“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
