Chapter Six

DESTROYING THE CREATOR

Anybody familiar with the Creator defined in the Bible would likely admit no idea on the face of the earth is more preposterous than the one implied in the title of this chapter. A Being like the one described in the Bible, by definition, could not be destroyed.

While the Creator described in the Bible could not be destroyed as a Being, all that is required to destroy the idea of the Creator is to persuade people such a Being as the One described in the Bible exists only as a concept in the mind of man.

Now most everybody on earth knows that a concept is nothing more than an idea, an explanation in words of something that exists in someone's mind. The concept of the Creator is well known. Briefly summarized, the concept goes like this: the Creator is a Being with a Will, and a Mind, and a Plan. The Creator is infinite, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, omni-everything. The Creator is actually out-there, an aspect of objective reality, and is called "the Creator" because everything in the universe was created by the Creator. For thousands of years the Creator existed in western civilization as more than concept; to the great majority of people in western civilization the Creator was fact.

Joseph Campbell destroyed millions of people's ability to see the Creator as fact. He accomplished this feat by changing the Creator from fact to concept in the minds of people.

It is absolutely critical that we see the distinction between fact and concept. Fact is an idea that exists in the mind. So too is concept. At this point it is impossible to distinguish fact from concept. The distinction becomes apparent when we see that fact is believed to have objective reality, whereas everyone agrees concept may exist only in the mind of a person.

The scientific method teaches us how to distinguish between concept and fact. The method through which we establish this most important distinction is called perception. Elementary science teaches us that all scientific knowledge begins with a hypothesis, a theory about some specific state of affairs. For instance, a student might wonder what water is composed of. Suppose the student theorizes, hypothesizes, conceptualizes that water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. This hypothesis is not fact--it is concept: it exists only in the mind of the student. Now if the student conducts an experiment and in that experiment perceives that mixing two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom creates water, and if other people reproduce the student's experiment exactly and perceive the same results, the student is led by science to see that the hypothesis is no longer concept, the concept is now called fact, scientific fact. Even though there has been no change in the elements of the idea in the mind of the student, there has been a fundamental change in the role those elements play in the mind of the student. Now that the concept has been changed to fact through perception of the results of the experiment, the student's options as a scientist are now determined, they are now ruled, by the thing that once was called concept but is now called fact. When it was concept, there was no authority in that thing to rule the student. Once the concept became fact it carried with it the authority to rule the mind of the student.

Joseph Campbell used the scientific method to destroy the Creator as fact. He changed the Creator from fact to concept and convinced the reader that Campbell's definition of god was fact. Remember what we read earlier, "...our view is no longer confined to a spot of space on the surface of the earth. It surveys the whole of the planet. And this fact, this lack of horizon is something new...Now it has been--as I have already said--chiefly to the scientific method of research that this release of mankind has been due, and along with mankind as a whole, every developed individual has been freed from the once protective but now dissolved horizons of the local land, local moral code, local modes of group thought and sentiment, local heritages of signs. But this scientific method was itself a product of the minds of already self-reliant individuals courageous enough to be free. Moreover, not only in the sciences but in every department of life the will and courage to credit one's own senses and to honor one's own decisions, to name one's own virtues and to claim one's own vision of truth, has been the generative forces of the new age..."

At the heart of Campbell's power was an analysis of reality that defined western civilization as a story of people who could not tell the difference between concept and fact. He believed the scientific method of research had provided "release of mankind" because it was through the scientific method that people became enabled to clearly distinguish between fact and concept.

Campbell gave concept a new name; he called it "the local heritage of signs" but he was still talking about what we commonly know as concept: "...and along with mankind as a whole, every developed individual has been freed from the once protective but now dissolved horizons of the local land, local moral code, local modes of group thought and sentiment, local heritages of signs." Campbell believed that the scientific method had freed people from inherited concepts that had ruled mankind in the past. It was through being delivered from the local heritage of signs that individuals were freed from the local land, local moral code, local modes of group thought and sentiment" that had once held them in bondage.

The local heritage of signs were the words a person inherited that explained the answers to the questions that had to be answered if an individual was to have a self-image. Campbell understood better than most that a person's self-image literally provided the structuring force that guided every action in the life of an individual.

Campbell contended that the scientific method allowed an individual to ignore the local heritage of signs and through ignoring the local heritage of signs, the individual became free from the local land, the local moral code, the local modes of group thought and sentiment. As a result of this freedom from "local" structuring forces, there was now the opportunity for new structuring forces to be chosen by the individual. Campbell would provide these new structuring forces.

At the heart of the local heritage of signs in western civilization is the concept of the Creator. Campbell explains it this way: "In the Western rangers of mythological thought and imagery, on the other hand, whether in Europe or in the Levant, the ground of being is normally personified as the Creator, of whom Man is the creature, and the two are not the same (italics mine); so that here the function of myth and ritual cannot be to catalyze an experience of ineffable identity. Man alone, turned inward, according to this view can experience only his own creaturely soul, which may or may not be properly related to its Creator. The high function of Occidental (western) myth and ritual, consequently, is to establish a means of relationship--of God to Man and Man to God. Such means are furnished, furthermore, by institutions, the rules of which cannot be learned through any scrutiny of nature, whether inward or without. Supernaturally revealed, these have come from God himself, as the myth of each institution tells; and they are administered by his clergy, in the spirit of the myth."

In order understand what has happened in the modern world it is necessary to understand what Campbell meant by "the spirit of the myth." Remember that Joseph Campbell presented himself as a scientist whose job was to teach us the science of mythology? He specifically stated that through the scientific method people were now in a position to know the facts about mythology. These "facts"--the discoveries Campbell believes himself to have made--comprise the totality of what he means by "the spirit of the myth."

And what are the facts that comprise "the spirit of the myth?" Campbell summarized the basic principle that governed everything he had to say about myth, "...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 other door."

Basic principles are "basic" precisely because they form the base upon which every other fact is built. Basic principles are the facts that compose the table upon which rests other facts that comprise the zigsaw puzzle of understanding. Therefore any final understanding is determined, is a direct product, of the basic principles upon which the understanding is constructed.

Now let's examine what Campbell had to say about the "natural history" of the god myth chosen by the people of western civilization. We have already established that the myth was a myth about "the Creator, of whom Man is the creature, and the two are not the same..." It is most important to remember that Campbell proposed that two things must be understood before an examination of the Creator myth could occur: (1) "that whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted"; (2) neither could it be "dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence".

Those who accepted Campbell's definition of myth were obliged to approach the study of the Creator after having presupposed the Creator could not be literally true. Campbell was exactly like a judge who instructed the jury before hearing the evidence that the person being tried had to be judged guilty. No matter what evidence was presented to the contrary, the Creator could never be judged to be literally true. Let us hope we never stand before a jury so instructed.

The question arises as to why these "myths" Campbell spent his life studying are important enough to warrant our attention if none of them are literally true. Campbell explains his view of the importance of these myths: "The comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit; for we find that such themes as the fire-theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected hero have a worldwide distribution--appearing everywhere in new combinations while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same. Furthermore, whereas in tales told for entertainment such mythical themes are taken lightly--in a spirit, obviously, of play--they appear also in religious contexts, where they are accepted not only as factually true but even as revelations of the verities to which the whole culture is a living witness and from which it derives both its spiritual authority and its temporal power. No human society has yet been found in which such mythological motifs have not been rehearsed in liturgies; interpreted by seers, poets, theologians, or philosophers; presented in art; magnified in song; and ecstatically experienced in life-empowering visions. Indeed, the chronicle of our species, from its earliest page, has been not simply an account of the progress of man the tool-maker, but--more tragically--a history of the pouring of blazing visions into the minds of seers and the efforts of earthly communities to incarnate unearthly covenants. Every people has received its own seal and sign of supernatural designation, communicated to its heroes and daily proved in the lives and experience of its folk. And though many who bow with closed eyes in the sanctuaries of their own tradition rationally scrutinize and disqualify the sacraments of others, an honest comparison immediately reveals that all have been built from one fund of mythological motifs--variously selected, organized, interpreted, and ritualized, according to local need, but revered by every people on earth."

From Campbell's point of view myths are important because everybody who ever lived was influenced in a fundamental way by them. But he had another reason: A study of mythology "compels us to study the cultural history of mankind as a unit." Remember Campbell's overarching goal? "...to work for the forces of unity". In order to create a unified world view, mankind must perceive itself to be a unit--to be one. Anything that contributed to this unified world view was a step in the right direction for Campbell. If it was possible to see the common thread that binds all mankind together regardless of apparent cultural distinctions, then a foundation for the unified world view had been found. Campbell believed a "natural history" of myth could allow people to see the structuring force that binds all people together.

Campbell continues, "A fascinating psychological, as well as historical, problem is thus presented. Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth. In fact, the fullness of his life would even seem to stand in a direct ratio to the depth and range not of his rational thought but of his local mythology. Whence the force of these unsubstantial themes, by which they are empowered to galvanize populations, creating of them civilizations, each with a beauty and self-compelling destiny of its own? And why should it be that whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination--preferring even to make life a hell for themselves and their neighbors, in the name of some violent god, to accepting gracefully the bounty the world affords?"

Campbell believed that since man "cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth" someone might as well come up with a myth that has the power to bring all people together into a unified world view.

But here's the point that made Joseph Campbell a decisive influence in modern culture: the myth Joseph Campbell was constructed was a myth supposedly constructed out of the "facts" discovered through scientific research. He explains it best: "No one of adult mind today would turn to the Book of Genesis to learn of the origins of the earth, the plants, the beasts, and man. There was no flood, no tower of Babel, no first couple in paradise, and between the first known appearance of men on earth and the first buildings of cities, not one generation (Adam to Cain) but a good two million must have come into this world and passed along. Today we turn to science for our imagery of the past and of the structure of the world, and what the spinning demons of the atom and galaxies of the telescope's eye reveal is a wonder that makes the babel of the Bible seem a toyland dream of the dear childhood of our brain."

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. Then 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 or 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!...

"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, transubstantiate 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."

And that is exactly what is happening in the United States of America today. Everything, even God Himself, has been defined as simply a matter of interpretation. Christians contend their interpretation should rule this nation, New Agers contend for theirs, Jews contend for theirs, Muslims contend for theirs, Agnostics contend for theirs.

Within the political context of the United States of America, such acrimonious debates are manageable. While dangerous, and sometimes lethal, such confusion among the population of this nation has occurred often in the past. History has shown that the American people, one way or the other, will eventually arrive at a living arrangement that does not threaten government's ability to maintain law and order. But it does not take a prophet to see that the world is entering a time of extraordinary political change, a time when the political patterns of the past will undergo radical change.