Joseph Campbell's Creative Mythology in Light of Info-Psychology, Chaos Magic, and Hologram Theory

Arbor
Fall 2006

The notion that a somehow final point of all-knowingness about the nature of the universe, about the inner nature of energetic relationships can be attained simply and by stint of allegiance to a particular belief system or scientific theory, is patent nonsense. And, as hunger ensures and prepares for satiety, the truth seeker plunges forward into life’s absurdities and statements and tears at it flanks so that sHe might be better able to understand the cosmos by the light of wisdom. It should be especially apparent to the student of culture, philosophy, comparative mythology or religion that a deeper strain than we are led to suspect exists between inner reality and outer reality. It is that whose “center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” that we wish to experience, to be held by, to better understand. We have been purged by now of the archaic delusion that we will find a message of love, charity, justice or transcendent meaning by the talking heads of government, business, academia, and organized religion. These are
institutions long bereft of any sense of the intrinsic worth, freedom, and individuality of every human being, and the imperturbable need of every child, woman, and man to better seek and understand the order and nature of their true will. Government would hope for the horizon of human potential to appear as a monolithic statement of approval of their hell-contrived machinations. It would assume that you knew not what was order for your household, and that you would gladly supply it with the funds to arm police squads for every street corner. Politicians, at this stage of history, choose their profession either from a desire for petty, state approved power, or from naïve ignorance of the true nature of social and political change. The heads of business would prefer that you remained haply unaware of your own unique nature and path, because one cannot sell beauty products to one who already deeply feels herself, by all possible eyes, as beautiful. Business interests would rather you constantly conceived of yourself as pathetic, impotent, ugly, uninteresting, and lacking, for how else do you convince adults to continue buying toys? Academia works, curiously, so that the most exciting work and that most mind-expanding theorems are not only ignored but in most cases deliberately repressed in order to maintain the status quo. The most dangerous things in a western educational paradigm, from kindergarten to professorship, is an independent, analytical, unafraid mind which chooses to evaluate the world based on its own morals and experience, and not on those of the establishment. How many of us were beaten down and called stupid for our ability to creatively think and see differently than the sheep we were surrounded by at a young age in those dungeon-like classrooms, while the most passive, uninterested, goosesteppers made the highest marks? And finally, religious institutions, while in theory gaining closer to the answers to our problems, have more often than not, in the west especially, maintained a firm hold over the plight of the spiritual centers of their adherents, for ultimately, organized religion is born from the unfortunate idea that if you do not accept exactly the terms of the given belief system, however archaic and ridiculous, then your soul will burn in hell. In all four categories; government, business, academia, and organized religion, alternatives to the established norm are stymied, ignored and ridiculed, until they gain enough steam amongst the rabble, and are then
changed into the new orthodoxy. In all four categories we see institutions who purport to provide our lives with sustenance and meaning, with order and with higher understanding, and we have seen how they paradoxically do nothing but squelch these values.

Indeed, at the apex of modern achievement, with our technological wizardry gathered all around us, and skyscrapers which beg of Babel, means of force which dwarf even that most jealous and bloodthirsty Old Testament deity, and amounts of horded money which would make of King Solomon a pauper, we remain empty handed when it comes to that nagging question: why am I here? Why am “I” at all? What is “I?” From within these very modern parameters to which we find ourselves bound, we seek a higher order, a Divine hand by which not only are the oceans and mesas drawn, but are the tales and directive themes of the universe, the keys unlocking the doors of a higher perception are to be found. A most potentially pure place to which to cast our gaze for meaning, inner and outer, is myth. Far from being merely a form of folk entertainment, myths point our eyes to where we find ancient wisdom unfettered by the petty authority of a pope or a king. Myths are steeped in our own unique brand of humanly wisdom which has always
and at every point existed in order to push us further in our quest for meaning. And as we have seen in the previous three chapters, the world’s mythologies, like the world’s religious and philosophical systems, contain within each of them the same golden thread which connects them all like pearls on a necklace, and it is this element of uniformity between them which charges their authority with timelessness and universality. For whether we speak of the Sun, Krishna, Osiris, Adonis or Jesus, the themes of the mysteries of birth, the tragedy of earthly life (with its four dimensions) and its mysterious death, and finally the triumph of re-birth or resurrection, are all apparent and avail to us a glimpse of the reason or purpose behind these processes. Humanity has been telling the same mythic stories for millenia, with very little fundamental thematic modification, because the lessons were, evidently, slow to be learned. The pedagogical process of mythological revelation has always, as far as we can tell, been of a descending nature; the meaning which we seek and find in myth comes from ’out there,’ from the Gods and Goddesses, from the one God, or from the great void beyond. Their authority and value are based upon where they are believed to come from. The story of humanity’s slow march through the ages is one of the competition between these loci of power and their attendant followers, unknowingly and at all times bellowing the same general themes against one another, threatening the wrath of their God upon whosoever does not believeth in him. In short, throughout nearly all of our recorded history, from the deluge to the theory of relativity, we have sought meaning in the ‘out there,’ the higher, the beyond, the super-human. This relationship between center of transcendent power and eventual envelope of its wisdom runs from high to low, fine to gross, God to human, priest to congregant, teacher to student.

However, it appears that a shift of tectonic proportion has been underway and exponentially gaining momentum, outwardly here and esoterically there, by which we come to find the mythic meaning of our existence, and that is the basic premise of Joseph Campbell’s work Creative Mythology. Creative Mythology is the fourth and final book in a series called The Masks of God, wherein Campbell reviewed primitive, Oriental, and Occidental mythologies, culminating in the work under scrutiny here, which proposes that around the time of the European middle ages, mankind began to project its own values into myth in novel ways, infusing, almost knowingly, itself into its gods and goddesses, thereby evolving the pedagogical relationship described above into a spherical, transpersonal system of meaning, in essence leaving behind the ‘trickle down’ structure of the previous ten millennia. As Campbell himself described the thesis of the book:

"In the context of traditional mythology, the symbols are presented in socially maintained rites, through which the individual is required to experience, or will pretend to have experienced, certain insights, sentiments, and commitments. In what I am calling "creative" mythology, on the other hand, this order is reversed: the individual has had an experience of his own - of order, horror, beauty, or even mere exhilaration - which he seeks to communicate through signs; and if his realization has been of a certain depth and import, his communication will have the value and force of living myth..."

Instead of one receiving lessons and values from the higher, one creates one’s own lessons and values out of the very stuff of one’s life. This novel premise places the individual in the axis mundi, the frontispiece, the center of hir own affairs, cosmic or molecular, and demands of hir that sHe find meaning in the chaos surrounding hir, and not merely to prostrate hirself before another’s altar.

In the book, Campbell takes the reader on a journey through the major mythological themes from the middle ages to the renaissance, to the age of enlightenment and finally to twentieth century thought, and reaffirms his doctrine that myth has four primal functions: the first being to “reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendous et fascinans of this universe,” the second to provide a taxonomic, systematic cosmological schema of this universe, the third “is the enforcement of a moral order,” and the fourth to align the individual to “himself (the microcosm), his culture (the mesocosm), the universe (the macrocosm), and [finally] that awesome ultimate mystery which is both beyond and within himself and all things (Campbell, p. 4-6).” The final function is that which concerns what he calls creative mythology, in that it places
emphasis on the individual first, ascending upwards to the highest. It “corrects the authority holding to the shells of forms produced and left behind by lives once lived. Renewing the act of experience itself, it restores to existence the quality of adventure, at once shattering and reintegrating the fixed, already known, in the sacrificial creative fire of the becoming thing that is no thing at all but life, not as it will be or as it should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is, in depth, in process, here and now, inside and out (Campbell p. 7-8).”

Within creative mythology, the burden of purpose and meaning, of triumph and tragedy is in the hands of the individual, and not a culture, a belief system, not a hero or a god. The template for inculcation is in the very processes of one’s life, and the curious patterns and tendencies, the absurdities and chaos which fill that life. It is not to be found in an ancient text, or on the lips of an authority figure, or even in the processes of nature as it is, but in the phantasmagoria of our inner labyrinth of longing and fear, and the beasts which fill the dark wooded path we have found ourselves, upon reaching maturity, to be slowly treading, never straight but always forward, whether we enjoy it or not. The efficacy of towering, thunderous, dogmatic edicts issued from the mouths of machine-like men no longer is sufficient, alone, to alleviate our straits we find ourselves to be in at this time. An unfathomable amount of universes like our own exist ‘out there,’ an ‘out there’ so incalculably distant that even terms designating the dimension of space itself, as we understand it, seem to beg of re-definition. The amount of planets which may or may not harbor what we call ‘life,’ namely consciousness or intelligence, could be permeating the
entire ALL of existing existences, beings perhaps made only of blue light, the coherence of whose nervous structures compared to ours could be as a diamond to a clump of dirt. These things we can safely assume, and they only scratch the surface of possible possibilities, expanding further and wider out until infinity itself is reached. The authority of mortals and our peculiar dogmas, models, and schemas can no longer provide the salvation we desire, deserve, and delay.

An important theme or leitmotiv within mythology and literature which Campbell addresses is what he calls the love-death. The love-death has become a central schema within the mythology of the west, and has influenced not only secular literature, from where much of our modern (past 900 years) mythology has derived from, but also our understanding of the mystery schools which flourished in Europe after Pythagoras, as well as Gnostic and Christian myth. In drawing Egyptian, Babylonian, greater near eastern, Greek, Roman, and Celtic mythic systems together, Campbell places the lovedeath theme in the center of western mythic novelty since the middle ages. Much of this is based on the court singers and poets, or minstrels, of the middle ages, wherefrom came some of the first European literature. The love-death is a novel force in literature, according to Campbell, which, once it found its way into mainstream poetry, became an exceedingly powerful one. This distinct genre of troubadour poetry sought to communicate “the celebration of a love the aim of which was neither marriage nor the dissolution of the world. Nor was it even carnal intercourse; nor, again . . . the enjoyment, by analogy, of the “wine” of a divine love and the quenching of the soul in God. The aim, rather, was life directly in the experience of love as a refining, sublimating, mystagogic force, of itself opening the pierced heart to the sad, sweet, bittersweet, poignant melody of being through love’s own anguish and love’s joy (Campbell p. 178).”

The power behind this theme is not an individual’s love for hir own family, tribe, culture, country, or god but for the love which sHe finds that obliterates the need for any of the above mentioned items. It is in this love which the individual finds hir salvation, hir hidden meaning, hir reason for living, and even more importantly, hir reason for dying. For in love, and in sexual union, we become one with our beloved and in a sense lose ourselves in our beloved, which is no more a metaphor for union with god, but a redemptive, soul-cleansing process in and of itself. For above the lowly material plane, the strict, biological differences between masculine and feminine disappear and the two lovers, while in rapturous union, represent the cosmic whereby “opposites,” previously thought to be of separate substance, come together and thereby create something new. The Greek god Pan and the European god Baphomet (commonly thought by the ignorant to be Satan), with its horns, hooved feet, phallus, female breasts, one arm pointing up and one down, with solve written on one arm and coagula on the other, represents this blending of opposites; Pan and Baphomet were worshipped as models of the blending of opposites which is a sometimes painful but purifying aspect of higher consciousness or closer union with god.

Linking the love-death theme historically, Campbell remarks that “there is evidence as well of a generic kinship of the classic mystery cults not only with the grandiose Egyptian mythic complex of that dying god Osiris and the Mesopotamian Tammuz, but also with those widely distributed primitive myths and rites of the sacrificed youth or maiden (or, more vividly, the young couple ritually killed embracing in a sacramental love-death), whose flesh, consumed in cannibal communion, typifies the mystery of that Being beyond duality that lives partitioned in us all (Campbell 203-204).”

Another theme within western European literature since the middle ages, which stands as more of a function of the mythology therein, is what he calls anamorphosis, "to form anew," whereby the scattered pieces of our lives, the different episodes and fragments of memories and events which make us what we are and are to be, can be brought together and unified through myth or mythic processes. "Chance experiences, scattered throughout a lifetime, when viewed reflected in a mythic form, come together and show an order in depth that is the order of man everlasting," the process by which enfolded becomingness unfolds and becomes, and then again folds back up into itself its scattered segments (Campbell, 325). This is perhaps the most important function of myth in the modern world- to show us that hidden reality which is more real than this one, whereby the "causal, chance, fragmentary events of an apparently undistinguished life disclose the form and dimension of a classic epic of destiny when the conic mirror is applied, and our own scattered lives today, as well, are then seen, also, as anamorphoses. Like Shakespeare's mirror held up to nature, the symbols bring forward into view that informing Form of forms which, through apparent discontinuity, is 'manifest,' as the
Upanishads declare, 'yet hidden: called Moving-in-secret.' Primitive and Oriental thought is full of presentiments of this kind: on the crudest level, in the sentiment of magic and its force; more subtly, in the recognition of the force of dream and vision in the shaping of a life (Campbell, 195)."

We have described two of the most important issues which the book addresses, and which, I believe, display Campbell's thesis best. To reiterate that thesis, it is simply that, in contrast to what we can tell from primitive and ancient mythological systems and the cultures they affected, since around the time of the middle ages, it seems that we have been placed in a position of directly influencing our own mythology, and affecting it through the events of our own individual lives, and the new mythology, which Campbell calls 'creative,' is a product of this novel development. It appears that the source from which we derive our mythic themes has availed itself more so to our involvement, and this is the point; the bounce-back factor from deep-seated wish to collective unconscious to waking consciousness is occurring faster that it did, say, 2,000 years ago.

I wish to here depart from Campbell temporarily, in order to better place his thesis in a broader forum which he himself seems unaware of, but which is vital to bring it fully into practical understanding. There are several places we can look to for understanding of this phenomenon, which Campbell comes nowhere near, and which can explain, I think, something of the mechanism by which this is occurring and does occur. It is precisely something of the metaphysical process by which this occurs that I want to attempt to explain, from several different vestiges, one psychological, one spirito-magical, the other quantum physical.

In one of his later works, Info-Psychology, Timothy Leary posits a theory of nervous system modification related to the way in which we receive, integrate, and transmit information, and the possibilities now open to us of manipulating not only the way that our brains perceive reality, but the actual reality that they perceive. The premise is that "all realities are neurological- patterns of impulses received, stored and transmitted by neural structures. Consciousness is defined as energy received by structure. Intelligence is defined as energy transmitted by structure. For the human being the structures are neural circuits and their anatomical connections (Leary p. 32)." He is describing the means by which we interact with the information we come into contact with, such as the morals, taboos, themes, and cosmologies of myth- and specifically how it is that we can evolve new means of creating them, modifying them, and turning them into healthy templates for psychological growth, when they have become outdated and useless. It is at this crux that we find ourselves in, a 'pre-partum' depression before the next sweeping evolutionary step, which to Leary will propel us not only to higher levels of reality as a species, but to other planets as well. The process by which this occurs is an interactive one, and to Leary the choice to participate in the construction of reality has arrived because of the slow evolution of our nervous systems- for the first time in history it is a widespread possibility that we can actually create the world to be what we want it to be-- using our minds. "Whatever the mind can conceive it tends to create. As soon as humans accept and neurologically imprint the notion of higher levels of intelligence and of circuits of the nervous system as yet unactivated- a new philosophy of evolution will emerge (Leary p. 3)." These "higher levels of intelligence" are a product of our discovery of atomic and quantum mechanics, which propose such ideas as bi-location (wherein one particle can literally be shown to be in two different places at the same time), and also that matter is composed of waves of energy which are, for some reason or another, at such an incredibly slow (comparably) rate of vibration that they appear as solid, contiguous forms. Leary's thesis is that this energy is readily open to us via our nervous systems to be fully understood, interacted with, and re-composed, on a mental or psychic level, thereby addressing indirectly the possibilities of creating mythologies. "The brain is a biochemical- electric-computer in which each nerve impulse acts as an information "quanta" or "bit"; that the nervous is structurally wired into genetically pre-programmed circuits designed to automatically select and relay certain perceptual cues and to discharge rote reactions; that imprinting of models accidentally present in the environment at critical periods determines the tunnel realities in which humans live (italics mine, Leary p. 2)." The models here spoken of, which are "accidentally present in the environment," are the mythological structures which have developed sedimentally over the course of thousands of years, and which are now obviously fracturing, crumbling, and re-forming at an exponentially faster rate. It is a theory of psycho-spirito-mental evolution which greatly informs Campbell's "creative mythology."

Another system of thought which illuminates Campbell's Creative Mythology, called Chaos Magic, was advanced by a British quantum-physicist and occultist named Peter Carroll in 1992, just five years after Leary came out with Info-Psychology. Carroll's primary theory, Chaos Magic Theory (CMT) rests on the postulation of a dimension of reality in and around matter which he calls 'ether,' an ancient word, it is true, but he has his peculiar definition: "ether acts as though it were a form of information emitted by matter that is instantaneously available everywhere and has some power to shape the beavior of other matter (Carroll p. 21)." By seeking, accessing and understanding the etheric dimension, which can be compared to the 'void' from which atoms derive the velocity and trajectory of their movement, as well as the collective unconscious, we can directly interact with and perhaps even manipulate reality- material, mental, and spiritualon
a level hitherto undreamt of outside of the magical systems of the world. The novelty of CMT is that it incorporates Quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity- and builds upon them. Carroll states that "wave functions [material reality] are actually a mathematical description of etheric patterns and that this ether can be considered as a form of information exchange between material events operating over . . . Planck time . . . that the etheric dimension should be considered as somehow orthogonal to the ordinary (pseudo) time dimension of classical relativistic descriptions (Carroll p. 7)."

In his attempt to resolve the millennia-long dispute between science and religion, and between the esoteric and the exoteric, Carroll places CMT at the crossroads between these confusedly divided means of viewing the world, and chastises both for their inherent inability to evolve their world-views- the scientific or materialist world view is empty handed because it takes no meaningful account of the transcendent and infinite, the divine and supreme, and the religious-spiritual world view because it cannot bring down its convictions about the divine into real world exploration. CMT explodes the supposedly necessary divide between these two, asserting that they only need to be separated amongst unevolved peoples. "The problem for scientists is that they are observing and trying to describe effects due to something which they refuse to believe can exist. The problem for magicians is that they refuse to believe that the effects they create or observe could be due to something for which equations could be written (Carroll, 40)."

Again, as we said above with regards to Info-Psychology, CMT goes beyond Campbell, in a sense, in that it describes the actual nuts and bolts of this shift in consciousness which Campbell's book states is upon us in novel ways. We can thank Campbell for annotating the past eight hundred years of western mythology in order to show that this shift is occurring, and that we are beginning to take an increasingly more influential role in the formulation of our myths, however he offers almost nothing as to the 'how' or 'why.' Info-Psychology and Chaos Magic Theory, in conjunction with Creative Mythology, provide an explanation for this mysterious new echelon of mentation we are, as a species, revolving closer to, without diminishing or cheapening its
mysterium.

A third theory of the nature of our interaction with the universe, which was advanced by Czech psychologist Stanislav Grof in 1985, and which was elaborated greatly upon by American writer Michael Talbot, is the theory that the universe is a sort of hologram of infinite proportions. "There is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it- from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons are only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond space and time," writes Talbot (Talbot p. 1)." The holographic theory of reality proposes that not only does the universe seem to act and react, to manifest and maintain airtight interdependence like a hologram does, but our minds are a sort of microhologram, which are inseparable from the whole. Holograms are similar to our minds in
that a piece of holographic film, broken off from the whole, can still project a hologram when a laser is beamed through it, losing no amount of data or clarity. To this phenomenon, Talbot attributes "associative memory," "our ability to recognize familiar things," "photographic memory," "the transference of learned skills," and "phantom limb sensations and how we construct a 'world-out-there.'" The hologram theory does not state that the universe is a hologram, which would be absurd, but simply that the hologram is the best model that we have to explain the inexplicable phenomena of both universe and mind. The "ether" of CMT is related to material reality in that one creates wave patterns which affect the potential and actual occurrences in the other. The phenomenal reality of matter and our interaction with it is composed of these wave patterns, which have their inspiration in the etheric wave patterns, which are unseen except to the people who have the ability, who we usually call psychics or clairvoyants. The hologram theory states that this same process occurs, just that it is in the order of a hologram. With this theory, we have "come full circle, that the discovery that consciousness contains the whole of objective reality- the entire history of biological life on the planet, the world's religions and mythologies, and the dynamics of both blood cells and stars- to the discovery that the material universe can also contain within its warp and weft the innermost processes of consciousness, Such is the nature of the deep connectivity that exists between all things in a holographic universe (Talbot p. 81)."

If this is the order of the universe then perplexity is unfounded regarding Campbell's idea that we are taking a more direct role in shaping our own mythologies. What is more likely is that we have always had the ability to do this, but a shift in focus has occurred, and we are now more concerned than ever with ourselves as individuals and our own unique experiences as the deciding factor of the framework of our cultures and mythologies, rather than on one god or group of gods 'out there,' wielding power which must be feared and submitted to. This shift of focus on the individual as the unit of importance in culture, as apart from the family and nation, a shift that has been occurring in an exponentially quicker fashion, especially since WWII, is part of the trend towards a Creative Mythology, versus a passed-down or received mythology. For, as Campbell said in conclusion of the book, "today all norms are in flux, so that the individual is thrown . . . back upon himself, into the inward sphere of his own becoming, his forest adventurous without way or path, to come through his own integrity in experience to his own
intelligible Castle of the Grail (Campbell, 677)." And as the means of finding their own beacon or cornerstone in this world of flux becomes ever more precarious in our postmodern, post-religious, materialistic culture of plasma screen preacher-men and bible-quoting, mass murdering heads of state, the fundamentally new evolution of ideas which Timothy Leary, Peter Carroll, and Michael Talbot have provided us with can serve, I believe, to assist a new generation of truth seekers to find a new kind of light, a new kind of enlightenment, and a new kind of mythology.

Sources Used

Campbell, Joseph. Creative Mythology (New York, Penguin Compass: 1968)
Leary, Timothy. Info-Psychology (Phoenix, New Falcon: 1987)
Carroll, Peter. Liber Kaos (York Beach, ME, Weiser: 1992)
Talbot, Michael. The Holographic Universe (New York, HarperCollins: 1991)