Joseph Campbell

In my weekly Sunday Symposium I am now going through the life and thought of Joseph Campbell. He was a man who opened my brain/mind/spirit/soul to a new world of scholarship and mystery. He was a man who became my good friend.

My friendship with Campbell began when I spent three magical weeks with him one summer high in the Montana mountains. He lectured about five hours a day allowing ample time for one-on-one discussion. I remember vividly a day that changed my life. Just the two of us….walking….on one of those glorious days in the Moon When the Ponies Shed. We were at 7000 feet. The sky was an intense blue, undimmed by haze or smog. It was “like wine” as they say. Aspen leaves were quaking.

Walking on such a day, in such companionship, is a spiritual experience…when in silence, or soft talk…you feel…smell…hear…see…touch…and taste everywhere the Mystery. To move toward the Mystery of our being we must allow our spirit to soar and fly in the timeless quest for the sacred. Throughout history that quest has been described in many different ways in the myths of humankind.
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Mythological continuity

Anthropologists and religious historians estimate that in the last 150,000 years, since Neanderthal times, there have been at least 100,000 distinctly different religious traditions. Religions do not just pop into existence. They are a spin off from preceding cultures and they borrow, steal and plagiarize from the preceding culture and reuse the material to suit their own purposes. For instance, scholars know today that the Old Testament names of the Hebrew patriarchs had been around for 1000 years prior to Hebrew Old Testament times. Scholars know today that nothing in the Gospels is historical or biographical but is legend and folklore and a perfect example of mythological diffusion or mythological continuity. None of the writers of the Gospels knew Jesus personally. No biblical scholar in any major university would deny this.

As Carl Jung writes: “the Osiris myth was clearly superseded by the Christ myth. This is one of the finest examples of mythological continuity.” The Osiris myth, in the beautiful trinity of Isis and Horus, lasted for 4500 years in Egypt. Even 500 years after the death of Jesus, Christians used to worship in Alexandria before statues of the virgin mother Isis suckling her divine child in a stable.

One good example: the genealogical table of Christ in the book of Matthew (1:1-17) consists of 3 X 14 names. The greatest festival in Egypt was the Heb-Sed celebration to reaffirm the Pharaoh as God’s son. In the processional, statues of 14 of the Pharaoh’s ancestors were carried before him. There had to be 14. Celebrated every 3 years, it had to be 3 X 14, or exactly the same mythological formula found in the book of Matthew, the genealogy of Jesus.
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Love song to the earth

Earth Day is fast approaching, under a full moon, for April 2. For some strange cosmic reason it is always “nature” that fills me with the most poetic love. I remember that “Men and books lie. Only nature never lies.” (Thomas Paine) This is my Earth Day love song.

• Dawn breaking…the first light of a new day. Outside of my study window is the cosmic dance, the winged ones of the air…my mourning doves floating in for the gourmet breakfast that I prepared for them before dawn…my finches darting in from all directions for their little sacks of feed hanging in the trees.
• My “paisano” will show up. My “fellow countryman” as the Mexicans call the road-runner. This bird has a four toed foot with two pointing forward and two backward…equally divided between the past and the future…reminding me of time past and time future…always pointing toward the eternal now.
• The beauty of the Yucca, as always, appears eloquent to me…even distinguished in beauty and form. The creamy white blossoms shooting up on their great spike are dazzling to me. No wonder the Spaniards called them “The Candle of the Lord”. There is a sermon here for me on nature and symbiosis. There is only one little moth, Pronuba yuccasella, that can fertilize these flowers which could not be fertilized in any other way. The moth and the Yucca exist only for earth other… I ask: “Where did mother nature arrange this relationship millions of years ago?” It reminds me, daily, of that Mystery…that “something unknown doing we know not what.”

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