The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

Lesson 1

Objectives: Students will share their summer project on mythology and gain knowledge why mythology is the foundation of culture and literature.

Aim: What is myth? Why did people create myths in every culture?

Texts:

Video clips of The Power of Myth
PDF Book: Th Power of Myth : http://ebooksbeus.weebly.com/uploads/6/3/0/8/6308108/the_power_of_myth_-_joseph_campbell.pdf

CC Standards

RI.1 & w.9b: citing evidence to support analysis of explicit and inferential textual evidence

RI.2 and RI.3 : determine a central idea and analyze how it is conveyed and elaborated with details overs over the couirse of a text

SL.1: engage effectively in a range a collaborative discussion building on other’s ideas and express their own clearly

W4: PRODUCE CLEAR AND COHERENT WRITING IN WHICH THE DEVELOPMENT, ORGANIZATION AND STYLE ARE APPROPRIATE TO TASK AND AUDIENCE

Formative Assessment: double entry journals, annotations, responses, making a claim statement based on paragraphs, short analysis of evidence

Agenda

Do Now: Share one mythology that you enjoyed reading the most with a partner and explain why.

Learning Sequence:

Share in pairs and respond to the following questions
What connections can we see among the myths?
What elements make the myths distinctive in their own ways?
Why do people need myths? DO we need myths? What do myths entail?
What is the most interesting myth-related vocabulary word you have learned?

Informal Mid-Lesson Assessment: How has the myth project inspired you in some way?

Homework: Browse the series of The Power of Myth (http://billmoyers.com/spotlight/download-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-audio/). What are the major themes embedded in myths?

Lesson 2

Objectives: Students will interpret and respond to Campbell’s explanations of myth.

Aim: According to Campbell, what is the power of myth?

Agenda

Do Now: According to Campbell, What are the major themes embedded in myths? If possible, give an example for each theme.

Mini Lesson

Activity one-Reading and responding-

The Power of Myth: its hero and structure

Read and discuss an excerpt from The Power of Myth (page 11-13).

“Why do you need the mythology?”” She held the familiar, modern opinion that ‘ll these Greek gods and stuff’ are irrelevant to the human condition today. What she did not know– what most do not know — is that the remnants of all that “stuff”line the walls of our interior system of belief, like shards of broken pottery in an archaeological site. But as we are organic beings, there is energy in all that “stuff.”Rituals evoke it. Consider the position of judges in our society, which Campbell saw in mythological, not sociological, terms. If this position were just a role, the judge could wear a gray suit to court instead of the magisterial black robe. For the law to hold authority beyond mere coercion, the power of the judge must be ritualized, mythologized. So must much of life today,”

Respond: In this passage, how does Moyer describe the importance of mythology in our society? Use specific evidence to support your view point.

2. Read and discuss a 2nd excerpt fom The Power of Myth-

…”That’s not what the hero’s journey is about. It’s not to deny reason. To the contrary, by overcoming the dark passions, the hero symbolizes our ability to control the irrational savage within us.” Campbell had lamented on other occasions our failure “to admit within ourselves
the carnivorous, lecherous fever” that is endemic to human nature. Now he was describing the hero’s journey not as a courageous act but as a life lived in self-discovery, “and Luke Skywalker was never more rational than when he found within himself the resources of character to meet his destiny.” Ironically, to Campbell the end of the hero’s journey is not the aggrandizement of the hero. “It is,” he said in one of his lectures, “not to identify oneself with any of the figures or powers experienced. The Indian yogi, striving for release, identifies himself with
the Light and never returns. But no one with a will to the service of others would permit himself such an escape. The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.” One of the many distinctions between
the celebrity and the hero, he said, is that one lives only for self while the other acts to redeem society”.

Respond: According to Campbell, how is a hero defined and the purpose of a hero’s journey? Provide specific evidence to support your view point.

Excerpt 3: The Power of Myth

He agreed that the “guiding idea” of his work was to find “the commonality of themes in world myths, pointing to a constant requirement in the human psyche for a centering in terms of deep principles.” “You’re talking about a search for the meaning of life?”I asked.
“No, no, no,” he said. “For the experience of being alive.” I have said that mythology is an interior road map of experience, drawn by people who have traveled it. He would, I suspect, not settle for the journalist’s prosaic definition. To him mythology was “the song of the universe,” “the music of the spheres” — music we dance to even when we cannot name the tune. We are
hearing its refrains “whether we listen with aloof amusement to the mumbo jumbo of some witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture translations from sonnets of Lao-tsu, or now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimoan fairy tale.” He imagined that this grand and cacophonous chorus began when our primal ancestors told stories to themselves about the animals that they killed for food and about the supernatural world to which the animals
seemed to go when they died. “Out there somewhere,” beyond the visible plain of existence, was the “animal master,” who held over human beings the power of life and death: if he failed to send the beasts back to be sacrificed again, the hunters and their kin would starve.
Thus early societies learned that “the essence of life is that it lives by killing and eating; that’s the great mystery that the myths have to deal with.” The hunt became a ritual of sacrifice, and the hunters in turn performed acts of atonement to the departed spirits of the animals, hoping to coax them into returning to be sacrificed again. The beasts were seen as envoys from that other world, and Campbell surmised “a magical, wonderful accord” growing between the hunter and the hunted, as if they were locked in a “mystical, timeless” cycle of death, burial, and resurrection. Their art — the paintings on cave walls — and oral literature gave form to the impulse we now call religion. As these primal folk turned from hunting to planting, the stories they told to interpret the mysteries of life changed, too. Now the seed became the magic
symbol of the endless cycle. The plant died, and was buried, and its seed was born again. Campbell was fascinated by how this symbol was seized upon by the world’s great religions as the revelation of eternal truth — that from death comes life, or as he put it: “From sacrifice, bliss.”

Respond: a. Why does Campbell call “mythology was “the song of the universe”? b. Why does he describe myths as “grand and cacophonous chorus “? What does the phrase mean? c. How does Campbell describe the myth that portrays the hunting and hunted? What’s his assertion about this hunting myth/ Do you agree? Explain. c. How the the seed become the “magic
symbol of the endless cycle”?

Quick Write: Pick one idea from today’s discussion and explain why you believe it is the one of the crucial points Campbell tries to explain about the power of myth.

Activity 2: Listen to audio clips an take notes-

Listen to Campbell’s descriptions of first story tellers: ( http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-3-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-the-first-storytellers-audio/) and take notes. Respond: why did 1st story tellers create myth? What does Campbell mean by myth “put[ting] the mind in accord with the body, and the way of life in accord with the way nature dictates?”
Browse the series of The Power of Myth (http://billmoyers.com/spotlight/download-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-audio/). What are the major themes embedded in myths? (the heroes adventure, sacrifice and bliss, love and goddess, masks of eternity )
What messages can we draw from Heroes’ Adventures myth? Listen to the audio clip: http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-1-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-the-hero%E2%80%99s-adventure-audio/
Read Campbell’s Chapters: “Myth” and “The First Storytellers”;( page 180-): excerpt from The first Storytellers

Exit Slip: Describe one notion you have learned today about mythology from Campbell’s discussion of myth.

Homework: Start drafting your 200 word response to Campbell’s notion of mythology.

Lesson 3

Objectives: Students will gain new perspectives by reading closely the excerpts from The Power of Myth by Campbell and sharing their understanding of each passage.

Aim: How has Campbell’s discussion of myth change your views on mythology?

Agenda

Do Now: Share your central ideas about the power of myth from your essay. Be sure to provide evidence you have used.

Mini Lesson:

1.Re-examine the two excerpts and identify at least one literary element or technique from each passage and see how it is used to develop the central idea.

Use the following inks for literary terms and rhetorical devices as your resources-

2. Read and discuss a 2nd excerpt fom The Power of Myth-

Respond: According to Campbell, how is a hero defined and the purpose of a hero’s journey? Provide specific evidence to support your view point.

Your Turn to practice: : Identify one specific literary technique and element from the passage and discuss its effect on meaning.

Excerpt 3: The Power of Myth

Quick Write: Describe the effect of one device or technique used for the author to emphasize his idea.

Activity 2: Watch the video and take notes of key points.

the series of The Power of Myth (http://billmoyers.com/spotlight/download-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-audio/). What does Campbell say about-

the heroes adventure,
sacrifice and bliss,
love and goddess,
masks of eternity

Quick write: What’s the one idea that stood out for you the most?

Homework: Describe a pattern of myth you have observed based on Campbell’s discussion. Visit the website : http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero’s_journey.htm (What is the structure of a Hero’s Journey myth? )

Lesson 4

Objectives: Students will look for patterns or structure in myth by reading a dialogue between Moyers and Campbell.

Aim: Why animal sacrifice is a constant theme in myth? What is the pattern in a hunting myth?

Do Now: Think of two myths you read. What is the one thing that both myth share in common? Which theme does each myth reveal?

Mini Lesson-

Read the following dialogue between Campbell and Moyers. We’ll do the following afterwards-

describe a central idea and its supporting evidence
identify literary elements and techniques
patterns of myth

Text: THE FIRST STORYTELLERS
The animal envoys of the Unseen Power no longer serve, as in primeval times, to teach and to
guide mankind. Bears, lions, elephants, ibexes, and gazelles are in cages in our zoos. Man is no longer the newcomer in a world of unexplored plains and forests, and our immediate neighbors are not wild beasts but other human beings, contending for goods and space on a planet that is whirling without end around the fireball of a star. Neither in body nor in mind do we inhabit the world of those hunting races of the Paleolithic millennia, to whose lives and life ways we nevertheless owe the very forms of our bodies and structures of our minds. Memories of their animal envoys still must sleep, somehow, within us; for they wake a little and stir when we venture into wilderness. They wake in terror to thunder. And again they wake, with a sense of recognition, when we enter any one of those great painted caves. Whatever the inward darkness may have been to which the shamans of those caves descended in their trances, the same must lie within ourselves, nightly visited in sleep.
— JOSEPH CAMPBELL,

The Way of the Animal Powers

MOYERS: Do you think the poet Wordsworth was right when he wrote, “Our birth is but
a sleep and a forgetting:/The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,/Hath had elsewhere its setting,/And cometh from afar”? Do you think that is so?

CAMPBELL: I do. Not in entire forgetfulness — that is to say, the nerves in our body
carry the memories that shaped the organization of our nervous system to certain environmental circumstances and to the demands of an organism.
MOYERS: What do our souls owe to ancient myths?
CAMPBELL: The ancient myths were designed to harmonize the mind and the body. The mind can ramble off in strange ways and want things that the body does not want. The myths and rites were means of putting the mind in accord with the body and the way of life in accord with the way that nature dictates.
MOYERS: So these old stories live in us?
CAMPBELL: They do indeed. The stages of human development are the same today as
they were in the ancient times. As a child, you are brought up in a world of discipline, of obedience, and you are dependent on others. All this has to be transcended when you come to maturity, so that you can live not in dependency but with self-responsible authority. If you can’t cross that threshold, you have the basis for neuroses. Then comes the one after you have gained your world, of yielding it — the crisis of dismissal, disengagement.
MOYERS: And ultimately death?
CAMPBELL: And ultimately death. That’s the ultimate disengagement. So myth has to serve both aims, that of inducting the young person into the life of his world — that’s the function of the folk idea — then disengaging him. The folk idea unshells the elementary idea, which guides you to your own inward life.
MOYERS: And these myths tell me how others have made the passage, and how I can make the passage?
CAMPBELL: Yes, and also what are the beauties of the way. I feel this now, moving into my
own last years, you know — the myths help me to go with it.

Mid Lesson Discussion Questions-

What kind of questioning techniques does Moyers use to help the listeners understand the conversation better?
What is the central idea in this part of the narration by Campbell?
Interpret “The myths and rites were means of putting the mind in accord with the body and the way of life in accord with the way that nature dictates.”
“If you can’t cross that threshold, you have the basis for neuroses. Then comes the one after you have gained your world, of yielding it — the crisis of dismissal, disengagement”. What kind of ” threshold” .doe Campbell mean?.What kind of crisis and disengagement?
What is ” ultimate disengagement?”
How does myth serve as a guide to help people follow the rites of passage?

__________________________________________________________ Continue

MOYERS: You say that the image of death is the beginning of mythology. What do you mean?
CAMPBELL: The earliest evidence of anything like mythological thinking is associated with graves.
MOYERS: A nd they suggest that men and women saw life, and then they didn’t see it, so they wondered about it?
CAMPBELL: It must have been something like that.You only have to imagine what your
own experience would be. The grave burials with their weapons and sacrifices to ensure a continued life — these certainly suggest that there was a person who was alive and warm before you who is now lying there,cold, and beginning to rot. Something was there that isn’t there. Where is it now?
MOYERS: When do you think humans first discovered death?
CAMPBELL: They first discovered death when they were first humans, because they died.
Now, animals have the experience of watching their companions dying. But, as far as we know, they have no further thoughts about it. And there is no evidence that humans thought about death in a significant way until the Neanderthal period, when weapons and animal sacrifices occur with burials.
…
CAMPBELL: Society was there before you, it is there after you are gone, and you are a member of it. The myths that link you to your social group, the tribal myths, affirm that you are an organ of the larger organism. Society itself is an organ of a larger organism, which is the landscape, the world in which the tribe moves. The main theme in ritual is the linking of the individual to a larger morphological structure than that of his own physical body. Man lives by killing, and there is a sense of guilt connected with that. Burials suggest that my friend has died, and he survives. The animals that I have killed must also survive. Early hunters usually had a kind of animal divinity — the technical name would be the animal master, the animal who is the master animal. The animal master sends the flocks to be killed. You see, the basic hunting myth is of a kind of covenant between the animal world and the human world. The animal gives its life willingly, with the understanding that its life transcends its physical entity and will be returned to the soil or to the mother through some ritual of restoration. And this ritual of restoration is associated with the main hunting animal. To the Indians of the American plains, it was the buffalo. On the Northwest coast the great festivals have to do with the run of salmon coming in. When you go to South Africa, the eland, the magnificent antelope, is the principal animal.

MOYERS: And the principal animal is…

CAMPBELL: — is the one that furnishes the food.

MOYERS: So in the early hunting societies there grew up between human beings and animals a bonding that required one to be consumed by the other.
CAMPBELL: That is the way life is. Man is a hunter, and the hunter is a beast of prey. In the myths, the beast of prey and the animal who is preyed upon play two significant roles. They represent two aspects of life — the aggressive, killing, conquering, creating aspect of life, and the one that is the matter or, you might say, the subject matter.

MOYERS: Life itself. What happens in the relationship between the hunter and the hunted?

CAMPBELL: As we know from the life of the Bushmen and from the relation of the native Americans to the buffalo, it is one of reverence, of respect. For example, the Bushmen of Africa live in a desert world. It’s a very hard life, and the hunt in such an environment is a very difficult hunt. There is very little wood for massive, powerful bows. The Bushmen have
tiny little bows, and the extent of the arrow’s flight is hardly more than thirty yards. The arrow has a very weak penetration. It can hardly do more than break the animal’s skin. But the Bushmen apply a prodigiously powerful poison to the point of the arrow so that these
beautiful animals, the elands, die in pain over a day and a half. After the animal has been shot and is dying painfully of the poison, the hunters have to fulfill certain taboos of not doing this and not doing that in a kind of “participation mystique,” a mystical participation in the death of the animal, whose meat has become their life, and whose death they have brought about. There’s an identification, a mythological identification. Killing is not simply slaughter, it’s a ritual act, as eating is when you say grace before meals. A ritual act is a recognition of your dependency on the voluntary giving of this food to you by the animal who has given its life. The hunt is a ritual.

MOYERS: And a ritual expresses a spiritual reality

CAMPBELL: It expresses that this is in accord with the way of nature, not simply with my own
personal impulse.

CAMPBELL: These early myths help the psyche to participate without a sense of guilt or fright in the necessary act of life.
MOYERS: And these great stories consistently refer to this dynamic in one way or the other — the hunt, the hunter, the hunted, and the animal as friend,as a messenger from God.
CAMPBELL: Right. Normally the animal preyed upon becomes the animal that is the messenger of the divine.
MOYERS: And you wind up as the hunter killing the messenger.
CAMPBELL: Killing the god.
MOYERS: Does that cause guilt?
CAMPBELL: No, guilt is what is wiped out by the myth. Killing the animal is not a personal act. You are performing the work of nature.
MOYERS: Guilt is wiped out by the myth?
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: But you must at times feel some reluctance upon closing in for the kill. You don’t really want to kill that animal.
CAMPBELL: The animal is the father. You know what the Freudians say, that the first enemy is the father, if you are a man. If you are a boy, every enemy is potentially, psychologically associated with the father image.
MOYERS: Do you think that the animal became the father image of God?
CAMPBELL: Yes. It is a fact that the religious attitude toward the principal animal is one of
reverence and respect, and not only that — submission to the inspiration of that animal. The animal is the one that brings the gifts — tobacco, the mystical pipe, and so on.
MOYERS: Do you think this troubled early man — to kill the animal that is a god, or the messenger of a god?
CAMPBELL: Absolutely — that is why you have the rites.

Activity 2: Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’ Monomyth:
http://changingminds.org/disciplines/storytelling/plots/hero_journey/hero_journey.htm

Examine the hero’s diagram

Exit Slip: What are the elements of myth? What is the most important message you have gained from Campbell’s The Power of Myth video series?

Homework: Watch at least three video clips from The Power of Myth series and write a 200-word commentary on the Campbell reading( due Wednesday 9/10). Tell your own creation story, noting the elements within it that align with the features of creation stories( due Sept. 16)

World Literature

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

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