From Joseph Campbell’s book Paths to Bliss, Part I, Man and Myth:
“Traditionally, the first function of a living mythology is to reconcile consciousness to the preconditions of its own existence—in other words, to the very nature of life itself.
Life lives on life. There is no way around it.
Its first law is: either I eat you, or you eat me; and for consciousness this is a very hard problem to digest. This feeding of life by life—that is, by death—was underway for billions of years before eyes opened and became aware of what was happening, long before Homo sapiens appeared in the universe. Vital organs evolved in dependence on the death of other beings in order to continue their own existence. These organs carry impulses of which our consciousness is not even aware; when we do become aware of them, we may be horrified to discover that the nightmare of ‘eat or be eaten’ is part of our own essence.
The impact that this horror—this monster called life—has upon a sensitive consciousness is colossal.
Life is a terrifying force, and if it were not so, we would not exist at all. The first function of a mythological order was to reconcile consciousness to this fact.
The earliest primitive systems introduced by mythology are affirmative—they accept life as it is… To me this is truly astonishing, considering what early humans were confronted with: all the suffering, pain, and hardship bound up with sheer survival. I have studied many myths from such cultures across the world, and I cannot recall encountering even a single denial of life or the universe in primitive thought. Weariness of the world comes later, among those who live in comfort.
The only way to accept life is to accept it fully—right down to its rotten, horrifying foundations.
It is precisely such an affirmative attitude that we find in primitive rites. Some of them are so brutal that one can hardly bear to read their descriptions, let alone witness them. And yet they present to the young initiate a vivid image: life is monstrous, and if you intend to live, this is how you must live—according to the tradition of the tribe.
This is the first function of mythology—not merely to reconcile consciousness with the conditions of its existence, but to do so with gratitude, with love, with acknowledgment of sweetness. For all its bitterness and pain, primordial existence at the very core of life is something sweet and wonderful. It is precisely such an affirmative worldview that pours forth from these frightening rites and myths.
Later, around the 8th century BCE, there occurs what I call the Great Reversal. At that time, certain individuals endowed with heightened sensitivity discover that they cannot accept the daily horror of life. Their worldview is reflected in Schopenhauer’s words: ‘Life is something that should not have been.’ Life is a fundamental, metaphysical, cosmic mistake. Many find it so unbearable that they withdraw from it.
What mythology arises then? In this period emerge the mythologies of withdrawal, rejection, renunciation—the denial of life. Here we find the mythological order of escape. I mean genuine escape—withdrawal from the world. And yet, how do you extinguish within yourself the urge to go on living, or the resentment that life does not give you what you believe it owes you, that it turns out to be such a nightmare? How do you extinguish the thirst for life or the disappointment in it? The answer is: by embracing world- and cosmos-denying mythologies that perform this function. Jainism or early monastic Buddhism are magnificent examples of such a metaphysical approach…
As the records show, a third system arises in the form of Zoroastrianism, dating between the 9th and probably the 7th centuries BCE. At that time emerges the idea of a deity—Ahura Mazda, lord of light and truth—who created a perfect world. Angra Mainyu, lord of deception, destroys or denies that world. According to Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), the restoration of the flawless world is already underway, and we can participate in this process. By encouraging good in our lives and actions and suppressing evil, we can gradually assist in the renewal of the lost good world.
We will recognize this belief as having reached us through the later stages of the biblical tradition and the Christian narrative of the Fall and Resurrection.
This third position offers a meliorative mythology. It expresses the idea that certain actions can bring about change. Through prayer, good deeds, or some other activity, one can alter the fundamental principles, the basic conditions of life. You accept the world—but on the condition that it conforms to your idea of what it should be. It is like marrying someone in order to improve them—this is no marriage at all.
As far as I know, these are the three basic mythological viewpoints in highly developed cultures: one fully accepts, one fully rejects, and the third places conditions—‘I will accept the world when it becomes what I believe it should be.’ The popular secularization of the last viewpoint naturally finds expression in the progressive, reformist attitude we encounter everywhere around us.
A mythological order is a system of images that gives consciousness the sense that life has meaning—which it does not, my dear friend. Life simply is. But the mind is forever seeking meaning; it cannot participate in the game unless it learns (or invents) some system of rules…
Ultimately, through the game you experience that positive state which means being present in existence, living meaningfully. This is the first function of mythology—to awaken in the individual a feeling of grateful, affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery of life.”
Joseph Campbell, Paths to Bliss, Part I, Man and Myth, pp. 33–39
Joseph Campbell is among the greatest scholars of comparative mythology. His most famous book is The Hero with a Thousand Faces, followed by the four volumes of The Masks of God, presenting primitive (1), Eastern (2), Western (3), and creative (4) mythology. His ideas gained their widest popularity through the television series The Power of Myth, where, in a series of conversations with the program’s host Bill Moyers, the viewer encounters another side of Campbell—that of the captivating lecturer and storyteller.
I felt compelled to share this passage from Paths to Bliss because I am among those who, like Schopenhauer, would say that life as such should not exist. While reading about the first function of myth, I felt the life-affirming force of Campbell’s words—that human consciousness must reconcile itself to the preconditions of its own existence—wash over me. I felt part of my resistance to life fall away, and something within me turned over.
Life has meaning—and life has no meaning. Both are true, and both are necessary if we are to grasp life in its fullness. I like the term “supra-meaning” (or Über-Sinn), which Jung writes about in The Red Book, and which unites these two.
Thus, the first function of mythology according to Campbell is to reconcile consciousness with the dark side of life, “awakening in the individual a feeling of grateful, affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery of life.” And because things are best understood in context, I will also briefly present the remaining functions of mythology:
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the cosmological – to present an image of the cosmos and the surrounding universe that evokes and sustains this sense of awe;
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the sociological – to affirm and maintain a shared set of behavioral rules, commandments, and prohibitions upon which a given social unit relies for its existence;
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the psychological (symbolic) – to guide the individual through the stages of life, from birth through maturity and all the way to death.
Campbell maintains that the second and third functions—the cosmological and the sociological—are no longer necessary in modern secular society, as they are fulfilled by science and by legal regulation within the state. By contrast, the first and the fourth functions remain alive, because neither science nor the state can give human beings what myth provides.
That which can reconcile us to the paradoxes and pains of life on Earth—where life feeds on life.
Including our own.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
