Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
By Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell Foundation
San Anselmo, California
New World Library, Novato, California
2001. 137pp. cloth. $20.00
Reviewed by Dennis Patrick Slattery
 So often the alliance, if not the correspondence, between religion and mythology has been an uneasy one, perhaps because each perspective on the individual or group in the world in relation to a higher or transcendent power has not been sufficiently articulated by either. Joseph Campbell's popular and penetrating work in the fields of myth and religion offers one of the best articulations of the two.
I once heard him speak and immediately find himself in very hot water when I was a graduate student at The University of Dallas in the mid-seventies. At a lecture Campbell gave at this conservative catholic institution, famous for its liberal arts curriculum, a philosophy professor asked him: “what is myth?” Without skipping a beat, Campbell responded: “Other people's religion. And what is religion? Other people's misunderstood myths.” These lines are quoted in this fine little gem of a book that will serve well anyone attempting to grapple with the symbolic nature of both religious and mythical images and experiences.
The titles of the chapters tell the big story:
1. Metaphor and Religious Mystery
2. The Experience of Religious Mystery
3. Our Notions of God
4. The Religious Imagination and the Rules of Traditional Theology
5. Symbols of the Judeo-Christian Tradition
6. Understanding the Symbols of Judeo-Christian Spirituality
7. Question Period. The last section is a taped discussion with Campbell on many of the book's themes. I should mention that this is one in a series of volumes published by The Joseph Campbell Foundation, founded in 1991 to gather up and publish The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, a task needed and appreciated by many who want to study with some depth how myth and religion actually have more to say to one another in shared common grounds than one might think. Furthermore, to study these chapters is to enter a sophisticated short course on the nature and function of metaphor, symbol and the transcendent, all of which, Campbell repeats often, are debunked, drained and dissolved of their numinous power by religious institutions that focus too much on the historical fact of a religious event rather than on its symbolic evocation. The great “evil” (my word, not his) of concreteness is that it sends scholars looking for concrete evidence and geographic locations of Noah's Ark, the East Entrance to the Garden of Eden, and historical “proof” for the Virgin Birth instead of seeing that these are symbols that speak to areas and dispositions of the soul.
Myths, like religious belief systems, “reinforce a certain moral order and shapes a people or individual to it.” To this end, Campbell believes, “the life of a mythology springs from and depends on a metaphoric vigor of its symbols. The symbol, energized by metaphor, conveys some realization of the infinite. To focus on the literal event as the object of worship, he says in a variety of ways, is to lose the sense of awakening in the person a sense of awe, a vision of the ultimate mystery, that transcends all forms.
Campbell also argues mightily against the dualism that keeps Western religions locked into a narrow view of understanding the miraculous events in both Old and New Testaments in human terms as first and foremost, historical facts. Lost is the imagination that takes these symbols in, feels their resonance in a vital way in one's daily life and is initiated, transformed, changed forever by their presence. While the Western religious imagination seeks a “personal relationship with God as the Other,” Eastern traditions do not divide self from Divinity but believe rather that God is us and we are it. Hence the title of the essays: Thou Art That , “tat tvam asi.” God and the individual are one and the same thing.
I like Campbell's quoting Christ's words—“the kingdom of God is within you”—for it positions God and his creation within the individual, not separated and outside. How do we then, return to Eden? Campbell says not by finding it somewhere in the East, but “by overcoming fear and desire….The Garden is a psychological, spiritual experience, a metaphor for what is happening now.” It is beyond place and time.
Whether one is offended by Campbell's debunking the literal historical facts of the Bible in favor of their more mythic and metaphorical power is in some cases certainly possible. But it is hard to argue with him that “myths, symbols constitute a special language of religious experience, a part of all religions”; such a view is certainly a liberating way to re-approach, study and implement the amazing stories of the Bible as well as the Holy Books of other religious traditions. I like his claim that “historical events are given spiritual meaning by being interpreted mythologically.
One may be convinced that myths, far from being “untrue,” as our culture has it, are in fact the richest corridors to transcendent truths we all seek.
Dennis Patrick Slattery is Core
Faculty in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. His most
recent work is Psychology at the Threshold, co-edited with
Lionel Corbett. He is a Mythic Journeys guest speaker.
The Song of Taliesin and The Song of Arthur
By John Matthews
Reviewed by John Adcox
The author of far too many books to list (he's probably written more books than I've written grocery lists), John Matthews has made a name for himself combining excellent scholarship with intuitive speculation in his exploration of Celtic myth, shamanism, and Western mystery traditions. However, in The Song of Taliesin and The Song of Arthur , Matthews proves once again that he is at his best as a poet and storyteller.
The Song of Taliesin collects twenty "lesser known” Arthurian tales, all attributed to the legendary Welsh bard, Taliesin, from a wide spectrum of sources, ranging from The Mabinogion to the Welsh Triads, extant fragments of ancient bardic lore. He embellishes the tales with his own knowledge, culled from a lifetime of study of the Matter of Britain, and of course his skills as a storyteller.
To tell the tales, Matthews has created a scribe living among monks who recalls the teachings of his master, Taliesin himself. The conceit works well; it gives the tales both an immediacy and a thread to bind them together. The tales themselves are all well told, and the modern voice Matthews uses to turn poems and fragments of legend into short stories accessible to today's readers robs them of none of their power and mythic resonance. Of special note is “The Voyage to Annwn,” Matthews' chilling retelling of Taliesin's mysterious and haunting poem, The Spoils of Annwn.
The Song of Taliesin makes a number of Celtic Arthurian tales not included in more well-known sources, ranging from Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur to the vast numbers of modern novels, accessible to modern readers. It's true strength, though, is that it is a joy to read.
The same can be said of Matthew's follow-up, The Song of Arthur. Again, the narrator is a monk, although this time not a contemporary of Arthur's. The new narrator looks back, as we do, at a lost golden age of myth and heroes. Again, the book collects lesser-known Celtic tales and breathes new life into them for modern readers. Once again, the use of a monk allows Matthews to give insights to parts of the tales that might seem obscure to us today.
Both books draw on much earlier versions of the Arthur story than most of us are familiar with. Matthews provides excellent notes on his sources, and provides pointers for further reading, both for the tales themselves, and for the mysterious mythic tradition at their roots. Book volumes are highly recommended as resources and as excellent reads for cold winter nights.
The Arthurian legends are more than a sub-genre. They are almost a industry in an of themselves. In the hands of storytellers like John Matthews, it is no wonder that they remain evergreen.
John Matthews is a Mythic Journeys guest speaker.
Coyote Moon
By John A. Miller
Reviewed by John Adcox
As fond as I am of trickster tales, it's hard to imagine anything with a title like Coyote Moon can be anything other than mythic. Coyote Moon doesn't have a lot to do with coyotes, or even with tricksters (although I have a feeling that author John Miller himself may qualify), but the novel is certainly mythic.
First, baseball plays a major role in the story. As the brilliant book Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth shows, baseball is a goldmine for mythic material. Add in liberal doses of cutting edge physics (if you're not up on your science, don't worry), possible reincarnation, and the search for meaning and miracles, and the result is a myth lover's delight.
A rookie baseball player, missing a past but blessed with a cannon for an arm and a stellar batting average, a Mexican waitress, a physics professor, the widowed owner of a trailer park, and a band of retired, wandering Germans are all drawn together to a place in the desert. Why? None are certain. Only that it seems something is about to happen. Something that might reveal a great secret, something that might even be a miracle.
As the relationships of the charming and engaging characters deepen, they seem reborn and renewed as their inhibitions and old lives melt away in the desert heat. What happens exactly? The ending, alas, is vague, or at least open to interpretation. All miracles are. And John A. Miller is at least as much a trickster as the coyote who seems to wink at the needy seekers in the novel.
But as ambiguous as it may seem in the end. Coyote Moon is certainly not unsatisfying, and is never less than a joy to read. The lyrical passages on love, life, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and, of course, baseball and the meaning of life and destiny, are lovely, and the characters are a genuine pleasure to meet and share a journey with. |
