'Earth is in the heavens', Joseph Campbell taught us

Joseph Campbell was a scholar, teacher and thinker who accomplished enormous popularity addressing the disenchantment of modern life with a bulletin of renewal and promise. His message had corking influence. Today when you hear someone say "I'm spiritual but not religious," Campbell is partly to blame.

Campbell once spoke about the famous image astronauts took of the Earth rising over the moon'south horizon that beginning appeared during the early on 1970s. The space age, he felt, had brought the states an sensation that is notwithstanding slowly sinking in: The globe every bit we know it is coming to an stop.

"Our world every bit the center of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which God's love is reserved for members of the in group: That is the world that is passing away," said Campbell. "Apocalypse is not about a fiery Armageddon and salvation of a chosen few, merely well-nigh the fact that our ignorance and our self-approbation are coming to an stop."

Today when books about the end of times, the Mayan predictions for 2012 soar to the peak of the bookstore charts, Campbell's view is timely and helpful.

Although the discussion is commonly used to announce a falsehood, "myth" – equally Campbell taught us – is equally relevant today as current headlines. A New Yorker, Campbell was fond of maxim "The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Creature, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Artery, waiting for the calorie-free to change."

Campbell's message was that these are stories nearly our common religious experience. They are not old museum pieces with fiddling relevance. Myth is about our life today. Myths, he said, are the "masks of God."

One of the most beloved teachers of our time, Campbell was a reliable guide through the mysteries of the aboriginal texts of Beowulf, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Egyptian mysteries, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Arthurian romances, the American Indian myths, stories from the Hindu, Buddhist and Christian religions besides as modern myth makers like James Joyce, Thomas Mann and Pablo Picasso. These stories and images from the earth's cultures are, he felt, "secret openings through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into homo cultural manifestation." He was convinced that faith boils upward from the "basic, magic ring of myth."

Campbell acknowledged that his Catholic upbringing had proven a rich resource for his life. "I recollect any 1 who has not been Catholic in that sort of substantial way has no realization of the ambiance of faith within which you live. It's powerful; it'south potent; it's life supporting. And it's beautiful. Every calendar month has its poetic and spiritual value… I'1000 sure that my interest in mythology comes out of that."

"Truth is one," he said, "and the sages speak of it past many names." The common themes and images in our sacred stories and art transcend the cultures from which they come up. He believed that a reviewing of such primordial images and themes in mythology such as expiry and resurrection, virgin nativity, the hero's quest and the promised land – the universal aspects of the soul, the blood memories – could reveal our common psychological roots. "They could even show u.s.a., equally seen from below," Campbell wrote, " how the soul views itself."

Campbell showed us that that the moon flights and the accompanying photographs were theological moments too equally celebrated ones. "They ended a bully cleft in our spirit, proving to us that Earth is not below and heaven above. Earth is in the heavens," said Campbell's friend Eugene Kennedy. "Carl Jung said that the proclamation past Pius XII of the supposition of the Virgin Mary in the 1950s was naught less than Mother Earth returning to the heavens. This contempo annunciation of new dogma shows so well how our religious images reflect our experience," Kennedy said.

Kennedy's interview with Campbell for the New York Times Magazine introduced Nib Moyers to Campbell, leading him in turn to the public television series that made Campbell famous.

In that interview, Campbell talks about the Stanley Kubrick flick "2001: A Infinite Odyssey," particularly the opening scenes that draw our ape-like ancestors millions of years ago snarling and squabbling with each other, then cowering together in fear at nighttime while predators lurk outside their cave. "Notwithstanding at that place is one among them," Campbell points out, "who is slightly different, i who is drawn out of marvel to approach and explore, one who has a sense of awe earlier the unknown. This one is apart and alone, seated in wonder before a panel of metallic standing mysteriously upright in the landscape. He contemplates it, then he reaches out and touches it cautiously in the way the first astronaut'due south foot approached and then gently touched downwards on the moon.

"Awe, you meet, is what moves united states forward," said Campbell. Awe dwells at the centre of our religious experience.

"We live in the stars," said Joseph Campbell, "and nosotros are finally moved by awe to our greatest adventures. The kingdom of God is truly within us."