Joseph Campbell's Mythology and Me

My husband's family is a family of hunters. As a former vegetarian, this is something that took some getting used-to. His grandfather, a burly mountain man who makes chainsaw sculptures in his free time, owns acres of land covered by towering, ancient trees. As soon as hunting season begins in the fall, my husband's father and grandfather are out in the woods, stalking deer, killing them, cutting them into pieces and storing the meat in the freezer. A deer becomes steak, hamburgers. This is far removed from the usual modern way of acquiring one's meat. My mother, upon hearing of their hunting exploits always says something disapproving. "Why can't they just get their meat from the store, like most people do?" In a way, I agree with her. Sometimes I think it must take a twisted sort of person to willfully choose to go out and shoot an animal rather than buy one from the grocery store. Then again, I reason, that deer leads a much better life in the woods than a cow on a farm. I would rather live my life running through the woods, raising my babies, eating and sleeping and free than in a cramped pen, exposed to all of the atrocities of modern factory farming.

This, for me, is an example of a modern scourge: our lack of connection with nature and unwillingness to face the fact that we, too, are animals and take part in the food chain. If we can't see what we are eating for what it is, maybe we can forget that somebody had to die so we could eat. Chickens are dissected, only the boneless breasts left chilled and disembodied on a Styrofoam plate in the refrigerated section of the store. Cows are ground up, unrecognizable and more resembling play-doh than an animal. It is easy to pretend that you aren't eating something that was once alive. Some, disgusted by their omnivorous nature, become vegetarians and extract themselves from the killing of other sentient creatures. This is the route I went for years until I succumbed to peer pressure and ate a McDonalds chicken sandwich. I had had enough of the taunting, my "friends" pushing meat under my nose in the high school cafeteria and mocking me for not partaking in the yumbo or Mexican pizza or whatever other atrocity New York state had deemed good eating for that day. This represented my choice. I could either remove myself from meat-eating altogether, knowing what had to be done to get my meat, or I could eat it and try to forget what it really was. This, like I said, is obviously quite easy to do. Meat doesn't typically look like what it once was anymore. Recipes no longer instruct you to cook your calf's head until its eyes fall out. But what if there is a third option?

Joseph Campbell, in his book The Power of Myth, discusses the concept of "killing the god" (Campbell, 92). Ancient peoples (and in fact many people to this day) did not have the options we have today. Their meat did not come prepackaged and sanitized. They had to hunt it, kill it, butcher it, and eat parts of it we in much of Western society consider disgusting. Not only that, but this was done is a world where animals were not seen as our cousins of lower worth. Primitive peoples typically saw the animals as being our equals at least and often our superiors (95). Animals were seen as father figures and spirit guides, as gods (93). To assuage guilt over killing animals, hunters devised elaborate rituals and systems of taboos that went along with the acts of hunting and eating animals. They saw hunting as "a kind of covenant between the animal world and the human world," (90). The wise animals, knowing that this was just the way of things, offered themselves up to the people willingly, and the people observed various rituals in order to show that "killing the animal [was] not a personal act," but a natural one (93). They hunted, killed and ate with reverence for the sacrifice of the animal. It was in this way that the hunters could feel like they were living in accord with other creatures. It was, I think, a way of apologizing. Killing is nasty business, no matter how you do it, but to associate some sort of order with it and allow dignity for the animal that has died, I think, makes it better. The hunters of the past faced plainly what they were doing; they didn't hide from the facts of life. They faced their omnivorous nature and made amends.

This is, of course, in direct opposition to the way we eat today. We have no respect. Who knows how cows are raised and slaughtered? Most people turn a blind eye, because they don't want to think about it. People don't have much interest in insuring that they are dying a dignified death, that they are being respected. Meat is wasted, thrown out, left to rot. And who says grace anymore before dinner? I remember as a child, we said grace at least before Easter and Christmas dinner. Now, we don't even do that. Aren't we thankful? Shouldn't we be thanking somebody? Certainly we could stand to learn a little something from the hunters of ancient times. And even though modern society often paints hunters as being amoral (for what kind of messed up person goes out and shoots animals when they don't have to, anyway?) the fact of the matter is that if you eat meat, the animals are going to die, either by your hands or somebody else's. I have come to have respect for my in-laws, who go out there in nature and face their prey. At least, in getting to know the deer, learning their habits, following their tracks, carefully tracing them through the woods, they can gain respect for the deer's soul. And when I eat venison, I know where it came from, that it lived a good life and that it was killed quickly and mercifully. That is certainly more than I can say for those disembodied chicken breasts, although I do still eat them. Campbell says: "That is the way life is. Man is a hunter, and the animal is a beast of prey," (91). In life there are hunters and the hunted, and we are lucky enough to be at the top of the food chain.

These same people who created elaborate mythologies surrounding hunting and eating also mythologized their landscape. The world was a collection of different significant, sacred places. In The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers asks Joseph Campbell: "What does it mean to have a sacred place?" (Campbell, 115). Campbell responds by telling Moyers that a sacred place is a spot or a time in your day that you come to get the "thou" feeling of life. This is a spot where you tap into mana, the life force of the world. You tap into whatever is inside you that makes you happy. This is a place where you forget about all of the outside demands on your time and go to just be yourself. Campbell points out that in the past, the whole world was sacred (115), but today, we must carve a spot out and make it sacred.

I had a best friend growing up, born three days after me, with whom I spent nearly every waking moment. She was essentially my sister, my twin. Even though we look nothing alike, people often mistook us for one another and called us by one another's names. We were inseparable and joined spiritually. Amanda and I lived together in a world outside of the "real" world. We had an elaborate mythology of our own set up from the time we could communicate. She was a dragon. I was a unicorn. The neighbor's yard was an icy arctic tundra and griffins grew out of acorns. At around age twelve, however, we came to realize that our world was disappearing. One day, as we stood in front of my house, ready to play "pretend," we realized we couldn't do it. Before, we were able to immerse ourselves completely in our fictitious universe. Now, all of a sudden, with puberty and adolescence on the horizon, we couldn't do it. We had lost our childhood, just like that. Amanda was about to move, as well. In that last summer before she moved, we "discovered" a nearby field.

This was private property and it did not technically belong to us. But to us, it was amazing, wide-open and untouched. We began going there that summer when we were twelve, wading through the high grass, tip-toeing on rocks across a stream. We claimed that field as ours and it was holy. Campbell says that "people claim the land by creating sacred sites," (115) and that is exactly what we did. We built a "shrine" to various bands that we liked at the time. This field seemed to be in a state of misuse and there were all sorts of treasures lying around. Garbage was dumped in the stream and in small valleys around the field, and objects from these garbage heaps became adornments for our shrine. We arranged the bottles, toys and clocks artfully on stones. The field was mapped in our heads, certain sites standing out as particularly significant: the rock, the stream, and the fiery tree.

Amanda moved away soon after that, but for several summers, she returned and we revisited our sacred spot. We expanded our mythology to include our burgeoning interest in illicit drugs. Amanda and I came up with a whole story about the field being cultivated with marijuana. If we stole it, we said, the farmer would come after us with barking, vicious dogs. This was of course not technically true, but it served to replace our old mythology of childhood.

That was how we went from childhood to adolescence. We had no official marker telling us we were no longer children. As Protestants, we didn't even have confirmation or a bat mitzvah or anything like that. In ancient times, there would have been some sort of initiation rite associated with our entrance into adulthood. As Joseph Campbell says, in primary cultures today, a girl becomes a woman at the time of menarche. Then she goes off in a hut and thinks about "what she is" (104). Menstruation is a very real symbol of her adult role as a mother and giver of life. Boys, he says, go through something much more grueling. They are circumcised and made to drink blood. The older men come to them as "spirits" and they go through pain to become men (102). This reminds me of the movie 300, in which King Leonidas as a boy must go out in the frozen wilderness, naked and practically unarmed. He fights and kills a wolf and comes back a man.

In modern times, however, we have no initiation rituals. When are you grown? It could be at any number of times. It could be when you reach sexual maturity, get your drivers license or when you get your first job. Maybe it is when you graduate from high school or college. Or yet again, maybe it is when you start your career or when you get married. Maybe it happens when you have your first child, when you turn 25 or 30 or 35. It is hard to say. In the past, as I said before, becoming an adult was tied to reaching sexual maturity. If that were the case, girls would become women at age twelve or so (or younger) and we know that is certainly not the case. I still don't feel like an adult and I am married, own my own home and have three children. I still feel like a child. If there is an initiation into adulthood, it seems that these days, it must be largely mental and very much personal. I know that I don't think the way I did as a child. I recognize a shift at twelve, when I realized I couldn't play pretend anymore. I also recognize a shift at around eighteen, when I was initiated into the adult world by being broken and thrown out on the cold, hard ground of a reality of neuroticism.

I wasn't a bad kid. I did well in school. I was teased for being a teacher's pet. Generally I was well-behaved. I hung out with the "bad kids" though, and by my sophomore year of high school was smoking pot. This of course isn't a big deal for most people, but as I soon learned, I am very sensitive to the effects of drugs, legal or otherwise. I didn't do it much, but I really should have stopped once I realized that altered consciousness in general had a paranoia-inducing effect on me. But a cute boy I liked asked me to do LSD with him and I caved to the pressure. There were a lot of elements at play there, of course. I was rebelling against my ex-boyfriend who had told our drug dealer friend not to sell it to me. I was rebelling against what seemed to me to be my outdated innocence. I was of course trying to show my parents and the world and all of my friends who saw me as a goody-two-shoes that I was a teenager, somebody worthy of respect. We got the drugs, went to the sacred field, ate them and waited. At first, I was amused by my experience. I saw "chicken soup" written in the clouds in Chinese, even though I didn't know Chinese. I imagined that I was wearing a bathrobe instead of my coat, standing on the step of a double-wide trailer and scolding the neighborhood kids. But then things turned sinister. Everywhere I looked, the trees looked the same. Which way was out? I started panicking. The boy told me to be calm, just relax, but I couldn't. I was sinking down into a void. I felt terrified, like I was sinking into my own body, slipping out of consciousness. I could hear my name ringing in my ears but couldn't respond. Random memories were coming up in flashes, as if my brain were opening random filing cabinets, looking at the memories contained within and then discarding them. I saw visions of old toys I enjoyed as a child, places I had gone on vacation and old friends.

Somehow, I managed to pull myself back up out of the void and stumble home. I told my parents what was happening and they drove me to the hospital. I asked them, crying, if I was going to die. My mother said, "I don't know."

I was starting to calm down by the time I was admitted to the hospital emergency room. I was still hallucinating, but the hallucinations were amusing again. Rasputin rode by on a bed. My doctor was wearing a red sequined dress. She scolded me for doing drugs and told me not to do them anymore, and that was that. I was sent home.

Unfortunately that event essentially broke me. I did drugs one more time after that, and it caused basically a horribly extended flashback. I had near constant panic attacks for several weeks. I couldn't sleep and was hallucinating about my own death, aliens and ghosts. It was horrible. I went to the psychiatrist every few days as they adjusted and readjusted my medications. Eventually, they got me stabilized, but I was never the same.

Was this my modern initiation ritual into the world of neuroticism? I never did drugs again, but I was irrevocably broken. I was once outgoing. Now I am shy and reserved. I was once happy. Now I am depressed. I hope someday I go back to "normal" but then I wonder, is this me as an adult? Is this what adulthood is for me? My initiation, I believe, was every bit as grueling as that of the aboriginal boys described in Campbell's book, except that when they are done with theirs, they are men: strong and functional. When I was done with mine, I was an adult in the sense that I no longer held onto childish optimism, but worse than a child in that emotionally, I could no longer function. It takes incredible strength to make my own phone calls. I shy away from people I have known my whole life, afraid that they will judge me. I think I was better off in society before this happened.

The trickster of Lewis Hyde's book, Trickster Makes This World stands at the crossroads. He is neither here nor there. Hermes is neither human nor god, and he stands at that border. Hyde says that a trickster standing at the border can choose to stay there and keep playing his role as the trickster, he can be absorbed (cannibalized) into the culture, or he can be anthropemized, or exiled into the wilderness (224). "The most successful change-agent," he says, "avoids either fate and manages to stay on the threshold, neither in nor out, but short of that difficult balance the next best fate may be to be eaten, to be incorporated into the local myth (224).

Throughout his book, Trickster Makes This World, Hyde explores in depth the story of Hermes, who employs several calculated steps to become a god himself. He is cannibalized into the pantheon, but it is important to note that as he is absorbed, he changes the world into which he is absorbed. Hermes reapportions the meat and therefore chooses each of the gods' lot. He makes a spot for himself. Hermes may play by the rules (for the most part) after he becomes a god, but we must not forget that he helped to make those rules.

Hyde also discusses Frederick Douglass, who helped to change a world in which African Americans were synonymous with "slaves" into the world we have today which, while it is not perfect, is certainly better. He could have backed off, given up on the United States and fled to Africa. He didn't. He chose to stay in the United States, argue that slavery was unconstitutional and change things from the inside. Hyde writes, "As much as he may have accommodated himself to American ideology and religion, he did so in a world he had helped to change. If Douglass got himself eaten instead of exiled, we should recognize that American ideology was altered for having had to absorb him," (250).

So what about me? After my breakdown led me away from drugs, would I be exiled by my group of friends, who were held together by the glue of drug use? Or would I be reincorporated into the group in some way, broken as I was? I had always stood on the border between two worlds. I was an honor's student with straight A's. I took AP classes and belonged to that world in a way. At the same time, I was friends with the kids who skipped class to play hacky sack, smoke pot and discuss Nietzsche. After my bad experience I wondered if I would be accepted back into my circle of friends or if I would be exiled.

Well, I am no trickster and I couldn't weasel my way back into my social group. I was uncool. Not only was I a nerd, but now I couldn't even do drugs. My best friends abandoned me. I was an exile.

What can an exile do? Well, an exile can travel. I did a fair amount of that after my breakdown. First I went to Mexico, then Japan and then, finally to Canada. Phil Cousineau, in his book Once and Future Myths says that "we travel great distances at great expense to be in the presence of stone and glass and paint and ink that will raise our spirits out of the doldrums of our desperate everyday lives, feel the mystery, as the preachers used to sing, from out of the darkness for a few fugitive moments so that we might feel the presence of our own hearts pounding as if we were falling in love again for the first time," (Cousineau, 196). It is a method by which people, wearied by the modern world, can tap into the mana of the earth and gain knowledge from people and civilizations long since dead. I know that I have had those moments while traveling where I felt a magic glow of reaching something typically unreachable back home.

In Mexico, we sipped Mexican beer while driving golf carts caravan-style past poor Mexicans in tiny homes, stray dogs and street vendors to the fertility shrine on the Isla Mujeres-the Island of Women. My friend and I joked that if we touched it, we may magically become pregnant, like the Virgin Mary. At eighteen, that thought was unspeakable, yet we climbed up the side of the stone structure and posed for pictures, each of us smiling and squinting in the hot Mexican sun. Although I didn't exactly "get" it, I could feel the power of the shrine, the holiness intended by the builders. It is that experience, not the nightclubs of Cancun that I remember most fondly. There was something just so beautiful and calm about the place. It was as if I had tapped into the spirit of the ancient Mayans and could feel their presence still, just as Cousineau felt when he stood on Easter Island, viewing the moai.

In Japan, a similar experience awaited me. I stayed in a small town outside of Kanazawa for two months during the monsoon season, living with a host family, eating exclusively Japanese food and going to intensive Japanese language classes during the day. We went on many extracurricular excursions. Monks taught us to make pottery and elderly women showed us how to arrange flowers. We went to Kyoto and visited the old Imperial Palace and spent countless hours in the mountains, the beach and at meditation gardens. Again, in this ancient country I could feel the hum of energy, the ghosts of an old age. I remember visiting a shrine and seeing monuments to those long dead, their ashes contained within urns atop the stone structures. People had left offerings in soda cans and bowls. Although warned not to by a fellow student, I snapped a picture of one of the monuments. I remember feeling a great swelling of power around the place, something unexplainable. When the pictures were developed, a fine mist appeared around the headstone, something I had not seen when taking the picture. This still sends chills up my spine, although I know that logically, it was probably just moisture that I didn't notice as I took the picture. Still, though, the power of the place was inescapable. I bought a good luck charm from the monks at one of the shrines and it still hangs in my car here in the US. This was a spot where people could reach eternity.

Finally, there was beautiful Montreal. I went there with my husband for our belated honeymoon. It wasn't much like a traditional honeymoon since we had to leave our two older children at home and I was pregnant with our third, but we had fun. We visited countless churches since I have a "thing" for religious architecture and Montreal is just full of gorgeous Catholic and Anglican churches.

One church that we visited was L'Oratoire Saint-Joseph de Mont-Royal. It was strange to me, as a Protestant, to enter a Christian building dedicated to somebody other than Jesus. Inside, though, you could feel the hush and reverence of the many pilgrims who have traveled there to gain something: understanding, grace, belief. My unbelieving husband, the eternal skeptic, felt moved to light a candle for his grandfather, who had passed away a few months before. After viewing the inside of the church we ran through pouring rain to the small apartment belonging to Frere Andre, who built the oratory. Bars blocked off his tiny room. A woman knelt solemnly on the floor, praying. Just before she left, she dropped a paper.

I thought this was a mistake, but upon inspection, I saw hundreds of other papers just like hers, lying on the floor by the man's bed. Notes in French and English were everywhere. These were prayers, addressed to brother Andre, asking him to put a good word in for these people. There were pictures of children, husbands and brothers. It was truly amazing. It was a place where people could come to access God, it seemed, just like the moai of Easter Island, just like Jerusalem and the fertility shrine in Mexico and the Buddhist and Shinto shrines in Japan.

It is in travel, in fact, that I feel I can gain a sense of healing following my downfall. If my unholy initiation ritual served to make me dysfunctional, going to these places has actually helped me to become functional again. Going to museums, shrines and monuments, I can feel a hint of the power of the past and the accumulated wisdom of all of those generations of people heaped up beneath me. Maybe they can teach me how to become centered again, how to find my voice again and participate in the world. In that vein, I like to believe what Joseph Campbell says: "The images of myth are reflections of the spiritual potentialities of every one of us," (273). Amen, Mr. Campbell.