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[Music] [Music] [Music] Hello, I'm Susan Sarandon. Mythos with Joseph Campbell is a series about myths and mythology. Simply put, a mythology is a set of stories or ideas that tries to make sense of the world and our place in it. But these are big ideas, ideas that make you think. This series is probably not for everyone, but neither is it exclusive. No special knowledge or education is required. You need only a deep interest in what it means to be alive to experience these ideas as Campbell brings them to life.
Joe Campbell taught mythology and comparative religion for 50 years. In one sense, he was a conventional scholar, spending 38 years at one college, Sarah Lawrence in New York. His approach to mythology, however, was far from conventional. Instead of concentrating on the differences that separated cultures throughout the ages and across the globe, Campbell sought the similarities, the universal themes of the human experience, those ideas we share in common with all humankind. Before he died in 1987, Joe Campbell made a final tour across the United States, presenting a series of lectures and seminars. Taken together, they represent Campbell's vision of the one great story of our human adventure, the story told here in this series of programs. Before beginning this story, Campbell offers a short explanation of how a functioning mythology serves both the individual and the society.
[Music] I see mythology, when it's in a socially functioning way, as serving four functions. The first function is what I would call the met—the mystical function. Mystical, it opens up a realization of the mystical dimension, that behind the surface phenomenology of the world, there is a transcendent mystery source, and that is the source also within yourself.
The second function has to do with the image of the world, what I would call a cosmological function. This changes radically from time to time. In the very early hunting and planting and gathering societies, a relatively small horizon, and the science was that of what was visible. It was in terms of the visible world. The sun rose, went down. The moon rose, it went down. With Copernicus, this all changed. The sun isn't rising; it's we that are twisting. The cosmology is totally changed. Cosmology and science change the mythology. To be up to date and really to work in the minds of people who are living in the modern scientific world, must itself incorporate the modern scientific world.
The third function of a mythology is sociological, to validate and maintain a certain specific social order here and now of this specific society. The fourth problem is the pedagogical problem, guiding the individual harmoniously through the inevitable crisis of the stages of life in his world today, in terms of its goods, its values, its dangers.
If every story has a beginning, where does the story of humankind begin? Where does mythology come from? For Campbell, the beginning to this story does not exist somewhere out there in the distant past. Rather, it starts right here, right now, within us, with what it means to be a human being. It's easy to see what separates us from each other, what makes us different. We all look and sound differently, and most societies have different values and customs. These are the physical and cultural distinctions that set us apart. What then are the characteristics we share in common? How are we all the same? To answer this question, Campbell uses the language of psychology to penetrate to the core of our human spirit.
In the last years of the last century and first of this, there was a very important German anthropologist named Bastian, Adolf Bastian, who was a world traveler and early recognized that in the mythologies and religions of the world, there were certain themes, certain motifs that recurred everywhere. And he called these elementary ideas, elementary duncan. He recognized also, of course, that in the various provinces and in various centuries, these elementary ideas appeared in different costumes, in different forms, with different applications, and associated with totally different social situations. And he called these local variations, phil gedonken, or ethnic or folk ideas.
Now, this is a very important distinction. In some of the writings following Bastian, these two ideas have become confused, and he has been said to have represented simply the idea of the elementary idea. On the other hand, we have to take into account the distinction between what is universal in mythology and religion, and then what is provincial and separate. This divides our whole subject into two departments. One, that of the differences, is the concern principally of historians and ethnologists, and they make a very important point of the distinctions. On the other hand, there's the problem of the universals. Why do they occur everywhere? This is a psychological problem, and this is the one that I propose to deal with in today's seminar.
Of the psychologists who've dealt with these problems, and there have been many, for me, Carl Jung says the most—now, I don't present him as a final, definitive theorist. His work is suggestive. This is an enormous subject and full of mystery still. So I want to begin today by briefly reviewing Jung's approach to the problem of the elementary ideas, which he calls archetypes of the unconscious. Now, that immediately gives us a psychological ground on which to build, that these are in some way features in the unconscious of the human animal, and experiences that coming through the nervous system are assimilated and interpreted in terms of these psychological ground archetypes.
So, to begin with, we start with this simple circle here. This is a picture of the soul, the psyche. Plato says the soul is a circle. So, uh, here we have it. Now, every circle has a center, and that is indicated by the dot in the center there. The horizontal line represents the threshold of consciousness. Above that is our mental waking consciousness, and below that is what might be called the wisdom consciousness of the body itself. The term that Jung uses for the totality is the Self. Now, this word, the Self, in his terminology, is not to be confused with the Hindu Atman, which has been translated as the Self. If Atman were what I was talking about, there would be no circle there at all; it'd be just a white flash on the screen. The Atman is undifferentiated consciousness. But what Jung is talking about is consciousness enclosed in a specific human body, namely yours, and it is conditioned in all of its experience and action by the conditioning body in which it resides. Male, female, young, old, healthy, or decrepit, one way or another, that is the machine that you've got to live with, and it's with that that you've got to deal. There's no use wishing, uh, you were, you know, six foot eight, tall, blonde, and blue-eyed. The bounds of your experience are indicated by the circle.
The center of consciousness is termed the Ego. Simply means "I" in German is the "Ich." I have represented this as rectangular to indicate that its mode of judgment is not in accord with that of the body, with that of nature. This room that we're in is rectangular; it's built by consciousness. When you walk out of this room, you come into the country out there, this beautiful country. It has nothing to do with rectangles, and all conscious thinking is likewise out of accord with the order of the body. Myths come from down here, from where the energies come from, as dreams do. And it's the business of the ego not to try to dictate to this circle, to say how square it should be, but to try to bring its impulse system into relationship to the conditions of the environment which the ego has constructed. Culture is a cooperation, as a result of a cooperation between the Self, you might say, and the ego. And mythology is the language of the Self speaking to the ego system, and the ego system has to learn how to read it. And for the most part, we in our world have forgotten.
Now, down below there, we have the Shadow, as Jung calls it. It's like the blind spot for the ego, that about yourself of which your ego is completely unconscious, of which it has no knowledge whatsoever. I've rendered it in a series of separate strokes. This Shadow, in Jung's terminology, corresponds almost precisely to the Freudian unconscious. The Freudian unconscious is constituted of repressed experiences, repressed shocks that the infant, first the infant and then later the growing child, has experienced. Jung's first interest in Freud was in Freud's theory of the mechanism of repression. What is it in the psyche that so puts these things out of sight that consciousness is completely unaware of them? And it is these shocks that have set up the slant, the posture, the, uh, the structuring attitude of the individual to life. It's these that constitute the personal unconscious. The shocks that will have, uh, upset and transformed the life experience of one person will not be precisely the same as those that will have done so for another. And so the Shadow is the order of what Jung calls the personal unconscious. On the other hand, the Self is a function of the biology of the body. We have two things here: we have a basic human biology, and we have then a system of individual experiences. Both in the unconscious realm, as far as our ego knowledge is concerned, it's out of those centers then that dreams come. And dreams, of course, will be primarily personally oriented. They will have come from the Shadow system, mostly. But the Shadow system rests on the deeper ground.
When we come to myths, the imagery is out of the general system. And Jung speaks of two orders of dream. There will be one order of symbols that you can interpret by personal associations, the free association technique that Freud uses. But there will be then other images in your dreams at certain, uh, critical moments in your life that you cannot interpret through personal associations. They will be strictly mythological in their, uh, character. On the other hand, you can have dreams that have to do with personal experiences that are quite peculiar to yourself. And, and these Jung calls the, the smaller or little dreams, and the others, the big dreams. Often big dreams occur in technicolor.
The next problem is this: the Persona. Personae, persona is the Latin word for the mask worn by an actor. Each society has its wardrobe of personae. For you, if we were here in Taos, let's say, 250 years ago or something like that, we would be an American Indian community, and there'd be a totally different set of personae. Tasks to do. These are the phil kagan, these are the folk ideas. This is the system of transformations that we have to live with. And it's through the persona of the society that one comes into relationship to other human beings, and also into the world of nature, which means into the world of one's own character. These will differ from one society to another.
Now, in a traditional society, and the supreme example is traditional India, the individual is meant to identify with the persona. He is to live in terms of what is called the dharma, the duty system that is put upon him. And he is a Brahmin, he is a warrior, he is a merchant. He isn't playing the role; he is it. In our modern Western society, which has much more respect for the individual values and individuality, the person who identifies himself with his role, we call a stuffed shirt. You have to put the role off and put it on again. It's not part of you. The executive comes home in the evening and is met by the executive's wife. The executive plays ball with his, the executive son, for a little while. And then later in the night, the wife will have the privilege of going to bed with an executive. And, uh, this is the thorough stuffed shirt. Not only are you, in our society, supposed simply to put the role on and put it off, but also you're supposed to develop your critical faculties. This is the function of ego, of which the Orient and traditional societies know nothing. The whole character of Oriental thinking is elimination of ego, which in Sanskrit is called a hung, a hunkara, making the noise "I." By eliminating ego, annihilating the critical faculty, you identify with the role that the society has put upon you. In other words, what we think of as the creative faculty is completely gone.
Now, this is one of the problems when a Western person goes to an Oriental guru to become illuminated. The, the Oriental person has a relatively fragile ego. But we have been asked, ever since childhood, you know, "Johnny, would you like chocolate or vanilla ice cream?" "I want strawberry." Uh, so we go out and get strawberry. I always crave for the kid. We're even allowed to choose our wives and husbands. This doesn't happen in the East. Life happens to people in the East; they don't choose it. And so this faculty, this judging, this evaluating, this accepting responsibility faculty, is not developed. So a Western person with a developed evaluating ego goes to an Oriental guru, and the guru has a little hammer to break egos. That's what's known as method. And the, the person comes in with this rock of an ego. The, the guru is used to things about as fragile as those things you hang on Christmas trees. And you come with your ego and you say, "Guru, I want to get rid of my ego." So he takes the hammer. Nothing happens. I know people who've had hammers hitting them for 40 years, and nothing has happened, and they think there's something wrong with them. And this is, uh, psychologically bad news.
This important, you know, the word "sati" in Sanskrit, it's spelled S-A-T-I, long I. That word "sati" comes from the verb "to be." The woman who has thrown herself on her husband's funeral pyre and been burned up with him has performed her duty as a wife. This is a long, long idea. The two are one. He has died; she has gone down into the death world, as, uh, in honor, in the Sumerian story, goes down to rescue Dumuzi or somebody like that. It's an old story, as the woman's hero deed, giving up her life to join that with her husband, and both achieve immortality through that. We say "commit sati." In India, they say the woman becomes sati; she becomes something. She is something. And the woman who doesn't do it is a sati is nothing. One's character is a function of one's identification with one's socially given duty, a totally different system from ours.
Now, another thing to remember with the persona, persona system, is this includes the morality as well. The morality of the cust—of the culture is involved in this. So that morality is something you put on and put off. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." And a lot of people have trouble with that.
When people hear the word psychology, they often think of therapy. Someone has emotional problems and needs help to get through a crisis. To Campbell, psychology's greatest value lies in the insights it offers to all of us about how we live our lives. Campbell believed that the more we know about our common psychological roots, the more we feel connected not only to the rest of humanity but to the mystery source of all life. He has spoken so far about the Self, our conscious and unconscious being, and about the persona system, the relationship of the individual to society. But what of the most mysterious relationship of all? That between man and woman.
Now we come to the next business: anima, animus. The anima is the readiness in the masculine psyche to respond to a female presence, put it that way. It's the ideal of woman that is in the psyche. This has in each case two aspects. One is the archetypal or collective anima image. All males are born with that readiness. But the other is the personal aspect. Now, let us ask, how is the personal aspect rendered? The first object for a subject is mother. The child is born from the mother's body and is immediately put on the mother's body, and mother is the world. The child has had no other experience. The entire eros, the entire libido, the entire experience of object is of the mother. And the child is completely ready for that. The mother as environment and the child as the creature are comp—perfectly matched. Child knows exactly what to do, goes to the mother's breast, and is now being nourished. Didn't have to be told this. What to do? The body is made to live in its environment. So the first object for any subject is a female object, the mother. And how does that mother behave? Is she glad to have the child, or does she resent it? All this comes through. Is she gentle? Is she skillful? And so forth, and so on. This is the first determination of the anima structure. This is the personal experience, and it will differ from mother to mother. Then all images of woman later in experience rest on that. They build up this image and transform it, differentiate it, and so forth. So the male relationship to the female is based on a very singular ground, which in each individual experience will have its own character, personal, collective aspects.
The experience of the male as male, as something else, comes later. I'm told somewhere in the second year. Up to that time, Daddy has been mother's hairy helper, but now the, uh, and really not quite satisfactory either. Then, um, what comes along around this other age crisis is the realization there is an essential difference here, and I'm on this side or that. Now we have the Freudian family romance of the Oedipus and the Electra complexes, the male boy and the male father with rivalry for the mother, and in the girl's case, the young girl and the mother in rival for the father. This is a quite secondary situation, and of course, this will differ from society to society. In our society, where we have the closed family, you have a quite different situation from what you would have, for example, in a Polynesian village where everybody is everybody's father and mother. The children are the children of the community, and people behave with children as though they were their own children. The thing is a totally different thing. So we have two totally different structures here.
The male in relation to the female, the female relates to the male. Furthermore, by the time the Daddy is recognized as something different from mother's helper merely, there are other males in the environment. There are uncles, brothers, doctors, and gentlemen, perhaps, whom father knows nothing about. So, as Jung says, the woman has a kind of jewelry for her animus or anima, whereas the male has the singular bunner.
And now comes my masterpiece. This diagram shows that knowledge of the unconscious is gained by the ego by way of projections. The unconscious, and this is something that is really serious, unconscious is unconscious. You don't know what's down there until you experience it by way of a projection. So a woman walks in the room, and I'm struck. What's happened? She has received my anima projection. I was a dimple here or something like that that mother had, and there it is. I don't recognize this mother; I think it's that out there. And then I married the creature. Now, I don't know what I'm doing, really. The, uh, what I'm really, uh, joining up with is a projection of my own psyche. And it doesn't take long in marriage, for a fact to show through. And, uh, here comes the typical, uh, problem. Now, what are you going to do? You thought you were marrying this, and you got that. And, uh, there are two possibilities. One, you can say, "Darling, I am disillusioned. I'm taking my anima back for reprojection." And, uh, this, this can go on. The only alternative is to transform passion into compassion and say, "Well, dear, all right, I accept the fact." And then there comes, uh, what we call love. Love is really the relationship to the person; it's a person-to-person relationship that develops. Otherwise, there's tension, but there has to be a reconciliation with the fact world. And this we call maturation.
Now, I've got up there not only people but animal and trees. Women frequently identify themselves in their dreams and visions with vegetable forms and so forth. And we can fall in love with the tree, with the plant, projecting into the plant sentiments which belong properly to human beings or animals. I know people who have invested more love in their cats than in their families. The, these things, uh, are inevitable. So what I want to go through today are these projections. I'm going to deal first with the shadow projections. The shadow is the rejected, frightening aspect of your experience of life, which then gets projected onto people. The shadow in your life will always be a person of your own sex. It's the you that you are refusing to admit. It has terrifying, threatening qualities, but you must remember that it also encloses values, positive gold values, that you have not allowed to come into your life. The shadow, you don't know anymore why it is you don't like that person. I've had the experience, the rather common one in my life: "I do not like you, Dr. Fell." "The reason why I do not know, I cannot tell, but this I know and know right well: I do not like you, Dr. Fell." Well, this is a person that's doing things that I was taught not to do, let's say, something like that. Then the anima projection. But then there's another, the projection of the Self, the idea of your totality, your fulfillment. This is a very important matter in with respect to education, pedagogy. There's a theory going around now that the character of the teacher doesn't matter so long as the teacher has the information that's necessary. This is all wrong. It's the character of the teacher that evokes ideal ideological participation and spontaneous identification and learning. Everyone can remember four or five teachers out of many dozen who actually did something to one. These were people that evoked the self-image, and with it the learning, and what they had to teach.
And now we come to the next problem. What is it that enforces the persona system? That enforces the folk idea system? The first level are the neighbors. What will the neighbors think? Little Sati won't throw herself on her husband's funeral pyre. What will the neighbors think? So we throw her on. This is the most important, really. Then we have the whole institutionalization of, uh, morality and social custom and so forth that enforces this system. Then we have the idea of nature. The idea of nature. People speak of, you know, natural moral laws and all that sort of thing. So there were any such thing. And finally, with this, I represent the idea of transcendence. This is the "daz durch" through which the soul goes, burning out all temporality into eternal life. The ideas that are represented here, the grades of ideas, are what enforce this circle. And when the persona system is enforced by the society, there will be, and a socially locally conditioned anima, animus system also. The image of the mother, she is of a member of a certain society, a certain race, and so forth. This establishes this.
Now, there are two kinds of mythology. There's the, what is called the right-hand path, the mythology of the village compound that keeps you fixed in the context of your world. And you grow up here, you live as expected, you live a dignified, successful, and in a rich society, a richly developed life. On the other hand, you may flip out. You may have the feeling of incongruities here. "This doesn't go with me." And then you move out. You move out into a realm of danger. This is known as the left-hand path. You follow the way of your own bliss, and you are in a realm for which there are no rules. And since your bliss is not mine, you don't know where you're going here. You will live a life of danger, creativity, perhaps not a respected life, but certainly an interesting one. And these are the two choices, and there are mythologies for both. There's the right-hand mythology, which is local to each culture. And then there is what I would call the general mythology of the hero journey, the night sea journey, the hero quest, where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before, namely, the fulfillment in time and space of his own potentialities, which are peculiar to himself.
The ego, persona, the shadow, anima, animus, projections—the more we try to arrive at a simple understanding of these ideas, the more complex the whole matter becomes. We all have an intuitive sense of these things, yet with the language of psychology, sometimes serves more to confuse than to clarify. Besides, if these ideas are constant to the human race, why must we rely on unfamiliar vocabulary to understand them? According to Campbell, we needn't. The archetypes of the unconscious, the universal themes, are accessible to all through the universal language of art. In art, Campbell sees the abstract elementary ideas take concrete form.
And now I've come to another phase of this wonderful Dali, in his best period, about 1928, of "Persistence of Memory," or "Wet Watches." This is the experience of time in the unconscious. We have two systems: the conscious system, where time goes tick, tick, tick, and we grow old with it. The other, the unconscious system, who just doesn't know anything about this. And in the late old age, you can have experiences that really are appropriate to much earlier years. So what are you going to do about it? These two systems operating in us.
Here is another of his, dream inspired by the buzz of a bee around a pomegranate, one quarter second before waking. This is the pomegranate with the bee. Here is the pomegranate in the dream. The pomegranate is the fruit of the underworld, psychologically, the unconscious. Out of it come the powers of the underworld. First, the fish that swims in the abyssal waters. Noah did not have to take fish into the ark. The fish is an ever-present power in the abyss of the unconscious. And then the shadow, the threat aspect, pouncing at her. Zoom! That's, that's really out of Freud.
Now, here's the story. When the ego becomes uncertain about its moral position, everything in the psyche begins to move. This happens on campuses. Student A finds herself rooming with Student B. Student B comes from a family, let's say, that votes Republican, and Student A's family votes Democrat. The families would not speak to each other. They would even burn each other at the stake if they, if they could. And then they, these students find, "Oh, there's a perfectly decent person." Their whole borrow and theoretical position is loose. And then that takes place. Two very important movements. "Whoa, that's me coming up, boy, as your own other side." I call that the knock-knock principle. I once knew a, nice little Christian gentleman who said, "If I weren't a good Christian, I'd be a terrible person." I asked, "Well, what, what do you think you'd do?" He didn't know. I said, "You're not a danger to society." One can overestimate the threat of one's own shadow. And the other is the allure of the exotic. You see, what's happening is the social bounds, the social right-hand path system, is disintegrating. Shadow comes up, and you have the collision of righteous against darkness and so forth and so on. And the other, exotic allure, all first out the island and those hula girls, that I call the twinkle, twinkle principle. And, uh, and this is, this is what happens. Then the poor man, everything he wants to do, he doesn't want to do. And so he's hanging on more tenaciously than ever to the persona system. So half his energy goes into, into holding on to what he expects himself to be, and the other end of wishing it was something else. And then he experiences depression, no energy for anything except that tension.
This is the way you feel. This is another Dali, and it's called "Premonitions of Civil War," or "Soft Composition with Boiled Beans." But I, I present this for a certain reason. "Premonitions of Civil War." The dynamics of the psyche, the dynamics of the society, are equivalent. What has been pushed down is going to come up, and there's the tension. And what we were talking about a few years ago, the, the explosions of the inner city, is exactly the social counterpart of this coming of the shadow up. It's a function of the organism that has not been recognized and given its position. And always out of that comes an enlargement of consciousness. And there has to be an assimilation of the two. Knock-knock, twinkle-twinkle, transformation of consciousness. One comes up against intolerable decisions time and again. And that means that you have not a moral order that actually takes into account the necessities and actualities of life. The prime example in our biblical tradition of the intolerable decision is that of Abraham, invited by his God to kill his son Isaac. That's an intolerable decision.
This is an 18th-century painter, Fuseli, an Italian painter, and it's called "The Nightmare." This is a whole century before Freud, Jung. Artists knew all these things long ago. It's wonderful to read Thomas Mann's paper on Freud and the Future. Somebody invited Thomas Mann to give the talk at the, uh, party for Freud's 80th birthday. Well, who would in his right mind invite an artist to talk about anybody but himself? So what, what Mann really did was talk about himself. And he said, "The wonderful thing about Freud was that, never having read any of the great romantic philosophers—Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and the rest—he had, out of his own investigations, translated their romantic philosophy into medical language." This. And then he went on to say, "Now I, in my work, I knew all these things before I ever read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. And now, of course, you see, doing my Joseph novels, I've moved on to Jung." That was a great talk for Freud's 80th birthday. But here we have it. The artist knew these things. So what's so frightening and terrifying about a horse and a cat? Only what she has projected into the idea. And this is obviously an erotic nightmare of terrifying import.
The elementary ideas of Bastian, the psychology of Freud and Jung, the philosophy of Schopenhauer—these are big ideas. Many of us have a surface knowledge of these individuals. Yet, with Joe, we can begin to appreciate the themes common to their work and to the human condition. But these men represent the West. If these ideas are truly universal, what about the rest of the world? What about the East?
Some years ago, I was greatly surprised and interested to learn that in India, the same two aspects of mythological and art forms that Bastian had recognized were recognized as well, namely, the elementary and the folk aspects. The folk aspect of an artwork or an image is known as *deshi*. D-E-S with a stroke over it, I. And *deshi* means local, provincial, and popular. I think that's an interesting combination of words. The elementary, however, is designated by a term that I find enormously interesting. It's called *marga*. M-A-R-G-A. The first day along A. And *marga* means the path. It's from a Sanskrit root *rigg*, which relates to the trail left by an animal, and the sense of it is that by following the path of the archetypes, the archetypal images, the elementary form, or the elementary aspect of the image, you are led to the den of the animal that left the path, and that then is your heart. And the animal is the human animal. You are led inward to yourself by following the path of the archetypes.
Now, this gives a clue to the two fundamental aspects of the mythological message. The elementary idea is enclosed in the folk idea. The source of the elementary idea is the human imagination, the human spirit, and its address is to the human imagination, the human spirit. The folk inflection relates specifically to the sociology of the local culture. The elementary idea is enclosed in the folk system. The rituals of the folk, consequently, also enclose the elementary instruction, the elementary idea. The young person growing up and being trained in the ritual life and moral order of the society is at the same time being introduced to the elementary ideas, which are the very ground of his own nature. So the first function, then, is to induct the young person into the society. And since the enclosed elementary idea speaks deeply to the individual's own spirit, he is deeply engaged in the society. And this is the kind of engagement that comes of identification with the society, that comes from induction into a traditional culture. We don't have it. Our commitment to our society is from up here. People ask for reasons, you know, "What's this war about?" "Am I going to go into it?" I mean, you don't get that in the other kind of a system at all. Your society is you, in some deep way.
But then there comes a time in mid-life, or post-mid-life, rather, when the society disengages you. Younger people who have come along can do the job better than you. Also, let me just tell you secretly, you've disengaged yourself when everybody you meet reminds you of somebody you've already talked to, and everything you hear, you've heard before. You're ready for another show. And, uh, and so the folk system disengages you, and you disengage yourself. But you've already been introduced, through the folk, to the elementary ideas, which are the marker, the path that leads you into your own self. First half of life, engagement. Second half, disengagement. First half of life, the folk idea, *phil gaddanka*, *deshi*. The second half, elementary idea, archetype, the *marga*.
And now, this is exactly Dante's rendition of this whole theme in his very interesting philosophical work, the *Convito*, or *Convivio*, two names for it. He gives the first 25 years of life as the years of development. He calls it adolescence or infancy. The human being is in a position of dependency until certainly 12 or 13 or so. And in our culture, when you go through for your PhD, you'll be in a condition of dependency and submission to authority until you're 45, and you may never recover. Some just don't recover. And you can tell by the number of footnotes justifying the assumption of authority. It's very difficult after the age of 45. So this is the first stage of life, and the virtues assigned by Dante are obedience, a sense of shame—not guilt. Those are two very different things. Shame is embarrassment because of failure of performance. Guilt comes from offending something that you regard as a high authority. But a sense of shame, that's a noble virtue, an aristocratic virtue, whereas guilt is not. A sense of shame, comeliness of appearance, and sweetness of conduct. To give this to my students in the '60s, I can tell you, was always a pleasure. They illustrated the opposite to all four of these: no sense of shame, no obedience, the most disastrous appearances, and destructive conduct. So that was that.
Then we come to 25 to 45, which is the mid of life, maturity, with 35 at the center. Now, Dante's vision is assigned to his 35th year, the Good Friday to Easter of his 35th year. It's rather amusing. Dante was born in 1265, so he was 35 years old in the year 1300. And in that period, 1300 was thought to be the middle year of the history of the world. So it wasn't difficult for him to coordinate his individual life with the life of the universe, you see. And we don't all have it that easy. But this is the time then for the transition, and through the experience of the sense of the symbolism of the culture to come to the knowledge of it, not simply following. And so from here on, we have people of knowledge, and the virtues are the virtues of the medieval knight: their temperance, and courage, and love, and loyalty, and courtesy. It's a pretty good show.
45 to 70. Now, these are the years that in India are to be spent in the forest. This is the year of *vanaprastha*, leaving the society for the forest. Not so in the West. As a result, India, in particular, in social and in and political life, has never had the advice of people who knew anything beyond what had been given. And so their political systems are in the same state as the political systems of 2000 BC, that is to say, despotism. And revolution consists simply in a palace revolution to install another despot. But in the West, from the Greek world on, we have an evolution of institutions that comes from the advice of the agent, the wisdom of those who have lived on. They don't go into the forest; they remain in the society. And the virtues here, 45 to 70, are of wisdom, justice, generosity, and cheerfulness. I mean, you should be in such a condition that nothing can knock you down by that time.
Then 70, and as I always think, you know, it's an unfortunate term that Dante has found for this, because it's decrepitude. From here on, and the two virtues here are looking back over the lifetime with gratitude, so important. No matter what your seat in the opera, it's been a great show, it really has. And looking forward to death as to a return home. That's not a bad schedule. It is indeed a great show.
Campbell has begun his story of humankind with the tour of our inner world, the psyche, the soul. Join us next time when Joe explores how the language and rituals of myth connect this inner world of spirit to the outer world of culture in which we actually live our lives.
[Music] So [Music] you.