The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers

“A myth is a story that has power.” This is not a quote from The Power of Myth but from a particular sermon by an intelligent priest from my home town. That simple statement, while I couldn’t come up with the words for it myself, became the basis of my understanding of traditions, religions and stories in general. Fact or fiction, true or untrue, it does not matter. It is the power of the story that is important in defining it as myth.

That power of story is what is explored in The Power of Myth, the edited transcripts of the PBS series consisting of conversations between Bill Moyers, the host, and Joseph Campbell, the expert in comparative religion and mythology. I read it once before in a mythology class in college (taught by the same professor as the Tolkien class I mentioned in this post). This book is a good introduction to why any human being in the modern era would bother with such a study, but it’s also a good foundation for a few thoughts on why we might still care about myths outside of classrooms and lecture halls and PBS series.

I had a vague memory of this book leaving me feeling a bit flat, like I didn’t really “get it” the first time I read it. I was probably a kind of stupid twenty year old at the time, so I was hoping that my years of experience since then would allow me a wiser approach this time around. I wasn’t entirely disappointed, but there were quite a few passages in the book that made me think, “I’m beyond this in my own ‘journey’” or “I knew that already.”

It was when I made some feeble attempts to share some of the concepts in this book with someone else, to paraphrase, to summarize, to explain, to connect, that I realized I’ve got a long way to go. I just didn’t have the words. I had to go to Campbell and read his words to get my point across. He had the words and phrases, the facts and metaphors. I could only borrow them from him.

As an example, here is an answer that Campbell gives to Moyers about the idea of reincarnation that I think applies well in general to the concept of myth, the story that has power (although Campbell disagrees in the next line that this is a chief motif of mythological stories through time):

 

It suggests that you are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth. But you can live in terms of that depth. And when you can experience it, you suddenly see that all the religions are talking of that.

 

Whatever the mythmakers of any time may have had in mind, their stories may still have some power for us today if we’re willing to let them, especially if we accept the stories as ways to connect us to our past, to describe our significance in the universe, to come to terms with suffering and death (our own and what we cause by being alive). To answer “Why?” to everything.

A Year of Books I've Read Before