Myth comes in the same zone as dream, and this is the zone of what I would call the Wisdom Body […] This wisdom of the dream, wisdom of the vision, is the wisdom then of the perennial philosophy…
Joseph Campbell, lecture on Transformations of Myth through Time
Surprisingly, though Joseph Campbell’s vast opus in comparative mythology addressed in detail many of the active elements of the perennial philosophy, there were comparatively few instances where he addressed the perennial philosophy and its content by name. These instances, though, show clearly the Campbell took the perennial wisdom as a given, as something that had already been amply demonstrated by his exploration of the themes of mythic imagination and ritual enactments across the world.
Campbell visits the motifs of the perennial philosophy most frequently in the e-book “Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor.” He is critical in this work of the development of Western religion and Christianity in particular for the isolation, the cutting off of mankind from interacting directly with the spiritual energies animating the race. Western religion commonly places an intermediary between the individual and the Divine – whether the priest, as in the Catholic Church, or the Bible, as is found in many Protestant denominations. The individual is taught that no salvation is possible except through the intermediary alone, and by implication, through the interpretation of the intermediary alone of what the spiritual life is. Further, in the Western traditions, Campbell points out that commonly the mythic image becomes concretized as literal events in the history stream and are thereby stripped of their symbolic power. He laments that the connotative dimension is often supplanted by the denotative fact in Western culture, leading to a religion that can be slowly strangled of its life blood – the ever-renewing fount of spiritual inspiration from the Source itself. Campbell argues that this is at odds with the perennial philosophy as developed in the Eastern, Greek, and Hermetic traditions, is inconsistent with the needs of the human psyche and soul, and is arguably contrary to the message of Jesus Christ himself.
How in this tradition do you get related to God? The relationship is accomplished through an institution. This we may term the first mythic dissociation in that it dissociates the person from the divine principle. The individual can only become associated with the divine through the social institution. Thus, in the Jewish tradition, God and His people have a covenant regarding their special relationship.
Joseph Campbell, “The Experience of Religious Mystery,” Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
In the Christian tradition, Christ is the center because He is true God and true Man. This is regarded as a mystery because of the unity of these two natures. It is no mystery at all in the Orient, where each of us is conceived to be precisely a piece of God.
Our Western religious culture is committed to these social groups and their various biblical and ecclesiastical claims, which, in the light of modern historical and scientific research, are brought into question. By this arrangement, however, we have been emptied of our sense of our own divinity. We have been committed to a social organization or hierarchical institution, which sets up a claim for itself. And now that claim itself is in question. This breeds what we term alienation—that is, an individual sense of estrangement from the religious institution through which we relate to God.
The God of the institution is not supported by your own experience of spiritual reality. This opens a gap challenging the validity of the human being. The first aim of the mystical is to validate the person’s individual human experience.
It is an interesting speculation to wonder if this, among other reasons, accounts for the gradual loss of influence of the mainstream Western religions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As mentioned elsewhere on this website, the percentage of Americans considering themselves “spiritual but not religious” has been steadily increasing in recent years. It has not helped matters for mainstream religions that the institutions themselves have not acquitted themselves honorably in recent decades; we have seen textbook examples of precisely the phenomenon Campbell was speaking of – an ongoing slow and steady erosion of the moral authority of the church that initiated and asserted its sole claim as the mediator between the individual and God. Coexistent with this state of affairs is a progressive alienation of members of the body of Christ from the institutions set up to be their intermediaries. None of this is good for Western culture without better and viable options in place for the future, though it may be destined in a sense, as all forms pass away eventually to be replaced by other and hopefully better understandings.
In any of the orthodox biblical traditions, one cannot identify oneself with God. Jesus identified himself with God in this sense. But God is a metaphor, as he also is a metaphor for that which we all are. And he says in the Thomas Gospel, “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I shall be he.” Not that “I” standing there, talking to his disciples, physically present before them. It is the “I” of the dimension out of which he is speaking. “Split the stick, you will find me there; lift the stone, there I am.” And, of course, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Is it above? If so the birds will be there before you. Is it below? The fish will be there before you. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Who and what is Heaven? God is in Heaven. Where is God? Within you.
Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
This idea is the sense of Zen Buddhism. You must find it in yourself. You are it: “Thou art that. Tat tvam asi.” That message from India electrifies us, but sadly, the churches are not preaching it.
I have received, every now and then, one of these translated collections of the mystics of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which the denotation is consistently taken for the connotation. When these translations meditate on Jesus, that is worship, not mysticism. They are meditating on the concrete referents of the death and resurrection of Jesus.[…][E]mphasizing the physical situation simply devalues the symbol because it is thereby interpreted as a concrete term.
In a lecture series given in the early 1980s, Campbell took a deep dive into the mythic content and implications of the perennial philosophy as expressed in the East. In this excerpt, Campbell expertly calls our attention to the origins of religious thought systems, and how those origins required a translation from the raw and uninterpreted images and dramas of mythic content playing out in the minds and hearts of mankind. Religious philosophy by its very nature is an abstraction, a translation as he calls it, from uninterpreted psychic content that may at best have been shared to that point in time only as story-telling in an oral tradition – to a written tradition, where ideas and content were correlated and put down into a written system of letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs that conveyed a conceptual interpretation of what the raw images and dramas meant in essence. This was the monumental step mankind made that Campbell notes at the beginning of the excerpt.
The second stage of religious development, as Campbell notes, occurred when these written interpretations, drawn closely from the living Source of spiritual inspiration, became more powerful than the castes and social classes of these early societies, and the priestly class was ultimately disempowered to some degree and their functions usurped by the message conveyed. The revolutionary message of the perennial philosophy was thus planted deeply in the psyches and hearts of the Hindu religion.
So we come to this translation of myth into philosophy. The world is an ever-burning fire; feed that fire. You feed that fire by the priestly sacrifices. But now comes the second stage in philosophizing, the stage known as the Upanishads.
Joseph Campbell, lecture on Transformations of Myth through Time
If the Vedas date from 1000 BC, the Brahmanas date from somewhere around 900 to 800 BC. About that time also there begin to come the Upanishads. The two big ones are the Brihad-Aranyaka and the Chandogya. This is the essential shift now. Shad means “to sit”; upani means “close in.” You sit close in to a teacher who teaches you close-in doctrine. The teacher says, “So when you take food to your mouth, this is a sacrifice.” The fire within you is Agni, the fire of the sacrificial flame.
Why go to the Brahmans? [Editor: Indian priest class] You’ve got it in yourself. Turn in. All those gods you are invited to worship through the public sacrifice are projections of the fire of your own energy. There’s that wonderful passage in the Chandogya, “Worship this god, worship that god, one god after another; those who follow this law do not know. The source of the gods is in your own heart. Follow the footsteps to that center and know that you are that of which the gods are born.” That’s an idea that has already occurred in Egypt. It’s the basic idea of the perennial philosophy.
Deities are symbolic personifications of the very energies that are of yourself. These energies that are of yourself are the energies of the universe…The kingdom of heaven is within you, yes, but it’s also everywhere. This is [the] perennial philosophy…
This video link runs for almost an hour, but is well-worth the time to watch Campbell’s real-time development of the motifs and themes of the Eastern version of the perennial philosophy.
Link: Joseph Campbell – #6 The Perennial Philosophy of the East
Academics are tasked with working with the ideas and themes they are given, analyzing, comparing, contrasting, and synthesizing new understandings on occasion, so perhaps we should not expect that Campbell would unequivocally become an enthusiastic cheerleader for the perennial philosophy – that was not his function or role. But it is clear in his works where his allegiances lie. And it is more than enough that he developed these ideas and correspondences to the breadth and depth that he did, in the process showing us what it was to “follow one’s bliss” in his vernacular, as he clearly loved his life’s mission and work deeply. While it is not exactly accurate to say that Campbell was an unabashed advocate and proponent for the perennial philosophy, he was well aware of its place and significance in his field of comparative mythology. More importantly for our purpose, Campbell had a profound and deep understanding of how all of the pieces fit together – from the mythic image, drama, dream, or vision and their accompanying rituals arising from a culture’s collective unconscious, to the reconciliation and synthesis of a multitude of mythologies across time and cultures, to the connections with Carl Jung’s depth psychology and how an individual’s personal psychological unconscious content reflected the level of the mythic realm the individual could access, and finally, how all of the previous came together in its highest expression as the perennial philosophy, tying together the Divine and human, collective culture, and individual psyche into one living tapestry – a body of wisdom that has not yet been alienated from its Source inspiration and is available for invocation today by seekers everywhere. In this broad understanding, Campbell has laid an intellectual groundwork for the creation of new mythic rituals – new wineskins – uniquely suited to Western temperaments. For this major contribution we can all be grateful.
Via Perennis 