Get to workGet to work
“A life—a life with substance—has to be earned and fashioned from within, not received from the world as a gift.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
Another way of looking at itAnother way of looking at it
“Shame brings honor. Shame is the crown of the soul and a sense of shame the highest virtue.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
In case you’ve been wonderingIn case you’ve been wondering
“Behind every rich man stands a devil, and behind every poor man two.” – Carl G. Jung, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
So get over it alreadySo get over it already
“Protestant versions of the Christian faith tend to lean more heavily than the Catholic on the family-cult theology of the Old Testament, which when seriously considered as an appropriate base for a proper world religion is constitutionally ineligible, since it is finally but the overinterpreted parochial history and manufactured genealogy of a single sub-race of a southwest Asian Semitic strain, late to appear and, though of great and noble influence, by no means what its own version of the history of the human race sets it up to be.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
Make it soMake it so
“No experience is more likely to put politics out of mind, more thoroughly prove it irrelevant, and better teach how to forget it, than the experience, through art, of what is everlasting in man. And at a time when world political events of truly fearful force are involving all that is in us of individual human worth in sympathetic participation, overwhelming it and bearing it away—precisely at such a time it is fitting to stand firm against the megalomaniacs of politics, in defense, namely, of the truth that the essential thing in life, the true humanity of life, never is even touched by political means.” – Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (trans. Joseph Campbell)
There are no political solutions, only political problemsThere are no political solutions, only political problems
“Politics I hate, and the belief in politics, because it makes people arrogant, doctrinaire, harsh, and inhuman. I do not believe in the formulae of the anthill, the human beehive; do not believe in the république démocratique, sociale et universelle; do not believe that mankind was made for what is being called ‘happiness,’ or that it even wants this happiness,’—do not believe in ‘belief,’ but rather in despair, because it is this that clears the way to deliverance; I believe in humility and work—work on oneself, and the highest, noblest, sternest, and most joyous form of such work seems to me to be art.” – Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (trans. Joseph Campbell; emphasis in original)
It’s right hereIt’s right here
“The substance that harbors the divine secret is everywhere, including the human body. It can be had for the asking and can be found anywhere.” – Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (trans. R. F. C. Hull)
The gradationsThe gradations
“The best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation; after that, mass indoctrination; after that, intercultural exchange.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
The fire this timeThe fire this time
“Well I know this, and anyone who’s ever tried to live knows this, that what you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessity, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you, I’m describing me. Now here in this country we’ve got something called a nigger. It doesn’t, in such terms, I beg you to remark, exist in any other country in the world. We have invented the nigger. I didn’t invent him. White people invented him. I’ve always known—I had to know by the time I was seventeen years old—that what you were describing was not me, and what you were afraid of was not me. It had to be something else. You had invented it, so it had to be something you were afraid of, and you invested me with it. Now, if that’s so, no matter what you’ve done to me, I can say to you this, and I mean it, I know you can’t do any more and I’ve got nothing to lose. And I know and have always known—and really always, that is part of the agony—I’ve always known that I’m not a nigger. But if I am not the nigger, and if it’s true that your invention reveals you, then who is the nigger? I am not the victim here. I know one thing from another. I know I was born, I’m going to suffer, and I’m going to die. The only way you get through life is to know the worst things about it. I know that a person is more important than anything else, anything else. I learned this because I’ve had to learn it. But you still think, I gather, that the nigger is necessary. Well, he’s unnecessary to me, so he must be necessary to you. I’m going to give you your problem back. You’re the nigger, baby, it isn’t me.” – James Baldwin, Take This Hammer
Zero-sum and not a gameZero-sum and not a game
“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.” – Hannah Arendt (interviewed by Roger Errera in The New York Review of Books)
We’ll even take a cheetoh benitoWe’ll even take a cheetoh benito
“Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: ‘Things must change—no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.’ Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. . . . Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another.” – Hannah Arendt (interviewed by Roger Errera in The New York Review of Books)
Spatiotemporal extensions in the sea of beingSpatiotemporal extensions in the sea of being
“Since every sight, sound, smell, taste, and tactile impression necessarily comes to us from some part of space and endures for some period of time, space and time, consequently, are the ineluctable preconditions of all outward experience whatsoever: we have our being in their ambience, as fish in water, and what any state of being independent of time and space might be, we neither know nor can imagine. Nor can we hope to learn from reason; for all thinking is ineluctably conditioned by the laws of grammar and logic. Thus all forms beheld in the outer world and all thoughts entertained about them are removed by the conditions of perception and cogitation from whatever the prime state—or non-state—might be of any Being-in-itself.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
Now we know so much better, don’t weNow we know so much better, don’t we
“Hard by the Cathedral were the gallows and the wheel. Every man lived in those days in the consciousness of an immense danger, and it was hell, not the hangman, that he feared. Unnumbered thousands of witches genuinely imagined themselves to be so; they denounced themselves, prayed for absolution, and in pure love of truth confessed their night rides and bargains with the Evil One. Inquisitors, in tears and compassion for the fallen wretches, doomed them to the rack in order to save their souls. That is the Gothic myth, out of which came the cathedral, the crusader, the deep and spiritual painting, the mysticism. In its shadow flowered that profound Gothic blissfulness of which today we cannot form even an idea.” – Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (trans. Charles Francis Atkinson)
Your money is no good hereYour money is no good here
“Civilization, seriously regarded, cannot be described in economic terms. In their peak periods civilizations are mythologically inspired, like youth. Early arts are not, like late, the mere secondary concerns of a people devoted first to economics, politics, comfort, and then, in their leisure time, to aesthetic enjoyment. On the contrary, economics, politics, and even war (crusade) are, in such periods, but functions of a motivating dream of which the arts too are an irrepressible expression. The formative force of a traditional civilization is a kind of compulsion neurosis shared by all members of the implicated domain, and the leading practical function of religious (i.e. mythological) education, therefore, is to infect the young with the madness of their elders—or, in sociological terms, to communicate to its individuals the ‘system of sentiments’ on which the group depends for survival as a unit.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (emphasis in original)
What it isWhat it is
“Love’s service is without eyes, and love is without fear.” – Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isold
Rutting of a sortRutting of a sort
“The experiences and illuminations of childhood and early youth become in later life the types, standards and patterns of all subsequent knowledge and experience, or as it were, the categories according to which all later things are classified—not always consciously, however. And so it is that in our childhood years the foundation is laid of our later view of the world, and therewith as well of its superficiality or depth: it will be in later years unfolded and fulfilled, not essentially changed.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit
We, the peopleWe, the people
“Every child is born with a certain balance of faculties, aptitudes, inclinations, and instinctive leanings. In no two is the balance alike, and each different brain has to deal with a different tide of experience. I marvel, then, not that one man should disagree with another concerning the ultimate realities of life, but that so many, in spite of the diversity of their inborn natures, should reach so large a measure of agreement.” – Sir Arthur Keith, Living Philosophies
Getting thereGetting there
“In the recent past it may have been possible for intelligent men of good will honestly to believe that their own society (whatever it happened to be) was the only good, that beyond its bounds were the enemies of God, and that they were called upon, consequently, to project the principle of hatred outward on the world, while cultivating love within, toward those whose ‘system of sentiments’ was of God. Today, however, there is no such outward. Enclaves of national, racial, religious, and class provincialism persist, but the physical facts have made closed horizons illusory. The old god is dead, with his little world and his little, closed society. The new focal center of belief and trust is mankind. And if the principle of love cannot be wakened actually within each—as it was mythologically in God—to master the principle of hate, the Waste Land alone can be our destiny and the masters of the world its fiends.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
We make ’em up as we go alongWe make ’em up as we go along
“The older mythic orders gave authority to their symbols by attributing them to gods, to culture heroes, or to some such high impersonal force as the order of the universe; and the image of society itself, thus linked to the greater image of nature, became a vessel of religious awe. Today we know, for the most part, that our laws are not from God or from the universe, but from ourselves; are conventional, not absolute; and that in breaking them we offend not God but man. Neither animals nor plants, not the zodiac or its supposed maker, but our fellows have now become the masters of our fate and we of theirs.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
Some doSome do
“No one of adult mind today would turn to the Book of Genesis to learn of the origins of the earth, the plants, the beasts, and man. There was no flood, no tower of Babel, no first couple in paradise, and between the first known appearance of men on earth and the first buildings of cities, not one generation (Adam to Cain) but a good two million must have come into this world and passed along. Today we turn to science for our imagery of the past and of the structure of the world, and what the spinning demons of the atom and the galaxies of the telescope’s eye reveal is a wonder that makes the city of Babel of the Bible seem a toyland dream of the dear childhood of our brain.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
You would thinkYou would think
“The ultimate success of all government is dependent upon the proper management of human susceptibilities rather than upon the faithful obeisance to preconceived theories and images.” – Adda B. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International History
So be carefulSo be careful
“A master is not justified in putting his tow to every test which she will survive, if she be fit. There is a zone in which proper caution will avoid putting her capacity to the proof; a coefficient of prudence that he should not disregard.” – Judge Learned Hand, The T. J. Hooper, Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, 1932
And then it starts all over againAnd then it starts all over again
“Without arguing the point as to whether a state can survive without compelling its subjects to accept as Absolute Truth whatever system of belief the dominant elite may have decided to put forth as divine revelation, we shall observe . . . that gods suppressed become demons; which is to say, that psychological and sociological factors neither assimilated nor recognized by the consciously controlled system become autonomous and must ultimately break the approved system apart.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
So much for your freedoms and all thatSo much for your freedoms and all that
“Staggering under his crushing burden of taxes, in a State which was practically bankrupt, the citizen of every class had now become a mere cog in the vast machinery of the government. He had no other function than to toil for the State, which exacted so much of the fruit of his labor he was fortunate if it proved barely possible for him to survive on what was left. As a mere toiler for the State, he was finally where the peasant on the Nile had been for thousands of years.” – James Henry Breasted, The Conquest of Civilization
Discourse deployed along networks of powerDiscourse deployed along networks of power
“The paramount concern of a popular religion cannot be, and never has been, ‘Truth,’ but the maintenance of a certain type of society, the inculcation in the young and refreshment in the old of an approved ‘system of sentiments’ upon which the local institutions and government depend.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
The crown jewelsThe crown jewels
Stars, darkness, a lamp, a phantom, a dew, a bubble;
A dream, a flash of lightning, and a cloud:
Thus should we look upon the world.
– from The Diamond Sutra
What a piece of workWhat a piece of work
“How small a part of the boundless and unfathomable time is assigned to every man? for it is very soon swallowed up in the eternal. And how small a part of the whole substance? and how small a part of the universal soul? and on what a small clod of the whole earth you creep? Reflecting on all this consider nothing to be great, except to act as your nature leads you, and to endure what the common nature brings.” – Marcus Aurelius, The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (trans. George Long)
Neither responsibility nor rightNeither responsibility nor right
“No one achieves excellence in his life task without love for it, in himself without love for himself, or in his family without love for his home. Love brings everything to flower, each in terms of its own potential, and so is the true pedagogue of the open, free society.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
Not exactly propagandaNot exactly propaganda
“The world is full of origin myths, and all are factually false. The world is full, also, of great traditional books tracing the history of man (but focused narrowly on the local group) from the age of mythological beginnings, through periods of increasing plausibility, to a time almost within memory, when the chronicles begin to carry the record, with a show of rational factuality, to the present. Furthermore, just as all primitive mythologies serve to validate the customs, systems of sentiments, and political aims of their respective local groups, so do these great traditional books. On the surface they may appear to have been composed as conscientious history. In depth they reveal themselves to have been conceived as myths: poetic readings of the mystery of life from a certain interested point of view. But to read a poem as a chronicle of fact is—to say the least—to miss the point. To say a little more, it is to prove oneself a dolt. And to add to this, the men who put these books together were not dolts but knew precisely what they were doing—as the evidence of their manner of work reveals at every turn.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology
Keeping a healthy perspectiveKeeping a healthy perspective
Make merry, day and night;
Make of each day a festival of joy,
Dance and play, day and night!
Let your raiment be kept clean,
Your head washed, body bathed.
Pay heed to the little one, holding onto your hand,
Let your wife delight your heart,
For in this is the portion of man.
– from The Epic of Gilgamesh