Chapter Four
THE CREATOR AS MAKE BELIEVE
From the pinnacle of power wherein resides the mature scientific mind, Joseph Campbell pronounced his verdict on a Creator he perceived to come from "the dear childhood of our brain." But he knew he could not dismiss the Creator quite that easily. In order to destroy the influence of the Creator totally, he had to explain how people came to be so strongly influenced in the first place. How did people come to believe there is a Being "out-there", a Being with a Will, and a Plan, a Being who Created the Universe, and, as Creator, controls the universe today? Campbell gives us an answer, an answer Campbell claims is the result of research done by psychologists, anthropologists, etc. who sought an explanation for the one central fact of human history: man's belief in the Creator.
In order to do Campbell's theory justice, I will let him explain it to you. He begins his explanation by telling us how primitive cultures view the masks used in religious festivals: "Moreover, the mask in a primitive festival is revered and experienced as a veritable apparition of the mythical being that it represents--even though everyone knows that a man made the mask and that a man is wearing it. The one wearing it, furthermore, is identified with the god during the time of the ritual of which the mask is a part. He does not merely represent the god; he is the god. The literal fact that the apparition is composed of A, a mask, B, its reference to a mythical being, and C, a man, is dismissed from the mind, and the presentation is allowed to work without correction upon the sentiments of both the beholder and the actor. In other words, there has been a shift of view from the logic of the normal secular sphere, where things are understood to be distinct from one another, to a theatrical or play sphere, where they are accepted for what they are experienced as being and the logic is that of "make believe"--"as if."
"We all know that convention, surely! It is a primary, spontaneous device of childhood, a magical device, by which the world can be transformed from banality to magic in a trice. And its inevitability in childhood is one of those universal characteristics of man that unite us in one family (italics mine). It is a primary dictum, consequently, of the science of myth, which is concerned precisely with the phenomenon of self-induced belief."
Let's summarize what Campbell told us: The "science" of myth assumes that all belief in gods are the result of "self-induced belief." He amplifies his point: "'A professor,' wrote Leo Frobenius in a celebrated paper on the force of the daemonic world of childhood, 'is writing at his desk and his four-year-old little daughter is running about the room. She has nothing to do and is disturbing him. So he gives her three burnt matches, saying, 'Here! Play!' and, sitting on the rug, she begins to play with the matches, Hansel, Gretel, and the witch. A considerable time elapses, during which the professor concentrates upon his task, undisturbed. But then, suddenly, the child shrieks in terror. The father jumps. 'What is it? What has happened?' The little girl comes running to him, showing every sign of great fright. 'Daddy, Daddy,' she cries, 'take the witch away! I can't touch the witch anymore!'"
Campbell explains the meaning his example, "This vivid, convincing example of a child's seizure by a witch while in the act of play may be taken to represent an intense degree of the daemonic mythological experience." In other words, Campbell wants us to believe that the child is an example of what happens to everyone who participates in a mythology, in a religion. He expands his point by quoting J. Huizinga who wrote what Campbell calls "a brilliant study of the play element in culture, "By considering the whole sphere of so-called primitive culture as a play-sphere, we pave the way to a more direct and more general understanding of its peculiarities than any meticulous psychological or sociological analysis would allow." Campbell adds his amen to Huizinga's comment, "And I would concur wholeheartedly with this judgment, only adding that we should extend the consideration to the entire field of our present subject."
And what is the focus of the "entire field" Campbell has in view? Lest we think the idea of "self-induced belief" is relevant to only "primitive" cultures and religions, Campbell shows us how he intends to expand the idea of self-induced belief to our present culture, "In the Roman Catholic mass, for example, when the priest, quoting the words of Christ at the Last Supper, pronounces the formula of consecration--with utmost solemnity--...it is to be supposed that the bread and the wine become the body and blood of Christ, that every fragment of the host and every drop of the wine is the actual living Savior of the world. The sacrament, that is to say, is not conceived to be a reference, a mere sign or symbol to arouse in us a train of thought, but is God himself, the Creator, Judge, and Savior of the Universe, here come to work upon us directly, to free our souls (created in His image) from the effects of the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (which we are to suppose existed as a geographical fact).
Lest we miss his point, Campbell contrasts the Catholic Mass with Indian mythology, "Comparably, in India it is believed that, in response to consecrating formulae, deities will descend graciously to infuse their divine substance into the temple images, which are then called their throne or seat... It is also possible--and in some Indian sects even expected--that the individual himself should become a seat of deity. In the Gandharva Tantra it is written, for example, 'No one who is not himself divine can successfully worship a divinity;, and again, ' Having become the divinity, one should offer it sacrifice.'"
Campbell continues, "Furthermore, it is even possible for a really gifted player to discover that everything--absolutely everything--has become the body of a god, or reveals the omnipresence of God as the ground of all being. There is a passage, for example, among the conversations of the nineteenth-century Bengalese spiritual master Ramakrishna, in which he described such an experience. 'One day,' he is said to have reported, 'it was suddenly revealed to me that everything is Pure Spirit. The utensils of worship, the altar, the door frame--all Pure Spirit. Men, animals, and other living beings--all Pure Spirit. The like a madman, I began to shower flowers in all directions. Whatever I saw I worshiped."
What does all this mean? Campbell tells us, "Belief--or at least a game of belief--is the first step toward such a divine seizure...But in the playing of the game of the gods we take a step toward that reality--which is ultimately the reality of ourselves. Hence the rapture, the feelings of delight, and the sense of refreshment, harmony, and re-creation! In the case of a saint, the game leads to seizure--as in the case of the little girl, to whom the match revealed itself to be a witch. Contact with the orientation of the world may then be lost, the mind remaining rapt in that other state. For such it is impossible to return to this other game, the game of life in the world. They are possessed of God; that is all they know on earth and all they need to know. And they can even infect whole societies, so that these, inspired by their seizures, may likewise break contact with the world and spurn it as delusory, or as evil. Secular life then may be read as a fall--a fall from Grace, Grace being the rapture of the festival of God."
Once again Campbell contrasts this state of self-induced "possession" where the individual does not know what possesses them, with the Eastern model, "But there is another attitude, more comprehensive, which has given beauty and love to the two worlds: that, namely, of the lila, 'the play,' as it has been termed in the Orient. The world is not condemned and shunned as a fall, but voluntarily entered as a game or dance, wherein the spirit plays."
What is the point that Campbell is reaching for? People must learn to understand that everything they think about the gods is play-acting. "...any state of seizure, whether by life or by the gods, must represent a fall of drop of spiritual niveau, a vulgarization of the play. Nobility of spirit is the grace--or ability--to play, whether in heaven or on earth. And this, I take it, this noblesse oblige, which has always been the quality of aristocracy, was precisely the virtue of the Greek poets, artists, and philosophers, for whom the gods were true as poetry is true. We may take it also to be the primitive (and proper) mythological point of view, as contrasted with the heavier positivistic; which latter is represented, on the one hand, by religious experience of the literal sort, where the impact of a daemon, rising to the plane of consciousness from its place of birth on the level of the sentiments, is taken to be objectively real...For it is true, as the Greek philosopher Antisthenes has said, that 'God is not like anything: hence no one can understand him by means of an image,' or as we read in the Indian Upanishad, 'It is other, indeed, than the known
And, moreover, about the unknown!;
thus it must be conceded, as a basic principle of our natural history of the gods and heroes, that whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, that whenever it has been dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the door.
"And so what, then, is the sense that we are to seek, if it be neither here nor there?"
In other words, Campbell is now going to tell you what he understands should be the individuals response to all these "scientific facts." He tells us, "Kant, in his Prolegomena to Every Future System of Metaphysics, states very carefully that all our thinking about final things can be only by way of analogy. 'The proper expression for fallible mode of conception,' he declares, 'would be: that we imagine the world as if its being and inner character were derived from a supreme mind.'"
Campbell tells us why he agrees with Dr. Kant's prescription, "Such a highly played game of 'as if' frees our mind and spirit, on the one hand, from the presumption of theology, which pretends to know the laws of God, and, on the other, from the bondage of reason, whose laws do not apply beyond the horizon of human experience."
He continues, "I am willing to accept the word of Kant, as representing the view of a considerable metaphysician. And applying it to the range of festival games and attitudes just reviewed--from the mask to the consecrated host and temple image, transubstantiated worshiper and transubstantiated world--I can see, or believe I can see, that a principle of release operates throughout the series by way of the alchemy of an 'as if'; and that, through this, the impact of all so-called 'reality' upon the psyche is transubstantiated. The play state and rapturous seizures sometimes deriving from it represent, therefore, a step rather toward than away from the ineluctable truth; and belief---acquiescence in a belief that is not quite belief--is the first step toward the deepened participation that the festival affords in that general will to life which, in its metaphysical aspect, is antecedent to, and the creator of, all life's laws.
"The opaque weight of the world--both of life on earth and of death, heaven, and hell--is dissolved, and the spirit free, not from anything, for there was nothing from which to be freed except a myth too solidly believed, but for something, something fresh and new, a spontaneous act.
"From the position of secular man (Homo sapiens), that is to say, we are to enter the play sphere of the festival, acquiescing in a game of belief, where fun, joy, and rapture rule in the ascending series. The laws of life in time and space--economics, politics, and even morality--will thereupon dissolve. Whereafter, re-created by that return to paradise before the Fall, before the knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, true and false, belief and disbelief, we are to carry the point of view and spirit of man the player (Homo ludens) back into life; as in the play of children, where, undaunted by the banal actualities of life's meager possibilities, the spontaneous impulse of the spirit to identify itself with something other than itself for the sheer delight of play, transubstantiates the world--in which, actually, after all, things are not quite as real or permanent, terrible, important, or logical as they seem."
On the one hand Campbell wants us to understand that if there is a God we are it; but, on the other hand, it is perfectly permissible to act "as if", to play like, to identify "itself with something other than itself for the sheer delight of play..." Such is the attitude that Campbell must create before the people of earth will be ready to accept the myth Campbell is designing for the world.
That he is committed to designing such a myth Campbell makes very clear, "Evidently some mythology of a broader, deeper kind than anything envisioned anywhere in the past is now required: some arcanum arcanorum far more fluid, more sophisticated, than the separate visions of the local traditions, wherein those mythologies themselves will be known to be but the masks of a larger--all their shining pantheons but the flickering modes of a 'timeless schema' that is no schema.
He continues, "But that, precisely, is the great mystery pageant only waiting to be noticed as it lies before us, so to say, in sections, in the halls and museums of the various sciences, yet already living, too, in the works of our greatest men of art. To make it serve the present hour, we have only to assemble--or reassemble--it in its full dimension, scientifically, and then bring it to life as our own, in the way of art: the way of wonder--sympathetic, instructive delight; not judging morally, but participating with our own awakened humanity in the festival of the passing forms."