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The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space
Campbell’s last book published in his lifetime, written when he was eighty-two. The argument is concentrated: that mythology is metaphor, that the failure to read the metaphors of the religious traditions as metaphor — what Campbell calls “metaphors as facts” — is the source of the present crisis of literalism. The book draws Navajo sandpainting, Hindu kundalini, the Tibetan Bardo Thodol, and Christian iconography into a single comparative argument about the symbolic function and its present derangement.
The work is the late and most concentrated statement of Campbell’s thesis that the symbolic faculty is not optional cultural ornament but the human organ by which the soul’s relation to its own depth is mediated. It is also the volume in which Campbell most plainly states the Lineage-relevant claim that the fourth function — the pedagogical — must be reinhabited by individuals whose tradition has lost the capacity to do so collectively. The book stands in the same relation to Campbell’s earlier comparative volumes as Jung’s late Mysterium Coniunctionis stands to the earlier Symbols of Transformation: a tightening, not a recantation.
For the seba.health library, this is the Campbell text that most cleanly demonstrates why the comparative survey was always already a depth-psychological argument.