Chapter Five
THE MYTH OF MOTHER RIGHT VS. THE MALE CREATOR
The question before us today, the question of authority in this nation is simply this: were the forefathers who created, fought for, lived and died to protect the authority of the United States of America "dear children of the infancy of the mind" who were deluded by manipulative leaders into believing answers to the question of authority that were lies? Joseph Campbell and his followers would have us think so.
Millions of people in this nation are being influenced to believe the evolution of government in western civilization is the result of a sexist tyranny that used the idea of the Creator as a device to manipulate the ignorant masses into serving the interests of the defenders of the Creator.
The most powerful element in the myth created by Joseph Campbell can be traced to the fact that Joseph Campbell made a living teaching in a women's college: Sarah Lawrence. There, during the fifties, sixties and seventies, Campbell was surrounded by some of the best and brightest female minds on earth. What he saw convinced him that the time was ripe for a new myth that had as its subject the struggle between the sexes.
In order to create his new myth Campbell had to go back to the beginning of civilization and rewrite the history of government in western civilization.
When one attempts to fan away the mists of ancient history and find out where we are coming from, some serious fanning is required. Two options are available for arriving at factual conclusions: One can look to the various creation accounts contained in ancient manuscripts, all of which are inscriptions of the folklore of various tribes carried word of mouth through ancient generations until finally deposited by the hand of ancient scribes; or one can look at archaeological findings and make up their own theory. Campbell did both.
Using enormous amounts of archaeological, anthropological, psychological, and artistic data, Joseph Campbell attempted to prove the entire process of the evolution of government in western civilization was an unjustifiable, evil attempt by a male, sexist, brutal and false mythology to destroy a gentle, true, pure myth which he calls Mother Right, a myth that Campbell tries to convince us must be preserved because the myth offers mankind its only hope for survival.
Realizing as he does, that the question who am I? cannot be answered except in context of where I am coming from, Campbell spends enormous amount of attention to detailing the cultural history of our species. As we examine exactly how he defined our past it will be easy to see precisely how Campbell went about destroying the hold of the idea of the Creator on the mind of man.
Campbell alleges that in the beginning of culture there was a basic conflict between Eastern and Western Civilization. This basic conflict between east and west cannot be overemphasized because as Campbell developed his myth to impact the modern age, his impact cannot be understood unless the conflict between eastern and western civilization is in view. I might add that part of Campbell's credibility among modern students can be attributed to the fact that Campbell developed a "world view" of history, a view that included both halves of the history of mankind at a time when most historians were still explaining reality from the one-sided "western civilization" point of view.
I will let him tell his story of the conflict between eastern and western civilizations, a conflict that was in essence a conflict between different mythological explanations of reality: "For on a deeper level of the past than that of the shuttleplay of Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Islam, and, later, Europe, the legacy of the Bronze Age supplied many of the basic motifs of Occidental, as well as of Oriental, mythological thought. Moreover, the origins of this legacy were neither in India, as many still suppose, nor in China, but in the Near East, the Levant, where the spades of recent archaeological investigation have uncovered a background of preparation going back to c. 7500 B.C. At about that time, in the high, protected mountain valleys of Asia Minor, Syria, northern Iraq, and Iran, the arts of agriculture and stock-breeding were developed, and these produced an epochal mutation in both the character of human existence and its potentialities for development. Whereas earlier mankind had lived only precariously by food-collection (the hunt and vegetable-gathering), men now became substantial tillers of the earth. Self-sustaining villages appeared, and their number, steadily increasing, spread in a broad band eastward and westward, arriving simultaneously at both oceans, about 2500 B.C. Meanwhile, in the developed zone of origin, the nuclear Near East, a second epochal mutation occurred c. 3500 B.C., when in the river land of Mesopotamia the fundamental arts of all high civilization were invented: writing, mathematics, monumental architecture, systematic scientific observation (of the heavens), temple worship, and, dominating all, the kingly art of government. The knowledge and application of these reached Egypt with the first pharaohs of Dynasty I, c. 2850 B.C., Crete and the Indus Valley, c. 2500 B.C., China, c. 1500 B.C., and c. 1000-500 B.C. passed to Mexico and Peru."
"Now in the Neolithic village stage of this development and dispersal, the focal figure of all mythology and worship was the bountiful goddess Earth, as the mother and nourisher of life and receiver of the dead for rebirth. In the earliest period of her cult (perhaps c. 7500-3500 B.C. in the Levant) such a mother-goddess may have been thought of only as a local patroness of fertility, as many anthropologists suppose. However, in the temples even of the first of the higher civilizations (Sumer, c. 3500-2350 B.C.), the Great Goddess of highest concern was certainly much more than that. She was already, as she is now in the Orient, a metaphysical symbol: the arch personification of the power of Space, Time, and Matter, within whose bound all beings arise and die: the substance of their bodies, configurator of their lives and thoughts, and receiver of their dead. And everything having form or name--including God personified as good or evil, merciful or wrathful--was her child, within her womb.
"Toward the end of close of the Age of Bronze and, more strongly, with the dawn of the Age of Iron (c. 1250 B.C. in the Levant), the old cosmology and mythologies of the goddess mother were radically transformed, reinterpreted, and in large measure even suppressed, by those suddenly intrusive patriarchal warrior tribesmen whose traditions have come down to us chiefly in the Old and New Testaments and in the myths of Greece...
"For it is now perfectly clear that before the violent entry of the late Bronze and early Iron Age nomadic Aryan cattle-herders from the north and Semitic sheep-and-goat-herders from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world, there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life that was completely repugnant to those lion hearts for whom not the patient toil of earth but the battle spear and its plunder were the source of both wealth and joy. In the older mother myths and rites the light and darker aspects of the mixed thing that is life had been honored equally and together, whereas in the later, male-oriented, patriarchal myths, all that is good and noble was attributed to the new, heroic master gods, leaving to the native nature powers the character only of darkness--to which, also, a negative moral judgment now was added. For, as a great body of evidence shows, the social as well as mythic orders of the two contrasting ways of life were opposed. Where the goddess had been venerated as the giver and supporter of life as well as consumer of the dead, women as her representatives had been accorded a paramount position in society as well as in cult. Such an order of female-dominated social and cultic custom is termed, in a broad and general way, the order of Mother Right. And opposed to such without quarter, is the order of the Patriarchy, with an ardor of righteous eloquence and a fury of fire and sword."
Joseph Campbell saw clearly that what people believe about where they are coming from forms the foundational fact upon which their self-image is erected. In his overview of the farthest realms of culture, Campbell drew a picture of reality that, if accepted as fact, leads to potentially earth-shaking consequences for our present day. In order to understand those potential consequences, let us examine Campbell's theory.
The picture Campbell draws of the distant past includes some assumptions that need to be spotlighted. He tells us, "...going back to c. 7500 B.C...Whereas earlier mankind had lived only precariously by food-collection (the hunt and vegetable-gathering) men now became substantial tillers of the earth. Self sustaining villages appeared, and their number, steadily increasing, spread in a broad band eastward and westward, arriving simultaneously at both oceans, about 2500 B.C...there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life that was completely repugnant to those lion hearts for whom not the patient toil of earth but the battle spear and its plunder were the source of wealth and joy." Clearly Campbell means to show us two kinds of people: those with "an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life"; and those "for whom not the patient toil of earth but the battle spear and its plunder were the source of wealth and joy." Campbell clearly intends his reader to decide that the peaceful culture was superior to the violent battle spear and plunder culture. Such an intention would be admirable if such a peaceful culture ever existed. To Campbell's discredit, nothing in history, archeology, or human nature supports Campbell's assumption.
Campbell omits some critical facts from his picture of history. While archaeology supports Campbell's assertion that self-sustaining villages began to appear about 7500 B.C. and appear to spread eastward and westward, archaeologists and anthropologists would never agree with a hidden assumption in Campbell's scenario: Campbell implies that the land around the most ancient villages was unoccupied. That the only people were the people who lived in the villages. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, most archaeologists and anthropologists, as well as ordinary horse-sense, attribute the formation of the first villages to the need for families to congregate together the better to protect themselves from invaders and other menacing threats in the homeland. Not until Campbell brings in the invasion of the Patriarchs do we have any hint that people had a problem holding on to their land. Campbell does make a quick allusion to a time prior to the settlement of villages when "mankind had lived precariously by food-collection (the hunt and vegetable-gathering)" but passing that fact rapidly by, he leads us to picture an idyllic Eden where worship of the Mother Goddess allows all people to feel in harmony with nature.
Anyone who takes a moment to analyze what we know of our species can clearly imagine what our species was involved in when all the world was a jungle and no law prevailed except the law of the jungle. It is possible to support Campbell's image of the past as long as all certain conditions are in place: groups of people composed only of blood-relations, good climate, plenty of easily available food. But bring in a hungry group of outsiders and watch the dreamy paradise disintegrate. Or watch what happens to our healthy, well-adjusted extended-family if the climate changes, a drought comes and the land begins to dry up. We see trouble in paradise.
Only when we analyze closely the role that land has played in the development of government can we see clearly the Campbell, instead of documenting the role that myth has played in our species, is himself creating myth for our species.
Everyone agrees that some people perceived themselves to own land long before official government documents were present in history. No one denies that somewhere in the farthest reaches of time some unnamed person had to be born on land never before occupied by Homo sapiens. In the framework of modern legal thinking, the first person born on the land would reasonably be understood to own the land by birthright. Theoretically, species other than Homo sapiens could advance a claim, some species quite forcefully, but such claims would be settled out of court, settled according to the law of the jungle. If Homo sapiens prevailed in the land dispute with other species, we can understand how the person left occupying the land would have agreed with the legal scholars and felt himself or herself to have the right to own the land, the rights of other creatures notwithstanding.
The land question became unsettled when the land one was born on no longer sustained life. Then one was forced to migrate. Anthropologists and archaeologists agree that migration, the nomadic lifestyle, was the stone age norm. If the migrater found fertile land that was occupied by one who perceived himself to own the land as a birthright, and if the present inhabitants refused to share the land, the migrater could pass on, or the migrater could stay and try to seize the land. Since the land problem began before legal documents came into being, there was no way of proving that the person occupying the land held the land as a birthright and therefore had the right to refuse land to the newcomers. The only certainty was without land the people would perish. Survival justified the battle that was sure to come. If the seizure was successful, the new owner based his claim to the land on what?: the force of arms.
In time, might replaced birthright as the foundation for land ownership. Campbell tells us that "the kingly art of government" came into existence sometime around 3500 B.C. But anyone who has insight into what was required for people to have access to land that supported the game, water, and vegetation necessary for survival has to know that government, the cooperative relationships among people for the purpose of enforcing their will on another, had been in existence ever since the first man and first woman had the first child. What Campbell called "the kingly art of government" was nothing more than an advanced stage in the orderly evolution of the search for a land that could support the culture that began with the first family of Homo sapiens.
But Campbell defines the "Age of the Patriarchs" as a "suddenly intrusive" invasion that overwhelmed the goddess mother and destroyed the idyllic culture that worshiped mother earth. As I said earlier it is possible to conceive such a culture in a tropical island protected by an ocean; there such a culture could develop and flourish surrounded by the bountiful mother earth and unthreatened by neither beast nor man. But the fertile crescent of the Levant, the area Campbell admits gave birth to civilization, was not a tropical paradise protected by an ocean. The Levant was Lions and Tigers, with the only protected places found in the most inaccessible and easily defended steep mountain hideaways. Everywhere else was exposed to invasion. Within such a setting, common-sense tells us the father of a family would not have been despised.
Voltaire told us that history is a joke the living play on the dead. Surely one of the cruelest jokes in history would be to turn the father in ancient families into a cruel, power-hungry ogre intent on overthrowing a peaceful culture because "its plunder was the source of wealth and joy". No doubt there have been such men throughout history, but few of them lived long enough to raise a family.
What does Campbell use as evidence to support his myth about this "essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic" culture that worshipped Mother Right? One piece of written evidence that he uses at various times in all his books is what he calls "the words of the goddess Isis addressed to her initiate Apuleius, c. 150 A.D." Isis says, "I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, the principal of them that dwell in heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses. At my will the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell are disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names.
"For the phrygians that are the first of all men call me the Mother of the gods of Pessinus; the Athenians, which are sprung from their own soil, Cecropian Minerva; the Cyprians, which are girt about by the sea, Paphian Venus; the Cretans, which bear arrows, Dictynian Diana; the Sicilians, which speak three tongues, infernal Proserpine; the Eleusinians, the ancient goddess Ceres; some Juno, other Bellona, others Hecate, others Ramnusie, and principally both sort of the Ethiopians, which dwell in the Orient and are enlightened by the morning rays of the sun; and the Egyptians, which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustomed to worship me, do call me by my true name, Queen Isis."
Now Campbell explains the meaning of this piece of "scientific" evidence: "No good Catholic would kneel before an image of Isis if he knew that it was she. Yet every one of the mythic motifs now dogmatically attributed to Mary as a historic human being belongs also--and belonged in the period and place of the development of her (Mary's) cult--to that goddess mother of all things, of whom both Mary and Isis were local manifestations; the mother-bride of the dead and resurrected god, whose earliest known representations now must be assigned to a date as early, at least, as c. 5500 B.C."
The date was important because Campbell's myth of the destruction of Mother Right by the warrior Patriarchs who brought in the myth of Creator depends on something like the words of Isis having been in existence throughout the history of civilization. To bolster that thesis, Campbell examines many artifacts and explains the pictures contained on them as evidence that the cult of Mother Right had a strong hold on the people in the Levant and Near East when the period known in Biblical language as the Age of the Patriarchs began. He summarized his evidence, "The entire ancient world, from Asia Minor to the Nile and from Greece to the Indus Valley, abounds in figurines of the naked female form, in various attitudes, of the all-supporting, all-including goddess: her two hands offering her breasts; her left pointing to her genitals and the right offering her left breast; nursing or fondling a male child; standing upright among beasts; arms extended, holding tokens--stalks, flowers, serpents, doves, or other signs. Such figurines are demonstrably related, furthermore, to the well-known Bronze Age myths and cults of the Great Goddess of many names, one of whose most celebrated temples stood precisely at Ephesus, where, in the year 431 A.d., the dogma of Mary as Theotokos, 'Mother of God,' was in Council proclaimed. At that time the pagan religions of the Roman Empire were being implacably suppressed: temples closed and destroyed; priests, philosophers, and teachers, banished and executed. And so it came to pass that, in the end and to our day, Mary, Queen of Martyrs, became the sole inheritor of all the names and forms, sorrows, joys, and consolations of the goddess-mother in the Western World: Seat of Wisdom...Vessel of Honor...Mystical Rose...House of Gold...Gate of Heaven...Morning Star...Refuge of Sinners...Queen of Angels...Queen of Peace."
Campbell is attempting to demonstrate that Christianity, the religion of the Creator imposed by the warrior Patriarchs, finally usurped Mother Right, took over its symbols and myths in service to the Patriarchs. He develops this theme by examining the various creation myths found in the ancient world. We should not be surprised at his conclusions: "There can be no question but that the imagery of the various creation stories of the Bible derives from a general fund of Sumero-Semitic myth...but it also is to be noted--as many have been zealous to point out--that between the Bible and this particular epic 'the divergences,' to quote one authority, 'are much more far-reaching and significant than are the resemblances.' The Bible represents a later stage in the patriarchal development, wherein the female principle...is reduced to its elemental state...and the male deity alone creates out of himself, as the mother alone had created in the past. The Babylonian epic stands between, along a line that may be logically schematized in four steps:
1. the world born of a goddess without consort;
2. the world born of a goddess fecundated by a consort;
3. the world fashioned from the body of a goddess by a male warrior-god; and
4. the world created by the unaided power of a male god alone...And we are going to find, throughout the following history of the orthodox patriarchal systems of the West, that the power of the goddess-mother of the world, whom we have here seen defamed, abused, insulted, and overthrown by her sons, is to remain as an ever-present threat to their castle of reason, which is founded upon a soil that they consider to be dead but is actually alive, breathing, and threatening to shift..."
After having established the context within which what Campbell calls "the patriarchal systems of the West", meaning of course the religions that grew out of the Old and New Testament, Campbell proceeds to do his level best to invalidate the historicity of any part of the message contained within the Bible. He does this through a comprehensive restatement of the work of those Biblical scholars who spent their lives proving that the Bible was something other than what it presents itself to be. He takes as his premise these words, "The world is full of origin myths, and all are factually false." Then quoting the work of Biblical scholars like de Witte, Oesterlay, T.E. Robinson, he draws a picture of a Creator who if He did exist, no respectable person would have anything to do with Him.
I'll give you a couple of examples: "According to our Holy Bible," Campbell tells us, his writer's voice redolent with sarcasm, "God and his world are not to be identified with each other. God, as Creator, made the world, but is not in any sense the world itself or any object within it, as A is not in any sense B. There can therefore be no question, in either Jewish, Christian, or Islamic orthodoxy, of seeking God and finding God either in the world or in oneself. That is the way of the repudiated natural religions of the remainder of mankind..." Now I cannot speak for Jewish or Islamic orthodoxy, but I can say that Christian orthodoxy says more than a little about a God who, although wholly other, did allow himself to be known! Paul tells us that the eternal deity of God is known to everyone through "the things that have been made". For this reason--because all men can know about God just from looking at the things that God created--God is rightfully angry when people decide to ignore the God who revealed himself in nature and substitute in His place gods that people make up for themselves. But Campbell, who is apparently aware of virtually everything else written on the subject of gods throughout the course of human history, missed what Paul had to say. This is not really surprising since had he mentioned what Paul said, Campbell's entire argument would have to be seen to be false. And we can be sure, if Campbell did not notice what Paul said about how men come to know the God revealed in the Bible, that Campbell would have failed to notice also what the Bible says about the God who condescended to allowed himself to be known, to be found in the person of Jesus Christ, the One of whom it was said he "is the fullness of the Godhead, bodily revealed." Also much could be said about Paul's announcement in the temple of Mars on the Aereopagus that "God is the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being." Obviously, I could go on and on, but the point should be clear: Campbell develops an analysis of reality that either utterly ignores the basis message in the Bible, or he distorts the meaning of the message so much that where the Bible says "yes", Campbell interprets it to say "no".
Chapter Six
Defending the Creator
There is awesome, knee-slapping irony in the title of this chapter. The idea that a Creator like the One described in the pages of the Bible would need people to defend Him is one of the most lubricous ideas conceivable by the mind of man. There is simply no analogy of futile weakness attempting to protect the strong that is quite as preposterous: mouse protecting the elephant doesn't come close, match flame protecting the sun is closer but not really near, an atom protecting all the matter in the universe still doesn't get it. All analogies fail in communicating how utterly ridiculous a person would be who thought they could add anything that the Creator of the Bible would need to defend Himself.
The Creator does not need defense. He is capable of taking care of Himself. What needs defending is people.
Born of woman in space and time, of all creatures most vulnerable from birth, people need protecting. Ideas fly through our heads like arrows through flesh that can mortally wound individuals, families, tribes, cultures, societies, nations...planets.
Planets die you know. Or maybe they just never come to life. Either way, the universe surrounds us with examples of planets different from ours. Dead places--too hot or too cold to support life. "Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice..." People need protecting. That's what the Founders of the United States of America said governments were for. To protect people. To protect their Rights. To protect Rights given to people by the Creator of people.
There is a war going on in the world that has as its goal the destruction of the idea of the Creator from the mind of man. That idea needs protecting. Not the Creator, the idea of the Creator. The idea of the Creator in the mind of man.
THE CREATOR IN THE BIBLE
Campbell defines all of history as a drama where people were deluded into following false myths, myths that were created by manipulative leaders whose only concern in using words was the control of people, rather than factual accuracy that amounts to truth. In explaining Freud's theory that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian nobleman, Campbell defines his attitude toward Biblical writers, "Freud's theory has, of course, been attacked from every side, both with learning and without. However, according to his own by no means unlearned view, it furnishes the only plausible psychological explanation of the peculiarly compulsive character of biblical belief, which is in striking contrast to the relaxed, poetic, and even playful approaches to mythology of the Greeks of the same period. Biblical religion, according to Freud, has the character of a neurosis, where a screen of mythic figuration hides repressed conviction of guilt, which, it is felt, must be atoned, and yet cannot be consciously faced. The screening myths are there to hide, not to reveal, a truth. Hence, they are insisted upon as factual--or, as people say today, 'existential.' The Jewish God is supposed to be, as the saying goes, a 'living God,' not a mere mythic god, like the others of the world; not a merely phantasmagoric symbol of something stemming, like a dream, from his worshipper's imagination. He was introduced from without by Moses and remains without, as a presumed fact."
How does Campbell substantiate his attitude toward the story in the Bible? He starts by telling us, "The world is full of origin myths, and all are factually false. The world is full, also, of great traditional books tracing the history of man (but focused narrowly on the local group0 from the age of mythological beginnings, through periods of increasing plausibility, to a time almost within memory, when the chronicles begin to carry the record, with a show of rational factuality, to the present. Furthermore, just as all primitive mythologies serve to validate the customs, systems of sentiments, and political aims of their respective local groups, so do these great traditional books. On the surface they may appear to be composed as conscientious history. In depth they reveal themselves to have been conceived as myths: poetic readings of the mystery of life from a certain interested point of view. But to read a poem as a chronicle of fact is--to say the least--to miss the point. To say a little more, it is to prove oneself a dolt. And to add to this, the men who put the books together were not dolts but knew precisely what they were doing--as the evidence of their manner of work reveals at every turn.
"The first decisive step toward a reading of the Old Testament as a product, like every other piece of ancient literature, not of God's literary talent but of man's, and, as such, not of eternity but of time, and specifically an extremely troubled time, was taken by Wilhelm M. L. de Wetter (1780-1849) in his epochal two-volume work..." Starting there, Campbell proceeds to dismantle, in so far as he was capable, every claim to historical accuracy put forth in the Bible. But his aim was not merely to demonstrate that the Bible was inaccurate as history, his aim was to invalidate the God talked about in the Bible.
In order to destroy the Creator revealed in the Bible, all Campbell had to do was destroy the Creator/Creature distinction in the mind of his readers. The way Campbell goes about destroying this distinction is through doing everything in his power to prove to his readers that the reader is not a Creature, but the Creator Himself! If that notion seems incredible, perhaps you need to stop and think about what the Bible says got our species in trouble with the Creator in the first place. "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden?"
"The woman said to the serpent, 'We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die."
"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
In order to convince people that there is no real distinction between the creature and the Creator, Campbell had to destroy totally any lingering influence of the story of the Garden of Eden.
Listen to Campbell, "The reason for the Occidental (western religions--Jewish, Christianity, Muslim) rejection--or one might perhaps better say, fear of comprehension--of this doctrine (the Creature as Creator) is that our notion of religion, as based on the recognition of a Creator distinct from his Creation, is fundamentally threatened by any recognition of divinity, not simply as present in the world but as inherent in its substance. For, to quote again the Upanishad: 'Whoever thus knows, 'I am the Imperishable,' becomes this universal: and not even the gods can prevent him from becoming so, for he becomes thereby their very self. Hence, whoever worships another divinity thinking 'He is one, and I am another"--he knows not. He is like a sacrificial animal for the gods. But if even one animal is taken away, it is unpleasant. What then, if many? And so it is not pleasing to the gods that men should know this.' Campbell continues, "Nor was it pleasing to Yahweh (the Hebrew word in the Old Testament normally translated "God") (note mine). "Nor is it pleasant to those who worship any god. For, according to this view, not any envisioned deity, but the individual, in his own reality, is that which is the reality of being: "You are the dark-blue bird and the green parrot with red eyes./You have the lighting as your child./You are the seasons and the seas./Having no beginning, you abide with all-pervadingness,/Wherefrom all beings are born.'
That is Campbell's myth summarized and precisely defined. Now he contrasts his myth with the story in the Bible. "According to our Holy Bible, on the other hand, God and his world are not to be identified with each other. God, as Creator, made the world, but is not in any sense the world itself or any object within it, as A is not in any sense B. There can therefore be no question, in either Jewish, Christian, or Islamic orthodoxy, of seeking God and finding God either in the world or in oneself. That is the way of the repudiated natural religions of the remainder of mankind: the foolish sages of the Orient and wicked priests of Sumer and Akkad, Babylon, Egypt, Canaan, and the rest--no less than the witch doctors and shamans of the jungle and the steppes, 'who say to a tree, ''You are my father,'' and to a stone, ''You gave me birth'' (Jeremiah 2:27); for, as the prophet Jeremiah has declared: 'the customs of the peoples are false.'"
Campbell continues, "In any comprehensive view of the great and small mythological systems out of which the beliefs of mankind have been drawn, the biblical idea of God must be clearly set apart, as representing a principle nowhere else exclusively affirmed; namely, of the absolute transcendence of divinity. In the sacred books of the Orient, the ultimate mystery of being is said to be transcendent, in the sense that it 'transcends' (lies above or beyond) human knowledge, thought, sight, and speech. However, since it is explicitly identified with the mystery of our own being, and of all being whatsoever, it is declared to be immanent, as well: in fact, that is the main point of most Oriental, as well as of most pagan, primitive, and mystical initiations. And it seems to me to be the point, also, of Yahweh's fear lest man, in the words of the Upanishad, should come to know 'I am the Unperishable!' and himself thus become God's very self. 'Behold, the man has become like one of us,' Yahweh declared; 'and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever...' It is the same mythology, but transformed to other values; namely, toil on earth, not the realization of bliss."
Hopefully anyone reading this will have enough insight into the message contained in the first three chapters of the book of Genesis to appreciate the ultimate irony contained in Campbell's analysis of the story. In fact, Campbell has identified the precise point of tension between the Creator revealed in the pages of the Bible and all of mankind. The story in Genesis makes clear that after eating the forbidden fruit, all Adam and Eve had to do to become like God was to put out their hand and eat the fruit that was on the other tree in the Garden, the Tree of Eternal Life. And the Creator stopped them! Why? Well, Campbell would have us believe it was because that was all that separated us from actually being exactly like God. And the Creator did not want that! Why not? Campbell would have us believe it was because the people who created the Creator myth were involved in creating an orderly society where people did what was necessary to make society function smoothly. That is why, from Campbell's point of view, "toil" instead of "bliss" is the goal of the Creator myth.
Campbell is no longer concerned about the Creator myth, except as an example of the infantile thinking of western civilization in the past. He knows the hold the Creator once had has been broken. But he is slightly disappointed that some not only still believe the myth but teach it to their children as truth. "Love, they say, is blind. In the curiously baffled history of mythological thought in the West, this chapter of Elohim's (the Creator, God in the Bible) creation has played a formidable part; for when it was thought to have been a report from the old World Artificer himself, rendered to Moses on the mountaintop, the majesty and simplicity of its lines carried a force that has now departed. We know today that they were set down by a poetizing priestly hand in the century of Aristotle...and to find (out these things) is, to say the least, disappointing. But even more so is the present custom of communicating all this archaic lore to our children, as God's eternal truth."
In case we don't get the point Campbell further clarifies his position in the following summary of the Biblical text, "Does it not, then, appear that we are dealing with the laws rather of myth, fairy tale, and legend than of any order of fact yet substantiated for either natural or human history? The past, as in every other folk tradition of the world, is here portrayed not with concern for what is known today as truth, but to give a semblance of supernatural support to a certain social order and its system of belief. That was then--as it is now and ever has been for those in *whose mind the good of a society holds a higher place than truth--adequate justification for any fabrication that the mentality of the time might be persuaded to accept. All that is really exceptional about the present remarkable example (the Bible) is that, whereas no modern thinker in his right mind would argue for the historicity of the fragments of myth brought together in the Odyssey, we have a modern literature of learning reaching from here to the moon and back, doing precisely that for those sewn together in these ancient tales of about the same date."
Here we see the gist of Campbell's attack on the Creator: the Creator is a concept created by people "in whose mind the good of a society holds a higher place than truth--adequate justification for any fabrication that the mentality of the time might be persuaded to accept." That is the backdrop upon which we are to view the evolution of western civilization, and the governments that evolved throughout western civilization.
Campbell would have us believe the message in the Bible has no literal validity, and the people of western civilization were the dupes of manipulative leaders who, while having good intentions, nevertheless treated the people like children. Joseph Campbell would have us believe that our forefathers were deluded children who had no real insight into reality, deluded children who actually believed there was a Creator out there, deluded children who accepted as fact the authority of governments that justified their authority on the basis of its relationship to the Creator.