Myth in modern society

The question carries a soul-logic underneath it — specifically the expansive/progressive ratio and, more deeply, the pneumatic one: the assumption that if we can recover or reconnect with myth, something will be healed, some deficit in modern life corrected. Campbell is the great popularizer of this hope, and he is worth taking seriously precisely because his diagnosis is sharper than his prescription.

Campbell's structural claim is that mythology traditionally served four functions: mystical, cosmological, sociological, and psychological. In Pathways to Bliss he argues that modernity has effectively dissolved the middle two:

In our present world, the cosmological and the sociological functions have been taken away from us. Our image of the cosmos is totally different from the image expressed by the religious traditions in which we have been brought up. Likewise, the social order today is totally different from what it was in the days when those laws of Moses and so forth were composed.

What remains operative, in his account, are the mystical and the psychological functions — and it is the psychological that bears the full weight in a secular age. This is where Campbell converges with Jung: myth is not primarily cosmology or social cement but a vehicle for what Jung called the individuation process, the soul's navigation of its own depths. The marsupial image Campbell reaches for is telling — mythology as a second womb, a developmental container — and its failure is equally telling: when the rational attitude tears the pouch, "you have a lot of missed births that didn't graduate from the second womb."

The pneumatic ratio is already running in this framing. The implicit promise is that myth, properly received, will carry us through — that the psychological function can substitute for the collapsed cosmological and sociological ones. Campbell's directive to "follow your bliss" is the most compressed version of this promise: a secularized individuation imperative that relocates the sacred from institution to individual interiority. What it does not reckon with is that the soul's logics of not-suffering are themselves mythic in structure. The hero's journey is not only a map of transformation; it is also a "if I complete the journey, I will not suffer" narrative. The monomyth can function as bypass.

Hillman names this more precisely. In Re-Visioning Psychology he argues that the gods have become diseases — that the mythic powers, stripped of their proper containers by a demythologized culture, return as pathology:

The Gods become diseases. We cannot command the commander, nor replace him with his sergeant, the strong ego. It's too late for that; the nineteenth century is over, and the marauding fantasies do not heed the ego anyhow.

The implication is not that we need more myth in the sense of more narrative — more hero journeys, more Campbell seminars — but that we need adequate containers for the mythic powers already active in the psyche. Hillman's prescription is southward rather than upward: not transcendence but the elaboration of "appropriate receptacles" for the soul's contents, a culture of imagination rather than a culture that imports mythic imagery as spiritual supplement.

Giegerich presses the critique further. His argument in The Soul's Logical Life is that the modern ego and modern science have not broken with this or that myth but with the entire status of soul that made mythic experience possible in the first place. To invoke Apollo behind modern science or Hercules behind the heroic ego is, in his reading, to underdetermine the actual character of modernity — and to do injustice to Apollo and Hercules, who "belong to a logically much more harmless world than ours." The modern situation cannot be adequately diagnosed by reaching back to ancient mythological figures; it requires confronting what is genuinely new in the soul's current condition.

What this means practically: myth in modern society is not absent but displaced. It operates in political ideologies (the Communist Manifesto's structure of righteous suffering, golden age, and final struggle is mythic in form), in advertising's desire-logics, in the personal growth industry's progress narratives, in the language of recovery and redemption. Thomas Moore observes that when we reach for family stories to explain our suffering, we are "reaching for myth" — the eternal father, the eternal mother — even when we think we are doing psychology. The mythic is not gone; it is unrecognized, which is precisely what makes it most powerful.

The honest position is not that modern society needs myth returned to it, but that myth is already running — in its degraded, literalized, bypass-serving forms — and that depth work consists in making those forms audible. Campbell's Creative Mythology identifies the historical transfer of myth-making authority to the individual artist as the defining condition of modernity: the individual must now carry what liturgy and collective ritual once distributed. That is not a solution. It is a description of the weight.

  • Joseph Campbell — portrait of the mythologist and his four functions of myth
  • Mythos — the Greek term for soul-speech in images, and its distinction from logos
  • Four Functions of Myth — Campbell's structural account of what myth does for the psyche
  • James Hillman — portrait of the archetypal psychologist who argued the gods return as diseases

Sources Cited

  • Campbell, Joseph, 2004, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation
  • Campbell, Joseph, 1968, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV
  • Hillman, James, 1975, Re-Visioning Psychology
  • Giegerich, Wolfgang, 2020, The Soul's Logical Life
  • Moore, Thomas, 1992, Care of the Soul