Colleen's Reviews > The Power of Myth

I can't believe how much I hate a book about myths. What I was expecting was to learn about myths. What I got was old stodgy white men telling people how they should live and complaining about the "youth these days". The word "youngsters" is used without irony. Campbell and Moyers seem to think that the jails are filled with young people because they don't have myths and puberty rights in their lives. Campbell idolizes ancient cultures because they focused more on mysticism than we do; they were on the right path, we are not. This is the constant fretting about the state of the world these days, but from 1988.
I did get a few positive things out of it: rituals can be calming, we’d be better off if we were a little more connected with nature, stories can be a good source of learning, and myths (i.e., all religions) were originally meant to be allegories, not literal truth. I’m on board with all that. However, he’s hardly the first or only one to make these points, so there’s only so much credit I can give him when these ideas are steeped in a sea of ridiculousness.

For example, his laughable thoughts on puberty rites:

Campbell: That's the significance of puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are sacrifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don't have your little baby body anymore, you're something else entirely.
When I was a kid, we wore short trousers, you know, knee pants. And then there was a great moment when you put on long pants. Boys don't get to do that. I see even five-year-old walking around in long trousers. When are they going to know that they're now men and must put aside childish things?
Moyers: Where do the kids growing up in the city—on 125th and Broadway, for example—where do these kids get their myths today?
C: The make them up themselves. This is why we have graffiti all over the city…

Yep. You heard it right. Graffiti is because kids these days ain’t got no myths. But wait, there’s more! What is it with the kids and drugs these days?

M:"Do you think that it is the absence of the religious experience of ecstasy, of joy, this denial of transcendence in our society, that has turned so many young people to the use of drugs?
C: Absolutely. That is the way in.
M: The way in?
C: To an experience.
M: And religion can’t do that for you, or art can't do it?
C: It could, but it is not doing it now. Religions are addressing social problems and ethics instead of mystical experience.

Clearly societal problems aren’t related to drug abuse.

Then we have his take on multiculturalism.

C: Now in a culture that has been homogeneous for some time, there are a number of understood, unwritten rules by which people live. There is an ethos there, there is a mode, and understanding that "we don't do it that way".
M: A mythology.
C: An unstated mythology, you might say. This is the way we use a fork and knife, this is the way we deal with people, and so forth. It's not all written down in book. But in America we have people from all kinds of backgrounds, all in a cluster, together and consequently law has become very important in this country. Lawyers and law are what hold us together. There is no ethos.

Right, there is no American culture. Prob’ly all those immigrants. Takin’ our ethos and our jobs. Gimme them good ol’ days when people stayed with their own kind. (spits in the dust)

And then there’s his not-quite-Jungian idea of a greater consciousness. In this instance, plants get a shout out. Personally, I immediately thought of carrots.

It's part of the Cartesian mode to think of consciousness as being something peculiar to the head, that the head is the organ originating consciousness. It isn't. The head is an organ that inflects consciousness in a certain direction, or to a certain set of purposes. But there is a consciousness here in the body. The whole living world is informed by consciousness.
I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow. When you really see life energy, there's consciousness. Certainly the vegetable world is conscious. And when you live in the woods, as I did as a kid, you can see all these different consciousness relating to themselves. There is a plant consciousness and there is an animal consciousness and we share both these things. You eat certain foods, and the bile knows whether there's something there for it to work on. The whole process is consciousness. Trying to interpret it in simply mechanistic terms won't work.

From Tool’s intro to the song Disgustipated:

And the angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots! You see, Reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust."
And I sprang from my slumber drenched in sweat like the tears of one million terrified brothers and roared, "Hear me now, I have seen the light! They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers!"

Then, in a really puzzling move, he applies some kind of numerology to American history.

...the Great Seal [of the US]...there is an inscription in roman numerals. It is, of course, 1776. Then when you add one and seven and seven and six, you get 21, with is the age of reason, is it not? It was in 1776 that the thirteen state declared independence. The number thirteen is the number of transformation and rebirth. At the Last Supper there were twelve apostles and one Christ, who was going to die and be reborn. Thirteen is the number of getting out of the field of bounds of twelve into the transcendent. You have the twelve signs of the zodiac and the sun. These men were very conscious of the number thirteen as the number of resurrection and rebirth and new life, and they played it up here all the way through.

What dude?

Finally, he thought that women in history did not have a bad time of it because there were female saints and goddesses. Moyers points out that the "motifs and themes" were controlled by men. Campbell says that's going a little too far because there were great women saints. One can look back and quarrel with the whole situation, but the situation of women was not that bad by any means. We’re literally talking about medieval times here.

I can't even get into his ideas about dreams and marriage. And then there's the 'follow your bliss' idea, so privileged coming from these two that it just makes me blech.