FINDING THE ALTAR
Now really, what are you about? You’ve constructed a whole story out of your life as though it were a myth!
Yes, you say, that is exactly what you’ve done. But perhaps you’ve actually done more than that. Perhaps that’s just the beginning. For, if you really think about it, is your meaningful story now your myth or is myth now your meaningful story?
Some further looking inward will get at what I mean by this.
In his writing about personal myth, Joseph Campbell came up with a very helpful and revealing “test” for helping people uncover what their own driving myth may be. He writes:
You might ask yourself this question: if I were confronted with a situation of total disaster, if everything I loved and thought I lived for were devastated, what would I live for? If I were to come home, find my family murdered, my house burned up, or all my career wiped out by some disaster or another, what would sustain me? …What would lead me to know that I could go on living and not just crack up and quit? I’ve known religious people who have had such experiences. They would say, “It’s God’s will.” For them, faith would work. Now, what do you have in your life that would play this role for you?[i]
How you answer this question, Campbell says, “That is the test of the myth, the building myth, of your life.”[ii]
Campbell’s test is insightful at all stages of developing a personal myth. If you’re having trouble identifying what your driving story really is, it’s worth asking this question and seeing what arises inside you.
But the implications of Campbell’s question go deeper than that. Let’s say you’ve already experienced such a crisis—and even found, on the other side, a new meaning to bring the pieces back together. Your faith collapsed—but you found a new myth. Your meaning disappeared, but you forged anew. Good for you. But… what if that falls apart?
What happens when, using the methods discussed above, you’ve constructed a new story and then that gets torn to pieces? You’d thought you’d gotten things all sorted out once you chose to see that divorce as meaningful: it all led to your new relationship, after all. Well, what do you do when your second husband leaves, or unexpectedly passes away? What do you do when the cancer comes back? When your addict partner relapses? When redemption stalls?
What do you do when your personal myth fails?
Some people are unlucky enough to have their world crumble only once. However, if you’ve truly learned the art of mythmaking, of transforming accident into design, you will know what meaning’s really made of; you will be immune to despair. Why?
“The readiness is all.”
Meaning isn’t in the events, but in your relationship to them. It’s in the orientation you choose, the perspective you take. It’s in the will, and nothing external can take that from you. If your world is rocked, if your story falls apart, you are not adrift; you have the power to enchant tragedy, no matter what. Your story is not your myth: myth is your story.
“God’s will.” Amor fati. Destiny.
These are mythic attitudes that allow you to accept what is; to affirm your life, as it is, whatever happens; to say Yes to being you, Yes to your biography, whatever it may bring. To make of accident (or anything) a basis for your mission. Life it is—your life, and, as such, it shall be meaningful.
Well, as it happens, you’re the only one in the position to make that proclamation. No one else determines it. It’s up to you to gild disaster with significance, and raise from worthless happenstance to Calling what befalls you on the world’s wide heath.
If you can do this—if you can wrench out of catastrophe the unexpected acorn of your myth and make a myth out of catastrophe—then myth has served you in the deepest way of all. It has shot through everything, everything, with a shiver of transcendence. Meaning is in the making. God is in the overcoming—not in the myth you overcame.
Such ability to mythologize moves you beyond just the storytelling of a cohesive life, and thus beyond the “psychological” sphere alone. Far more than that, this is an engagement with living myth that performs the first and foremost function of mythology—the metaphysical function: the great Yes to the Greatest Question.
Campbell writes:
The first function [of myth] is awakening in the individual a sense of awe and mystery and gratitude for the ultimate mystery of being. In the old traditions – the very old ones – the accent was on saying yea to the world as it is. That’s not easy…[iii]
This means saying Yes, even to the devastated life; Yes, to total disaster. Yes, to all of it, just as it is.
Campbell refers to this ability to say “yes” to life as a “reconciliation” of the self and reality. Thus, elsewhere he calls the metaphysical function of myth the power “to reconcile consciousness with existence,”[iv] or that it deals with “the problem of reconciling consciousness to the preconditions of its own experience, which is to say to life.”[v]
Ultimately, it is this capacity to become reconciled to existence as it is that allows you to transform your life—from vertigo or nausea into meaning and myth.
The world is what it is, and, like God at creation, you look at it and declare “it is good!” For to affirm the world is to affirm your life, and vice versa. To be able to look on all the seeming chaos and confusion, the wild and profound forces propelling everything on, the overwhelming immensity of what you find yourself now pitted against, now crushed beneath, now riding upon in grandeur—to look at this great, incomprehensible enormity of what is in true acceptance, that is the unshakable Ground from which all meaning springs. To find this stance is to find the Archimedean point outside all fear and resentment, tireless longing and simmering disappointment. It is the Yes that makes your life, all life, mythical—shot through with the glory of God, incontrovertible. Campbell writes:
And this yea itself is the released energy that bears us beyond loathing and desire, breaks the barriers of rational judgment and unites us with our own deep ground: the “secret cause.”[vi]
Such a recognition shifts the fundamental orientation of personal myth. It is no longer your own creative ability to imagine your disparate experiences as a cohesive whole that renders them meaningful. This imaginative effort has expanded—into an appreciation of the universe itself as such a whole, one into which your own life fits and has its part and place. To affirm your life as destiny is to affirm all happening as destiny, to affirm all the workings of existence as some great Story—even if one too far beyond one’s own small reckoning to comprehend.
And yet, though incomprehensible, it is also a “compelling aesthetic statement,” the ultimate work of art, in fact, which strikes your heart and compels your wonder—so much so, that even though you cannot tell the plot, your wonder by itself is enough for it to earn your affirmation and deserve your Yes.
“Only a few days before his death,” recounts the great Jungian analyst and writer Edward Edinger in his book Ego and Archetype, Carl Jung
was asked by an interviewer about his notion of God. He replied in these words: “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.” The view Jung is here expressing is essentially a primitive view, albeit a conscious and sophisticated one. Jung is calling “God” what most people call chance or accident. He experiences apparently arbitrary happenings as meaningful rather than meaningless. …For the Self-connected man…chance does not exist.[vii]
Personal myth at this level thus operates in a way that fulfills not only the psychological function of myth (to center the individual, carry them through the stages of development, and harmonize them with their world) but also the metaphysical function: to awaken in the individual a sense of awe and gratitude for the Ultimate Mystery, reconciling them to reality as it is.
Look how far play can take you! From saying Yes to the story of our lives to saying Yes to the Story of existence. From finding a ground within to a Ground beyond ourselves and in all things. In this way, what Campbell says about the high art of tragedy applies also to the art of personal mythmaking (indeed, perhaps they are essentially the same). After considering this Yes-saying stance, he writes:
Thus a breakthrough is accomplished from biography to metaphysics, the backdrop of time dissolves and the prospect opens of an occult power shaping our lives that is at once of the universe and of each of us, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which is finally that everlasting fire which is exploding in the galaxies, blazing in the sun, reflected in the moon, and coursing as the ache of desire through our veins.[viii]
What is this “mysterium tremendum et fascinans” Campbell refers to when talking about the metaphysical function of myth? The term comes from the great German scholar of religion Rudolf Otto, specifically his work The Idea of the Holy. The book is about the so-called “numinous experience”—that distinct feeling, typical of religious experiences, when a person feels connected with the true ground of all things, the ultimate mystery at the core of reality, which is both terrible/tremendous and fascinating (tremendum et fascinans). Such a feeling, Otto writes,
may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its “profane,” non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. …It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.[ix]
Such feelings characterize the encounter with the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the sense of the Ultimate. In the final analysis, life is affirmed because of its connection to this Ultimate Reality, before which we stand in wonder and awe and gratitude. In the ultimate analysis, to affirm your life is to affirm this Ultimate Reality, which is the great Mystery. It is to this that your self stands in relation; it is within this that you live your life. It is therefore this glorious Mystery which sanctifies your life, which compels your affirmation at a non-rational level. Indeed—even to identify with that Mystery, to personalize it. You yourself are also an expression of that same Mystery. As Campbell was always fond of saying, quoting the Hindu mystics: “Thou art that.” So the first function of myth is for a man to stand before the awe-full Mystery of life—“not to be afraid of it, but to recognize it is his own mystery dimension as well.”[x]
And so your mythmaking has progressed to this—from an infusion of your own existence with meaning, to a recognition of that same meaning in all of existence, in all that exists: from personal myth, you might say, to personal myth.
The big, cultural myths once served to communicate this “numinous” aspect of existence to individuals. This was, in fact, the very essence of religion and religious practice. It is what the given tradition’s mythic symbols achieved. Christ on the cross, Buddha under the Bo Tree, Krishna in Arjuna’s chariot. All triggered a response to the numinous, to the holy. As living myths, they worked to put people in touch with the mysterium tremendum by activating certain psychic states.
With the decline of traditional religions though, this, too, is now left to the individual, to discover the link and articulate it in personally meaningful terms—that is, as personal myth. So Bond writes:
When the cultural expression of the relationship to psyche itself is no longer sustaining the myth-creating process must unfold along the lines of an individual relationship to the impersonal psyche. A new expression of the functional relationship is required; a religious expression in the individual that emerges from careful and scrupulous observation of the numinosum in his or her own life—an individual religious practice.[xi]
In this way, the task of personal mythmaking deepens, moving beyond expressing one’s experience as myth to expressing one’s experience of myth—from building a meaningful whole out of your life to articulating your life in relation to the meaningful Whole. Put differently, personal myth at this level will entail your own personal articulation of the holy, the numinous, the mysterium tremendum. So it is that personal myth leads naturally to the development of a personal spirituality—indeed, to something like a personal religion.
NEXT: 4. MATERIALS
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NOTES
[i] Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss, 88.
[ii] Joseph Campbell (2001) Thou Art That (New World Library, Novato, CA), 24.
[iii] Pathways to Bliss, 104-105.
[iv] Campbell, Lecture: “The Thresholds of Mythology.”
[v] Campbell, Lecture: “Mythology in the Modern Age.”
[vi] Joseph Campbell (1997) The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987 (New World Library, Novato, CA), 238.
[vii] Edward Edinger (1992) Ego and Archetype (Shambhala, Boston), 101.
[viii] Joseph Campbell (1986) The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (New World Library, Novato, CA), 104.
[ix] Rudolf Otto (1923) The Idea of the Holy (Oxford University Press, London), 12-13.
[x] Campbell, Lecture: “The Inward Journey.”
[xi] Bond, Living Myth, 51.