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#JosephCampbell #quote #Mythology In the last third of the 19th century, the buffalo were slaughtered en masse. . . [For the North American Indians] The whole social mythology lost its central image. The rights in the songs and dances–they had no reality anymore. It was all referring back to a time that wasn’t there. And . . . → Read More: Use Religious Symbols to Turn Inward #JosephCampbell #quote #Mythology #dreams All of the dogmatic talk about meanings and moral values and all that has nothing to do with any of that central mystery. It’s an is, and the way to experience one’s own isness in relation to the mystery of all mysteries it is through handling those elementary mythic images. Basically, . . . → Read More: Mythological Imagery Propels You Into the Spiritual Realm This point is tremendously important. Many of the images–which in our religion are dogmatically affirmed as having had historical reality–are very difficult today to interpret in historical terms. . . . We have a collision between these articles of faith in the historical and physical sciences, which we have to admit our ruling our lives, . . . → Read More: The Primary Truth is the Spiritual Reference of the Symbol, Not Historical Evidence as Truth And so, with reference, now, to our problem of the symbol, we may say that a symbol, like everything else, shows a double aspect. We must distinguish, therefore, between the “sense” and the “meaning” of the symbol. It seems to me perfectly clear that all the great and little symbolical systems of the past functioned . . . → Read More: The New Mandala – symbol and meaning. Some minds require mescalin to dissolve in them their references; others may be quelled by the hypnotizing beat of a drum or the rhythmical organization of a work of art. (For example, which of us ever looked, really, at an old pair of shoes until they were shown to us by Van Gogh?) Certain religious . . . → Read More: The Symbol without meaning: art and science Let us ask, therefore: What can the value or meaning be of a mythological notion which, in the light of modern science, must be said to be erroneous, philosophically false, absurd, or even formally insane? The first answer suggested will no doubt be the one that, in the course of the past century, has been . . . → Read More: What can the value or meaning be of a mythological notion? As far as I know, in the myths themselves the origins of their symbols and cults have always been attributed to individual visionaries–dreamers, shamans, spiritual heroes, prophets, and divine incarnations. Hovering Hawk, for example, when asked how his people made their songs, replied: “We dreamed them. When a man would go away by himself–off into . . . → Read More: The origins of myths’ symbols have been attributed to visionaries. But not only in the higher cultures; even among the so-called primitives, priests, wizards, and visionaries interpret and reinterpret myth as symbolic of “the Way”: “the Pollen Path of Beauty,” as it is called, for example, among the Navaho. And this Way, congenial to the wholeness of man, is understood as the little portion of . . . → Read More: The Way of the individidual is the microcosmic reiteration of the Way of the All and of each. [In] “Primitive Man as Metaphysician,” I have revived a formula, first proposed by Kant, for the release of the archetypal symbolic images of mythic thought from their various local matrices of culturally conditioned references and “meaning,” so that, viewed apart from the uses to which they have been applied in the social provinces of human . . . → Read More: Primitive Man as Metaphysician “The symbols of the higher religions may at first sight seem to have little in common,” wrote a Roman Catholic monk, the late Father Thomas Merton, in a brief but perspicacious article entitled “Symbolism: Communication or Communion?” “But when one comes to a better understanding of those religions, and when one sees that the experiences . . . → Read More: Symbolism: Communication or Communion? |
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