi .

This first selection is from Chapter 3, "Our Notions of God," and is titled "Symbols: Out of Time and Place" in which Joseph Campbell discusses the Arthurian legend and the Queste del Saint Graal, pages 28 - 31.

Robert Walter is Executive Director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, a position he has held since its inception in 1990. In 1979, Bob began to work on several projects with Joseph Campbell, who subsequently named him editorial director of his Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Following Campbell's death in 1987, he served as literary executor of Campbell's estate, completing Volumes I and II of the Atlas and supervising its posthumous publication. He continues to oversee the publication of Campbell's oeuvre, including the video series Joseph Campbell's Mythos and the Joseph Campbell Audio Collection. Prior to his work in publishing, Bob was a founding Faculty Fellow at California Institute of the Arts; lectured widely on experiential education; and pursued a professional theater career, working for a decade as a director, production manager, and playwright. Bob was a founding Trustee of United Religions Initiative (URI) and has served that organization as Treasurer and as a member of its Global Council.

Symbols: Out of Time and Place

"History is not, as we well know, the actual source or primary reference of these symbols. They are psychological archetypes known to all mythologies. That is why, at this time, the gurus and the roshis from India and Japan are having such a profound influence and exerting such attraction on Westerners, particularly young people. They are telling our flocks that the reference of these universal symbols lies within themselves. The Western institutions should understand that they are right and recall that they possess the very same symbols on the altars of their churches. We Westerners also have the same spiritual lessons in the words of many of our own greatest mystics.

"To which thought I would now add another, that when you are given a dogma telling precisely what kind of meaning you shall experience in a symbol, explaining what kind of effect it should have upon you, then you are in trouble. This symbol may not have the same meaning for you that it had for a council of Levantine bishops in the fourth century. If you do not react as expected, you doubt your faith. The real function of a church is simply to preserve and present symbols and to perform rites, letting believers experience the message for themselves in whatever way they can. Whatever the relationship of the Father to the Son, or of the Father and Son to the Holy Ghost may be, as defined by high ecclesiastical authority, the individual's assent to a definition is not nearly as important as his or her having a spiritual experience by virtue of the influence of the symbol. To respond, for example, to the Virgin Birth within one's heart by a birth of the spiritual life that we know as 'of Christ.' This Virgin Birth within is well expressed in Saint Paul's statement, 'I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me' (Gal. 2:20).

"We are all born as animals and live the life that animals live: we sleep, eat, reproduce, and fight. There is, however, another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans , that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one's days. That is the birth - the Virgin Birth - in the heart of a properly human, spiritual life.

"As the mystic Meister Eckhart declared of such a crisis in a sermon to his congregation ('Sermons and Collations' LXXXXVIII), "It is more worth to God his being brought forth ghostly in the individual virgin or good soul than that he was born of Mary bodily.' To which he added, 'This involves the notion of our being the only Son whom the Father has eternally begotten ... The best God ever did for Man was to be man himself.' Reading the symbol this way sheds the dross of history for the immediacy of our experience of mystery.

"Just think of it! We have come forth from this Earth of ours. And the Earth itself came of a galaxy, which, in turn, was a condensation of atoms gathered in from space. The Earth may be regarded as a precipitation of space. Is it any wonder, then, that the laws of that space are ingrained in our minds? The philosopher Alan Watts once said, 'The earth is peopling, as apple trees "apple." People are produced from the earth as apples from apple trees.' We are the sensing organs of the Earth. We are the senses of the universe. We have it all right here within us. And the deities that we once thought were out there, we now know, were projected out of ourselves. They are the products of our human imagination seeking to interpret, one way or another, the mysteries of the universe, which we surely see today as a very different universe from what it was in the days when Yahweh threw down stones from heaven on the army of the Amorites and caused the sun to stand still in the sky until his chosen nation took vengeance on its enemies (Joshua 10:13).

"Nor is our society what the ancient once was. The laws of social life today change from minute to minute. There is no more security in the knowledge of some communicated moral law. One must search out one's own values and assume responsibility for one's own order of action and not simply follow orders handed down from some period past. Moreover, we are intensely aware of ourselves as individuals, each responsible in his or her own way, to themselves and to their world.

"We can no longer speak of 'outsiders.' It once was possible for the ancients to say, 'We are the chosen of God!' and to save all love and respect for themselves, projecting their malice 'out there.' That today is suicide. We have now to learn somehow to quench our hate and disdain through the operation of an actual love, not a mere verbalization, but an actual experience of compassionate love, and with that fructify, simultaneously, both our neighbor's life and our own.

"There is a passage in the Old French Queste del Saint Graal that epitomizes the true spirit of Western man. It tells of a day when the knights of Arthur's court gathered in the banquet hall waiting for dinner to be served. It was a custom of that court that no meal should be served until an adventure had come to pass. Adventures came to pass in those days frequently so there was no danger of Arthur's people going hungry. On the present occasion the Grail appeared, covered with a samite cloth, hung in the air a moment, and withdrew. Everyone was exalted, and Gawain, the nephew of King Arthur, rose and suggested a vow. 'I propose,' he said, 'that we all now set forth in quest to behold that Grail unveiled.' And so it was that they agreed. There then comes a line that, when I read it, burned itself into my mind. 'They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest at the point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and there was no way or path.'

"No way or path! Because where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path. And that is what marks the Western spirit distinctly from the Eastern. Oriental gurus accept responsibility for their disciples' lives. They have an interesting term, 'delegated free will.' The guru tells you where you are on the path, who you are, what to do now, and what to do next.

"The romantic quality of the West, on the other hand, derives from an unprecedented yearning, a yearning for something that has never yet been seen in this world. What can it be that has never yet been seen? What has never yet been seen is your own unprecedented life fulfilled. Your life is what has yet to be brought into being.

"In this modern world of ours, in which all things, all institutions, seem to be going rapidly to pieces, there is no meaning in the group, where all meaning was once found. The group today is but a matrix for the production of individuals. All meaning is found in the individual, and in each one this meaning is considered unique. And yet, let us think, in conclusion about this: when you've lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all."

Editor's Note: The second selection is from pages 87 - 89, in the chapter titled "Question Period." In his answers to questions, Joseph Campbell adds an even more direct discussion of the "quest" and "the hero's journey." Following are excerpts:

"Question: Does the mythic motif of the 'Hero's Journey' apply to the Judeo - Christian tradition?

"Let us review some of the basic mythological heroes who work through for us the crisis of resolution by which the classical mythological cycle is completed.

"We begin with Moses, the symbol of one who goes off alone, leaving his people only to return with a law for them. This is the identical hero journey that we find in all of the old ethnic traditions. Every one of the social orders is finally traced back to the realization and experience of some single individual who alone experiences the mystery, passes the test, as it were, and returns with a message for mankind, as in the case of Moses, his coming down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments.

"The next great figure in this tradition is Christ. How was Christ understood by the original Christians, all of whom were Jews? The key word is found in Paul who wrote to the Galatians that Christ redeemed man from the curse of the Law. The 'Establishment' may be understood as a system of laws through which one's experiences of life are filtered. One must be redeemed from this through the doctrine of love. From Christ's words, we have learned that we should love our neighbors. We are not - as in previous times - to hate our enemies, but to love them instead. Christ also said that man is not made for the Sabbath, but that the Sabbath is made for man. In other words, the Law is to serve man and not man the Law. This represents an enormous transformation of our spiritual understanding of our relationship to each other, God, and laws fashioned by other men in His Name.

"Let me remind you of that moment in which Christ transcended all the laws. It is the story of His forty days in the desert. In this case, the devil represented the Law that had to be transcended. The very first question the Devil put to Christ was, 'Why don't you turn these stones into bread?' Christ replies that man lives not by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. He rejects the economic theory of the spiritual life, thereby refuting Bernard Shaw's notion that one must be economically well - off before one can practice spiritual exercises.

"In the second temptation, the Devil takes Christ up onto the mountain top, showing and offering to Him the lands of the world if He will bow down to him. And Christ says, 'Get thee behind me, Satan,' thereby transcending the seduction of political power as life's aim.

"The Devil then takes Him up to the pinnacle of the temple, suggesting that if Christ is so spiritual, He can cast Himself down and God will bear Him up. Christ rejects this temptation to spiritual inflation by saying, 'You shall not tempt the Lord thy God.' Christ returns then from the desert to preach to the people the new message of the spirit, the message of love.

"Question: Does this apply to us? Are we 'heroes' on a spiritual journey?

"In the European Middle Ages the theme of an individual on an individual quest clearly emerges. This is the theme of the Grail legends. Why should anyone go questing for the Grail in Gothic Europe when the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was being celebrated in every church? The reason was that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was a general sacrament that did not depend on the recipient's or the priest's personal character for its effect. It was a miraculous, magically working conduit of the grace of the Crucifixion of Christ which pours into those who received it. All one had to do was abide by the laws of the Church and examine one's conscience and resolve not to sin again. It was not in itself, however, a test of character.

"This mythological Grail was not inside any Church and only the person who had a certain character could find it. The Grail was carried by absolutely virtuous maidens and it represented an integrity of character and life rather than a sacramental system.

"Sir Gawain, Arthur's nephew, proposes a vow, since they thought it a disgrace to go forth in a group, each should enter the forest at that point where he found it darkest, and where no other path existed. This is the absolute opposite to the Oriental guru system, in which you accept the direction of a guru who knows what is best for you. But it is you and your potential character, which has never been seen and which can be brought into being by no one else, that is the life quest in the Western sense. Each individual pursues it in his or her own way. The problem in our society and in our schools is to inculcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere - to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. Spiritually, then, we must all seek the Grail by entering that part of the forest where nobody else has cut a path for us."

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