The Origin of Myth: from Babylon to Middle-Earth
Paula Haigh
The consensus of learned men today is that myth originated in our most remote evolutionary past. Lapsed Catholic Joseph Campbell, pre-eminent scholar of mythology, tells us that “our primal ancestors told stories to themselves about the animals they killed for food and about the supernatural world to which the animals seemed to go when they died. ... The hunt, became a ritual of sacrifice. ... and a magical, wonderful accord grew between the hunter and the hunted, as they were locked in a mystical timeless cycle of death burial and resurrection.” Primitive art, then, according to Campbell, gave form to the impulse we now call religion.” (The Power of Myth, 1988, p. xvi-ii)
Campbell goes on to note the thematic similarities amongst the myths of vastly differing cultures of the past, but he never makes any connection between these great religious themes and the stories told by our evolutionary ancestors around the campfires. He never found the real meaning of those different “masks of God”, as he calls them, the “stories of creation, of virgin births, incarnations, death and resurrection, second comings and judgment days.” He cannot tell us the real origin of these recurring themes, preserved in all cultures as myth. What he settles for, in the end, is a reduction of all mythical themes to human sentiment and invention.
However, it has never been docuмented or even claimed that a feral child or a primitive culture or community invented the great religious themes of the mythologies. They are, in fact, always given, always “handed down”. That they could be “campfire stories’’ invented by primitive men reflecting on their hunt is the merest imaginative speculation of the evolutionists reduced to wishful thinking.
The great truths of Faith are beyond our comprehension and certainly above and beyond the imagination of men. They are true Mysteries, transcending human reason. But their transmission, once revealed, is something else.
Campbell also liked to equate the sayings of Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ with similar sentiments found in other religions. One of his favorite stories was that of the troubled woman who came to the Indian saint and sage Ramakrishna saying, “O Master, I do not find that I love God.” And he asked her, “Is there nothing, then, that you love?” To this she answered, “My little nephew.” And he said to her, “There is your love and service to God, in your love and service to that child.”
But Ramakrishna lived from 1836 to 1886 and was obviously influenced by Christianity: A similar influence, fraudulently claimed to be original with Hinduism, is that of Tibetan monasticism. The present Dalai Lama lets it be believed that his practice of monasticism, so similar to that of Christians, originated with Hinduism. But such is far from the truth. Cardinal Wiseman, in his “Lectures on Science and Religion” docuмents that monasticism was taken to the Far East in the 13th and 14th centuries by Christian missionaries and was quickly and easily adopted by the naturally contemplative inclinations of those Eastern religious people.
Campbell also loved to quote the Gospels and the Koran in the same breath, indicating an assumed identity of belief; and in his book, The Masks of God (1959), he makes a passionate plea for a gathering together of all the myths into some transcendent unity, some “great mystery pageant ... To make it serve the present hour, we have only to assemble – or reassemble – it in its full dimension, scientifically, and then bring it to life as our own in the way of art; the way of wonder – sympathetic, instructive delight, not judging morally, but participating with our own awakened humanity in the festival of the passing forms.” (p. 18)
Myth, then, for Campbell, both in its origin and culmination, is a celebration of humanity. According to him, the origins of myth lie in our evolutionary past and can, in fact, be reduced to the best in human nature such as the love of mother for child, of neighbor for suffering neighbor, as manifested by the Indian saint and sage, Ramakishna, as well as by Catholic Christian saints and heroes. In other words, religion itself evolved from man’s own nature and inventiveness which reach their highest peak in altruism.
The “Masks of God” turn out to be only the masks of human emotion and thought. This is the evolutionary world view built and ever building anew upon the imaginary speculations of so-called learned men.