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| Joseph Campbell, the author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, teaches us that myths have historically served to explain four different aspects of human experience: mystical, cosmological, sociological, and pedagogical. This newsletter discusses each of these four aspects in terms of the craft of writing fiction. |
Joseph Campbell is perhaps best known for The Hero with a Thousand Faces. George Lucas famously cited this book as his inspiration for Star Wars, and the text has since served as the outline for countless novels and movies. Campbell was a student of myths, and of comparative mythology in particular, finding commonalities in the myths of diverse cultures and traditions. His comparative approach has fallen out of fashion in current scholarship, but there are still lessons we can learn from him.
In particular, he tells us that myths serve four different functions. The first is the mystical experience, second is the cosmological understanding, third is the sociological function, and, fourth, is pedagogical. Authors who understand and exploit these aspects of myth produce works that resonate with readers. Done with depth and feeling, they resonate with readers not just in a particular time and place, but through the ages.
Myths are metaphors that explore the mystery of life and living. Buddha taught that all life is suffering. Perhaps Graham Greene had this in mind when he said, “I write to escape history.” The four functions of myth provide a path to, if not serenity, at least an understanding of how to live as a human being in an uncertain world.
The title to this newsletter comes from Yeats:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats
What is slouching toward Behtlehem and how does it relate to myths? Read on to find out.
The Mystical Experience
The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine. There’s a mystery to life and living—and dying—that is deeper than our senses can reveal. Dante would have called this the anagogue, literally “looking upward,” from the seen to the unseen.
Living inevitably involves encountering and reconciling contradictions. In order to live, we must consume life. After all, even plants are—or were—living things. We can’t live without consuming and thus killing other life. But another way to understand this—a metaphorical way—is that there is a cycle to life: life gives birth to new life. Ancient peoples revered and blessed the animals that nourished them, that gave them life, as way of reconciling this contradiction.
Death is the ultimate contradiction of life. Just because life ends, does not mean that living is without purpose. Myths as old as Gilgamesh and as current as Spock’s demise in Star Trek can reveal that eternity happens not in the future, nor in the passage of time, but in an eternal moment shared by two living souls. It’s in those eternal, transcendent moments that we surmount the contradictions of life and living.
Yeats, in his poem, “The Second Coming,” quoted above, saw the mythical aspect of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem as marking the end of the Bronze Age and the start of the Christian Age. He wrote at the end of World War I, which surely ended the political and social order of the nineteenth century, and he foresaw the birth of a terrifying new order replacing the Christian Age—metaphorically, he saw the devil “slouching toward Bethlehem” to give birth to this new order.
Fifty years later, Joan Didion published a series of essays about the 1960s counter-culture with the title, “Slouching Toward Babylon.” Her theme was the same as Yeats’, namely that the old social order was collapsing and being replaced with one that was both purposeless and terrifying.
Both these contemporary authors used the mythical aspects of Bethleham as a metaphor for their particular moment in history, thinking that it marked the beginning of a new and terrifying epoch.
We're perpetually slouching toward new myths, like it or not. Authors can help us find our way by framing and reframing myths.
The Cosmological Experience
Whatever culture we live in, there is likely to be a creation story that explains the origin of the universe and the place of humans in it. These creation stories—myths, if you will—can have a profound impact on culture and society. In some creation stories—Adam and Eve, for example—humans start out in an idealized place but then sin and are thus expelled into the world, where, perhaps paradoxically, they are given dominion over all other creatures. Other creation myths have humans existing within nature, both now and in the past. In these origin myths, humans are part of nature, as opposed to having mastery over other creatures.
The ancient Greeks had a creation story, too, one that involved a succession of gods, from the Titans, to the deities on Olympus. This world view included a flat earth, a dome-shaped shield in the sky, and gods in the heavens. But, starting with Anaximander in the fifth century BCE, they replaced this view of the world with one based on observation—on data gathered by the senses. By the second century BCE, they knew the world was spherical and included the notion that the planets were worlds, like earth. They even had remarkably good estimates on the distance from earth to the planets.
Notice that this new view of the world is based on the conviction that the world is knowable through observations—that we can trust our senses to deduce what the world is like.
Today we rely less on myth and more on science for our view of the universe (myths like “creation science” notwithstanding). However, the more we learn about the universe, the more mythical our understanding seems to become.
Einstein, for example, famously said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” This wasn’t really a theological assertion. Instead, he was stating his bedrock belief that the universe followed knowable, deterministic laws, and that probability could only describe but never explain how the universe works. In essence, he was re-stating Anaximander’s premise.
Einstein also “lost” this argument, and Heisenberg and his uncertainty principle “won.” So, the old myth about a knowable, deterministic universe, got replaced with a new one, about a probabilistic (but still kinda-sorta predictable) universe replaced it.
Other foundational aspects of the old world view persist. Cause precedes effect, otherwise known as the second law of thermodynamics, for example (so, no time travel and no faster-than-light travel). Something called “locality,” or what Einstein called “no spooky action at a distance.” Who’s to say these aren’t just as faulty as the Titans and the Olympic gods turned out to be?
However, the notion that chance governs the universe, the foundational belief from quantum mechanics, has had a profound impact on our world views. It’s created a reaction, a longing for—a demand for-- the old world view, the safe and stable deterministic one. We see this playing out every day in the headlines.
It’s as if we really are slouching toward a new Bethleham, as Yeats feared.
The Sociological Experience
The sociological experience is when myth reveals a set of rules for living in society. It’s the myth about George Washington not being able to lie about cutting down the cherry tree and other founding myths about the USA. I won’t mention those myths in detail because the lived experience of myths often makes the mistake of turning metaphor into mandate, myth into fact. There is always the risk that the sociological experience of a myth transforms the ritual that stands for the meaning of the myth into a commandment.
A proper understanding of myth is liberating as opposed to commanding. Myth as metaphor reveals how to live a fulfilling life as a human being. Understanding the myth as metaphor gives the individual agency to decide how to live and how not to live. The myth of Faust is a perfect example of the folly of certain kinds of decisions. The myths of Luke and Anakin Skywalker likewise illuminate the power the individual and the choices they make.
The Pedagogical Experience
Campbell said that the pedagogical function…[reveals]…how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.
The hero with a thousand faces starts in the real world, but is called to a quest. On the quest, she (or he) discovers her personal but also universal Truth. She then returns to the real world, changed, and is able to live a fulfilling life.
Campbell gives dozens of examples of this myth. Odysseus, Hercules, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and Parzival are all examples. Even Buddha. Everyone knows the journey of Luke Skywalker, but, truly, Star Wars is really the journey of Anikan Skywalker, from the child, to the villain, to the redeemed hero at the end.
Myths as lessons show up in places you wouldn’t think to look. Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon shows us how live an honorable life in a dishonorable world. Rick in Casablanca shows us the power of integrity in a world that has none. Deckard in Bladerunner shows us how to have mercy in a merciless world. These are all modern myths for our modern world, for a world always slouching toward something new and horrifying.
Conclusion
Stories resonate with us because they teach us, through the power of myth, how to live a meaningful life under the most trying circumstances.
When we write fiction, we create an imaginary world, with imaginary characters, and imaginary problems. But, as Hemingway pointed out, if we make them real enough, and true enough, they become more than true. They become really real. They become metaphors, myths, where readers will bring their own lived experience and find their own Truth. |
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For Authors: September 24, 2025 Issue [#13359]
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