"And so Galahad decided it would be a disgrace to set off on the quest with the other knights." "Alone, he would enter the dark forest, where there was no path." "In the story of Galahad is the myth of the hero's journey." "How does it speak to our lives?" "What myths are we living today?" "Now, there was a moment in Jung's life when he realized what it meant to live with a mythology and what it meant to live without one." "And he asked himself by what mythology he was living and he found he didn't know." "And so he said, "I made it the task of tasks in my life to find by what mythology I was living."" "Well, how did he do it..." "What does it mean to live by a mythology and why is it important?" "This man, Joseph Campbell, has spent a lifetime finding answers to these questions." "Now, if you can find that point, you can find an initial point for beginning your own reconstruction." "Throughout his career as teacher and writer," "Campbell has been challenged by a persistent misunderstanding over the very meaning of the word myth, a misunderstanding he confronted most recently in a radio interview." "The red light goes on, and he starts out with this popular idea." "He says, "myth is a lie." "A myth is a lie, isn't it?"" "I said, no." "You must talk about a mythology, a whole mythology by which people live." "Of course, that was out the window already." ""It's a lie."" ""It's a metaphor."" ""It's a lie."" "About 5 minutes to go," "I realized this young man does not know what a metaphor is." "So I felt I could be tough, too." "You know, I had him now in a hammerlock, you might say, and he's not going to get out." "I said, "no, I'm telling you myths are metaphors." "Give me an example of a metaphor."" ""You give me an example," he says." ""I taught school for 38 years." I said, "no." ""I'm asking the question this time." "Give me an example of a metaphor."" "Well, the poor man fell apart." "I mean, I felt ashamed." "You don't do anything like this to people." "Nietzsche has a saying in, I think it's "Zarathustra"" "or "The Will To Power" One." "The pale criminal:" "the one who has the courage of the knife but not of the blood." "And I had no courage to face what I had done to this young man on his show live to his public." "The show was in his name." "So he fell apart, and then he said, "I don't know what to do." "Wait a minute."" "Then he says finally - and we now have about a minute and a half or 2 minutes to go." "He comes up from the floor and says, "I'll try."" ""This so-and-so runs very fast." "People say he runs like a deer."" "I said, "that's not the metaphor."" "Tick, tick, tick goes the clock." ""The metaphor is, so-and-so IS a deer."" ""That's a lie," he says." ""That's a metaphor," I said." "That's the end of the show." "And that got into me." "It is so simple." "Do you believe in God?" "God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought..." "Even the categories of being and nonbeing." "Those are categories of thought." "I mean, it's as simple as that." "So it depends on how much you want to think about it." "Whether it's doing you any good, whether it is putting you in touch with the mystery that's the ground of your own being." "If it isn't, well, it's a lie." "So half of the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts." "Those are what we call theists." "The other half are people who know that the metaphors are not facts." "And so they're lies." "Those are the atheists." "Now in his 80s," "Campbell is being honored for the impact of his ideas." "Not surprisingly, those most drawn to these ideas are men and women in the arts, the modern myth makers." "Author of "Watership Down," Richard Adams." "His discoveries have reverberated out into writing novels, into psychiatry, into mythology, into anthropology, into filmmaking, into creative work." "And apart from all that, he's a damn nice guy." "Volume two will come in its time, but I've written another whole book." "What is it?" "The name is a bit pretentious, but it's "The Inner Reaches Of Outer Space:" "Metaphor As Myth And As Religion."" "It's a biggie." "Author and psychologist Dr. James Hillman." "No one in our century, not Freud, not Jung, not Thomas Mann, or Lévi-Strauss has so brought the mythical sense of the world and its eternal figures back into our ordinary daily consciousness." "The new myths call up new art forms." ""Star Wars" producer/director George Lucas." "About 10 years ago," "I set out to write a children's film." "I had an idea of doing a modern fairy tale." "I stumbled across "The Hero With A Thousand Faces."" "After reading more of Joe's books," "I began to understand how I could do this." "It was a great gift and a very important moment." "You know, it's possible that if I hadn't run across that," "I would still be writing "Star Wars" today." "There's a wonderful life force that comes through the wit and charm when Joe speaks that, as wonderful as the books are, don't capture the man." "Campbell now lives in Hawaii with his wife Jean Erdmann." "He remains committed to a lifelong journey of discovery into the power and significance of myth, a journey that began with a boyhood passion for American Indians." "I was from a very early date, as a kid - around 4 or 5 years old - fascinated by American Indians." "I went to school and had no problem with my studies, but my own enthusiasm was in this maverick realm of the American Indian mythologies." "It had been less than a generation since the Indian wars had ended, and popular culture had already begun to recreate them in legend." "These stories had mass appeal, particularly to young boys." "Buffalo Bill was the grand showman of the age." "In 1914, he brought his traveling wild west extravaganza to New York City." "When he was 10 years old," "Campbell saw them perform at Madison Square Garden." "But Campbell was drawn beyond the popular images of the day, and it was the Indian, not the cowboy, who became his hero." "We lived in New Rochelle in those years." "And when I was about 11 and 12," "I had read all the books about Indians in the children's library and was actually admitted to the stacks." "There they all were - all the reports of the bureau of ethnology, you know, Cushing and Boas and a lot of them." "And I think that's where my life as a scholar began." "I know it did." "Campbell saw that the Indian myths were more than fanciful tales." "They were symbolic stories that reconciled the Indians to the harsh reality of life." "The essence of life is it lives by killing and eating." "And that's the great mystery that the myths have to deal with." "The primitive people that lived by killing have to reconcile the psyche to this thing." "Not only that, but they're wearing the skins of the animals." "Their tents are made out of the animal skins." "So they're living on death all the time in a sea of blood." "The Indians had a way of killing a whole herd of buffalo, which gave the tribe its meat for the winter, by driving them, stampeding them over a great precipice." "So the animals go over, and they're knocked to pieces at the bottom." "And then they can be killed." "But this particular year, they'd stampede the buffalo." "And when the buffalo would get to the edge, they'd turn aside, and nobody was going over." "It started to look bad for the tribe." "Well, one morning, a young woman gets up to get the water for her family and teepee, and she sees the buffalo just up there right on the edge." "And she said, "oh, if you'd only come over" ""and give food to my people for the winter," "I would marry one of you."" "And immediately, they began coming over." "They're just tumbling over and all this kind of thing." "Well, that was a surprise." "But the still larger surprise was that one of them comes up and says," ""all right, girlie, we're off."" ""Oh, no," she says." ""Yes," he said." ""Look, it has happened." "And you've given your promise, and we've gone to work."" "And so he takes her by the arm." "And it's hard to know how buffalos could do this, but they did." "And he leads her off over the hill and out onto the plain." "In seminars around the country," "Joseph Campbell, the scholar, gives way to Joseph Campbell, the storyteller." "Here, he recounts the tale of an Indian girl whose father is killed trying to rescue her from the buffalo." "Her magical chant, which restores him to life, is the source of a mythical covenant between the Indians and the animals." "...Robe." "Puts it over the piece of bone and starts to chant." "She chants a magical power song." "And presently you can see there's a man under the buffalo robe." "She looks under it." "Yes, it's daddy, all right, but he needs a little more singing." "And she goes on with her chant." "And presently he stands up." "Well, the buffalo are tremendously excited about this." "And they say, "well, now, why don't you do this for us?" ""Why don't you bring us back to life after you've killed us all?" ""Now we'll give you our buffalo dance." ""We'll tell you how to do it." ""And when you will have slaughtered a lot of our people," ""you dance this dance and sing your song, and we'll come every year to feed your people."" "Now I turn from one people one to another, and you get one story after another like this of a covenant between the people and the animals, all understood to be part of the nature of the world," "this life eating life." "And, of course, when they eat, they don't thank their idea of God for having given them the animal, they thank the animal, you see?" "It's a rather appropriate act." "And it's a beautiful idea that life is on the surface unendurable." "It's a fierce, ferocious thing." "Schopenhauer said at one of his best moments," ""life is something that should not have been."" "And if it is not something that should not have been but something that should be, then you got to say yea to it, that's all." ""The way it is."" "The function of myth and the function of Indian lore was to put man in accord with nature." "But the city streets of Campbell's boyhood were a far cry from the nature world of the American Indians." "Born in an Irish catholic family and environment and spent your boyhood with nuns, and you're serving mass and you're an altar boy, and you're studying the catholic doctrine for a long time with deep belief." "And I think anyone who has not been a catholic in that what I'd call substantial way has no realization of the ambience of religion within which you live." "It's powerful, potent, life-supporting." "And it's beautiful." "It was during his student years that Campbell's conflict between the literalism of church doctrine and the world of science began." "The problem was, you know," "You're deeply built into the system of the church and you're losing your faith." "That's no fun." "I mean, it started when I was studying biology, you know?" "Absolutely no relationship between the biological, we say, evolution of the human species and the animal and plant and all this world here and what you get in the book of "Genesis" with a cosmology that dates in the fourth millennium, b." "C." "And how can you go through life with that?" "Well, I couldn't, anyhow." "The famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 spoke on a national scale to the crisis of faith that Campbell was experiencing as a student." "Headlines screamed the news." "Two of the nation's top lawyers," "William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, squared off in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee." "John Scopes, a young public schoolteacher, was on trial for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in science class." "The issue was clearly drawn." "Can science and religion coexist?" "The problem of science is to give you an image of the universe, what it's like, what it actually is like, and this changes from decade to decade, actually." "No scientist says, "I've found truth."" "It's a working hypothesis." "And the next season, we'll have another structure." "I would qualify that enormously, enormously." "OK, they think they've found truth." "So the problem of mythology is to relate that found truth to the actual living of a life." "The myth has to deal with the cosmology of the day, and it's no good when it's based on a cosmology that's out of date." "And that's one of our problems." "No, I don't see any conflict between religion and science." "Religion has to accept the science of the day and penetrate it to the mystery." "The conflict is between the science of 2000 b." "C." "and the science of 2000 a." "D." "And this is one of the problems with our tradition, where our inherited mythology " "I say the Judeo-Christian tradition - relates to the near east in the first millennium b." "C." "And it has nothing to do with life here, and everything has to be explained." "And a mythological image that has to be explained to the brain is not working." "When you move through a culture field that is so alien to your own that the images don't click off any response, any recognition, then you're out of sync." "But the controversy of the Scopes Trial was not whether the biblical symbols were out of date but whether they were symbols at all." "Must the Bible be taken literally?" "Did God create the world in 6 days?" "What you have there is the result of a concretization of the symbols." "To think that the symbolic statement refers to a historical fact." "And the two prime ones that are troubling our world are the image of the virgin birth, which has nothing with to do with a biological problem, and the image of the promised land, which has nothing to do with real estate." "These are symbols of the birth in the heart of a spiritual life." "I was lecturing to this point and saying that for the Christian, one should live in terms of the Christ in you." "And a woman came to me some weeks later and said," ""there was a priest sitting beside me when you said that." "And he said, that's blasphemy."" "Well, if that's blasphemy, what kind of thing will we talk about?" "By the time he entered college," "Campbell's attempts to reconcile science and church dogma had reached an impasse." "A chance meeting would show him a new direction." "In 1923, his family took a boat trip to Europe." "On board, he met the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti and was given a book on the life of the Buddha." "In Buddhism, Campbell would find remarkable parallels to the stories he had been taught were exclusive to Christianity." "The stories, though similar, were interpreted in vitally different ways." "It was a very interesting moment in my understanding of these things during the Second World War, when we were in the war with Japan." "One of the New York newspapers published a photograph of one of the door guardians, the gate guardians, in Nara, in Japan, right outside of Tokyo." "And here is this door guardian." "This was the cherub put at the gate of the garden of Eden." "And that guardian stands at the gate to the Buddha's city under the Tree of Immortal Life." "What it said under that was," ""the Japanese worship gods like this."" "Well, they don't." "That is a symbol of your own fear and holding to your ego, which is what's keeping you out of the garden, where the Buddha sits under the tree." "And his right hand says, "don't be afraid of those guys." "Come through."" "Suddenly, it dawned on me that our God was exactly that guardian at the gate, because he has put the guardians at the gate and told us that they're emphatically there and we mustn't go through." "That shifts the whole thing." "So our religion is basically a religion of exile." "Campbell's own sense of exile from Catholicism intensified his exploration of oriental religion and philosophy." "The complexity of Buddhist and Hindu imagery forced him into a new reading of mythological symbols." "The thing that saved me was the Upanishads, Hinduism, where you have practically the same mythology, but it has been intellectually interpreted." "Let's say that already in the ninth century b." "C., the Hindus realized that all the deities are projections of psychological powers and they are within you, not out there." "They're out there also in a certain way, in a mysterious way." "But the real place for them is here." "Now I'm wondering whether within Christianity itself," "There's some sort of core of mythic understanding that is just as valid as, say, in Hinduism and Buddhism." "Well, the problem here is that in Hinduism and Buddhism that the historical interpretation of the symbols, you know, the reference to the life of the Buddha is quite secular." "The accent in Hinduism and Buddhism is the relevance of the symbolic forms to the transformation of your own life." "And you understand these as references inward to yourself." "For instance, most of the Buddhas had no historical existence at all." "Nobody thinks they ever had." "Avalokitesvara, Kuna Yin, Cannon, the great Bodhisattva of inexhaustible compassion, is just a purely mythic figure but represents something, whereas in the Jewish and Christian traditions, the accent is on the historical understanding of the terms, of the images." "Now, since both Judaism and Christianity are mythologically structured orders of symbols, they are susceptible to the other kind of reading." "And that can promise a breaking through every now and then with a prophet or a mystic." "He suddenly sees the symbol as saying something totally different." "And it's something that has to do with an immediate attitude of you to life." "Now, for instance with the crucifixion, if you think of this a calamity that is the result of your sins and Adam's sin and all that, that Jesus had to come down, the son of the father," "give himself on the cross to death, and look sad there, in trouble, that's one reading." "But when you read it another way, as the zeal of eternity for incarnation in time, which involves the breaking up of the one into the many and the acceptance of the sufferings of the world." "St. Augustine says this somewhere, where he says Jesus went to the cross as a bridegroom to the bride." "That's a total transformation of the idea." "Another one, the idea of the end of time, the end of time." "As a historical event?" "That's nonsense." "So why does it matter?" "The importance of the end of the time is as a psychological effect." "And you have to render it and experience it that way." "And this comes out in the gospel that's just been found - 1945- the gospel according to Thomas, which was buried to protect it from the vandals of Theodosius, and St. Augustine." "The disciples asked Jesus, when will the kingdom come?" "And he says, the kingdom will not come by expectation." "They will not say, see here, see there." "The kingdom of the father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it." "That is a totally different reading of the end of the world." "When you have seen the radiance of eternity through all the forms of time - and it's a function of art to make that visible to you - then you have really ended life in the world as it is lived by those" "who think only in the historical concretizing terms." "This is the function of mythology." "That's a mythological reading of what was otherwise a theological statement." "The Christ idea and the Buddha idea are perfectly equivalent mythological symbols, two ways of saying the same thing, that a transcendent energy consciousness informs the whole world and informs you." "The energies of the universe, the energies of life." "Whence?" "Science shows us that they are operative." "Subatomic particles come and go, come and go." "Where do they come from?" "Where do they go?" "Is it a where?" "So that the ultimate ground of being transcends definition, transcends our knowledge." "When you begin asking about ultimates, you're asking about something that transcends all the categories of thought, being, nonbeing, true, false." "These are, as Kant points out in "The Critique Of Pure Reason,"" "functions of our mode of experience." "And all life has to come to us through the aesthetic forms of time and space and the logical ones of the categories of logic." "So we think within that frame." "But what is beyond?" "Even the word "beyond" suggests a category of thought." "So transcendence is literally transcendent of all knowledge." "In the "Kena" Upanishad, it says very clearly already in the seventh century b." "C.," ""that to which words and thoughts do not reach."" "The tongue has never soiled it with a name." "That's what transcendence means." "And the mythological image in this first function of the mystic function is always pointing toward transcendence and giving you the sense of riding on this mystery." "And here in Akido or winning a race, you're riding on that level." "That's the mysticism of athletics." "and the mysticism in love is of the riding the two." "They really are one, only they look like two." "And the experience is the experience of a truth." "Schopenhauer has a wonderful paper which he calls "The Foundations of Morality."" "That's the one where he asks, how is it that a human being can so participate in the danger of another that, forgetting his own self-protection, he moves spontaneously to the other's rescue?" "How come?" "The first law of nature is self-preservation." "That is dispelled." "And his answer is, this is a metaphysical impulse that is deeper than the experience of separateness." "You realize you and the other are one." "Campbell returned from Europe in 1924 to find the roaring twenties in full swing." "He played saxophone in a college jazz band." "It was an exciting time, time to try new things." "He traveled to Hawaii, where he surfed with the legendary Duke Kahanamoku." "In 1925, he captained the Columbia university track team and became one of the fastest half-milers in the world." "Two years later, on a postgraduate fellowship from Columbia, he returned to Europe to study Arthurian romances." "It was a trip that would dramatically alter the course of his life." "I'll never forget the moment going into a grand - in the Bois de Boulogne, they had built a big exhibition palace for the intransigents, the artists who were not showing in the official galleries." "And these happened to be men like Picasso and Matisse and Miró and Brancusi and the whole lot." "In the abstract art of the early 20th century, artists were experimenting with bold new forms." "In their work, Campbell saw for the first time the modern expression of the primitive mythological motifs he had been drawn to as a student." "I remember seeing Brancusi's "Bird in Flight"" "the first time it was exhibited." "And walking around it was Raymond Duncan dressed like a Greek, you know?" "Well, I had come over from good old rural America, you might say, and this whole world of the far out avant-garde, well, bohemian, was totally new." "And opening up to the world of art and its relationship to my interest in mythology took place then." "The rage in Paris in the 1920s was a book by James Joyce entitled "Ulysses."" "And Campbell could not understand it." "He turned to Sylvia Beach, Joyce's publisher." "She gave Campbell clues to the book's seemingly impenetrable structure." "Joyce, like Picasso, was using mythological themes to express a modern vision." "It was a revelation to Campbell." "While in Europe, Campbell was introduced to the work of Carl Jung." "By studying the dream images of his patients," "Jung connected myth with dream for the first time." "Jung's work would play a pivotal role in Campbell's understanding of the universal symbolism in mythology." "Convinced of the parallels in myth, dream, and art, he left for home." "So I come back to the United States about two weekends before the Wall Street crash, and there wasn't a job in the world." "And I went up back to Columbia to go on with my work on the Ph. D." "and told them about, gee, this whole thing has opened out." ""Oh, no," they said." ""You don't follow that." "You stay where you were when you went to Europe."" "Well, I just said to hell with it." "And my father lost all his money, and I had some money I had saved as a student." "We used to play in a jazz band." "And so I had piled up money for a few years." "And on that, I, you might say, just retired to the woods." "I went up, actually, to Woodstock and just read and read and read and read for 5 years." "No job, no money." "Well, just about when I had decided that I not only didn't need a job but didn't want a job, I was invited to Sarah Lawrence, and I got the job." "So the idea was that we should follow the interests of the student." "Here, we had studios." "The dance" " Martha Graham teaches the dance at Sarah Lawrence." "I mean, this is what we have." "It was a marvelous, marvelous school." "So to be able to give the courses that dealt with materials that had meant something to me during my 5 years of reading and know that they would meet the needs of other young people was a real privilege." "Really great." "I was by my female students forced to consider the material from the point of view of the woman." "And that point of view had to do with, what does the material mean to life?" ""What does it mean to me?"" "Campbell's retelling of the medieval myth of Perceval spoke to his students on a personal level of love and marriage." "In the middle ages, people were required to profess beliefs they did not hold, to profess love for people whom they had married and had no love for." "They held positions that they had inherited, hadn't earned." "And so there's a context of inauthentic lives." "How does that get healed?" "It gets healed through the example of an authentic life." "The Arthurian tale of Perceval was the medieval model for an authentic life - the story of a young knight in King Arthur's court in quest of the Holy Grail, a quest that took him one evening to the castle of Lady Condwiramurs." "In the middle of the night, he wakes up, and she's kneeling by the bed, weeping." "And Wolfram says, "but she was dressed for war."" "She was wearing a transparent nightgown." "So she gets into the bed, and she's crying, and she tells him a story." ""My castle is under siege." ""There's a knight, the greatest king in the world," ""who wants my property and me as his wife." ""I would rather throw myself from the highest tower into the moat than to marry this man."" "And Perceval says, "well, I'll kill him in the morning."" "And she said, "that would be just fine."" "So in the morning, the drawbridge goes down, and down comes the Red Knight riding, and he collides with the Seneschal, the leader of the king's army." "And presently the enemy is on his back, and Perceval has his knee on his chest and rips his helmet off, is about to cut his head off." "And the man says, "I yield."" "He comes back into the castle, and Condwiramurs has put her hair up in the way of a married woman." "So there's a spiritual marriage, and each has chosen the other voluntarily." "And he has won a wife indeed." "And they go to bed that night." "And as Wolfram says, "not many a lady nowadays would be pleased with that night's sleep,"" "Because he didn't even touch her." "And he knew nothing about these things." "And a second night." "But they're married still." "And then the third night, he remembers, "oh, mother told me..."" "So then as Wolfram says, "if you will pardon me,"" "they interlaced arms and legs and felt that this is as it should have been going all the time." "Now, the idea there is that the physical is the consummation of love and the sacramentalization of the physical is the love." "So there are no clergy involved here at all." "Love is fulfilled in marriage, and marriage is the consummation of love." "This threw the whole thing into a new perspective." "In 1938, Joseph Campbell married his former student, Jean Erdmann, a noted member of Martha Graham's avant-garde dance company." "As a director of New York's Theater Of The Open Eye, she creates works that merge myth and art." "In "The Coach With The Six Insides,"" "she danced through the stages of a woman's life from the maiden to the crone." "I got this inspiration to work with the Anna Livia Plurabelle female figure in James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake."" "Well, my husband, as you know, has been working on "Finnegan's Wake."" "When we were first married, I swore I'd never read that book because I was on one arm and "Finnegan's Wake" was on the other arm." "And he spent just as much time with "Finnegan's Wake"" "as he did with me." "So it took me several - a number of years - to get over that, but I did." "At the time of their marriage," "Campbell was beginning his career as a writer, co-authoring his first book with Henry Morton Robinson." "It was a real season of writing and very, very exciting, on wonderful, wonderful material." "And whether it was "Finnegan's Wake"" "or the Navajo material or the Hindu material of Heinrich Zimmer's, it was all the same material." "I mean, and that was when I realized - and nobody can tell me anything differently - that there's one mythology in the world." "And it has inflected into various cultures in terms of their historical and social circumstances and needs and particular local ethic system, but it's one mythology." "So I get a phone from my friend." "He says, "Joe, Simon  Schuster is interested in a book on mythology, and if you get up on your high horse and knock them down,"" "he said, "I'll never talk to you again."" "So we arranged for a publisher's luncheon." ""And, yes, we'd like a book on mythology."" "Well, what kind of book do you want?" ""We want sort of a modern bullfinch."" "I said, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole." "They said, "what would you like to do?"" "I said, I'd like to write a book on how to read a myth, sort of a self-help book." ""Yeah, OK." "Write out a presentation, and we'll talk about it."" "So I went home." "Jean was on tour at the time." "And I spent one night just typing up a presentation of an idea for a book and brought it up." "And, oh, by God, I got a marvelous contract " "$250 on signing the contract," "$250 when the book's half-finished," "$250 on turning it in." "So I worked for 4 or 5 years." "What it was was "The Hero With A Thousand Faces."" "What it is is my first lecture to my students at Sarah Lawrence College." ""The Hero With A Thousand Faces"" "was the synthesis of years of work." "In his book, Campbell outlined his idea of the hero's journey that he had seen repeated in cultures throughout the world." "He saw the hero as the personification of a culture's mythology." "Traditionally, the hero might be a warrior, the ideal of strength... and courage..." "An explorer, the founder of civilizations..." "A philosopher, an adventurer of the mind." "And in the modern world, Campbell would add the artist and the scientist to the pantheon of heroes." "But the journey is essentially the same - one shape-shifting story of the vision quest that transforms the world." "Whether it is Odysseus, King Arthur, or Luke Skywalker, the hero is the one who responds to the call to adventure." "The stories often open with the hero appearing restless." "Something is missing in life." "There is a feeling of destiny." "It is a time for separation." "Sometimes it takes a shock to make the final break from the past and gain courage to accept the call." "But no one can go it alone." "Everyone needs a mentor to provide wisdom and magical power." "I suggest you try it again, Luke..." "But this time let go of your conscious self... and act on instinct." "Stretch out with your feelings." "See?" "You can do it." "The descent into the underworld of adventure is often blocked by strange and dangerous threshold guardians." "They mark the point of no return." "Beyond them is the region of the unknown, a dreamlike labyrinth of tests and trials." "Luke:" "I think we took a wrong turn." "To pass his initiation, the hero must become a dragon slayer..." "Aah!" "Here." "Hold this." "To seize the treasure or rescue the princess." "For luck." "But the decisive ordeal of the quest is when the hero confronts death." "He is challenged to follow the wisdom of his heart." "Use the force, Luke." "Let go, Luke." "Stand by." "What a wonderful power the machine gives you." "But is it going to dominate you?" "This statement of what the need and want is must come from you, not from the machine and not from the government that is teaching you or not from even the clergy." "It has to come from one's own inside, and the minute you let that drop and take what the dictation of the time is, instead of the dictation of your own eternity, you have capitulated to the devil and you're in hell." "Mephistopheles is the man who can furnish you the means to do anything you want." "He is the machine manufacturer." "He can manufacture the bombs, and he can manufacture things like this." "And can he give you what the human spirit needs, wants?" "I have a couple of friends who were in concentration camps." "And when Hitler was to give a speech in the neighborhood where their place was, they were brought out and had to stand at attention while he gave his speech." "And one of them told me that he had all he could do to keep his right hand from going up and saying, "heil!"" "The power of a well-constructed ritual to move from standards that are beyond those of your personal intention and control is terrific." "We have lost all sense of that." "We just now don't know anything about that." "But here comes a man with a genius for that kind of thing, and look what happened." "Heil!" "Sieg!" "Heil!" "You can ask yourself if you're wondering about your own mythology, what is your group?" "With what group do you identify?" "And the requirement today is becoming more and more obvious." "It is the recognition that the world is so small and so tightly interlocked that the community, the actual community, is a world community." "There's no mythology to take that in." "And in reaction, you might say, to this need for a total society, you have a lot of theme groups, people pulling back into their own chosen people group or black power group or capitalist group or this one, a blue-collar worker group," "and you get mythological systems oriented to parts of the totality." "It can't last." "We're living in a period that I regard as a kind of period of the terminal moraine of mythology." "It's as though a lot of mythological rubbish is all around." "The mythologies that built civilizations and are no longer working that way, are just in rubble all around us." "And an individual who puts himself to the task of activating his imaginative life, the life that springs from inside, not from response to outside information and commands, that person can find stimulation." "There's no rule." "An individual has to find what electrifies and enlivens his own heart and wakes him." "And I have a firm belief in this now, not only in terms of my own experience but in knowing about the experiences of other people." "When you follow your bliss - and by "bliss" I mean the deep sense of being "in it"" "and doing what the push is out of your own existence -, you follow that, and doors will open where you would not have thought there were going to be doors and where there wouldn't be a door for anybody else." "And there's something about the integrity of a life." "And the world moves in and helps." "The Medal of Honor of the National Arts Club to Joseph Campbell." "I knew I'd found something when I started writing "The Hero."" "It's been a large, large experience, because that's what I was hoping for when I was writing, namely that I was giving people the key to the realm of the muses, which is where myth is." "The seat of the soul is there where the inner and the outer worlds meet." "The outer world is what you get in scholarship." "The inner world is your response to it." "And it's where these come together that we have the mythos." "The outer world changes with historical time;" "the inner world is the world of anthropos." "it is the world constant to the human race." "And so you have throughout the mythological systems a constant: you always have the sense of recognizing something." "And what you're recognizing is your own inward life and at the same time, the inflection through history." "And the problem of making the inner meet the outer of today is, of course, the function of the artist." "And it's because my work has had some influence on people who are doing this that I feel so, so proud, so proud of this moment."