361 - Myths, Dreams, and Religion

Myths, Dreams, and Religion
Edited By Joseph Campbell
255 pp. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1970. $7.95.

This collection of eleven essays, originally lectures sponsored by the Society for Art, Religion and Contemporary Society, presents a depth psychological approach to the function of myth and dream symbolism in Western and Eastern religion and culture. The contributors are an assortment of scholars (theologians, Biblical specialists, psychiatrists, philosophers, orientalists, and a mythologist); but, contrary to the editor's claim, it is hardly "remarkable" that they deal with a small range of shared authorities and themes, for most of the authors approach their subject from a psychological, more or less Jungian, point of view. Nevertheless, their efforts present a closely integrated perspective upon what appears to be a central thesis: that myth and dream are complementary phenomena whose (archetypal) symbolism, in the final analysis, arises out of man's enduring unconscious.

In these- essays, "myth" is taken to be equivalent with the broad notion of "world-view." Thus Alan Watts defines "myth" as "the image in terms of which individuals make sense out of the world." But for Watts, some world-views are clearly preferable to others, and he proposes that we discard our aggressive, dualistic Biblical and materialistic images of man's relation to nature and adopt an Eastern organic and co-operative model. Taking "myth" to be "the expression of man's total response to his encounter with reality," John Priest rejects earlier notions of Israel's

362 - Myths, Dreams, and Religion

historical "demythologization" of the world and introduces the refreshingly new interpretation that "for Israel history itself became the mode or vehicle of mythology," because it was the medium of Israel's encounter with reality, or God. Dream phenomena in Israel are also shown to complement history as alternative medium of divine encounter. According to Amos Wilder, the Bultmannian issue of demythologizing the New Testament can only be kept alive today if we take "myth" in a "highly flexible sense to include mythopoesis and inherited dramatizations of existence or imaginative media of world-representation." From this point of view, Wilder observes that the Christian eschatological consciousness gave a "new mythical impulse" and a "new crystalization of meaning and community" to the collapsing Mediterranean synthesis of mythical images and symbols. Dreams and visions in the New Testament also reflect this new mythical orientation because they are shaped by the same eschatological consciousness.

The metaphysical and cosmological function of myth described by Watt, Priest, and Wilder is reduced by other scholars to an underlying, depth psychological function. For Joseph Campbell, it is the universal process of "shaping individuals to the aims and ideals of their various groups" in such a way that all myths express "the strains of a single symphony of the soul." Following Jungian theory, Campbell interprets the Old Testament Edenic image of the guarded garden as a variation upon the archetypal image of the guarded sanctuary of the soul, the guards symbolizing ego centered desires and fears in conflict with the soul. Campbell contrasts the "pseudohistorical" Edenic theme of expulsion and exclusion from the garden with the Oriental psychological theme of admission and entrance to the inner sanctuary (soul) by passing through guardian demons.

This and other investigations of the psychologically integrative function of symbolism in myth, modern literature, the arts, and dreams rely upon a Jungian framework. According to Campbell and Stanley Hopper, the mythical symbolism of Joyce, Mann, and Stevens represents modern man's quest for the unconscious via the imaginative exploration of archetypal images. (In Hopper, the Jungian unconscious is the touchstone of a truly alchemical method of literary criticism!) In the films of Bergman, Ira Proghoff discerns the attempt to produce "waking dreams" and "living myths" whose symbolism serves to express "inner" demons, thereby aiding the reintegration and growth of the modern psyche. Similarly, Rollo May suggests that the effectiveness of psychoanalysis lies in its ability to identify and "exorcise" inner "daimons" symbolizing deep divisions within the personality. Philosophy, too, according to Richard

363 - Myths, Dreams, and Religion

Underwood, may perform a similar "mythic" function of assisting in the birth of new states of consciousness.

Taken together, these essays attempt to deal with what Norman O. Brown calls "Metamorphosis, or symbolic function: the origin of human culture." On this subject Brown's contribution presents a rich pastiche of thoughts and quotations reflecting a wide variety of perspectives and interests. By comparison, one wishes the volume as a whole provided an equally rich variety of intellectual resources and perspectives. Indeed, it is incredible that none of the contributors refers to any of the recent (or past) interpretations of anthropologists, folklorists, or historians of religion, the foremost students of myth, and that no one gives any serious attention to the important relationships between myth, ritual, language, and history. Jung and Freud remain the origin and limits of the psychological perspective: Gestalt and social psychology go entirely unmentioned. For the most part, the authors also prefer to impose their psychological interpretations upon bits and pieces of mythical symbolism rather than to derive their views by working through actual mythical texts. This dogmatic method and narrowness of intellectual resources gives this volume a particularly parochial and imperious flavor, the product of a small group of scholars devoted to the pursuit of their own doctrines. Partly for these reasons I am unable to fathom the contributions by David Miller and Owen Barfield.

Benjamin C. Ray
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey