Perhaps that is the work with which to best end this narrative. The Mythic Image is a stunningly illustrated gift book and the quintessential Campbell, notable for its rich association, always important to Campbell, of myth and art, and of both to the reveries of dream. The first section is entitled ''The World As Dream," and of course suggests that myths are the key to the interpretation of the oneiric fantasy we see all around us and take for real. The book received virtually awestruck notices in such media as the New Yorker and Newsweek, but the historian of religion Charles H. Long, in the Religious Studies Review, perhaps had the best take on it as he noticed that the organization of the work itself is dreamlike. It wanders like a dream from one image to another: from rock paintings to "wild and erotic" Tantric art to gruesome sacrifices to the monumental buildings of lost civilizations, and on and on. By now Campbell is entirely uninhibited in his free association of symbols across space and time. The sleeping Kundalini serpent of Tantric yoga reminds him of something in Rembrandt's painting of Faust, and in one of the cave temples of Aurangabad the Buddha holds a "lotus ladder" reminiscent of both the Norse Yggdrasil and Jacob's ladder. There is no necessary cultural connection in these things, but there is a sort of dream melding of one image into another, an "oneiric logic," evocative of what here is Campbell's central concern, the relation of dream to myth.
The book, Long concludes, reads as though it had been written in a dream, while asleep. It is passive, ambiguous, haunting. 38
Basic Ideas
What is mythology supposed to do? Here, from Myths To Live By, are four functions of myth. All four of these clearly have direct or
Page 155
indirect political ramifications, either in the way myths give spiritual power and identity to an individual—notice the primary emphasis on the individual in these lines—
and so strengthens one's functioning within the political order, or by validating that order directly.
The first [function] is what I have called the mystical function, to waken and maintain in the individual a sense of awe and gratitude in relation to the mystery dimension of the universe, not so that he lives in fear of it, but so that he recognizes that he participates in it, since the mystery of being is the mystery of his own being as well.
The second function of the living mythology is to offer an image of the universe that will be in accord with the knowledge of the time, the sciences and the fields of action of the folk to whom the mythology is addressed.
The third function of the living mythology is to validate, support, and imprint the norms of a given specific moral order—that, namely, of the society in which the individual is to live.
And the fourth is to guide him, stage by stage, in health, strength, and harmony of spirit, through the whole foreseeable course of a useful life. 39
Such fundamental notions as these remained constant throughout Campbell's career. They included also the idea of the unity of myth, that is, that myths throughout the world give an essentially identical message (with the exception, perhaps, of the "Near Eastern"). We have seen how the idea was expressed in quasiFreudian terms in the preface to Hero. Also at the beginning of his career, he wrote in his preface to Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: All mythology, whether of the folk or of the literati, preserves the iconography of a spiritual adventure that men have been accomplishing repeatedly for millennia, and which, whenever it occurs, reveals such constant features that the innumerable mythologies of the world resemble each other as dialects of a single language. 40
No less important themes were the relation of myth to dreams and the unconscious; and, on the other hand, to the explication of comparable motifs in great literature.
Insofar as there were differences in the apparent values of myths, that was attributable to the workings of the "cultural morphology" he had learned from Oswald Spengler and Leo Frobenius. For morphological changes in myth as culture changed
Page 156
was possible; the geographical universality of myth was not necessarily also a temporal sameness age after age. The exact level of mythic universality versus cultural specificity or of timeless versus temporally conditioned truth in myth, however, was not examined in depth by Campbell.
Both Spengler and Frobenius were among those who not only were immensely popular writers in the Weimar period, but also perpetuated a highly sophisticated version of the volkish mood: antidemocratic, pessimistic about the modern world. It is clear that, more than most Americans of his generation, Campbell was nurtured by the milk of that particular strand of Weimar intellectualism, and always maintained a soft place in his heart for the glories of German thought.
It may be recalled that Spengler also enjoyed a vogue in the early and mid fifties in America. Many intellectuals, including the Beats, took up with the pessimistic, antimodern mood of thinkers like Aldous Huxley, C. G. Jung, and the rediscovered Spengler, in opposition to the brave new world of television, fishtail cars, and Cold War capitalism appearing outside their study windows. In the days of Hero and the Eranos conferences, Campbell was far from alone in publicly bemoaning (and maybe covertly applauding) the decline of the West, but he clung to the ghosts of Weimar intellectual life longer than virtually anyone else.
What impressed Campbell about Spengler and Frobenius was not so much their explicit political views as their concept of the morphology of culture, the view that cultures have definite shapes in space and time, in which all features of a particular cultural era interlock to form a definite style that is as much a form of consciousness and character as of art and architecture.
For example, according to Spengler the Russians have a "flat plane" culture expressed in low buildings and an ethics of egalitarian fellowship; western Europe is
"Faustian," with its soaring gothic spires, its distance perspective in art, its world exploration and world conquest, its longdistance weapons. Moreover, cultures pass through distinct stages of growth and decline, and it is here that Spengler's one celebrated book, The Decline of the West, expressed its prophetic judgment on a civilization that had already passed midlife. Campbell first read that book during the author's moment of post—World War I fame but he never forgot it, returning to its main themes again up to the end of his life.
Page 157
Thus fundamental to Campbell's position all the way through were two ideas taken from Frobenius and Spengler about the myths of particular cultures. First was the concept of the spiritual unity of a culture. That unified essence is expressed through the myths of the culture but is also found in visual art and even in individual personality styles. The unity is further expressed in the culture's particular forms of the Jungian archetypes and in its great literature. Joyce and Thomas Mann were supreme examples, for Campbell, of modernity's particular cultural circle.
Second, Campbell affirmed, with Frobenius and Spengler, that cultural circles can evolve. The medieval Western style was not the same as the modern Western.
Spengler, as is well known, and as is suggested in the very title of The Decline of the West, believed that cultural circles, like human beings and all organic life, pass through seasons of youth, maturity, and senescence, finally to die. But here Campbell preferred the more optimistic vision of his other German mentor, Frobenius.
He was struck by Frobenius's comparable concept that every race has its own paideuma or soul, its own way of feeling and its own spectrum of significant knowledge. This spirit is expressed in its art and its mythology, and may also evolve over time, so that the paideuma of a Neolithic agricultural people may be different from what it was when they were hunters and gatherers, or that of Renaissance Europe different from that of medieval Europe. 41