Creative Mythology by Campbell Joseph

Author:Campbell Joseph
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611780048
Publisher: PublishDrive
Published: 2018-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

VIII. The Amfortas Wound

In

Figure 61. Amfortas: the crippled kingPrimitive Mythology it has been pointed out that there is no such thing as man qua man. The young of the species Homo sapiens are born too soon, absolutely helpless, and acquire their specifically human faculties of speech, thought, and a symbolizing imagination, as well as erect posture and ability to use tools, under the tutelage of the particular social body into which they are adopted. They grow up to its style and world, imprinted with its signature, molded to its limitations; and the first function of the myths and rites of each group is simply to bring this specialized development to pass. The earliest social units, furthermore, were hardly greater than large families, of which every adult member was in possession of the entire cultural heritage. The myths embodied the substance of this heritage and the rites were the means by which it was both communicated to the young and maintained in force among the old. The myths and rites, that is to say, served a fostering, educative function, bearing the unfinished nature product to full, harmonious unfoldment as an adult specifically adapted for survival in a certain specific environment, as a fully participating member of a specific social group; and apart from that group he would neither have come to maturity nor have been able to survive.

In our present world we have such family rites as well, and as long as it is this psychological, educative function that they serve, as rites of passage, fostering the young to a maturity fit for this day and age, there can be little quarrel either with them or with those by whom they are administered. However, the world today is not as it was in the paleolithic ages, when the roving family hordes of mankind were rare and scattered companies on this earth, foraging as newcomers in a perilous environment of beasts. Nature was then very hard; society, therefore, too. Youngsters found to be intractable were simply wiped away. Conformity in the narrowest sense was an absolute necessity. And yet even then there was an allowance made for a certain type of deviant, the visionary, the shaman: the one who had died and come back to life, the one who had met and talked with spirit powers, the one whose great dreams and vivid hallucinations told effectively of forces deeper and more essential than the normally visible surface of things. And it was, in fact, from the insights of just these strangely gifted ones that the myths and rites of the primitive communities were in largest part derived.Note 95 They were the first finders and exposers of those inner realities that are recognized today as of the psyche. Hence the myths and rites, of which they were the masters, served not only the outward (supposed) function of influencing nature, causing game to appear, illness to abate, foes to fall, and friends to flourish, but also the inward (actual) work of touching and awakening

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