Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By
I was sitting the other day at a lunch counter that I particularly enjoy, when a
youngster about twelve years old, arriving with his school satchel, took the place at my left.
Beside him came a younger little man, holding the hand of his mother, and those two took the next seats.
All gave their orders, and, while waiting, the boy at my side said, turning his head slightly to the mother, “Jimmy wrote a paper today on the evolution of man, and Teacher said he was wrong, that Adam and Eve were our first parents.”
My Lord! I thought. What a teacher!
The lady three seats away then said, “Well, Teacher was right. Our first parents were Adam and Eve.”
What a mother for a twentieth-century child!
The youngster responded, “Yes, I know, but this was a scientific paper.”
And for that, I was ready to recommend him for a distinguished-service medal from the Smithsonian Institution.
The mother, however, came back with another. “Oh, those scientists!” she said angrily. “Those are only theories.”
And he was up to that one too. “Yes, I know,” was his cool and calm reply; “but they have been factualized: they found the bones.”
The milk and the sandwiches came, and that was that.
So let us now reflect for a moment on the sanctified cosmic image that has been destroyed by the facts and findings of irrepressible young truth-seekers of this kind.
At the height of the Middle Ages, say in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there were current two very different concepts of the earth.
The more popular was of the earth as flat, like a dish surrounded by, and floating
upon, a boundless cosmic sea, in which there were all kinds of monsters dangerous to man.
This was an infinitely old notion, going back to the early Bronze Age.
It appears in Sumerian cuneiform texts of about 2000 B.C.and is the image authorized in the Bible.
Fig. 1.2 — Planetary Spheres
The more seriously considered medieval concept, however, was that of the ancient Greeks, according to whom the earth was not flat, but a solid stationary sphere in the center of a kind of Chinese box of seven transparent revolving spheres, in each of which there was a visible planet: the moon, Mercury, Venus, and the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, the same seven after which our days of the week are named.
The sounding tones of these seven, moreover, made a music, the “music of the spheres,” to which the notes of our diatonic scale correspond.
There was also a metal associated with each: silver, mercury, copper, gold, iron, tin, and lead, in that order.
And the soul descending from heaven to be born on earth picked up, as it came down, the qualities of those metals; so that our souls and bodies are compounds of the very elements of the universe and sing, so to say, the same song.
Music and the arts, according to this early view, were to put us in mind of those harmonies, from which the general thoughts and affairs of this earth distract us.
And in the Middle Ages the seven branches of learning were accordingly associated with those spheres: grammar, logic, and rhetoric (known as the trivium), arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy (the quadrivium).
The crystalline spheres themselves, furthermore, were not, like glass, of inert matter, but living spiritual powers, presided over by angelic beings, or, as Plato had said, by sirens.
And beyond all, there was that luminous celestial realm where God in majesty sat on his triune throne; so that when the soul, at death, returning to its maker, passed again through the seven spheres, it left off at each the accordant quality and arrived unclothed for the judgment.
The emperor and the pope on earth governed, it was supposed, according to the laws and will of God, representing his power and authority at work in the ordained Christian commonalty.
Thus in the total view of the medieval thinkers there was a perfect accord between the structure of the universe, the canons of the social order, and the good of the
individual.
Through unquestioning obedience, therefore, the Christian would put himself into accord not only with his society but also with both his own best inward interests and the outward order of nature.
The Christian Empire was an earthly reflex of the order of the heavens, hieratically organized, with the vestments, thrones, and procedures of its stately courts inspired by celestial imagery, the bells of its cathedral spires and harmonies of its priestly
choirs echoing in earthly tones the unearthly angelic hosts.
Fig. 1.3 — Dante and Mt. Purgatory
Dante in his Divine Comedy unfolded a vision of the universe that perfectly satisfied both the approved religious and the accepted scientific notions of his time.
When Satan had been flung out of heaven for his pride and disobedience, he was supposed to have fallen like a flaming comet and, when he struck the earth, to have plowed right through to its center.
The prodigious crater that he opened thereupon became the fiery pit of Hell; and
the great mass of displaced earth pushed forth at the opposite pole became the
Mountain of Purgatory, which is represented by Dante as lifting heavenward
exactly at the South Pole.
In his view, the entire southern hemisphere was of water, with this mighty
mountain lifting out of it, on whose summit was the Earthly Paradise, from the center of which the four blessed rivers flowed of which Holy Scripture tells.
And now it appears that when Columbus set sail across that “ocean blue”
which many of his neighbors (and possibly also his sailors) believed was a
terminal ocean surrounding a disk-like earth, he himself had in mind an image more like that of Dante’s world—of which we can read, in fact, in his journals.
There we learn that in the course of his third voyage, when he reached for the first time the northern coast of South America, passing in his frail craft at great peril between Trinidad and the mainland, he remarked that the quantity of fresh water there mixing with the salt (pouring from the mouths of the Orinoco) was enormous.
Knowing nothing of the continent beyond, but having in mind the medieval idea, he conjectured the fresh waters might be coming from one of the rivers of Paradise, pouring into the southern sea from the base of the great antipodal mountain.
Moreover, when he then turned, sailing northward, and observed that his ships were faring more rapidly than when they had been sailing south, he took this to be
evidence of their sailing now downhill, from the foot of the promontory of the mythic paradisal mountain.
I like to think of the year 1492 as marking the end—or at least the beginning of the end—of the authority of the old mythological systems by which the lives of men had been supported and inspired from time out of mind.
Shortly after Columbus’s epochal voyage, Magellan circumnavigated the globe. Shortly before, Vasco da Gamma had sailed around Africa to India.
The earth was beginning to be systematically explored, and the old, symbolic, mythological geographies discredited. In attempting to show that there was somewhere on earth a garden of Paradise, Saint Thomas Aquinas had declared, writing only two centuries and a half before Columbus sailed:
“The situation of Paradise is shut off from the habitable world by mountains
or seas, or by some torrid region, which cannot be crossed; and so people who have written about topography make no mention of it.”
Fifty years after the first voyage, Copernicus published his paper on the heliocentric universe (1543); and some sixty-odd years after that, Galileo’s little telescope brought tangible confirmation to this Copernican view.
In the year 1616 Galileo was condemned by the Office of the Inquisition—like the boy beside me at the lunch counter, by his mother—for holding and teaching a doctrine contrary to Holy Scripture.
And today, of course, we have those very much larger telescopes on the summits, for example, of Mount Wilson in California,
Mount Palomar in the same state, Kitt Peak in Arizona, and Haleakala, Hawaii; so that not only is the sun now well established at the center of our planetary system, but we know it to be but one of some two hundred billion suns in a galaxy of such blazing spheres: a galaxy shaped like a prodigious lens, many hundreds of quintillion miles in diameter.
And not only that! but our telescopes now are disclosing to us, among those shining suns, certain other points of light that are themselves not suns but whole galaxies, each as large and great and inconceivable as our own—of which already many
thousands upon thousands have been seen.
So that, actually, the occasion for an experience of awe before the wonder of the universe that is being developed for us by our scientists surely is a far more marvelous, mindblowing revelation than anything the prescientific world could ever have imagined.
The little toy-room picture of the Bible is, in comparison, for children—or, in fact, not even for them any more, to judge from the words of that young scholar beside me at the counter, who, with his “Yes, I know, but this was a scientific paper,” had already found a way to rescue his learning from the crumbling medieval architecture of his mother’s Church.
For not only have all the old mythic notions of the nature of the cosmos gone to pieces, but also those of the origins and history of mankind.
Already in Shakespeare’s day, when Sir Walter Raleigh arrived in America and saw
here all the new animals unknown on the other side, he understood as a master mariner that it would have been absolutely impossible for Noah to have packed examples of every species on earth into any ark, no matter how large.
The Bible legend of the Flood was untrue: a theory that could not be “factualized.” And we today (to make matters worse) are dating the earliest appearance of manlike creatures on this earth over a million years earlier than the Biblical date for God’s creation of the world.
The great paleolithic caves of Europe are from circa 30,000 B.C.; the beginnings of agriculture, 10,000 B.C. or so, and the first substantial towns about 7,000.
Yet Cain, the eldest son of Adam, the first man, is declared in Genesis 4:2 and 4:17 to have been “a tiller of the ground” and the builder of a city known as Enoch in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
The Biblical “theory” has again been proved false, and “they have found the bones!” ~Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By, Page 13-19
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