Joseph Campbell's view of myth

An evolutionary algorithm to push the right developmental buttons

The God and his animal messengers. The god's feet rest on the beaks of a pair of birds portrayed upside down. Bronze plaque known as the Lafone luevedo Disk. Diameter, 4¼ inches; thickness, about ⅛ inch. La Aguada culture, Catamarca, northwest Argentina, c. A.D. 650 to 750. Thought by some to represent the pre-Incan divinity Viracocha with his servants, Imaymana and Tocapu. Frontispiece to The Way of Animal Powers.

Chicks still wet from hatching, covered in bits of shell that have been their only home, will run for cover at the sight of a hawk but not a gull, heron, or pigeon. Humans are not foreigners to animal instinct, as anyone hungry knows when they smell food and begin to salivate. To Campbell, most human instincts are akin to ducklings imprinting on their mother. There are periods of development when certain stimuli can open brain structures to be more or less permanently written. This, to him, is the function of myth and ritual, which have been selected for millennia to help form a human psyche:

“The address of mythological symbols is directly to these centers; and the responses proper to their influence are, consequently, neither rational nor under personal control. They overtake one. The symbols function, that is to say, as energy-releasing and -directing signs; and in traditionally structured cultures, they are deliberately imprinted in vividly impressive (often painful) rites, timed to catch the individual at those moments of ripening readiness when, in the critical periods of our human growth, the intended innate dispositions come to maturity.

In this sense, a mythology in its pedagogical functioning might be defined as a corpus of culturally maintained sign stimuli fostering the development and activation of a specific type, or constellation of types, of human life.”

This hews very close to the Snake Cult proposal that certain myths and rituals—a dying god, ego death in front of a mirror, second birth, the hanged man—were designed to help one understand that there is more than a material plane. To give developing minds introspective goggles, as it were. Campbell’s Historical Atlas of World Mythology is an excellent start for those who want to understand the history and function of myth. He starts at the beginning, man’s first recognition of death with burials over 50,000 years ago, and traces those ideas to our present religions and epics. Campbell is often remembered as Jungian for the archetypal hero’s journey, but he also posits diffusion of common themes when the evidence points that way (as with bullroarer mystery cults). As he has passed, I don’t feel bad plugging Library Genesis, which has the Historical Atlas for free.