Uses of Comparative Mythology

Essays on the Work of Joseph Campbell

Kenneth L. Golden, Kenneth L. Golden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317943198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection, first published in 1992, offers critical-interpretive essays on various aspects of the work of Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), one of a very few international experts on myth. Joseph Campbell examines myths and mythologies from a comparative point of view, and he stresses those similarities among myths the world over as they suggest an existing, transcendent unity of all humankind. His interpretations foster an openness, even a generous appreciation of, all myths; and he attempts to generate a broad, sympathetic understanding of the role of these 'stories' in human history, in our present-day lives, and in the possibilities of our future.

The Work

Joseph Campbell

The Twin Heroes: Campbell's Solar/Lunar Vision of the Masculine

Howard Teich

Since the advent of quantum theory and relativity theory, the two bases of modem physics, it has been commonly accepted that the classic ideal of scientific objectivity is no longer supportable. In the scientific community, there is no longer doubt: the seer influences what is seen; and what is seen for the first time forever alters what follows.

One of the most important distinguishing features of Joseph Campbell’s early scholarship was his acknowledgment of the male bias that pervades our recorded mythologies:

It is one of the curiosities and difficulties of our subject that its materials come to us for the most part through the agency of the male. The masters of the rites, the sages and prophets, and lastly our contemporary scholars of the subject, have usually been men; whereas, obviously, there has always been a feminine side to the picture also. (Primitive 352-353)

Campbell’s willingness to point out the gender bias of male mythology extends all the way back to his first published work, the extensive commentary accompanying the Navajo myth of Where the Two Came to Their Father (1943). The original publication consists of a beautiful folio containing eighteen silkscreens of Navajo sand paintings, reproduced by artist Maud Oakes under the direction of Navajo “Singer” Jeff King. The accompanying eighty-eight-page text booklet was comprised of two Navajo legends, recorded by Oakes and King together, along with extensive commentary by the young mythologist, Joseph Campbell. This first Campbell work explores the masculine initiation myth of the Navajo twin heroes in great depth. An empathic reading of the text, accompanied by meditative study of its sand paintings, may invoke in men an archetypal experience of what it means to be male in relationship to the feminine.

While Campbell’s readership tends to focus on the single male hero my thologem documented later in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Campbell presents his most complete treatment of a hero myth in the commentaries on the twin heroes mythologem accompanying Where the Two Came to Their Father (1943). As a paradigm for the development of the specifically male hero principle, the journey of the Navajo twin heroes is unrivalled in Campbell’s writing.

The twins, Monster Slayer and Child Born of Water, represent the “solar” and “lunar” aspects of the masculine ego, respectively:

The two, Sun-child and Water-child, antagonistic yet cooperative, represent a single cosmic force, polarized, split, and turned against itself in mutual portions. The life-supporting sap-power, mysterious in the lunar rhythm of its tides, growing and decaying at a time, counters and tempers the solar fire of the zenith, life-desiccating in its brilliance, yet by whose heat all lives. (“Commentary” 63)

Campbell goes on to suggest that a dichotomy similar to the solar/lunar counterplay embodied in the twin heroes mythologem is a central motif of all myths:

Such cosmic dialect, under one guise or another, is a major theme of all mythology. There are cycles that stress the conflict, the antithesis of the poles; there are those that stress the cooperation, or synthesis. In legends of the Twin Hero type the two are displayed in concord, moving together in operations which redound to the benefit of mankind. (“Commentary” 63)

Indeed, Campbell’s scholarship was profoundly influenced by his understanding of the solar and lunar images of the masculine principle. Western patriarchal culture has consistently interpreted solar psychology as masculine and equated lunar psychology with the feminine. Yet many problems have resulted from our culturally distorted perception of solar and lunar principles. Moreover, a culturally distorted “solar” revisioning of Campbell’s hero, a bias which Campbell himself did not share, has contributed greatly to various misreadings of Campbell’s monomythic hero’s journey.

Campbell's Solar and Lunar Mythology

Joseph Campbell sought to identify universal symbols and motifs that might transcend both cultural and temporal boundaries. He noticed that, within the mythological constellation of images, the union of polarized opposites was primarily symbolized in the meeting of Sun and Moon:

The image of the “meeting of sun and moon” is everywhere symbolic . . . and the only unsolved question in relationship to its universality are: a) how far back it goes, b) where it first arose, and c) whether from the start it was read both psychologically and cosmologically....[This] symbolism was known to Europe, China and Japan, the Aztecs and the Navajos: it is unlikely that it was unknown to the Greeks. (Occidental 164)

In the cosmogony of many archaic cultures, the sun and the moon have been recorded as the focal points of the cosmos and the most influential manifestations of the divine.¹ The solar/lunar dichotomy came to represent the two central organizing principles around which many creation myths, religious motifs, and psychological and spiritual systems traditionally assembled. Campbell noticed that the psychological qualities associated with sun and moon images in mythologies were often integrally related to their cosmological appearance:

The lunar light waxes and wanes. That of the sun is forever bright. Darkness inhabits the moon, where its play is symbolic of that of death in life here on earth; whereas darkness attacks the sun from without and is thrown off daily in defeat by a force that is never dark. The moon is the lord of growth, the waters, the womb, and the mysteries of time; the sun, of the brilliance of the intellect, sheer light, and eternal laws that never change. (Oriental 94)

Typically, since Greek and Roman Judeo-Christian patriarchal traditions have come to dominate our mythologies, the fundamental solar/lunar polarity has usually been represented as “solar-masculine” and “lunar-feminine”:

The new age of the Sun God has dawned, and there is to follow an extremely interesting, mythologically confusing development (known as solarization), whereby the entire symbolic system of the earlier age is to be reversed, with the moon and the lunar bull assigned to the mythic sphere of the female, and the solar principle to the male. (Occidental 75)

However, prior to the ascendancy of patriarchal “solar” traditions, many mythologies considered the solar principle feminine and associated the lunar qualities with the masculine. It is to Campbell’s great credit that he was not taken in by “mythologically confusing” assignment of gender labels to solar and lunar principles. Unlike many other male scholars of his era, who were reluctant to acknowledge the denigration of the feminine which accompanied the establishment of the patriarchy, Campbell routinely pointed out how mythologies were deliberately manipulated to support the new world order: “The progressive devaluation of the mother goddess in favor of the father . . . everywhere accompanied the maturation of the dynastic state and patriarchy” (Oriental 112).

Campbell’s sensitivity to the cultural gender distortion of solar/lunar dialectics allowed him to go one step further than merely acknowledging the historical ascendancy of one gender over the other. He also realized the damaging consequence of that political shift in consciousness: the suppression of the lunar-masculine and the denial of the solar-feminine. Those qualities associated with “solar psychology”—clarity, willfulness, competitiveness, endurance—have since been labeled masculine. The “lunar” qualities—tenderness, receptivity, intuitiveness, compassion, emotional availability—have been conversely restricted to the feminine. Janet McCrickard’s recently published study of sun and moon myths offers an extensive exposition of the solar-feminine side of this equation.² Too often, comparatists have failed to illuminate the suppression of the lunar-masculine and of the solar feminine.

Solar and Lunar Aspects of the Masculine

The universal theme of twin male heroes is documented in the mythologies of nearly every culture: it can be easily spotted in African, Mayan, Roman, Greek, and Eastern Indian mythologies. We are most familiar with the rivalrous male twins, like Romulus and Remus, and Jacob and Esau, but many other examples of twin boys, amicable as well as rivalrous, abound.³

Many solar/lunar twin male couples remain buried in the annals of history, largely because the lunar twin has been suppressed since the solarization of our mythology. It is seldom recalled, for example, that even Hercules was born with a twin. Few records exist to illuminate the relationship between Hercules and his brother, Iphicles, but the fact that Iphicles’s existence was for the most part suppressed suggests that their relationship may have been rivalrous. It is probable that Iphicles, whose name implies strength, was at one time a hero in his own right.⁴

The Twin Heroes motif is featured in nearly all New World mythologies. Jung’s colleague, anthropologist Paul Radin, proclaimed the legend of the Twin Heroes the basic myth of the American Indians:

The constituent elements of this myth, the plot themes and motifs, are found distributed fairly unchanged over an area extending from Canada to southern South America and from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. Because of this wide distribution and because of the importance attached to it everywhere, I feel it is not an exaggeration to designate it as the basic myth of aboriginal America.⁵

Campbell’s treatment of the Navajo solar/lunar twins may represent one of his most unique contributions to the anthropology of the human soul. Rarely do we come across such a precious example of oral literature that has not already undergone extensive acculturation at the hands of wellmeaning anthropologists. Artist Maud Oakes recorded the legend and sand paintings directly under the supervision of Navajo “Singer” Jeff King. The original folio contains an almost complete record of an initiation process, indeed one of the most complete we have. It permits us the rare privilege of seeing how a young man, actively immersed in the imaginary heroic journey, may transcend the limitations of both solar and lunar aspects of his ego.

Campbell regarded the Navajo twin heroes, Monster Slayer and Child Born of Water, as instrumental symbols, pointing us toward and perhaps helping to further our progress toward a resolution of limiting conflicts. The story of their journey, from the house of their mother Changing Woman to the house of their Sun-father, may represent Campbell’s most comprehensive example of his monomythic hero’s journey. The three stages he elucidates in The Hero with a Thousand Faces—Separation, Initiation, and Return—are fully developed here, not only in the text but even more dramatically in the series of eighteen sand paintings depicting the twins’ progress.

To anyone who, like Campbell, seeks to learn what is already known to many cultures of the world, the sand paintings present a rare opportunity for meditative insight. The male individuation process, so often and eloquently described, is rarely inscripted so exactly in the language of the unconscious mind. Through imagery and symbols, the series of sand paintings allow for the meditative mind to participate in a unique and uplifting journey.

Where the Two Came to Their Father was recorded along with an account of the Navajo creation story that sets up the preconditions for the birth of the twin males. Jeff King’s “Introductory Legend” describes how a rift develops between the sexes. As in many creation myths, like our own Judeo-Christian story of Adam and Eve, the original, paradisal relationship between Man and Woman falls into discoid. In this Navajo version of the universal motif, a quarrel between the First Man and the First Woman results in a long separation of the sexes. The rather misogynistic story line describes how the women, who cannot bear their loneliness any longer, masturbate with cacti and sticks, and give birth to Monsters that run rampant through the world.

At the outset of the masculine initiation myth, the twin heroes emerge for the eventual purpose of ridding the world of its Monsters. The solar/lunar twins are born of a human mother, Changing Woman, and a divine father, the Sun, who impregnates her through the divine agencies of sunlight and dripping water. The first sand painting of the series shows the twins as yet undifferentiated in form and color. In this first stage of their heroic journey, the Separation, they are about to set out on their journey to the House of their Sun-father, who might aid them in destroying the Monsters.

The second, third, and fourth sand paintings portray the series of dangers and obstacles the twins encounter on their way to the House of the Sun. Paul Radin emphasizes the importance of mythic twin heroes working together to achieve their common purpose:

Each twin constitutes only half an individual psychically. It is because the two are only complementary halves that they have always to be forced into action. . . . Each alone can do nothing positively. . . . For constructive and integrated activity ... the two halves must be united.⁶

Within the story, the twins must discover their unique talents and find the proper balance of combined action that will help them attain their common goal. In the individuating male psyche, this process of integrating the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• I: The Man
• II: The Work
• III: The Farther Reaches
• A Joseph Campbell Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index