Mythology Psychological Function

the first function of mythology is to arouse in the mind a sense of awe before this situation… This I would regard as the essentially religious function of mythology — that is, the mystical function, which represents the discovery and recognition of the dimension of the mystery of being.

Campbell defines the primary psychological function of mythology as mystical — the evocation of awe before the mystery of existence — and distinguishes it from mythology’s secondary cosmological, sociological, and transcendental functions.

Campbell, Joseph, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, 2001thesis

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mythology, however, is to be superseded by the transcendental function, if indeed humans are to recognize and affirm their destiny beyond mere conformity to the authority of social teachings regarding the moral law and the cosmic order.

Noel explicates Campbell’s argument that mythology’s sociological function of ego-formation must ultimately give way to a transcendental function that prepares the individual to face death and the mysterium tremendum of being.

Noel, Daniel C., Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990thesis

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beyond the function of the ‘imprinting of a sociology,’ myth has a transcendental aspect, an

Campbell insists that mythology performs a function irreducible to social conditioning, possessing a transcendental dimension that addresses the individual’s confrontation with mortality and ultimate being.

Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, 1988thesis

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mythology is psychology misread as cosmology, history and biography.

Campbell’s foundational claim, cited by Noel, asserts that myth’s true register is psychological: misreading it as literal cosmology or history destroys its living function and renders it obsolete.

Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, 1988thesis

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mythology is psychology misread as cosmology, history and biography… so to understand mythology is to render it irrelevant in a later time when there is a new science.

Noel elaborates Campbell’s dictum to show that the failure of mythology in modernity follows from the literalization of its metaphors rather than from any inherent exhaustion of its psychological function.

Noel, Daniel C., Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990thesis

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we may therefore think of any myth or rite either as a clue to what may be permanent or universal in human nature (which case our emphasis will be psychological, or perhaps even metaphysical), or, on the other hand, as a function of the local scene

Campbell identifies the fundamental polarity in the study of mythology between its universal psychological function (mārga, the way to the discovery of the universal) and its local ethnological expression (deśī), a distinction that organizes his entire comparative project.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis

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Mythology from around the world vividly explores the fundamental patterns and themes of human life as you find them anywhere on the globe… This is one of the values of mythology — its way of cutting through personal differences in order to get to the great themes of human experience.

Moore affirms mythology’s psychological function as the provision of depth and universality to human self-understanding, situating it as the imaginative counterpart to modern cosmology and factual science.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting

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the second function serves to present a universe within which the mystery as understood will be present, so that everywhere you look it is, as it were, a holy picture, opening up in back to the great mystery.

Campbell describes mythology’s cosmological function as the presentation of a universe permeated by sacred depth, so that ordinary perception becomes participation in the mystery that the mystical function initially discloses.

Campbell, Joseph, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004supporting

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The metaphors perform their function of speaking to these deep levels of human beings when they arise freshly from the contemporary context of experience. And a new mythology is rapidly becoming a necessity both socially and spiritually as the metaphors of the past… lose their vitality and become concretized.

Campbell argues that mythology’s psychological function depends upon the living metaphoric force of its images; when metaphors harden into literal belief, the function fails and a new mythology becomes historically necessary.

Campbell, Joseph, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, 2001supporting

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the psychological problems raised by this universality could easily be shelved by hypotheses of migration… the customary treatment of mythological motifs so far in separate departments of science… was not exactly a help to us in recognizing their universality

Jung argues that the universality of mythological motifs — suppressed by disciplinary fragmentation and migration hypotheses — is the primary evidence for their psychological origin in the collective unconscious.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting

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all life on earth is to be recognized as a projection on the plane of temporal event of forms, objects, and personalities forever present in the permanent no-where, no-when, of the mythological age

Campbell shows how initiation rites deploy the psychological function of mythology to link individual biography to the timeless mythological order, transforming temporal experience into participation in archetypal reality.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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The very point of the mythological mode of being-in-the-world is that events did not have to be turned into experiences by

Giegerich challenges Hillman’s definition of soul as the transformer of events into experiences, arguing that the mythological mode of being is precisely one in which events carry meaning in themselves without requiring subjective elaboration.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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we need myths to remind us of our emotional and erotic bonds with the natural world and of our interdependence with all that lives. Science has not superseded this function; it may have made it more pressing.

Noel, following feminist critics of Campbell, argues that mythology’s ecological and erotic functions — binding humanity to nature — remain indispensable and have not been rendered obsolete by scientific modernity.

Noel, Daniel C., Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990supporting

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Campbell also devalues mythology’s sociological function in his claim that disengagement is a deeper truth than social engagement… he emphasizes the psychological costs, in a tone reminiscent of Jung’s regrets over the loss of an integrated relation to the anima

This passage critically examines Campbell’s privileging of mythology’s transcendental and psychological functions over its sociological function, noting a parallel with Jung’s anima-loss regret while exposing a blind spot regarding patriarchal mythology’s social operations.

Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, 1988supporting

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It is as if Psyche were naturally pagan because of the soul’s natural polytheism… archetypal psychologizing means examining our ideas themselves in terms of archetypes. It means looking at the frames of our consciousness

Hillman grounds the psychological function of mythology in the soul’s inherent polytheism, arguing that mythologizing is not an interpretive add-on but the natural mode through which psyche perceives and structures experience.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

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Whatever myths may operate in the psyche, whatever contents we might disclose, as long as our method remains search for self, these other tales will yield only Oedipal results because we turn to them with the same old intention.

Hillman warns that the psychological function of diverse mythologies is neutralized when a single method — the Oedipal search for self — is imposed upon them, collapsing myth’s plural functions into one hegemonic narrative.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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woman is a ‘permanent presence’ in mythology both in her way of experiencing life and in her character as an imprint — a message from the world — for the male to assimilate

This passage flags the gendered asymmetry in Campbell’s account of mythology’s psychological function, noting that the feminine is cast as object of male assimilation rather than as an independent subject of mythological experience.

Noel, Daniel C., Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990aside

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it is in the rituals and mysteries of the group that the planters not only achieve their sense of the entity of the sib, but also learn the way by which the dangers of the journey to the happy land of the dead are to be overcome

Campbell illustrates mythology’s sociological and eschatological functions through planter societies, showing how ritual enactment of myth binds the living to the dead and organizes individual life-passage within a communal sacred order.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959aside

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what creative minds bring up out of the collective unconscious also actually exists, and sooner or later must make its appearance in collective psychology

Jung argues that the mythopoeic function of creative minds — drawing from the collective unconscious — is not merely aesthetic but prophetic, prefiguring historical transformations in collective psychology.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921aside

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